text:
"I got screwed again," Barisich says over the phone.
The irony of the situation is killing Barisich. The 50-year-old veteran shrimper and resident of Violet in St. Bernard Parish has donated hundreds of pounds of fresh seafood annually to his church, Our Lady of Lourdes, and to Archbishop Hannan High School, the Catholic school his two sons attended. Now that Barisich needs help, he can't get any ' not from the federal government, not even from his church.
When contacted, officials at Catholic Charities say the organization has a policy of not officially refusing aid to anyone. However, the group may refer some cases to other organizations that might be better able to assist them.
The lack of charity from his favorite charity isn't the punch line for Barisich. What really has him cracking up is why Catholic Charities won't give him support. It's not because he makes too much money; his monthly bills outweigh his monthly income by $2,000, so he definitely qualifies for some form of aid. In fact, according to Barisich, he's overqualified.
"They told me my need is too great," Barisich chuckles.
Not far away, Fabian Guerra isn't laughing much these days. The 47-year-old fisherman is sitting in a plastic lawn chair on the 3-foot concrete foundation on which his house once stood. Near him sits his father, Jerry, and Fabian's wife, Pam. A couple of his grandchildren run in and out of a FEMA trailer located next to the foundation. Before Katrina struck, Fabian's home in Hopedale, a small fishing village in lower St. Bernard Parish, was the first house he had lived in since Hurricane Betsy destroyed his dad's house in 1965.
"It was a big kick in the pants," Guerra says, remembering his two-story home. "I was living large."
He grew up in a trailer, raised his family in another, and now he's back in one, wrestling with his next move. Guerra doesn't have to walk very far to go to work. Across the only road that cuts through Hopedale is Bayou La Loutre, a small waterway that runs from the village of Yscloskey, through Hopedale, and eventually empties into Lake Borgne. Guerra's 35-foot skiff is docked on this shallow bayou, which is filled with the murky, brackish water that nurtures some of the world's best-tasting seafood. This water has been the source of his family's livelihood for generations.
St. Bernard Parish's official historian, Bill Holland, says Guerra can trace his family back as far as the late 1700s, when immigrants from the Canary Islands first arrived in St. Bernard. Their descendants became known as Los Isle'os ("The Islanders"). They were sugar cane farmers, cattlemen, hunters and trappers. Some Isle'os traveled to the far southeastern stretches of St. Bernard and became commercial fishermen. By the late 19th century, Yscloskey, Delacroix and Shell Beach were firmly established as commercial fishing villages. Hopedale later developed as an outgrowth of Yscloskey and Shell Beach. Guerra wonders if this will be the end of the line for his family's life in Hopedale.
His daughters have little interest in fishing, and there isn't much left besides the bayou water and marsh grass to anchor them to the area. Katrina scattered the family home to parts unknown and damaged his fishing boats and equipment. Even more devastating to this man, accustomed to working 16-20 hours a day on his boat, however, is his new daily routine of fighting his insurance company and waiting for the bayou to be cleared of debris. He hasn't worked in more than two months.
"I've crawled into a big hole, and it's hard to look up," Guerra says.
Commercial fishermen like Guerra, Barisich and the generations that preceded them have long played a major ' but often overlooked ' role in Louisiana's economy. How vital is commercial fishing to the state? Consider these statistics:
â?¢ A 2005 Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries publication states that in 2003 (the most recent year recorded) commercial fishing had an economic impact of more than $2.6 billion on the state's economy, supporting 29,245 jobs and accounting for $100 million in state sales and income tax revenue.
â?¢ Louisiana ranks second in the nation in commercial fisheries production and is home to three of the top six commercial fishing ports.
â?¢ Today's average American consumes more seafood than ever ' 16.6 pounds per year ' with shrimp, at 4.2 pounds per year, now the No. 1 choice for seafood.
â?¢ Although the United States imports 88 percent of its shrimp, Louisiana remains a top producer. Louisiana fishermen harvest 37 percent of the nation's domestic shrimp and 35 percent of the nation's oysters.
Unfortunately for Guerra and many of his fellow fishermen in lower St. Bernard Parish, the federal government seems unaware of the money and jobs at stake. The feds' response to the post-Katrina crisis in the industry has been woefully lethargic in terms of recovery projects and harshly frugal in terms of financial aid. That lack of concern and action may deal a final blow to these small seafood harvesters.
A United States geological survey map of Hurricane Katrina's path reveals that the storm dealt a direct hit to lower St. Bernard Parish. Although exact wind speeds are disputed, the National Weather Service estimates that Katrina had sustained winds of 140 mph when it made landfall in Grand Isle. Because the fishing villages of Hopedale, Yscloskey, Shell Beach and Delacroix lie outside the parish's levee system, Katrina's 18-foot storm surge roared inland unimpeded. In the wake of Katrina's wind and storm surge, little was left standing in these fishing villages.
In advance of the storm, most of the area's commercial fishermen moved their boats inland to the Violet Canal, which is protected by a levee. When Katrina's storm surge flashed up the Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet, multiple levee breaches and overtoppings occurred. Water even burst through the Violet Canal's locks. Because many fishermen stayed with their boats, they were able to loosen boat lines to allow their vessels to float up with the rising water. Later, as the water receded, the quick-thinking group maneuvered its own boats around the canal and re-anchored others, preventing many vessels from being lost or stuck on land.
Barisich, the president and founder of United Commercial Fishermen Association, believes the actions of these intrepid fishermen enabled 90 percent of the boats in the Violet Canal to survive the storm. Many others weren't so lucky. A preliminary FEMA survey in March concluded that at least 1,075 boats in coastal Louisiana needed to be salvaged.
Even though the fishermen of lower St. Bernard saved most of the commercial fleet, most of the boats sustained major equipment losses. Guerra says he has lost more than $40,000 in nets, electronics, generators, motors and boat trailers. With tight profit margins ' fishermen typically make less now than they did 20 years ago ' Guerra, like most commercial fishermen, couldn't afford to insure any of his lost equipment. Barisich says his uninsured loss, which includes property, equipment and private oyster bed destruction, totals more than $500,000.
Katrina transformed coastal Louisiana from a fishing paradise into a saltwater-inundated, debris-infested, mud-caked hell. The surge pushed salt water into the brackish and freshwater marshes and wetlands. According to congressional testimony in March by John Roussell, assistant secretary of LDWF, the storm killed "virtually 100 percent of the freshwater game fish in the heavily impacted areas." With so much salt water pooling in these wetlands, marsh grass and other vegetation died, leaving little oxygen and making the areas uninhabitable for freshwater fish.
The wind and surge also tore through wetlands, lifted tons of dead vegetation and sediment, and deposited them atop nearby oyster reefs, choking if not destroying whole beds. LDWF reports that oyster availability has been cut by 74 percent in the wake of the storm. One of the hardest hit oyster-harvesting areas was Lake Borgne, where many in St. Bernard's fishing villages farm their reefs.
Katrina likewise ripped apart homes, docks, trees, and other structures, dumping much of the flotsam in the bayous and channels that local fishermen, shrimpers and oyster farmers ply in the course of their work. Almost a year later, many of those waterways remain impassable. Hidden amid the wreckage are tanks of oil and gas from transportation stations previously located throughout the extensive coastal marshes. During Roussell's testimony to the Subcommittee on Fisheries and Oceans, he admitted that the tanks and their contents have yet to be found, and safely removing them will not be easy. The tanks are like sunken mines, able to rip into passing boats ' or be ripped open by propellers and dredges ' and spill their polluting liquids.
Almost 50 percent of Louisiana's commercial fishermen lack gear or cannot leave their marinas and docks because of hidden hazards in the waterways. As a result, the number of commercial trips from September to December 2005 plummeted. Based on LDWF documents, commercial fishing trips, including shellfish, oysters, crabs, saltwater fish, menhaden, and freshwater fish excursions, fell by 60 percent. In a scant four months, the state's fishermen swallowed a loss of more than $18 million, many because they simply could not leave the docks.
That number is dwarfed by what the Louisiana Fishing Community Rebuilding Coalition, made up of 20 fishing organizations throughout the state, concludes is the loss to the state's fishing infrastructure ' boats, docks, ice houses, fuel facilities and processing plants. The coalition estimates the total loss at more than $943 million.
Without infrastructure, fishermen can't fish. Katrina also ruined the icehouse that served Yscloskey, Hopedale and Shell Beach. The slips, boathouses and docks are almost completely gone, and there are only two fuel docks on all of Bayou La Loutre. Lynette Gonzales, owner of Net's Rock-n-Dock in Yscloskey, needed only a dock and some tractor-trailers to reopen her place in mid-November. Gonzales buys seafood directly from commercial fishermen and sells ice to fishermen. With the area's only icehouse closed, Gonzales is the sole source of what is suddenly a very valuable commodity, but hers is a small operation. Born and raised in Yscloskey, Gonzales purchased the dock in 2005. She neglected to insure her investment, but her father rebuilt the dock with wood and materials collected after the storm. Gonzales describes her dock as "old and new" ' bits and pieces of smashed Yscloskey docks.
When she first resurrected the dock, Gonzales had no machinery, so she bought seafood by hand until she could afford to buy a conveyor belt. Her house across from her dock was wiped out, and now Gonzales lives in a trailer. She has decided to wait until she sees "what the next years bring us" before rebuilding the house. If a hurricane hits the area again, Gonzales insists she will rebuild her business, but she doesn't want to have to worry about rebuilding a house as well.
With so much devastation to the environment and a vital industry at stake, the fishermen of St. Bernard hoped the federal government would step in immediately and bring relief. Instead, Congress has approved barely 10 percent of the funding requested to rebuild Gulf Coast fisheries, and 11 months after the storm, most of the waterways still haven't been cleared of debris.
After months of frustration at having no income and being stuck in the Violet Canal because of submerged and semi-submerged debris that poses a hazard to navigation, Barisich finally left the canal on May 4. He knew he was running a risk. Bayou La Loutre had only been cleared of sunken boats, not additional debris such as cars, trees or house wreckage.
"I took a chance," says Barisich. "I left at high tide, and I still bumped twice."
Diane and Gary Phillips were part of the fishing infrastructure in Hopedale. The couple relocated from Arkansas in 1992 when they bought Pip's Place, a marina with fuel docks, boathouses, a bait shop, boating supplies, hoists and living quarters. Diane says it was the love of the water and a need for change that first brought the former schoolteacher and her husband, a contractor, to the area. Soon after arriving, they settled into the 14-hour days the marina demanded, with hurricanes being the price of living in the "very best place in the country."
They survived hurricanes Andrew, Georges, Isidore and Lily. Even after every boathouse was destroyed and 3 feet of water had flooded the main building, they always reopened within four days of a storm. Now, not even a shingle or a splinter of wood remains of the marina, which covered 560 feet along the banks of Bayou La Loutre.
After Katrina, the couple concluded it would be a while before they could resume even limited operations. When their first commercial property adjuster contacted them in early December and told them they would receive $170,000 in windstorm insurance proceeds, they thought they would be back in business by spring. Combined with the money from their flood policy, they figured they could pay off their mortgage and purchase a couple of fuel dispensers. They were willing to live in their pickup until they could afford to build something bigger ' but at least they would be back.
A few days later, however, they were contacted by a new adjustor, who refused to meet with them but who deemed their property damage to be flood only.
In March, the Louisiana Fishing Community Rebuilding Coalition, along with other fishing organizations from the Gulf States, made a trip to Washington, D.C., to request federal aid. The group met with congressional staffers and legislators representing the Gulf South. After explaining their need, the coalition asked for $1.1 billion for fisheries and fishermen affected by Katrina in Texas, Florida, Mississippi, Alabama and Louisiana. In April, that amount was included in the early version of the Iraq/Katrina Emergency Supplemental Appropriations Bill.
When Congressman Charlie Melancon talks about that bill, his voice resonates with anger. Melancon, whose district includes St. Bernard Parish, says that by the time the measure became law there was only $128 million for Gulf Coast fisheries and fishermen. Melancon blames this on the collective ignorance and lack of compassion among Washington bureaucrats.
"The people of the Gulf Coast get treated like second-class citizens," Melancon says. "They're working people; they paid their taxes, and they did what they thought was right by life's rules. Should we help them? Yeah. What feeds the taxes in this country to keep it running? It's these people."
Melancon doesn't believe the slashed funding was because of the state's lack of political clout in Congress, because the meager $128 million is to be divided among the five affected states ' including President Bush's home state of Texas.
Louisiana's share of the federal aid comes to just under $53 million. The money will be sent to the LDWF, which will disburse the funds statewide. Jim Hanifen, assistant administrator for LDWF's Marine Fisheries Division, reports that the agency is in the process of formally applying for the federal funds through the U.S. Department of Commerce. He says the state has a target date of Oct. 1 ' more than a year after Katrina ' for receiving the money.
"We waited so long to do something for the fisheries," Hanifen says.
It won't be near enough for the state's ravaged coast and fishermen. As the LDWF's Roussell pointed out in his congressional testimony, the oyster industry alone suffered $176 million in losses. Those losses include not only sack oysters, but also seed oysters, which can be transplanted to beds for future seasons. According to Hanifen, the LDWF can only allocate $23 million to reseeding, rehabilitating and rebuilding public oyster reefs. Of that $23 million, the only direct benefit to oyster farmers is that the state will pay the permit fees for moving oysters from one place to another.
Although many state-leased oyster beds aren't producing or even accessible these days, oyster farmers must still pay rent to maintain their rights to the grounds.
Hanifen says another portion of the federal aid ' the amount has yet to be determined ' will be used for removing obstructions from fisheries and some habitat restoration. Hanifen says it's possible that fishermen could receive bounties for reporting obstructions and removing them. The last part of Louisiana's share will pay for cooperative research for monitoring the recovery of Gulf fisheries. Hanifen says this will allow LDWF to get a better sense of Katrina's true impact on the fisheries and how to plot recovery, and he thinks LDWF might allocate additional funds to compensate fishermen.
Perhaps the fishing coalition should have known that the feds would be of little help, considering the slow pace of clearing the waterways. The Coast Guard was assigned that task, with funding provided by FEMA, and while the Guard should be commended for its search-and-rescue efforts during the immediate aftermath of Katrina, the assignment of clearing waterways has overwhelmed Guard resources.
"We're in uncharted waters, and uncharted waters aren't good," says Master Chief Sam Allred, who is with the Coast Guard's Salvage, Wreck, and Debris Removal Office. "We're not salvage experts, but we're the closest thing federally."
Allred says the Coast Guard began vessel identification in late September and assigned case numbers to damaged, submerged and destroyed boats. Because that is not a typical Coast Guard assignment, the Shaw Group of Baton Rouge was brought in to handle the actual vessel salvaging. Even though the Coast Guard has little expertise in vessel salvaging, it is charged with managing Shaw's salvage operations.
Shaw Group pays for the lobbying services of Joe Allbaugh, former FEMA director and a close Bush confidante. Jim Bernhard, the founder and CEO for Shaw Group, is the former chairman of the Louisiana Democratic Party.
Shaw started picking up submerged boats in December. No additional debris, which clogs the bayous and channels, could be removed under the contract. Moreover, contractors were told to halt efforts when they reached water that didn't have a previous infrastructure such as icehouses, docks or landings. That means Bayou La Loutre beyond the Breton Sound Marina ' the last dock before the MR-GO but still miles before the Gulf ' has yet to be cleared of submerged vessels. Oyster harvesters who own or lease beds in these areas have to risk ruining their boats to get to their beds. As one oyster farmer puts it, "The joke around here is you need two boats: one to get beat up and the other to fish with."
The complete cleanup of coastal waterways is scheduled to begin this month and will be completed in three phases. The most frequently used waterways, as identified by parishes and the state, will be cleared first, with remaining waterways being cleared afterwards. Bayou La Loutre will be part of the first phase, which the Guard hopes to complete within 90 days of the contract being issued.
Meanwhile, white shrimp season begins this month ' for those who can get their boats to where the shrimp are.
In the 88 years that Blackie Campo has lived in lower St. Bernard, he has become as much a part of the coastal community as the marsh grass. He has supplied fishermen with fuel, docks, boat hoists and supplies for 73 years, and he has paid his taxes. He has lost his home to hurricanes four times ' in 1947, 1956, 1965 and 2005. He has the hardened wisdom earned from picking up the pieces time and again.
As he sits by the remnants of his dock ' his granddaughter's husband is working on the two fuel pumps that remain ' Campo, tanned as dark as the murky water, isn't bitter about his new circumstances. Still, he can't help reflecting on the irony of a federal government that supports rebuilding a foreign country but won't support its own land and people. "They haven't offered us any help," Campo says. "But they've spent $100 billion on people who would shoot us in the bat of an eye. We bombed their houses and then we go back and build them up again. They don't have to ask ' we just do it."
Like Campo, the fishermen of St. Bernard have learned a familiar lesson about Hurricane Katrina recovery: You can't depend on the federal government for help, but individuals, as well as faith-based and secular organizations, will lend a hand. Shell Oil & Exploration donated two icehouses, and the Alaskan Fishermen's Association has provided a traveler's lift, a 60-ton cranelike machine that lifts boats off land and puts them back into the water.
Private donations are appreciated, but the real money is in Washington. Barisich's group, United Commercial Fishermen's Association, drove to the nation's capital and gave away a deck box full of shrimp in an effort to showcase fresh, wild-caught, Louisiana shrimp ' and to try to influence legislators. The fishermen didn't get the funding they sought, but that didn't deter them.
Another group, the White Boot Brigade, has discovered that consumerism might be the best way to promote their cause. The group recently stomped up to New York City in their hallmark white "shrimp boots" and asked restaurants to feature Louisiana shrimp on their menus. Many chefs didn't know the difference between the delicate and complicated flavors of wild shrimp from Louisiana and the bland, farm-raised Asian shrimp that some of them had been serving.
"We want to bring the fishermen to places like D.C., New York, Chicago and L.A. with the message that these folks are here to do business," says Richard McCarthy, founder of the White Boot Brigade.
McCarthy, who runs the Crescent City Farmers Market, says the New York effort succeeded. Chefs are serving Louisiana shrimp, and New York retailers are selling the product. McCarthy believes this kind of relationship ' a direct link between fishermen and consumers ' could save the Louisiana shrimping industry. Rather than focusing on an industrial approach with larger and larger shrimp catches and smaller profits, McCarthy thinks shrimpers would benefit by raising quality standards to preserve the unique taste of Louisiana shrimp, making them the seafood equivalent of black Angus beef. That might mean smaller catches, but it could also bring higher specialty prices.
Share Our Strength, a nonprofit organization that fights hunger in the United States, has led a number of tours of Louisiana since Katrina, including stops in the St. Bernard fishing villages. Billy Shore, founder of SOS, invites restaurateurs on the trips to increase their awareness of the suffering in the region and to generate new business relationships.
"You can't solve the social problems that we care about by just redistributing wealth," Shore says. "You have to find ways to create wealth. We call it community wealth because it goes directly back into the community."
Many of the touring restaurateurs have become more involved in fund raising for the New Orleans area, and some have seen the value of featuring Louisiana seafood on their menus. Tom Sasser, a Charlotte, N.C., restaurant owner, has asked his seafood buyer to make Hopedale a regular stop on his purchasing route.
George Barisich says it remains to be seen if he will continue as a commercial fisherman. The Small Business Administration offered him a loan, but only if he put up his two flooded homes in St. Bernard as collateral. Barisich says that's unacceptable, but he will keep searching for financial assistance and fighting for the fishermen.
Diane and Gary Phillips have sued their insurance company. They believe their home was flattened by wind before the storm surge hit lower St. Bernard. In November, a doctor told Gary, who has had renal cell cancer, to go home and make his final arrangements. Diane says if she loses Gary, she will still return to Hopedale.
"When you live in a place you love, and you love the place you're in, then that's what you do," Diane explains. "You pick up the pieces."
Fabian Guerra has filed a similar suit. He has also applied for Louisiana Recovery Authority funds and hopes "something will stick" so he can rebuild his home on his family's ancestral land. He admits that it's been hard for him in the months following Katrina, with so much government inertia and his own inability to provide for his family. He plans to work his boat during this year's white-shrimp season, because he knows he can't stay away too long.
As he ponders his short-term as well as long-term prospects, Guerra sums up the feelings of all those who remain in lower St. Bernard: "You see this bayou that runs out front? I was born and raised here, and the water that flows through there is like the blood that flows through my veins. When I'm separated from it, I feel like I'm smothering, like when you throw a fish up on the grass and it takes so long for it to die."
And just as a fish out of water flips and flops trying to get back into the water, the people of lower St. Bernard vow to do all they can to keep their way of life alive.
The fight to clean up Lafayette Parish could get some added ammunition with two ordinances up for votes Tuesday by the City-Parish Council targeting litter-bugs.
By striking a deal to lessen the blow of health insurance changes on state workers, school employees and retirees, Gov. Bobby Jindal's administration lowered the volume of criticism but gave itself and local school boards a new budget headache.
With the airport tax coming up for a parishwide vote in about a week, the Broussard City Council and its mayor have come out in support of the proposal.
Protesters rallied peacefully in several Louisiana cities in the wake of the Missouri grand jury decision not to indict a police officer in the fatal shooting of Michal Brown.
US cities bidding on Olympics; Guard prevents more Ferguson riots; storm threatens travel and more national and international news for Wednesday, November 26, 2014.
Wednesday's Blogs from the Bog!
The U.S. rep billed LSU for work allegedly performed on the same days Congress voted on major legislation and held important committee hearings on energy and the ACA.
Abysmally low participation by the public has prompted the council to scuttle the 2014 survey with plans to simplify it and try again next year.
The village now says the ordinance will likely be overturned and authorities will more vigorously enforce existing leash laws.
Bill Cassidy cast an early ballot Tuesday, seeking to draw renewed attention to a race that has fallen off newspaper front pages and away from people's minds as they plan holiday meals and shopping schedules.
Battered all night by Baltimore's relentless pass rush, Drew Brees could feel his protection collapsing and Terrell Suggs getting ahold of him as he urgently unloaded a pass to the right flat toward tight end Jimmy Graham.
After a convincing defeat at the polls on Nov. 4, Earl "Nickey" Picard has decided to let bygones be bygones with his former right-hand man Brian Pope, announcing his support for his former employee's runoff bid to become Lafayette's next city marshal.
Saturday the athletic department did everything possible to ensure the 2014 Ragin' Cajun seniors remembered fondly their last home game. Rain and lightning never arrived but turbulence did in the form of the Appalachian State Mountaineers.
Even stranger than the Republican Party's decision to hold a "unity rally" earlier this month for Congressman Bill Cassidy in a Baton Rouge bar, Huey's Bar, was the fact that the establishment was named after Louisiana's most famous Democrat.
Bar Code is not a gay bar.
After failing to pass a medical marijuana bill last year, state Sen. Fred Mills, R-Parks, is telling supporters he will return in 2015 with legislation that focuses on different applications like oils and pills.
Voters, obviously, are not yet tuned into the 2015 ballot, despite the intriguing races it will host.
By now, the story of how longtime LSU coach Dale Brown discovered Shaquille O'Neal has been told many times: Brown happened upon a massive 13-year-old at an army base in Germany, stayed in touch with him and eventually became like a second father.
Fate simply wasn't ready to give the New Orleans Saints a break from longtime nemesis Steve Smith.
Lafayette Police have had a busy day.
Gov. Bobby Jindal's administration will use $130 million in patchwork financing from a tax amnesty program, insurance settlement, uninsured motorist penalties and other excess funds to close most of the state's midyear budget deficit.
Democratic U.S. Sen. Mary Landrieu said she disagrees with President Barack Obama's actions on immigration, hoping the latest controversy doesn't worsen her campaign difficulties.
Gay-rights advocates challenging Louisiana's same-sex marriage ban announced Thursday that they have asked the U.S. Supreme Court to review their case before it is heard by a federal appeals court.
Thinking himself the "son of God," the man charged with the 2013 killing of an officer of the Chitimacha Tribal Police will not stand trial following a ruling Thursday on his mental competency.
Either Saints coach Sean Payton doesn't want to tip Baltimore off as to who'll start in New Orleans' secondary on Monday night, or he really doesn't know yet.
NOV 26 Zach Kopplin, who we came to know and love when he was a Louisiana high school student lobbying for the continued inclusion of science stuff in science class, pens this post in The Atlantic about a "textbook" available for social studies instruction in Texas that discusses how Moses contributed to the Constitution. (Oy! Texas rednecks love Jews. Who knew?)
NOV 26 Finally, mad people on the interwebz is a good thing! World wide webby outrage has caused the village of Moreauville to reverse its plan to confiscate pit bulls and Rottweillers and euthanize them simply because of their breed, WAFB reports here. The plan? They're going to enforce the leash law. Well, that would have been a good place to start.
NOV 26 Jim Brown, like many of us Louisiana voters, seems fed up with out of town know-it-alls trying to tell us what to do. Bill Cassidy can't make it through the day without flying someone in to "tell us political retards" how to vote, he says.
NOV 26 Blogger Tom Aswell is writing about the behavior of the two finalists in the 6th Congressional District race: Edwin Edwards and Garret Graves. Edwards has come out swinging, but Graves' campaign seems bent on snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, Tom says.
NOV 26 Blogger CB Forgotston is confused, he says, because Governor Bobby Jindal said higher education wouldn't get cut, but it looks like it is being cut. CB's asking: When is a cut not a cut?
NOV 26 Unless you're in Virigina, you shouldn't count on seeing our Governor on Election Day. Mark Ballard writes in the Advocate's political blog that Bobby will be appearing at a GOP love fest of some kind there, instead of spending the day here.
NOV 26 This post on The Lens takes a look at the ongoing dispute in New Orleans over the banners about the upcoming tax election for the school system. The banners are hanging on schools, and some feel they are promotional, which is not allowed, instead of educational - which is allowed.
NOV 26 Not all college students are focused on football games and parties at this time of year. This post on DIG Baton Rouge recounts an LSU student group that tries to make sure that those who are hungry and homeless are not forgotten by those of us who aren't.
NOV 25 Edwin Edwards took off the gloves on Monday, this post on WAFB tells us. At a Press Club appearance, he wondered how his 6th Congressional District opponent, Garret Graves, could be an expert in all the areas in which he claims to be - when he has no college degree in anything. (Five years - FIVE YEARS - in college, but no degree. Huh?)
NOV 25 Blogger Mike Deshotels offers this primer on predatory charter schools and how they operate, specifically in Louisiana. They're not just profiting from our tax dollars, they're using children and shortchanging them to do so, Deshotels says.
NOV 25 Here's a link to the petition that has been created to save Zeus, a family dog who is targeted for death by the learned fathers of the Avoyelles Parish village of Moreauville. They passed an ordinance based on nothing that outlaws pit bulls and Rotweillers. As of Tuesday morning, the petition had more than 230,000 signatures - a number that's a wee bit higher than the village population of 929.


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Stop Flipping! The New Rules of TV
From where to (legally) stream your favorite shows to viewing advice from the best minds in the business, here's everything you need to know about the new golden age of television
Telling people "I hooked up with thirteen women this weekend" makes you sound like a creep. It's almost an act of valor, however, to stumble out of your apartment after a weekend-long TV binge, all squinty and pale, jabbering about a season's worth of white-trash smackdowns on Justified. With the TV binge, you enter into a kind of trance state in which every character is as lovingly familiar as a college friend and every one of a hundred plot points makes sense. But like everything else, there is a proper way to binge.
DO watch with a significant other. You know how having sex by yourself is sad but having sex with another human is great? It's like that.
DON'T inhale an entire series in one day; four or five eps at a time should be your limit. (Think a robust Bordeaux, not a box of Franzia.)
DO remember basic rules of health and hygiene. Every two episodes, hydrate with water (as in drink it) and do a couple of crunches.
DON'T binge on sitcoms with laugh tracks, even if it's How I Met Your Mother. (See Rule 7.)
- Tags
- Entertainment,
- Breaking Bad,
- Movies + TV,
- Mad Men
Food + Travel
- David Chang's Kitchen: Don't Get All "Fresh" with Me
- David Chang's Kitchen: Your Idea of Bologna is Total Baloney
- Chart: The Family Tree of Bourbon Whiskey
- Recipe: Semi-Summer Salad - Chef Jeff Taibe of Oak + Almond
- The Great Franco-Italian Pasta Experiment
- How to Pick from an Overpriced Restaurant Wine List

subset: commoncrawl


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Firefox OS Marketplace appears in leaked images
Those of you hankering for another look at the incoming Firefox OS will be happy with this next piece of news. Engadget is playing host to a collection of leaked images that show off the Firefox OS Marketplace, giving us an idea of how we'll shop for apps using the OS. Of course, we use the term "shop" loosely since all of the apps that appear in the images are being offered for free, but what can you do?


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How to do Constitutional Reform Totally Wrong
According to ITV:
The Political and Constitutional Reform Committee has unanimously agreed to recommend:
Online voting (including on smart phones)
Quicker ways of registering to vote (including on the day of an election)
A huge programme of devolution as well as mandatory voting
Extending the franchise to 16 and 17 year olds
Where to begin with the wrongness?
I'm more-or-less in favour of giving sixteen and seventeen year-olds the vote. I don't really care one way or another, but fine,
Huge programme of devolution — show me the details. I don't like the "DevoManc" stitch-up, but I'm entirely in favour of proper devolution.
But there are two big, HUGE, problems here for me — two problems so massive that I am actually angry and wanting to punch something.
The first is compulsory voting. I am absolutely, utterly, in favour of everyone who has the ability to vote using their vote. You won't find a bigger supporter of the democratic process than me anywhere in the world. But I am utterly in favour of people CHOOSING to use their vote. It is utterly abhorrent to force anyone to take part in the process. There are many people with strongly-held convictions that stop them from participating in elections, whether because they believe the system to be illegitimate and that their participation adds a veneer of legitimacy, or because they hold religious beliefs that forbid them from taking part in secular government. To force them to take part in something that goes against their conscience is something no civilised society should do.
There are also, though, those who just can't be bothered — surely they should be compelled to vote?
Firstly, because of the harm principle — "The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others." (sorry for the sexist language — quoting John Stuart Mill). Refusing to vote causes no-one any harm, so no power should be exercised to force people to do it. That, to me, is an absolute.
But also because from a purely pragmatic point of view, people who can't be bothered to vote will tend to have uninformed opinions, and to vote frivolously, because they don't think their vote matters — if they thought it mattered, they'd vote.
So compulsory voting forces people to go against their deepest convictions, weakens the democratic process, and does so for no actual gain.
I have voted in every election since I turned eighteen — every council election, every EU election, every stupid local referendum about mayors or speed cameras that gets ignored anyway, all of them. I believe exercising my democratic rights to be hugely important. But should this rule be brought in, I would consider it my duty as a liberal and a democrat to take part in peaceful civil disobedience and refuse to vote. I'm a liberal, and I'm against this sort of thing.
But I wouldn't even need to refuse to vote, it turns out, because the committee plans to take my vote away from me, by making it trivially easy to steal, or for someone to coerce me into voting for a candidate I don't support. The introduction of online voting would be an utter disaster — as Dave Page puts it, "verifiable, anonymous, online — pick two". Read his post — he made all the points I would have made about online voting a month ago. Basically, if you want to have online voting, you either give up the secret ballot, give up ever being able to check that the vote you think you cast actually went to the person you wanted to vote for, or (most likely) both.
This cretinous, foetid, outrage of a plan is what you get when you have a constitutional committee consisting of nine Labservative MPs, an SDLP member who might as well be Labour, and Jeremy Browne, the single most authoritarian Lib Dem MP in Parliament. Please God let these proposals be shredded, because as it is if they get accepted we might as well give up any hope of ever having a functioning democracy in this country.
Imposition of Identity, English Parliaments, and "Englishness"
At Alex and Richard's wedding a little over a week ago, I got into a discussion about devolution, inspired by the recent decision of the North-West Liberal Democrats to declare independence from the English party. This was entirely as moderate and reasoned as you would expect a debate on such an abstruse procedural matter among Liberal Democrats at a formal occasion like a wedding to be, by which I mean it ended with me and Jennie Rigg screaming incoherently at someone who I'd never met before, but who Jennie knows well.
The reason for this is that this person (who I won't name as I'm probably misrepresenting him) believes that England exists, while Jennie and I (and Mat, who managed to remain calm) do not.
More specifically, he believes that England as a coherent country makes sense. I don't remember many of his arguments, and I certainly don't want to straw-man him, so please accept from here on in that I am misrepresenting him horribly, but that I *am* representing arguments I've seen elsewhere accurately. I'm talking here about a generic argument, rather than a specific person's argument.
The argument is that if we have further devolution to Scotland and Wales, there must also be devolution to England. Not because it makes sense from a pragmatic point of view — an English Parliament would have a 90% or thereabouts overlap with the UK Parliament — but because "English identity needs to be represented".
Now, I have problems with this for a few reasons. The first is that I don't think decisions on the best way to govern should be based on intangible things like "identity", but on more pragmatic factors like "do the people here speak the same language, do they have the same economic needs", that kind of thing. My own view is that the level of devolution should be to areas somewhere in size between the old historic counties and the current European Union regions — "Yorkshire" and "Cornwall" make sense to me as lumps-which-can-be-governed, but "Lancashire" doesn't, and "the North West" feels like more of a sensible unit in that case. But those sort of sizes, anyway — regions which are, if not homogeneous, at least small enough that people in different parts of them are aware of issues that affect people in the other areas.
But even putting aside the pragmatic factors, the question of identity is one I find quite infuriating. Because yes, there is an "English identity" — but it's not an identity that actually incorporates huge swathes of England. Rather, when people talk about England and the English identity, nine times out of ten they live in, and are talking about, the Home Counties. In the case of a legislature, this would be poisonous — in fact we know it already is, because we live in a country already where laws are made by and for London with little or no concern for the rest of the country. I suspect that would be replicated in the case of an English Parliament, and I don't see how Penzance, Newcastle, and Hebden Bridge benefit from having laws and regulations made to benefit London, whether those laws are called "British" or "English" (nor for that matter do I see that laws and regulations that benefit Penzance would necessarily be particularly helpful for Newcastle or Hebden).
But even on its own terms, if identity is what matters, the fact is, a large chunk of English people don't consider "English" to be a meaningful identity. During the Scottish Independence referendum, the comment I saw more than any other from English people living, roughly, north of the Trent or the Dee was "take us with you!" — and, indeed, most Scottish Yes voters I talked to said "oh, we're not trying to get away from the North, it's the English we're trying to become independent from".
It may not be the case for all of us — perhaps not even a plurality — but there are *millions* of people in the north, and also in Cornwall, who feel a far greater affinity with Scotland and Wales than with those parts of England that people usually mean when they talk about "the English identity" and "Englishness". Manchester, Liverpool, and Leeds are closer to Glasgow not only geographically but also culturally and economically. Wales feels far less foreign to me than Oxford does.
There are many, many people who feel this way. I won't, of course, say that there is no sense of Englishness outside the Home Counties — of course there is — but I know a LOT of people from Yorkshire, for example, who don't think of themselves as English, as having anything in common with the South.
Any form of devolution based on concepts of "identity" has to take into account the fact that different people have different senses of identity. In the case of Englishness, there is a large group that doesn't want to be part of that identity — but that identity can only exist by erasing and subsuming those people.
And this is what happens if you build systems based on identity, rather than based on practicalities. Ignore the "English identity" and you're ignoring one group's wishes. But the alternative is to impose that identity on people who in many cases already see themselves as being oppressed and ignored by the very people doing the imposition. Quite apart from the sheer futility of it as a legislature, an English Parliament would be seen by many, many people in the North as yet another case of something being done for London's benefit, and imposed on the rest of us against our will.
The argument for an English Parliament boils down to an emotive one — that people's feelings about England matter, that they're not important. But by even making the argument that way, by framing it in those terms, the people making it are also saying that the feelings of those who disagree with them *do not* matter, and *are not* important. And we've already heard that rather a lot.
I'm British. I'm a Northerner. I'm an (adoptive) Manc. I'm a European. But I'll never be English, and you can't make me.
We Need STV, Not "PR"
(I hope the following is coherent — I've been sleep-deprived for much of the last week, and really don't feel very good)
We no longer live in anything that could be made to convincingly pose as a two-party system, even if you squint a bit. Nor do we live in the two-and-a-bit party system we had from 1981 through 2010, where Labour or the Tories would get a massive majority and the Lib Dems would have a handful of seats.
At the next election, while the Lib Dems' vote has haemmoraged, the party is still likely to get twenty or thirty seats — the same levels they were getting in the 90s — through targetted campaigning and the incumbency factor (I was predicting 35 until recently, and that's still possible, but would require rather more competence in getting a liberal message out than we've seen). UKIP topped the poll at the European election and look likely to come third nationally, but seem unlikely to get more than (at the very most) one or two seats in the election. The Greens are polling better than they ever have, and may still overtake the Lib Dems in support, though I doubt it. And the Scottish National Party have more members than any UK-wide party now, I believe, with the Scottish Socialist Party and Scottish Greens all doing fairly well.
Some of this I'm very glad about, some of it I'm much less happy about — I've often said that I wish the two main parties in the UK were the Lib Dems on the liberal side and the Greens on the authoritarian centralist side — but all of it's a fact. It's looking incredibly unlikely that any party will even get as high a share of the vote as the low share the Tories got in 2010, when they got most votes but couldn't get a majority without going into coalition with the Lib Dems.
In fact it's possible, though not likely, that the following absurd situation could happen next time — the Tories come first in popular vote, but second in seats, Labour come second in popular vote but first in seats, UKIP come third in the vote but get no seats at all, the Greens come fourth but also get no seats, and the Lib Dems come fifth but get enough seats that they get to be the kingmakers who decide what party or parties form the next government.
I don't think that's going to happen — I think the Lib Dem vote will recover enough, and UKIP's vote will drop off enough at an actual election, that those two parties will be pretty much neck-and-neck in the popular vote in May, with the Greens a distant fifth — but it's not at all unthinkable.
Three years ago, after the massive failure of the AV referendum (still the most upsetting public event of my lifetime), William Hague was crowing at Conservative party conference that electoral reform was "dead for a generation". Now the political system has become so chaotic and unpredictable that we're starting to see kite-flying articles in the Tory broadsheets talking about how the Tories should consider putting "PR" into their manifesto for the next election. I don't think that will happen, but electoral reform is not looking anything like as unthinkable as it did after the referendum — and if something as blatantly stupid as the scenario I outline above happens and we don't get reform, I could see riots happening.
The problem is that the kite-flying we're seeing talks about "PR", not about a specific system. And this is dangerous. It's partly the fault of the Lib Dems, for spending decades talking about "PR" rather than systems — and that was something that helped sink the AV referendum, when a load of thick bastards who thought they were being clever said they'd only vote for "full PR" without really knowing what the words they were saying meant.
There are actually at least three criteria that, in my view at least, need to be met to consider a voting system truly representative. Proportionality is one — the result should lead to roughly the same proportion of representatives for each party as there were people who voted for it — but it's only one, and to my mind the least important of the three. The system should also be preferential — it shouldn't discard as pointless all the votes that don't go to the top two candidates, which the Biggest Loser system we've got now does — and it should allow people to vote for specific candidates, or more to the point *against* them. If you've got an incompetent representative, you should be able to get rid of that person even if they're in a generally-popular party, and conversely if you've got a good independent candidate they should be able to win even without being a member of a party.
AV was my second-favourite choice, because it had both those latter two conditions. It isn't proportional, but it is preferential, and it allows you to vote for individuals rather than parties. Other voting systems have these aspects in different measure. The only one I know of that has all three is the single transferable vote, or British Proportional Representation (to give it the name which would possibly sell it to more voters, and by which it used to be known). This is the system that the Lib Dems have always advocated, and it is also the one that the Electoral Reform Society, among others, campaign for.
And we need to start advocating for British Proportional Representation now, and constantly, and explaining the difference between that and just "PR", which isn't "full PR", but is "only PR". There are many proportional systems out there, and some are profoundly undemocratic. The Bloody Stupid d'Hondt System (to give it its full name) that we use for the European elections, for example, is hideously undemocratic even though it's proportional — voters get to choose from lists of candidates chosen by the parties, with no control over which individual their vote helps elect. This moves control and accountability away from the voters and toward the party leaders. We all remember times when unpopular individual politicians from all sides have been kicked out by their local voters because of their personal unpopularity, even when they've been important figures in their parties (naming no Michaels, Peters, or Lembits). We've also seen, less often but occasionally, strong independent candidates get elected. Having a PR system like d'Hondt would ensure that that could never happen.
We need proportionality, but it must be balanced by the ability to vote for individuals. We need to make sure that if we do get electoral reform as a result of the current mess, it's not a stitch-up that transfers power into the hands of four voters named David, Ed, Nick, and Nigel.
No to PR, yes to STV.
The Liberal Approach To Immigration?
(What follows is me trying an idea out. I am not at all sure it's not a horrible idea, hence the question mark in the title. PLEASE criticise it — but also be aware when doing so that while discussion of *immigration* in my comments is fine, abuse of *immigrants* will get you banned.)
Like many Liberals, I am antipathetic to Nationalism at a fairly basic level, simply because to me the nation state seems the wrong sort of size to hold my interest or affections in any meaningful way. I love the city where I live, and even more those areas where I have lived or spent a lot of time within that city — Rusholme, Moss Side, Fallowfield, Didsbury, Levenshulme, Longsight, Chorlton, Withington, Whalley Range, and the city centre — that square about four miles on its side is an area I feel at home, know at least some of the people, feel comfortable.
To a lesser extent, I feel some loyalty to an area stretching roughly from Liverpool at the west to Bradford at the east. That chunk of the country is not somewhere you can fit into your head the way you can a small part of a single city, but still I know Mytholmroyd or Warrington, Alderley Edge or Halifax, not well, but well enough that they feel like parts of my extended community, close in the same way a second cousin you meet at family weddings is.
And in the other direction, I can feel a generalised loyalty for "the world" or "humanity". All men are my brothers, all women my sisters (except my wife, that would just be weird), all people with nonbinary genders my siblings-without-gendered-descriptors.
But England, or even more so Britain, I have no time for. It's too diffuse a concept, means too many things, is too big an area. I don't know what it means to love one's country in that sense — to feel the same affection for the grim concrete hell of Spaghetti Junction and the standing stones at Stonehenge, the battered, tacky, seafront at Blackpool and the Roman ruins at Chester. And while I share many experiences in common with other people in south Manchester, and some with people in Bradford or Liverpool, I honestly think Londoners have more in common with New Yorkers than they do with Mancunians, and I found Cornwall infinitely more foreign to me than I did Milan or New Orleans on my brief trips to those places. Britain, or England, is too diverse, not homogeneous enough to love for what it is, rather than a simplified ideal, and I am at heart a Puritan — I won't worship idols, and especially not idols of my own making.
So no, I'm not a nationalist, and I don't understand the nationalist mindset. I never have, and I doubt I ever will. Not that I think it necessarily bad, but it's alien to me.
And this is a problem for Liberals in general right now, because the two big stories in politics over the last few months — and ones that look likely to continue for the forseeable future, are stories about nationalism: the left-wing nationalism in Scotland, when 45% of the voting population voted for independence from the UK, and the right-wing nationalism of UKIP, who are somehow a bigger story because they managed to get a single incumbent incompetent Tory MP re-elected to the seat he'd represented for years, but with a purple rosette instead of a blue one.
As you might imagine, I have rather more sympathy for the Scottish nationalists than the UKIP ones, if only because the Yes voters I knew were proposing some actual solutions to the problems they see, rather than just whinging, which seems to be the majority of what comes from UKIP. And happily, the Lib Dem policy position is at least one that many of those Scottish nationalists could support — devolution of pretty much all powers to Holyrood, and increased devolution to the English regions as well. That's the position our party is fighting for in the ongoing weaselling competition in which MPs are trying to get out of their obligations to Scotland by blaming those other bastards, and I think it's one which the majority of Scottish people I know would support as reasonable, given the result of the referendum.
The right-wing nationalism of UKIP is rather harder for Liberals to work with. In this case, while UKIP have a host of policy positions (some good, most misguided, some which would probably destroy the country), the one that seems to hold the key to their popularity is their position on immigration.
The consensus among all three major party leaders seems to be that this position appeals to people because people are just racist arseholes, and so you should make horrible speeches about how immigrants need their rights taking away — or just, you know, pose with a load of people in blackface.
And no doubt some — many — of UKIP's voters are racist. They've certainly taken most of the BNP's vote away (and for that, if nothing else, we should be grateful — I have no time for Douglas Carswell, but in many ways I'd rather a Parliament with 650 of him than one Nick Griffin). But there are a lot of people who are concerned about immigration but who talk about other complaints — overcrowding, strain on services, teachers having to deal with huge gaps in culture without proper training or support — and in at least some cases those *are* their genuine concerns.
And this comes down again to the question of Britain not being homogeneous. There are areas of the country — London is the obvious example — that are hugely overcrowded, and where the basic infrastructure to support human life at a tolerable level is frankly at breaking point. I can see why people in London would not want any more people coming there (though I also don't see why anyone would *want* to move there — paying the GDP of a medium-sized South American country to rent a flat the size of my fridge that you have to share with two strangers doesn't sound like fun to me, but vive la difference and all that…). On the other hand, large areas of Scotland are apparently desperate for immigration — and frankly no-one in my own area seems at all bothered by it. I suspect that a lot of the reason it's seen as a problem, in fact, is the London-centric nature of the media.
Note that I'm not saying that the people in London who blame immigration for problems are right to do so — I think they're not — just that there are people who identify actual problems, and believe they have identified a cause. That's something that has to be dealt with somewhat differently than people who just hate people with different coloured skin.
Now, the Lib Dem policy at the last election (our policy was changed in March, much for the worse, and I believe this aspect was dropped) had a fairly sensible approach — issue visas that allow people to live and work only in specific areas of the country, those areas which are seen to need more people.
This is an idea that might well be effective, but is not, to my mind, particularly Liberal. It's still, fundamentally, about the central state telling people what they can and can't do. I don't like that centralising of power, and as long as power is centralised it can and will be abused.
So what I suggest is that, since we want radical devolution anyway, we should push for devolution of immigration policy (except EU immigration, which is something of a special case) to regional assemblies. Set a simple national policy — say, anyone who has been legally resident anywhere in the UK can apply for citizenship after a period of time long enough to prevent blatant abuse, but short enough to allow for reasonable changes in circumstances, say two or three years, and would then obviously have the same rights as any other citizen. But then every regional assembly could have their own rules about coming to live and work in their area. London might want to say "no more, we're full", while maybe West Yorkshire might say "frankly, we need more of you. We'll actually pay for your plane ticket over. Hebden's lovely, you should move there". You could still travel to London, of course, but you'd have to live and work in West Yorkshire (unless, say, West Yorkshire negotiated a deal with Greater Manchester allowing visas for one to be valid in the other).
Or the other way round — the point is that those decisions would be made by and for those affected, not a one-size-fits-all policy which pretends that the needs of London are the same as those of Kendal, or that Penzance and Newcastle have anything at all in common. And I think doing this would allow any actual problems caused by immigration to be addressed (and again, I doubt there are nearly as many as people say, but I don't deny the possibility that I am wrong), would allow Britain to get the benefit of immigrants and immigrants to get the benefit of living in places where they felt welcome, and would stop the actual racists from being able to use seemingly-reasonable concerns as a smokescreen.
Once that was brought in, I would, of course, advocate for the Liberal solution within Manchester (or the North West, or wherever the boundaries were drawn) — let everyone in. For me, immigration has only improved my life, and many of the things I like about those parts of Manchester I named before come from immigrants, whether the Irish community where I live now, with things like the Levenshulme Irish festival, the Asian immigrants who run the takeaways that ensured that no matter how poor I got in the past I could always get a decent meal for almost no money, or the immigrant who lives in my house and tolerates me waking her up after staying up til the early hours writing overlong blog posts. I want to push for more of that.
But that's an argument that can and should be made at a local level, not a national one. If we have to have borders, let them at least be borders around real places, not the fiction that is "the United Kingdom".
California Dreaming: A Note About Race
California Dreaming is a story of the LA pop music scene, but it's not the story of the LA pop music scene. In writing it, I had to choose a starting point, and for the bits of the story that I wanted to tell, Moon Dawg by the Gamblers is just about as close to a perfect start as could be imagined. The part of the LA scene I was most interested in is the part around 1967, when at the same time something like half a dozen of the greatest creative minds ever in popular music were working in close proximity to each other and moving in the same social circles. This was a flowering of talent unlike anything I know of in pop music, and in about a three year period from mid-1965 to mid-1968 produced about as much of the music I enjoy as the entirety of human history throughout the rest of space and time (and I enjoy a lot of music).
But this didn't just arise ab nihilio in 1960 when the Gamblers invented surf music. The reason the Gamblers were able to release their record — and Frank Zappa, Jan & Dean, Randy Newman, and all the rest — is because there were a lot of independent record labels in LA already. Records from LA in the years before 1960 included classics by T. Bone Walker, The Coasters, Etta James, The Penguins, Don and Dewey…
You might notice something about all those fantastic musicians.
Most (though not all) of the small record companies in LA in the late 50s and early 60s were owned by white men, and put out the music of black people. With the advent of surf music, they found a way to sell music made by white Angelenos, and given the levels of open, systemic racism in the US at the time (not that things are wonderful now, of course), it's unsurprising that the focus of many small labels turned very quickly from black musicians to white ones. The white music of the 60s was only possible because of the black music of the 50s.
Many of the white musicians also played the same clubs when starting out as a lot of Mexican-American garage bands. Unsurprisingly, few of those garage bands made much of a dent on the wider music industry.
There were, of course, still black musicians in LA throughout the 1960s, and I have tried to emphasise their role in the story whenever they show up, as I have musicians from other ethnic minorities, to try to give the book some of the balance it should have.
But the sad fact is that BAME musicians like Cleve Duncan, Ronnie Spector, Tina Turner, Arthur Lee, Johnny Echols, Taj Mahal, Larry Ramos, Don "Sugarcane" Harris, and Jimmy Carl Black, who managed to carve spaces for themselves in the white-dominated LA pop music scene of the 60s were very much the exception, not because of a lack of talent, but because of a lack of opportunity, as were the even smaller number of women who got to play a part in this story, who were kept out for rather different reasons.
None of the individuals I write about in the book was responsible for this situation, very few were racist in their personal lives or their own actions, but I thought it important to acknowledge that there are reasons that those people got to be the ones I wrote about. Some of those reasons are good, but some definitely aren't.


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noun; my cupcake. A man derived from Chicago and gives the best kisses & hugs in the world. The missing piece to Beautiful's puzzle. Her other half.
Shain, will you marry me?
by Desai aka Beautiful February 05, 2009
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Learn how the SAP Best Practices family of packages makes SAP Business All-in-One solutions more affordable, more flexible, and able to deliver faster time to value. Discover how the building-block approach of SAP Best Practices lets you address requirements now and as needs change.
Conozca cómo P&G, la mayor empresa de productos de consumo del mundo, ha valorado el software de aplicación SAP HANA para generar sus aplicaciones de informes y planificación financiera de nueva generación.
Learn how SAP ALM, SAP Landscape Management & SAP Solution Manager helped Procter&Gamble increase transparency into their business & increase their speed time to market. SAP helped P&G translate business requirements into their technical solutions, improve quality of their business & harmonize their business processes.
Discover how Grupo Modelo, Mexico's largest producer and seller of beer, used the value management methodology from the SAP Value Management program to help it maximize on IT investments.


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Jung Yoo Mi Admits Not Keeping in Touch With Jung Joon Young After "We Got Married"
Actress Jung Yoo Mi got real and revealed that she hasn't been keeping in touch with his then on-screen husband Jung Joon Young after their stint in the MBC variety show, "We Got Married."
In an interview with OSEN on August 1, the actress talked about her relationship with the rock singer after they finished the show. "We don't contact each other. Even when we were filming the show, we weren't the type to contact each other," said Jung Yoo Mi.
"I'm currently working with Choi Tae Joon in a drama and he's Jung Joon Young's best friend. The two really meet often. Whenever I meet (Choi Tae Joon), I hear news about him (Jung Joon Young). That's why even when 'We Got Married' is finished, I feel that there's still an extension (of our relationship)


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County to consider restrictions that would curb development, farming and other activities on more than 82,000 acres of land outside city limits, most of it on private property.
In the Old West, a sheriff's duties included disarming people before they took the law into their own hands.
Carlos Hyde's 4-yard TD run erased Washington's lead with 5:36 to play Sunday.
As more shoppers head online, small retailers are following them, while making sure brick-and-mortar stores stay relevant with unique experiences and special events.
Placing a cornucopia basket in the center of your table makes a powerful and luscious statement, both visually and symbolically.
The Green Music Center in Rohnert Park and the Wells Fargo Center in Santa Rosa have made sure you'll have lots of opportunity for holiday cheer.


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An open-source software platform used for visualization and analysis of molecular interaction and network data
Tutorial and training materials by OpenHelix
|Learn to use Cytoscape, an open-source software platform used for visualization and analysis of molecular interaction and network data. Cytoscape uses a graphical user interface with floatable panels to easily manage your network data. Graphical data displays and text attributes provide detailed information about interactions of interest. Customizable features enable extensive visualization and manipulation opportunities. This platform also offers plugin capability to increase functionality, and has an active user community developing and maintaining the software.
Note: This tutorial corresponds to Cytoscape 2.x versions. We are monitoring the releases of the 3.x software and will provide updates in the future.
You'll learn:
- how to navigate and use the graphical user interface
- to import network data from different sources
- how to create a network layout and import attributes for your network
- how to find and load plugins to add functionality to your network analysis
View additional tutorials for resources in
Recent BioMed Central research articles citing this resource
Gruel Nadège et al., Polarity gene alterations in pure invasive micropapillary carcinomas of the breast. Breast Cancer Research (2014) doi:10.1186/bcr3653
Lescarbeau M Reynald et al., Quantitative analysis of castration resistant prostate cancer progression through phosphoproteome signaling Systems biology, post-genomic analysis and emerging technologies. BMC Cancer (2014) doi:10.1186/1471-2407-14-325
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More about the resource:
The Cytoscape Consortium is a collaboration between the Institute for Systems Biology (Hood lab), the University of California San Diego (Ideker lab), Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center (Sander lab), the Institut Pasteur (Schwikowski lab), Agilent Technologies (Adler lab) and the University of California, San Francisco (Conklin lab), with support from grant agencies and corporate sponsors. Cytoscape is a downloadable Java application that can run on Linux, Windows, and Mac OS systems.
Click here for technical information on using OpenHelix tutorial and training materials
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Copyright 2009, OpenHelix, LLC.


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Uralkali Faces Flooding at Russian Mine, Could Boost Potash Prices
Uralkali suffered flooding and a sinkhole at its Solikamsk-2 mine this week, prompting speculation that the company may have to reduce its output.
Uralkali suffered flooding and a sinkhole at its Solikamsk-2 mine this week, prompting speculation that the company may have to reduce its output.
Interest in phosphate companies is slowly climbing as the market tries to shake itself out of its summer dormancy. Here's a look at where phosphate's future may lie.
Despite a volatile potash market, companies believe there are good times around the corner as demand for crops rises.
Ethan Park, an analyst with Extract Capital, recently spoke to Potash Investing News about what makes the fertilizer market a compelling story.
This week Arianne Phosphate and DuSolo Fertilizers made headlines in the phosphate space. Here's a look at what's been going on.
while precious metals flounder about with their lackluster performance, investors might want to consider other avenues for their investing needs, like the fertilizer market.
The Canadian potash giant is recalling some of the workers it laid off at the end of last year on the expectation that the market will improve in 2015.
Canada's phosphate production hopeful received a tidal wave of support from the Quebec government.
The company capped off the month of August by signing a memorandum of understanding with Tetra Tech and has plenty planned for 2014's last few months.
DuSolo Fertilizer is one permit away from phosphate production in Brazil.
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The long-term outlook for Potash is positive and the worlds largest Potash producers are confident that the next few years will see a return to robust demand growth. The main growth markets for the metal are the BRIC countries, but demand from Western economies is expected to rise as well. The automotive and aerospace industries are seen as the main catalysts for new growth as manufacturers seek to reduce fuel consumption by creating lighter weight vehicles.
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text:
n. A pie.
"Just going to go grab a mousecoffin from the bakery. Anyone else want one?"
by Duuudeomgggg April 29, 2010
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text:
November 26, 2014
Stay up-to-date with KAKE News:
EMPORIA, Kan. (AP) — A racehorse that drew attention when it was rescued from a Kansas slaughterhouse has been euthanized at a thoroughbred retirement home in Kentucky.
Clever Allemont, the 1985 Rebel Stakes winner, was euthanized on Monday after suffering from colic at the age of 32, according to a news release from Old Friends in Georgetown, Kentucky.
The Emporia Gazette reports that the horse was rescued by several horse lovers in 2008 after a dealer saw him in a slaughter buyer's pen in Lyons County and called a rescue organization. He was moved to Old Friends in 2009.
The horse won his first six races, including the Rebel Stakes, and was being touted for the Kentucky Derby when he hurt his hoof and was retired to stud.
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text:
TONIGHT'S MIGHT-SEE: "Hawaii Five-0" and "Blue Bloods," 9
and 10 p.m., CBS.
A week before these ratings-leaders start their seasons,
they rerun the season-finales. First, "Five-0" includes the return of Nick
Jonas (as computer-hacker Ian Wright) and Mark Dascascos (as Wo Fat, escaped
from prison). To save his kidnapped daughter, Grover (Chi McBride) must steal
$100 million.
Then Danny is put on modified duty, after looking into an
off-limits case. Suspicious, he passes it on to his dad (Tom Selleck), the
police commissioner … who is soon startled by what he finds.
TONIGHT'S ODDITY: "Z Nation," 10 p.m., Syfy.
The public passion for zombies seems to be ongoing. Last week's
hyperactive opener drew 1.6 million viewers, huge by Syfy standards; now, after
that fierce episode, "Z" has at least a bit of plot.
One man seems to have zombie-immunity. Now our heroes (led
by Tom Everett Scott) must reluctantly take him cross-country, to a California
lab. Tonight, they only get as far as New Jersey before needing a dangerous
mission to get more fuel.
TONIGHT'S ALTERNATIVE: "The Roosevelts: An Intimate History,"
8 p.m., PBS; rerunning at 10.
As war neared, this terrific documentary says, the majority
of Americans even opposed accepting refugees. The U.S. military was ranked 18th;
its Army (smaller than Romania's) had rifles designed in 1903. An isolation
movement ranged from Charles Lindbergh to students Gerald Ford and John
Franklin Roosevelt hesitated until resistance to the war
faded. Republicans chose a non-isolationist (Wendell Willkie), who endorsed a
draft before he did; Pearl Harbor and Hitler's quick declaration of war erased
any doubts. Amid a massive build-up, the Depression vanished; so did social-reform
Other choices include:
"Utopia" and "Red Band Society," 8 and 9 p.m., Fox. Getting
a small head start on other networks, Fox wraps up the second week of "Utopia"
and reruns Wednesday's OK opener to "Red Band": In a children's hospital,
mismatched teens find snatches of joy, agony, humor and, maybe, romance.
"Last Man Standing," 8 p.m., ABC. In the first rerun, Chuck
has two woes; he's separated from his wife and his purebred dog has become
pregnant via Mike's mutt. In the second, Eve's boyfriend disagrees with her
plan to wear her ROTC uniform to the prom.
"Running Wild with Bear Grylls," 8 p.m., NBC. Here's one
final rerun of the first season. Grylls heads into Utah canyons with former
two-sport star Deion Sanders, who had never been camping before.
"Girl Meets World," 8:30 p.m., Disney. When Cory gives a
living-history assignment, his daughter and her friends are swept back to 1961
New York.
"Mean Girls" (2004), 9 p.m., ABC Family. Tina Fey wrote this
clever script about a new student, tugged between two cliques. Lindsay Lohan
leads a terrific cast that includes Rachel McAdams and Lacey Chabert, plus
"Saturday Night Live" alumni -- Fey, Amy Poehler, Tim Meadows and Ana Gasteyer.
"The Knick," 10 p.m., Cinemax. The hospital tries a new
operating-room procedure. Its administrator continues to wheel and deal, now
with used equipment. Also, Cornelia reconsiders her engagement.


text:
No rating
GreatSchools Rating
Teacher quality
Principal leadership
Parent involvement
I have had the pleasure of working with St. Jude's graduates as they have transitioned into a competitive high school environment. St. Jude's students are not only prepared academically but are responsible and committed members of the school community. They are disciplined and ready to work on their own academics and are willing to serve the larger community. Consistently, St. Jude's graduates are prepared for a rigorous high school environment. Its graduates are testament to the school's administrative leadership and the faculty.
As a parent of two children at Saint Jude School, I am still amazed at the exceptional academic performance of the children at the school. When compared to other schools and school systems, it is clear that these kids achieve academic excellence! The teachers are second to none and have longevity with the school, which is hard to find these days. They go the extra mile to do what it takes to ensure that the kids have the skills they need to be successful. Our students place above average in standardized testing...awesome! Our principal meets with each and every child to review their performance with them and add her perspective. I'm not sure where you would find this level of care and professionalism, but I'm glad that my children benefit from it. The children have music, art and science lab. The afterschool program is run by the teachers with added activities such as karate. I can't say enough about the community that is Saint Jude School! The definition of a great school, on this site, is as follows: a great school has excellent teachers, strong principal/school leadership and a challenging academic program. Mission accomplished at Saint Jude School in Waltham!
Decent teachers, some parent involvement and lacking principal's leadership. The school is stuck on the past. No labs, very limited art program, kids are not allowed to think out of the box. Principal has been there forever and is very set on her old ways. Not worth the money.
This school has an excellent education curriculum, very good teachers with small class sizes and a very strong principal. We love the how most families are involved with the school. Besides academics, the moral instruction is excellent. I highly recommend this school to anyone.
This school is one of the best around for private school education. My children attended St. Jude years ago and now my grandchildren are there. The school is family orientated, friendly and competative with all schools. I rate this school as excellent in all aspects of education and would recommend St. Jude to anyone and everyone.
A kind, caring, academically challenging school. The students no only learn academics but also how to be a respectful citizen. The students who attend Saint Jude go on to do well in high school and college.
Community ratings and reviews do not represent the views of GreatSchools nor does GreatSchools check their accuracy or verify the reviewers' identities. Use your discretion when evaluating these reviews.
The Community Rating is the school's average rating from its community members (e.g., parents, students, and school staff). The highest possible rating is five stars; the lowest is one star.
175 Main Street
Waltham, MA 02453
Phone: (781) 899-3644
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text:
The ultimate derogatory term for a profoundly selfish and ignorant person (usually male). This word is reserved only for most acutely abhorrent people. Etymologically derived from "toxic cunt".
I lent the guy my phone to dial 911 and I never saw the cuntox again.
додав Dan Fox 11 Червень 2003
A hideous half-man half-beast that is best known for his ill manner and obnoxious attitude.
George has not only eaten my lunch from the work fridge, but has also attempted to sleep with my girlfriend. These are the actions of a cunt-ox.
додав Ben Duncan 23 Січень 2006
(Aussie slang)any person being a completely stuborn, obnoxious cunt on the issue that will not let you speak your side of the story, hence the suffix word Ox to indicate the stubbourness of the person.
Don was being a real cunt-ox today because he didnt want to hear my side of the story.
When Alscia is in one of her shitty moods she becomes a down right cunt-ox to deal with.
When Alscia is in one of her shitty moods she becomes a down right cunt-ox to deal with.
додав cartoonartist 16 Січень 2009


text:
SchueyRivers (was GoPackGo)
34, Male, Single, Melbourne - Eastern Suburbs, VICAdd to favourites
about me
Hey now! Its time
Chef, son, brother, loyal friend
I have a passion for cooking, cleaning, working, spending my time with people I care about. I may just be the perfect man!!!
Kiss me free!
At a glance
|SchueyRivers's details
|SchueyRivers's ideal partner
|34 years old
|25 - 35 yrs old
|Melbourne - Eastern Suburbs, VIC
|Within 75km of his
|Body type
|Athletic, A bit overweight, Slim, Average
|over 6'3/190 cm
|at least 5'0/152 cm
|Smoking habits
|Occasionally / socially
|Regularly, Occasionally / socially, Trying to quit, Don't smoke
|Relationship status
|Divorced, Separated, Single
|Have children
|No, have no children
|No, have no children
|Wants children
|Want (more) children of my own
|Want (more) children of my own, Undecided
|Social, Very Social, Average
|Eye colour
|Brown, Blue, Hazel, Grey, Other, Green, Black
|Hair colour
|Light Brown
|Light Brown, Auburn, Black, Blonde, Other, Red
|Ethnic/cultural background
|Other Caucasian
|East European, Hispanic / Latino, Middle Eastern, Other Caucasian, Other, Mixed Race, North European, Black / African, South European
|Political persuasion
|No strong beliefs
|No strong beliefs
|Sign of the Zodiac
|Cancer Check compatibility »
|Cancer, Libra, Capricorn, Leo, Aries, Pisces, Sagittarius, Scorpio, Aquarius, Taurus, Virgo, Gemini
|Drinking habits
|Occasionally / socially
|Often, Non-drinker, Occasionally / socially
|Other special diet
|No special diet
|Have pets
|No, like pets but do not have any
|No, Yes, have pets, No, like pets but do not have any
|Education level
|Post Graduate
|Some college, Post Graduate, Degree, Diploma, High School
|Hospitality / Tourism / Travel
|HR/Employment / Training, Agricultural, Hospitality / Tourism / Travel, Education / Science, Advertising / PR / Media, Mining, Other, Trades / Services, Legal, Unemployed, Construction, Consulting, Transport / Logistics / Warehousing, Sales / Marketing, Customer Service / Call Centres, Pharmaceutical / Biotechnology, Administration, Student, IT / Telecoms, Retail / Consumer / Personal Services, Government, Volunteer / Charity / Community, Property / Real Estate, Financial Services, Healthcare / Medical, Defence / Emergency Services, Arts / Entertainment / Sport / Recreation, Manufacturing / Industrial / Engineering, Accounting
|Job role
|Executive, Student, Admin / Clerical / Secretarial, Senior Management, Technical, Other, Tradesperson, Business Owner, Customer Service Role, Professional, Management
What I'm looking for
Loyal, loving, caring, independent, smart, funny.............
- Female, for a relationship or dating
My interests
- Music
- Tom Petty, Queen, Ludovico Einaudi Podcasts: Adam Carolla show
- Reading
- Food and drink books
- Movies & TV
- Lost, Sopranos, Oz, Prison Break, Anything Quintin Tarantino! Anything Ricky Gervais, Breaking bad, Californication Derek
- Sport
- NFL, baseball, basketball, poker
- Other Interests
- BBQ's Being outside on a great day enjoying life with the people that make me happy Exercise, beach, playing with the dogs at the park
Contact SchueyRivers
- Send a kiss to flirt and see if there is an initial attraction
- Open up a 30-day contact period* to send unlimited messages
- During the contact period you can also chat if SchueyRivers is online now.
- Get to know SchueyRivers safely and securely before you exchange your personal contact details
* One RSVP stamp is required per contact period.
Kiss me free!
- Last online:
- 30 Aug '14


text:
Upstate News
Doretta Royer 315 464-4833
Health Science Center's Vision 2000 Campaign to Benefit from Chenango Lake Perch Derby, Feb. 6
The Vision 2000 campaign of the SUNY Health Science Center at Syracuse will benefit from proceeds raised at the Chenango Lake Perch Derby, to be held Saturday, February 6 at Chenango Lake, Route 23, East Norwich. Registration for the Derby will be held 6 a.m. to 3 p.m. Fishing ends at 4 p.m. A date of Saturday, February 20 has been set in the case of postponement.
The Perch Derby will feature several prizes for successful anglers. The first registered fisherman to catch a tagged perch will win a $1,000 cash prize, courtesy of the Blueox Corporation of Oxford. All fish must be legally caught and New York State Angling Regulations will be in effect. If tagged perch is not caught, there will be six drawings for registered fishermen only: $500, $250, $100, $75, $50 and $25. In addition, there are $50 cash prizes and free mounts for the largest perch and the largest pickerel of the day. There will also be prizes for the oldest and youngest angler and the most unique fish caught. Prizes will be awarded every 15 minutes for the largest perch from 7 a.m. To 4 p.m. All of the prizes as well as the raffle ticket prizes have been donated by local businesses.
The Chenango Lake Perch Derby was begun by the American Cancer Society and enjoyed a very long and popular run in the 1980's and 90's, having last been held in 1995. At the height of its run, the Perch Derby attracted over 1500 registrants to Chenango Lake in the town of New Berlin, Chenango County, NY.
Proceeds from the Derby will benefit the Vision 2000 campaign, a program of the SUNY Health Science Center Foundation at Syracuse, Inc. It is a comprehensive campaign designed to increase awareness, recognition, and funding for the advancement of ophthalmology research and clinical care at the Health Science Center.
Ophthalmic research at the State University of New York Health Science Center at Syracuse is conducted through its University Vision Care and Research Centers. The Health Science Center is a worldwide leader in research of blinding conditions. As one of the few combined clinical/research ophthalmology facilities in the United States, University Vision Care and Research Centers have received both local and international recognition.
For more information about the Derby, contact Mayhood's Sporting Goods, (607) 334-2001 or visit the Ascent Networking website.
Search Upstate News
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Syracuse Post Standard
- Upstate University Hospital Now Home to MAKOplasty Technology
News 10 Now
- Upstate University Hospital deserves praise for correcting its finances
Syracuse Post Standard
- High Blood Pressure ER Visits Are on the Rise
Capital News 9 Albany
- Sharon Brangman on leading through challenges: Be willing to leave your comfort zone
Syracuse Post Standard
- Sharon Brangman on leading through challenges: Be willing to leave your comfort zone
Syracuse Post Standard


text:
When you work with an exclusive, vetted group of senior-level IT professionals, the learning is continuous. Wisegate members benefit from insights into what their peers are doing, learning from both successes and failures.
These resources offer a small window into the type of Wisegate content shared among our members.
As a senior IT leader, how do you fit with your IT company culture? How much does it matter to your career – and your well-being?
In IT Company Culture, Wisegate shares insights from a recent survey where hundreds of seasoned IT professionals were asked questions toward discovering how they relate to their company's overall IT culture. The results provide valuable insight into different IT cultures, where they are most likely found, and which one might suit you.