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U.S. Official Blames Shutdown for Failure to Explain NSA Spying
Ever since the first disclosures of global surveillance by the National Security Agency this past June, the Obama administration has maintained a consistent public response: The intelligence gathering programs are effective, legal, and meet with the approval of President Obama. In remarks in August, Obama said, "America is not interested in spying on ordinary people. Our intelligence is focused, above all, on finding the information that's necessary to protect our people, and — in many cases — protect our allies."
But now come revelations that the United States has also been spying on those same allies. Questions about how far that surveillance went, and what the White House knew about it, have caught officials off-guard and tied their public response in knots. The NSA is insisting that all of its spying operations are done with the White House's blessing — while Obama administration officials say that the President was unaware of some of the NSA's most politically-explosive missions. No wonder there's a growing sense at the upper levels of the administration that the NSA has gone too far, and needs to be reined in.
The latest trip-up came Monday, during a scheduled hearing of the Organization of American States (OAS), a long-standing continental organization that includes 35 independent states of the Americas. U.S. diplomats were scheduled to explain NSA practices at the hearing for the first time on the international stage. But Deputy U.S. Permanent Representative to the OAS Lawrence Gumbiner could not offer a response, citing the recent U.S. government shutdown.
"With the government closed and most of its employees furloughed, we lost the time essential for us to engage our inter-agency colleagues and prepare for this hearing," said Gumbiner. The inability to respond to any of the complaints cited about mass surveillance of individuals living outside the United States, a complaint of the hearing's petitioners, clearly frustrated Rodrigo Escobar Gil, rapporteur on the Rights of Persons Deprived of Liberty of the OAS's Inter-American Commission on Human Rights.
"The arguments of the state have been taken into account but there's no causes beyond the control of the state like an earthquake or natural disaster or something like that, that would have made it impossible to respond," Gil said. "The fact of the matter is that the domestic matters of the state are not justification for not providing a response to international bodies. This is an important opportunity."
It's especially important because news reports of NSA spying on foreign governments and their leaders have piled up last week, to include operations aimed at German Chancellor Angela Merkel's cell phone, the emails of former Mexican President Felipe Calderon, and the communications of up to 35 world leaders, as well as large-scale public surveillance directed at Brazil, France, Italy, and, as revealed in a new report Monday, Spain. Merkel, who has been criticized in Germany for not reacting more forcefully to previous revelations of NSA spying, phoned President Obama last week to express her disappointment that a trusted ally had intercepted her calls. Two German media outlets, citing sources in Merkel's office, reported that Obama told the German leader he didn't know about the spying, and that if he had known, he would have put a stop to it.
But U.S. officials now say the White House learned about the surveillance this summer, when it was discovered as part of an internal review of NSA programs that the president ordered following revelations of global surveillance by the ex-contractor Edward Snowden. It's not clear whether Obama was personally told about the spying before he spoke to Merkel, or what he was told about operations directed against other leaders.
The Obama administration now finds itself in the awkward position of defending what it calls routine intelligence gathering of the sort that all governments do — while simultaneously trying to distance itself from operations that may have become so routine the president or his national security team didn't notice them.
When The Cable asked a White House spokesperson what the president knew, and when, she said she would not discuss "internal deliberations and intelligence matters." White House officials have sought to quell foreign outrage by stressing that the intelligence the NSA gathers is no different than what other nations collect about their adversaries and allies alike. But U.S. officials told the Wall Street Journal on Sunday that the spying operations on Merkel and some other world leaders were stopped after they were discovered during the internal review this summer, months before they were ever disclosed publicly.
That suggests at least some calculation by the White House that the programs were not worth keeping — perhaps because they weren't productive, or because they were politically risky. One NSA document released last week by the Guardian states that monitoring some foreign leaders' communications didn't produce much useful intelligence. Another, disclosed by Der Spiegel, advises NSA surveillance operators to keep their work discreet because disclosure "would cause serious harm to relations between the United States and a foreign government." The internal review would have discovered the spying on foreign leaders at a politically sensitive time, when the White House was responding to reports of large-scale intelligence operations inside the United States.
Officials are still combing through the NSA's programs to determine what they have collected and which programs to keep. The State Department, one of the spy agency's most important consumers, is reviewing surveillance "with respect to our foreign partners," department spokeswoman Jen Psaki said last week. "We want to ensure we're collecting information because we need it and not just because we can."
The surveillance against Merkel may have begun as early as 2002. Former intelligence officials told The Cable that it's not unusual for the NSA to undertake surveillance without informing the president of every target. (But the fact that foreign leaders' communications were being monitored should have been known or presumed by the president's national security advisers, the former official added.) The NSA, for its part, insists that all its operations are guided from intelligence priorities and policies set at the top, to include the president and his national security team.
"NSA is not a free agent," said NSA spokesperson Vanee Vines. "The agency's activities stem from the National Intelligence Priorities Framework, which guides prioritization for the operation, planning, and programming of U.S. intelligence analysis and collection." The framework is approved by the top leaders of the government, but it leaves the question of how best to gather intelligence to the individual agencies.
On Sunday, a story in a German newspaper reported that President Obama had been personally briefed on the Merkel operation in 2010 by Gen. Keith Alexander, the director of the NSA. The article cited a high-ranking NSA official as saying that Obama allowed the surveillance to continue because he wanted more information about Merkel's role in managing the financial crisis in Europe.
When The Cable asked the NSA spokesperson to respond to the German article on Sunday morning, she declined and referred all queries to the White House. A White House spokesperson also declined to comment. By Sunday afternoon, however, the NSA issued a statement calling the German article false — but only in the most narrow sense.
"[General] Alexander did not discuss with President Obama in 2010 an alleged foreign intelligence operation involving German Chancellor Merkel, nor has he ever discussed alleged operations involving Chancellor Merkel. News reports claiming otherwise are not true," the statement read.
That left open the question of what other NSA officials may have told other officials in the White House about the operation. By Sunday evening, U.S. officials were reporting that the Merkel operation was halted after the White House learned of it this summer.
Tensions between the White House and the NSA have mounted ever since Snowden gave a cache of documents about NSA surveillance to journalists. Agency veterans have said that Alexander, the NSA director, and his top lieutenants have felt hung out to dry in the scandal, and are irked that very few administration officials have mounted a public defense of the agency and what its leaders believe they were ordered to do.
For his part, Alexander has made several strong public defenses of the NSA. Recently, he accused journalists of sensationalizing the surveillance stories and "selling" access to spy documents.
Alexander will step down from his post next year. His rumored successor, Adm. Michael Rogers, is a career spy with expertise in surveillance and cyber security. But his political resume is thin, and he would be stepping into the NSA job at a rare moment, when its normally secretive operations are tearing at the fabric of U.S. foreign policy.
Related Stories
Mr. President, We Can Handle the TruthDavid RothkopfDavid Rothkopf is CEO and Editor of the FP Group. His latest book, National Insecurity: American Leadership in an Age of Fear was published in October. | David Rothkopf |
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NSA Veterans: The White House Is Hanging Us Out to DryShane Harris
Shane Harris is a senior staff writer at Foreign Policy, covering intelligence and cyber security. He is the author of The Watchers: The Rise of America's Surveillance State, which chronicles the creation of a vast national security apparatus and the rise of surveillance in America. The Watchers won the New York Public Library's Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism, and the Economist named it one of the best books of 2010. Shane is the winner of the Gerald R. Ford Prize for Distinguished Reporting on National Defense. He has four times been named a finalist for the Livingston Awards for Young Journalists, which honor the best journalists in America under the age of 35. Prior to joining Foreign Policy, he was the senior writer for The Washingtonian and a staff correspondent at National Journal.| Report |
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The NSA and the State Dept. Go to War … With Each OtherYochi Dreazen
Yochi Dreazen is a Managing Editor for News at Foreign Policy. He is also writer-in-residence at the Center for a New American Security. His book about military suicide was published by Random House's Crown division in 2014.
Prior to joining Foreign Policy, Dreazen was a contributing editor at the Atlantic and the senior national security correspondent for National Journal. He began his career at the Wall Street Journal and spent 11 years at the newspaper, most recently as its military correspondent. He was born in Chicago, and later attended the University of Pennsylvania. At Penn, he edited the award-winning daily campus newspaper and graduated Magna Cum Laude in 1999 with degrees in History and English. He was hired by the Wall Street Journal immediately after graduation. Dreazen arrived in Iraq in April 2003 with the Fourth Infantry Division, and spent the next two years living in Baghdad as the Wall Street Journal's main Iraq correspondent.
Dreazen has made more than 12 lengthy trips to Iraq and Afghanistan and has spent a total of nearly four years on the ground in the two countries, mostly doing front-line combat embeds. He has reported from more than 20 countries, including Pakistan, Russia, China, Israel, Japan, Turkey, Morocco, and Saudi Arabia.
In 2010, Dreazen received the Military Reporters & Editors association's top award for domestic military reporting in a large publication for a series of articles about military suicide and the psychological traumas impacting veterans of the two long wars. His writing has appeared in the Washington Post, Smithsonian, Tablet and the New Republic and he appears regularly on TV and radio programs such as NPR's Diane Rehm Show and PBS' Washington Week with Gwen Ifill. Dreazen gives frequent lectures about journalism, the wars and current events to both civilian and military audiences.
Dreazen lives in Washington with his wife, Annie Rosenzweig Dreazen, and their beloved Golden Retriever, Charlie.| The Cable |


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Hinckley Sou'wester 70
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The Hinckley 70, the largest boat in the Hinckley line, bucks most contemporary yacht design trends, relying instead on traditional features that include a low freeboard, longish overhangs, an attractive transom stern, and lots of woodwork. The boat comes in four deck plan configurations: stern or center cockpit, and stern or center cockpit with deckhouse. Visibility is good with all of these arrangements. A choice of rig is offered as well: either the standard cutter, or a ketch with a slightly larger sail plan. The interior is spacious and comfortable bearing a close resemblance to classic wooden yachts that are no doubt designer Bruce King's inspiration. Cabin arrangements can suit up to three double cabins plus crew quarters. THE HINCKLEY COMPANY It has been more than sixty years since Henry Hinckley established a small boat building yard in Southwest Harbor, Maine. In the early years, the company developed a reputation for craftsmanship in the construction of fine wooden yachts, both power and sail. By the end of the 1950's the Hinckley yard had become this country's largest producer of wooden sailing auxiliaries. With the introduction of fiberglass as a boat building material in the late fifties, dozens of new companies were established across the country that employed assembly line techniques to produce hundreds of inexpensive fiberglass boats, generally free of quaky detail and woodwork. Having pioneered the use of fiberglass through experiments in the mid-fifties, the Hinckley Company launched the first Bermuda 40 in 1960. But there was an obvious difference, one that would shape Hinckley's future over the next three decades. Intent on preserving the craftsmanship and integrity with which its name had become synonymous, Hinckley chose to blend its expertise in wood joinery with the new fiberglass technology. The result was a rejection of assembly line methods in favor of an individualized approach to the construction of comfortable and capable sailing yachts. Today, Hinckley's philosophy remains unchanged. In 1990, after extensive study, Hinckley became the first American builder to convert entirely to Kevlar - E-glass hybrid composites in all hulls. In 1991, Hinckley engineered the world's first stoway spars in carbon fiber. In 1993 they adopted the SCRIMP process. This process allows the outer skin, core, and inner skins to be hand tailored as dry pieces in the mold. The entire laminate is then vacuum bagged in a single step and the resin is injected under pressure. The use of this advanced technique and materials results in an improved working environment, a stronger boat, and reduces the possibility of voids or delamination. When combined with the fine woods and noble metals which have always given Hinckley boats their distinct character, the result is a modern, high performance sailboat for those who appreciate fit, finish, and attention to detail: a personal yacht with historically unmatched value retention supported by a company committed to its boats and owners.
Additional Specs, Equipment and Information:
Designer: Bruce King Yacht Design - Hinckley
Keel: Other
Hull Shape: Monohull
LOA: 70 ft 3 in
Beam: 17 ft 6 in
LWL: 52 ft 4 in
Minimum Draft: 6 ft 6 in
Maximum Draft: 16 ft 2 in
Displacement: 90000 lbs
Ballast: 30000 lbs
Dry Weight: 90000 lbs
Engine Power: 200 HP
Engine Options
Engine Option 1: 1x Cummins Cummins 200 HP
Fresh Water Tanks: (600 Gallons)
Fuel Tanks: (450 Gallons)
Number of single berths: 11
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Yakuza 2
- Platforms: PS2
- Publisher: Sega
- Genre: Action, Third Person
- VN:F [1.9.22_1171]User Score: 0 votes
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Kazuma Kiryu, the protagonist of the first Yakuza, is named Fourth Chairman of the Tojo Clan but unexpectedly retires from life in the clan the same day. However, his personally chosen successor is assassinated by a former allied gang called the Omi. These events set in motion an engrossing storyline that sees Kazuma travelling through Japan, on what could be the last opportunity to stave off an all-out war between the Tojo and Omi clans
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Yakuza 2
Yakuza 2 is just like its predecessor a fun game if you don't have problems with an overdose on movies, the strong influence of the Japanese culture and a very deep storyline with strong character development
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Kevin Martin is the new chairman of the Federal Communications Commission.
Martin, who has been a commissioner since 2001, will take the reigns of the FCC as issues that will shape the broadcast industry come to a head. Chief among those will be the ultimate resolution of a date certain for the completion of the digital transition and switch-off of analog television service. While that issue may ultimately be decided by lawmakers, the commission will play a critical role in its unfolding.
In a statement posted on www.fcc.gov, Martin, 38, thanked out-going Chairman Michael Powell and said he was "deeply honored" to be designated as the new chairman.
For more information, visit www.fcc.gov.
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I have amazing coverage everywhere now. Wow, sprints sure done something... it doesn't suck like it used to two years ago. I honestly have really good service and 4G data everywhere, and way out in the boonies sometimes it is occasionally 3G only but still works. It used to not even load web pages 1-2 years ago and I'd miss calls while having service. Also, the New Market area that used to be a dead zone now has coverage - 5 bars. I'm impressed. I also gave 4G at the ski mountain now which used to be low service. Can't believe I'm saying this, but great job Sprint. It was worth waiting out. I also think upgrading phones significantly made a difference, they said Sprint spark phones get the better service frequencies.Was this review helpful to you?
Coverage has drastically improved since a year ago. Literally, I can't remember a time I haven't had usable service now - I get 4G LTE everywhere, and usable reception in every building. Sprint rebuilt its network, and since they finally added nextel's frequencies and got that new CEO... I'm glad I stayed. I can really see a difference compared to the previously abysmal network over a year ago. I don't even need, and barely use, wifi now... often my 4G is faster, and unlimited! I now even get service in the movie theater at new market. And up on howard's knob... even in the dorms. You need to get one of the "sprint spark" capable phones to get the better service and faster data though as it uses Nextel's old network, though. It's worth it.Was this review helpful to you?
Visited area twice during month of August 2014. Service was very sporadic. Most of the time I could not dial any numbers, got the circuits are busy or caller out of range messages. Also if it allowed me to text it would take a very long time to actually send, would take up to 5 minutes to go send. It was a very frustrating experience. My daughter is attending college there and I'm considering switching to a better service for that very reason.Was this review helpful to you?
If you have Sprint you will not have cell phone service at the movie theater or at the High School. You will only have service on king street, at the APP Campus, and the main street with all the stores on it. Needless to say, I'm dissapointed.Was this review helpful to you?
Don't know why one person had a recent bad experience with AT&T in Boone. I went to Boone at the end of July and had no problems. In Boone I had good signal even considering all the traffic and people in the city. At the place I stayed in my room I had good 3g signal till I moved deeper in the building even still I at least was able to make calls. Verizon also had good signal where I stayed I don't support any one carrier I just tell people what works.Was this review helpful to you?
Whenever I'm in boone, on king street, on campus, at the library, at cookout, near the hospital, It's got great coverage, I get full bars. But if you want to use your phone after your finished watching a movie, You'll have to walk around for a while till you can find a signal. I get 2 bars near the silo in the middle of the parking lot.Was this review helpful to you?
I love my iPhone 4S and I am normally happy with AT&T in my hometown of Pensacola, Fl. But, when I vacation in Boone, NC, I am so frustrated to not even get a signal at all. Please try to fix this issue so, I can really relax, after I can connect with business, family and friends. Thank you Loyal AT&T customer Jerry MistrettaWas this review helpful to you?
Reception is generally good, but they bait and switch you. Twice, they have promised a given rate and failed to honor it. The first cost at least $30 more month. Then, they did it again to us. This time we are locked in for an additional $20 per month. Customer service was no help.Was this review helpful to you?
Verizon wireless is the only carrier that really gets decent coverage once you get out of town. There are a lot of dead spots on back roads but the only service I know of that does better is Carolina West Wireless. I'm under contract with Verizon right now but anyone that lives out of town seems to have carolina west.Was this review helpful to you?
Virgin Mobile
I had Virgin on a trip up to Boone, and I MAYBE got a bar on campus. After that, nada. I LOVE Virgin Mobile, but since I'm moving up there, I have to switch!Was this review helpful to you?
When might AT&T think about a tower in the Boone area? Even though Apple has a cool phone, it's not enough to keep me on AT&T for cell service. Contract up in 4 months and I switch back to Verizon. I'll make do with a Droid!Was this review helpful to you?
Between 0-5 bars but dropped calls all the time. Won't receive / send calls / texts much of the time. At least once every couple days phone service stops working altogether. AT&T also has horrible service, especially when trying to call Verizon to AT&T and vice versa. Don't know of any phone service that works well in WNCWas this review helpful to you?
On campus I have 5 bars, as soon as I go off, it's 1-3 bars. I just use free digital roam, so I'm most likely on some other tower and I get awesome coverage with that. When I'm not on digital roam though, it's really spotty, and my friends on Sprint who visited and didn't have free roam ran up $40 extra on their bill that month and they only talked for 15-20 min in Boone!Was this review helpful to you?
I have not used AT&T here but I have heard people say that coverage in this area around Boone is not too good except in town. However, I have Verizon and am happy to report that coverage is almost complete anywhere I go. In fact, I can drive from here to Asheville and find only one area on 221 between linville falls and marion where there is any significant lack of coverage. Otherwise coverage in town and throughout the countryside is generally good with a few small pockets of weak signal here and there. Overall, I would not consider another provider here except Carolina West. In fact, Carolina West owns most of the CDMA towers around here anyway. In some places my phone operates (without roaming charges) on the Carolina West network. For instance, if I drive to Jefferson my phone switches to a CW tower near the intersection of 421 and 221 near Deep Gap.Was this review helpful to you?
None to average reception until recently - everything goes to voice mail with o phone even ringing, cannot receive text message.Was this review helpful to you?
US Cellular
US Cellular actually works really well in and around Boone. There are dead spots between Boone and Banner Elk, but I don't know any carriers that don't drop out there. I've never had a dropped call around Boone, not even inside stores or in the woods.Was this review helpful to you?
Sprint / Nextel has NO service at all anywhere on the campus. Even the walkie talkie service doesn't work and the IC402 phone is supposed to have double the coverage because it uses both Sprint and Nextel towers, HA... ..Was this review helpful to you?
Great service throughout Boone. I've taken and used my phone just about everywhere and I'm constantly at 5 bars. Thanks Verizon!Was this review helpful to you?
Just moved to Boone. Cingular coverage seems to be fine in town but when I drive off the main road and up into the mountains and my neigbhorhood it quickly goes to nonexistant coverage. I'm going to have to switch to a local provider that everyone says has great coverage if Cingular doesn't do something soon. Does anyone know if some phones are better than others or is this a network problem?Was this review helpful to you?
not an altell tower (roaming). highly variable reception from none to average.Was this review helpful to you?


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Welcome to Coin-O-Matic, your trusted commercial and coin operated laundry equipment distributor. Family owned and operated since 1921, we provide commercial washer and dryer solutions for businesses and locations around the Chicagoland Midwestern Region with excellence in customer service and professionalism.
Simply put, Coin-O-Matic is your #1 resource for Speed Queen commercial, coin and credit card operated laundry equipment. Speed Queen is the global leader in quality, product features, utility conservation, warranty and financial services plus they are made right here in the USA. Coin-O-Matic is Speed Queen's longest standing distributor because we know firsthand that business owners make more money with Speed Queen washers and dryers.
Whether you own rental properties to health clubs or an investor looking for a business opportunity we have laundry equipment solutions to satisfy your needs. Please contact us today as we are here to serve you.
Learn more about our solutions for apartments and multiple housing.
Learn more about our solutions for laundromats and coin laundries.
Learn more about our solutions for in-house laundry rooms.
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Many customers take advantage of our free service training in order to save money on repair expenses. Our free service training covers all aspects of equipment repair, don't miss this opportunity to learn from the pros free of charge.
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Retain customers by allowing them to use credit cards on your laundry equipment. Coin-O-Matic has installed over 1,000 credit card readers on washers and dryers with great success. This new technology is revolutionary.
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To meet the increasing "digital" demands of our clientele, Coin-O-Matic is proud to announce the new and improved Coinomatic.com.
Read more about New Coinomatic.com website launched!


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Lloyd floor mats
Reviewed By Linda M (Utica, OH) —5/25/2015 4:55 PM
Very pleased with the new floor mats, fit and look was great for my Porsche 911.
Reviewed By Nicholas G (COLUMBIA, SC) Reviewed for a 2005 Buick Park Avenue —5/23/2015 10:03 PM
My interior is gray but I went with black, with my car being two tone from factory black & sliver as one of the last 300 special editions park avenues built, fits & looks great with toned match! THANKS!!!
Reviewed By Mark Z (BUFFALO, NY) Reviewed for a 2013 Honda Civic —5/23/2015 6:41 AM
I have owned 35 cars and always bought after market mats for them. These mats are so far above all others in quality and appearance that the rest are are not wotth considering unless price is your most important consideration.


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Rare European Cat in Danger of Extinction
LISBON (AFP) — The Iberian lynx, a big cat found only in Spain and Portugal, remains "critically endangered" and is at risk of becoming the first large feline to become extinct since pre-historic times, a conservation group warned in a new study.
There are as few as 100 to 120 of the leopard-spotted cats in the wild, including around a dozen breeding-age females, from about 100,000 at the beginning of the 20th century, the report by SOS Lynx found.
Hunting, road deaths, and most of all a sharp drop due to disease in wild rabbits, the lynx's main prey, has led to disappearance of the cat, it said.
"It is not in Africa, Latin America or Asia where the first big cat extinction in modern times is likely to occur, but within the borders of the rich, supposedly 'developed' and environmentally-friendly European Union," wrote the report's author, British conservation consultant Dan Ward.
The nocturnal cat, which can grow to about one meter (three feet) long and weigh about 13 kilograms (29 pounds) — about the size of a domestic dog — lives in scrub forest in southern Portugal and southwestern Spain, near some of Europe's most popular tourist resorts.
Viable breeding populations however only exist now in two locations in Spain, and the up to 40 cats found in one of them, in Donana National Park, could dissapear in the next few years, Ward said.
"Only 4-8 cubs were born there this year and the population is not being well managed, is still declining and is already too small, fragmented and isolated to be recovered in the future without drastic intervention," he wrote.
The other breeding population found at a park in Andujar is more stable, with around 80 mature individuals, but this group is under threat from plans to build two motorways in the aera as well as from increased urbanisation, the report said.
Measures proposed by the report include legislating to protect the animal's habitat from intensive agriculture and urbanisation, decreasing speed limits around the two existing breeding grounds, and restoring the wild rabbit population.
An expansion of the fledgling captive lynx breeding program is also needed, according to the study.
There are currently 12 lynxes in captivity — including four females — spread over several centres in Spain and the goal is to increase this number to 70 by 2010 when reintroductions into the wild could begin.
Conservationists are optimistic that the first lynx bred in captivity may be born this spring, the report said.
The Iberian Lynx is classified as critically endangered — the highest category of endangerment for an animal still found in the wild — by the World Conservation Union.


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Stephen Colbert changes show titles to reflect Gwen Stefani's Emmy flubAdd to Favorites | The Colbert Report
Her co-presenter Adam Levine ( "The Voice") quickly corrected Stefani's mispronunciation but that didn't stop the team at "The Colbert Report" having a little fun. On the Aug. 26 airing of the show, Colbert's opening credits were changed to reflect Stefani's pronunciation, reading "Colbore" where it usually says "Colbert."
You can see "The Colbert Report" full episode here and check out the Vine of Stefani's flub below.
"The Colbert Report" airs weekdays at 11:30 p.m. ET/PT on Comedy Central
Photo/Video credit: Comedy Central


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Citizen Women's Eco-Drive Palidoro Collection Watch EW8115-51A Retail $250
Classic, refined lines matched to the very latest technology this Citizen Eco-Drive watch is addition to any collection. Elegant timepiece is powered by the sun or any other light source and will never require a new battery. Polished case is crafted in stainless steel. Case is fully integrated into the striking brick link bracelet. Bright mother of pearl dial with gold-tone hands and Roman numerals hour markers completes the look. Bracelet has an invisible, double locking clasp for added convenience. For long-lasting use, this distinctively stylish timepiece boasts the reliability of Japanese-Quartz movement, water resistant up to 99 feet (30 meters). The watch is backed by a five year limited manufacturer's warranty.
|Additional Features1
|Band color
|Band length
|Women's Standard
|Band material
|Stainless Steel
|Band width
|21 Millimeters
|Band length
|Women's Standard
|Calendar Type
|Case diameter
|24 Millimeters
|Case material
|Stainless Steel
|Clasp Type
|Crystal Type
|Dial color
|Movement type
|Japanese Quartz
|Part Number
|Target Audience
|Water Resistant Depth
|30 Meters
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It comes with the original manufacturers box, booklet and warranty.
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A trusted name in the jewelry business, Marchello & Co. has been catering all kinds of jewelry to their customers for over a decade. Built on a reputation of customer satisfaction at all their locations in the heart of New York City, Marchello & Co. has expanded their services to meet the demands of a wide range of cliental worldwide. Now offering customers all over the globe jewelry customization services and dealing excellent quality, unique products, Marchello & Co. has solidified itself as one of the leaders in the jewelry industry. They also offer a wide selection of diamond, designer and everyday watches from brands such as Joe Rodeo, Techno Master, Rolex, Cartier, Citizen, G-shock, and Anne Klein. Dedicated to providing the best experience for customers, Marchello & Co. offers free shipping in the United States and an unconditional 30 day return policy. Experience the excellence your friends and family are raving about.
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text:
Word Search
1,000,000 - 5,000,000 downloads
- Entertaining
- Good for exercising your mind
- It can get boring after a while
- There's not an expert level yet
+ By Abhishek Kumar
"Word labyrinth"
Reviewed by Anna Grace / Jul 26, 2011
Find all the wors quickly
Word Search is a popular word puzzle where you need to find the words given to you as quickly as possible.
The way of doing it is to look for the given words and once you've located them, drag your finger across the letters to select them. The phone will vibrate when you mark it.
In settings, you can choose the grid size (from 9x9 to 13x13), as well as the theme (beach, android, paper...). It's also possible to choose your preferred language (English, German, Spanish and so on). New in this game, you can also choose Number language and instead of words, your task will be finding series of numbers.
The score will depend on the time you spend searching for the words, and you can post it online if you want to. The game is okay and it's great for exercising the mind but it would be better with levels and more challenges, otherwise it can get boring. Abhishek Kumar is the developer of Word Search and other Android applications. If you enjoy word games, download it and start playing.
Word Search is a free classic word puzzle, containing over 5000+ words in eight different languages, seven customizable themes, online challenges and online score leaderboard.
★ Only WordSearch with Online challenges
★ 8 different languages and 5000 words to choose from
★ 7 different themes to choose from.
★ 4 game modes and sizes
★ Online score system
★ Language selection in English, German, Spanish, Italian , French, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish & Numbers
To find the hidden words in the puzzle, swipe them with your finger. Hidden words can appear in any orientation - up, down, left, right, or diagonally - and in either direction, forward or backward.
One of the best word search game, guaranteed fun for hours!!
Like us on Facebook
*google play services
Some lists where this application appears: Reviewed by Anna Grace.
Give it go soon
I hope it will be a great game..
I'm obsessed with word searches!! I can't get enough of this game!
Great. Keeps my son occupied.
Pretty fun
It's a good game, but it has a few bugs
Great word search.


text:
Stay up-to-date on current diabetes themes, proven therapeutic options, and knowledge resources and tools for you and your patients, and find detailed information on Novo Nordisk diabetes products.
These links take you directly to resources found on Web sites designed
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Jun 27, 2013
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Novo Nordisk would like to acknowledge Paula's involvement in our Diabetes in a New Light™ campaign, where she has helped make many people aware of type 2 diabetes and the lifestyle changes needed to control this serious disease.
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Novo Nordisk is a global
healthcare company with
90 years of innovation and
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The company also has
leading positions within
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text:
Translated as "Morning Dew", Asatsuyu is a pure Sauvignon Blanc and the only white wine made by Kenzo Estate.
The Japanese word which corresponds to the unity between all things, this alluring Rose represents the poetic balance between Kenzo Estate and its pristine natural milieu.
The gentian (Rindo in Japanese) is a purple flower evoking the color of this wine, a blend of Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Cabernet Franc and Petit Verdot.
Named "Indigo" for a color whose significance is profound in Japanese culture, this is a Cabernet Sauvignon possessed of the mighty stature the varietal is renowned for.
The name of the town where Kenzo was born, Asuka signifies a bright future and hope for tomorrow. The first Cabernet Franc from the estate, this has been selected specifically for the vintage.
cabernet franc
The result of an unprecedented harvest. Asuka is Kenzo Estate's first true Cabernet Franc bottling. Its glorious red hue frames a palate of plush tannins and bright raspberry fruit. The distinctly floral perfume hints at fresh plum and white pepper. We are delighted to present this unique offering.


text:
Legal Correspondent
Tribunal asks State commissions to act swiftly in this regard
New Delhi: Finding that the two-tier grievance redress mechanism on electricity billing disputes under the Electricity Act (EA), 2003 had not been made functional in several States even after six years, the Appellate Tribunal for Electricity has directed all State Electricity Regulatory Commissions/Joint Commissions to immediately do so.
Tribunal Chairperson Justice M. Karpaga Vinayagam and Technical Member A.A. Khan gave this direction on a review petition filed by the Delhi ERC seeking certain clarifications in a March 30 order, remanding the matter to the Grievance Cell to enquire into billing disputes.
When the review petition was taken up on May 29, it was brought to the tribunal's notice that the Grievance Cell was not functional in many States, including Delhi, and hence the dispute could not be heard.
The tribunal noted that under the Electricity Act, a Consumer Grievance Redressal Forum (CGRF) was meant to be the forum of first instance for adjudication and in the second instance, an ombudsman was to be appointed/designated for each State to adjudicate upon any representation made by a consumer aggrieved by non-redress of his grievances by the CGRF.
"The State Commissions/Joint Commissions have to specify various aspects of the standards of performance and rules governing the commercial relationship between a distribution licensee and its consumers. If this is not ensured by the State Commissions, the purpose of introduction of these Sections will not be achieved."
The tribunal, therefore, directed all the State Commissions/Joint Commissions to "constitute, appoint and make functional the CGRF for each distribution licensee under the regulatory supervision of the respective State Commission/Joint Commission. In case the CGRF had already been constituted but vacancy had arisen, to fill the vacancy in the CGRF; to constitute, appoint and make functional the ombudsman for the State; specify and publicise guidelines governing the functioning of the CGRF and of the ombudsman as also the grievance redress mechanism of the consumers of electricity within the State; notify and publicise appropriate standards of performance applicable to distribution licensees functioning under the regulatory supervision of the State Commission/Joint Commission."
The tribunal directed the State Commissions to send a compliance report on or before August 7.


text:
This section contains 4,734 words
(approx. 16 pages at 300 words per page)
Robert K. Morris
SOURCE: "The Bitter Fruits of Freedom," in The Consolations of Ambiguity: An Essay on the Novels of Anthony Burgess, University of Missouri Press, 1971, pp. 55-75.
Morris is an American critic, educator, and biographer. In the following excerpt, he compares the structure and philosophic themes of Burgess's dystopian novels, A Clockwork Orange and The Wanting Seed.
What followed from Burgess' preoccupation with the transition and ultimate death rattle of colonialism abroad and the atrophy of "self-indulgent" England at home were his two dark visions of dystopia—A Clockwork Orange and The Wanting Seed. Even the parboiled paternalism of the Empire and the synthetic socialism of the welfare state had still apparently left room—though not much—for a dialogue between the individual and society and had kept alive discussions as to what was right and what was wrong with England (The Right to an Answer, for example, presumed some sort of question to begin with). The subsequent stasis—or worse, stagnation—setting in after reconstruction placed the mystery of understanding, as well as the burden of existence, on the individual alone. No longer of import were the questions of how to view, contain, serve, survive, or possibly love a state that clothed, fed, housed, and medicated. Now what had been the issue was exacted from the sensibilities of those who, glutted physically and socially, lived under what amounted to a deadening hedonism. It must have seemed only logical to Burgess, after exploring the dialectics of the single and collective mind, that the problem of the novelist was to probe its metaphysics—to see how the naked needs of his rebel anti-heroes (no longer even privileged to suffer the "consolation of ambiguity") could be met in a mad, lost, loveless, brutal, sterile world.
At first blush, A Clockwork Orange and The Wanting Seed may appear—one because of stylistic shockers, the other for its Gothicism and grand guignol—more like bizarre and fantastic companions to the Burgess canon than parts of it. Like the majority of sci-fi trading on metarealities, the novels risk having the parts dissolve in the whole, the vantage point become lost in the vision. Unless, that is, one grasps from the outset that they are actually extensions of present conditions rather than forecasts of future ones. Such terrors as perpetrated by teenage werewolves like Alex in A Clockwork Orange and the domination of gangs like Hell's Angels are near-mild "happenings" placed cheek by jowl with current youth revolutions. And if the prime target of The Wanting Seed—overpopulation—is not yet, technically, a fait accompli, its proliferating literature, written not by hysterical Cassandras but by sound demographers, attests less to its imminence than, failing a cracking good holocaust, its inevitability.
One, then, must zero in on the contemporaneity of Burgess' issues—something that the ingenious superstructures and novelistic devices often impede. Take as an example the style of both novels. The ferocious and coarse, partly archaic, partly mod, neologic "nadsat" of A Clockwork Orange captures perfectly the violence and pace of incidents, breaking down into standard English only when the hero is being brainwashed and stripped of individuality. Clearly, it is always an amazing feat to have the language of a novel not simply match the action, but be the action. Clearly, too, one quickly wearies of the innovative, especially in matters of an outré style that so dazzles readers as to its form that they are almost eager to overlook its content. The brevity of A Clockwork Orange probably accounts for the success of its linguistic excess. Burgess, at any rate, has more luck in overplaying his hand in language than in standing pat. Though he was undoubtedly after a much different effect in The Wanting Seed, the contrast between the scrupulous impersonality of a Defoelike, third-person narrator and the nightmarish, surrealistic scenes never quite catches the tone of savagery that the satire seems to be striving for.
Again, there is the matter of structure. The triunal division of A Clockwork Orange—Alex damned, Alex purged, Alex resurrected—can be taken, depending on one's predilections at the start, as the falling-rising pattern of comedy or the rising-falling pattern of tragedy. That one may have it either way means, of course, there is a danger in having it neither. If the mode of a novel should say something about its meaning, or at least carry us forward so we may debate it, then we might have wished for a less open-ended conclusion, one that defined as well as disturbed. I find a similar falling off into diffuseness or blurriness in The Wanting Seed, in which Burgess, alternating the lives of Tristram and Beatrice-Joanna Foxe, attempts to match the "Pelagian-Augustinian" phases of ebb and flow that symbolize the arbitrary movement of historic cycles. Yet while the reunion of Tristram and Beatrice has been logically anticipated throughout, the pat, almost cliché ending of husband and wife rejoined, coerced no more by the forces of man and nature but rising above them—transfixed, as it were, in the still point of the ineluctable cycle—strikes me as an alogical apotheosis of the human spirit.
Yet both books conclude on notes of "joy": Alex fondling his "britva" as he anticipates the chorale of Beethoven's Ninth and more throat cutting; the Foxes (Adam and Eve and twin offspring?) standing in their Valéry-like "graveyard by the sea," facing the ocean out of which new life will come (il faut tenter vivre). The individual is thus endowed with regenerative powers never clearly woven into the fabric of the fiction, and Burgess barters even tentative answers for impressive technique. I feel, in short, that his adroit shock tactics with plot and language, expertise with satire, and partiality to apocalypse—all enviable attributes and potential pluses normally—come dangerously close here to outflanking the substantive ideas. Done as these novels are, with immense energy and cleverness, their sheer "physicalness" all but crushes their metaphysics.
That is a loss, for Burgess has much to tell us. However arbitrary the premises of these novels, however suspect their "political science," their speculations on freedom and free will are frighteningly pertinent. Violently opposing the sterile, mechanical life under totalitarianism, they point no less to the degeneration under anarchy and, further, offer no viable alternative. Freedom stifled is no less opprobrious than freedom unlicensed, but the middle ground—what every liberal imagines is the just and workable compromise—is accounted equally suspect. Burgess has given us in the earlier … novels a smug, self-satisfied, socialized England that has run down. Too much freedom creates the mess only stability can correct; of course, stability involves the surrender of freedom. Like those of Orwell and Huxley, Burgess' exaggerated portraits of the confrontation between individual and state will ever mystify—until too late—the addled sensibilities who, drugged by the present moment, will neither care about nor comprehend the moment beyond. Even more frightening, we have since Orwell and Huxley moved closer to the impasse where the problems at last overwhelm the solutions, and what we are left with for solution is perhaps only continual re-examination of the problem. Is it not, therefore, a trifle absurd to ponder tortuous issues of mind and soul when daily it grows impossible to cope with external realities like pollution, famine, and overpopulation? Can we even talk of freedom or free will to states that have written them off as mere philosophical aberrations? Yet what meaning can existence have without the continuing quest to define it?
On the one hand, Burgess answers these paradoxes through the nineteenth-century existentialism of writers like Dostoyevsky, Nietzsche, and Kierkegaard who dealt with freedom and free will, not in historic, but in metaphysical contexts. If revolution and the state initiated a new order of debate on freedom versus authority—from which arose the issue of free will—then the problems were quickly desocialized thereafter. Liberationism became as much the immovable force as necessitarianism the impenetrable object. Indeed, the best synthesis of the weird symbiosis between free will and freedom is still to be found in Ivan Karamazov's poem on the Grand Inquisitor, which, wrenched from its place in the novel, can satisfy radical and reactionary alike. Man, weak and imperfect as he is, can never bear the loneliness of living absolutely by free will and so surrenders the ideal of freedom to the Realpolitik of society. As Dostoyevsky realized all too sadly and well, most of us, lacking the superhuman inner strength necessary to do otherwise, submit our wills to Pilates and Inquisitors, rather than exercise them in an imitation of Christ.
Burgess' approach within this convention explains some of the broader outlines of both novels—especially since his hypothetical states dog the heels of totalitarian regimes. But clearly the Europe of a hundred years ago is not the "global village" of today. The revolutionary spirit abroad in the nineteenth century may have accounted in great part for its philosophy, but the trend of states toward a finer and fiercer repression (with no exit in sight) created an entirely new metaphysics on the older issues. Today, though man has more freedom to discuss his powers of freedom, the ugly fact is that the opportunities for demonstrating it have become more and more narrow. Striking out in acts of violence against the state that usurps freedom only binds our wills more rigorously to the state. Enigmatically, violence is not a display of free will at all, but an echo of historic determinism. For whether we like it or not, we cannot exercise free will in a vacuum; and though we like it less and less, the state is still the "objective correlative" for the freedom we seek. The true problem, in other words, is no longer how one learns to love Big Brother, nor what happens when one does not, but what results from not caring one way or the other about him.
What is chilling about A Clockwork Orange and The Wanting Seed is not so much Burgess' awareness of these philosophic questions, but the dead ends to which the empiricism of his answers leads. He achieves a partial perspective in The Wanting Seed in pirating from the Pelagian-Augustinian tussle over free will in order to superimpose metaphysics on history. His ENSPUN, a future conglomerate of English states, moves by fits and starts according to "theologico-mythical concepts" of two historic cycles that alternately place man in one phase or the other.
"Pelagius [as Tristram Foxe tells his history class] denied the doctrine of Original Sin and said that man was capable of working out his own salvation…. All this suggests human perfectibility. Pelagianism was thus seen to be at the heart of liberalism and its derived doctrines, especially Socialism and Communism…. Augustine, on the other hand, had insisted on man's inherent sinfulness and the need for his redemption through divine grace. This was seen to be at the bottom of Conservatism and other laissezfaire and non-progressive political beliefs…. The opposed thesis, you see…. The whole thing is quite simple, really." [The Wanting Seed]
This exposition comes early on and is "quite simple"—that is, if one contents himself with surfaces. I mentioned above that this philosophic rationale provides the structure for the novel. It also supplies the several antipodal outlooks (the optimistic and pessimistic, borne respectively by Beatrice-Joanna and Tristram) and accounts for the crucial rationalistic and voluntaristic arguments over the individual and the state (the Pelagian would allow man freedom of choice to populate himself out of existence; the Augustinian would stifle his natural instincts and freedom in order to preserve the state). Finally, in the most clever of ways, the rationale parallels the lineal development of the protagonists as their lives crisscross in the alternating historic cycles.
But what is also "quite simple" to ignore are the modern ironies Burgess twists into the debate between the venerable bishop-saint and the heretic monk. Augustine and Pelagius clashed, one may remember, over the most fundamental issues relating to free will: original sin and divine grace. Augustine developed the theory that Adam's sin is transmitted from parents to children throughout all generations through the sexual act (which, inevitably accompanied by lust, is sinful), while Pelagius taught that sin originates in man's following the bad example of Adam and that it is continued in mankind by force of habit. Consequently, Augustine concluded that man's ultimate salvation resided in the divine grace of God alone; Pelagius argued—with something approaching psychological insight—that divine grace is bestowed according to merit and that man, in the exercise of his free and morally responsible will, will take the determining initiative in matters of salvation.
This is very solemn stuff, and I hope the reader will not lose patience with me when I say that much of it is beside Burgess' main point, though very ingeniously tangential to it. As Tristram pedantically remarks, "The theology subsisting in our opposed doctrines of Pelagianism and Augustinianism has no longer any validity. We use these mythical symbols because they are peculiarly suited to our age, an age relying more and more on the perceptual, the pictorial, the pictographic." But translated into modern historic terminology, the theology has an added force, albeit an inverted one. The concept of original sin, the theory, is positively silly and insignificant when placed beside the desperate reality of overpopulation accruing from lust, fornication, and marriage. Birth is accountable for both the theological and historical problem as well as for the metaphysical bind of the protagonists. And, by the same token, one cannot even quixotically imagine that God's grace will clear up the population explosion; it is to God's modern counterpart, the state, that one looks for salvation….
Those skeptical of the chances governments afford us will find A Clockwork Orange sustaining to such skepticism. It is a book focusing on "the chance to be good" and proceeding from a single, significant existential dilemma: Is an evil human being with free choice preferable to a good zombie without it? Indeed, at two points in the novel Burgess spells out the dilemma for us. On one occasion, Alex, about to submit to conditioning, is admonished by the prison chaplain:
"It may not be nice to be good, little 6655321. It may be horrible to be good…. Does God want goodness or the choice of goodness? Is a man who chooses the bad perhaps in some ways better than a man who has the good imposed upon him?… A terrible terrible thing to consider. And yet, in a sense, in choosing to be deprived of the ability to make an ethical choice, you have in a sense really chosen the good."
And on the other, the unwitting F. Alexander, with whom Alex finds sanctuary temporarily, similarly remarks:
"You've sinned, I suppose, but your punishment has been out of all proportion. They have turned you into something other than a human being. You have no power of choice any longer. You are committed to socially acceptable acts, a little machine capable only of good…. But the essential intention is the real sin. A man who cannot choose ceases to be a man."
Yet, were this all Burgess had to say on the matter, the impetus of the dilemma would lose substantially in force. Society at large has never troubled itself with the existential agony (unless to repress some manifestation of it), and judging from the preponderance of sentiment abroad today, it would undoubtedly applaud the conditioning process that champions stability over freedom. But Burgess has found inhering in the central dilemma considerations even more immediate. What distinctions between good and evil are possible in the contemporary world? As absolutes, have such distinctions not been totally perverted or obliterated? And as relative terms, depending for definition on what each negates or excludes, have they not become purely subjective? In a technically perfect society that has sapped our vitality for constructive choice, we are, whether choosing good or evil, zombies of one sort or another: Each of us is a little clockwork orange making up the whole of one great clockwork orange.
I am not suggesting that this spare masterpiece necessarily answers the questions it raises. Even a philosophic novel is fiction before philosophy, a fact too easily lost sight of in the heat of critical exuberance. If anything, Burgess sharpens our sensibilities, shapes our awareness of his main argument, by letting us see the extent to which the human quotient dwindles in the face of philosophic divisions. One must, therefore, reject equally any monistic or dualistic readings of the novel, not because the book, per se, is complex, but because the issues are. It is obviously impossible to resolve syllogistically which is the greater evil perpetrated in A Clockwork Orange: Alex's rape and murder or the state's conditioning of his mind and, as some would have it, soul. Passive goodness and dynamic evil are choices that in themselves may or may not be acceptable or unacceptable, but that in terms of the novel are neither. My own preference is to view the book pluralistically, to see it as a kind of varieties of existential experience, involving at every turn mixtures of both good and evil that move outward through widening concentric circles of choice from the esthetic (ugliness, beauty) to the moral (sin, redemption). And, as with The Wanting Seed, the experiences are empirically stated.
Let me start with the esthetic that is oddly integral to the novel—its language. Vesch and tolchock and smeck and about 250 other nadsat neologisms characterize Alex's era as distinctively as phony and crap do Holden Caulfield's. Whatever sources Burgess drew upon ([the character Dr. Branom describes Alex's language as] "Odd bits of old rhyming slang…. A bit of gypsy talk, too. But most of the roots are Slav. Propaganda. Subliminal penetration."), it has generally been the brutality, harshness, distortion, artificiality, and synthetic quality of the coinages that have fascinated those (myself included) who make the direct connection between the way Alex speaks and how he acts. The language is all of this—an "objective correlative" with a vengeance—but it is something more. Burgess is also a musician, and any passage of sustained nadsat reflects certain rhythms and textures and syncopations. As the following:
Oh, it was gorgeosity and yumyumyum. When it came to the Scherzo I could viddy myself very clear running and running on like very light and mysterious nogas, carving the whole litso of the creeching world with my cutthroat britva. And there was the slow movement and the lovely last singing movement still to come. I was cured all right.
In its simplicity and naturalness as well as its wholeness and continuity, this final paragraph of A Clockwork Orange sings to me much as those free-wheeling lapses in Molly Bloom's soliloquy. It is hardly coincidental that Alex's favorite piece of music is Beethoven's Ninth, rich in dissonances that only the professional ear can detect, but filled also with as many untapped, infinite (so it seems) harmonies. In a way it is easy to understand why musical conservatives of Beethoven's time could find the Ninth "ugly" by the then rigorous harmonic standards and why, as a matter of fact, more than one critic fled from the concert hall at the beginning of the "lovely last singing movement." Alex's language is, in its way, ugly, too; but place it alongside the bland and vapid professional or everyday language of the doctors and warders and chaplains and hear how hollow their language rings. Burgess was out to show how sterile and devitalized language could become without a continuing dynamics behind it; how, in fact, the juice had been squeezed from it; and how, contrarily, Alex emerges as something of a poet, singing dithyrambs to violence, but revealing through the terrifying beauty of his speech the naked beauty of an uninhibited psyche.
The choice of an esthetic substantiates the several existential modes without explaining how the maladjustment—itself an indication of social, psychological, and biological "evils"—came about. The causes are naturally grounded in current events, and Burgess has spelled them out in earlier writings. Alex, the gross product of welfare state overkill, is not "depraved because he is deprived" but because he is indulged. "Myself," he notes rather pathetically at the beginning of A Clockwork Orange, "I couldn't help a bit of disappointment at things as they were those days. Nothing to fight against really. Everything as easy as kiss-my-sharries." Alex's utopia is more than the result of suprapermissiveness and self-gratification; it is the consequence of the "original sin" inborn with every offspring of modern organizational leviathans. Having discovered that existence has always meant freedom, but never having been taught "goodness," Alex responds predictably and inevitably to the killing burden of choice.
Socially, he and his "droogs" parody the formless, shadowy, omnipotent political entity that sports with them as they with "lewdies." This Kafkaesque infinite regression is frightening enough, though I find even more so Burgess' repeated inferences that we are all, in some way or another, products of conditioning: tools to be manipulated and clockwork oranges whether we will or no. Alex, not unlike Meursault or K. or—as Burgess more slyly than reasonably lets us imagine—Christ, is the mere scapegoat. He is the one called upon to expiate for the existence of others because he has dared question—or (in this case) has been forced to question—his own.
I don't know that Burgess offers any clear-cut expansion of the psychological and biological evils of modern life, but he does dramatize with vitality the theory that we are by now—depending on our luck—either neurotic or paranoid. Alex's particular routine sado-masochism—nightly orgies of "tolchocking" and the old "in-out in-out," alternating between sabbaticals at the all-too-Freudian Korova Milkbar and withdrawals (onanistic and otherwise) into his multi-speakered stereo womb—may be the healthy neurosis standing between Alex and the paranoia of the populace, though it proves something of a disaster for those elected as outlets for his self-expression. Yet more insidious is the growing feeling one gets in reading A Clockwork Orange of governments encouraging violence in order to whip up and feed the paranoia that will ultimately engender allegiance through fear. Ironically, Alex, on the surface at least, is less psychologically distorted and biologically frustrated in his career of violence than those he terrorizes or those who seek to condition him. And, in a more significant way, his small-scale brutalities reflect no deeper abnormality than those of larger scale perfected by the engineers of power politics.
Alex, of course, does not intellectualize his Non serviam. For one thing, he wouldn't know how to; for another, there is no need to. The evils of intellect—ignorance and error—have brought the state to a point at which only the fruits of escalated intellectual achievement can check and contain (if that is now the sole function left the state!) the robots it has brought into being. Nothing is mystifying about our present disenchantment with intellectuals who, however motivated or why, have skillfully and near totally excised with their finely honed organizations, systems, and machines the last vestiges of our intuition. Burgess makes a case for the Alex-breed being one of the last, though obviously not impregnable, strongholds of intuition. Yet Alex is neither a purely feeling (if ignoble) savage nor a crusader warring against thought. He is a prototype of those who, muddling means and ends by lumping them together, rebel out of a studied defiance to intellect, rather than out of any untutored intuitive urge. Intellect having failed to show them the "truth that shall make men free," intuition alone must sustain the illusion of freedom and itself become accepted as the creative act or be confused with it. Such intuitional virtues seem to account for Alex's successful "dratsing" with Georgie and Dim:
… when we got into the street I viddied that thinking is for the gloopy ones and that the oomny ones use like inspiration and what Bog sends. For now it was lovely music that came to my aid. There was an auto ittying by and it had its radio on, and I could just slooshy a bar or so of Ludwig van (it was the Violin Concerto, last movement), and I viddied right at once what to do.
What Alex does is carve up both of them a bit with his "britva," yet the episode is more significant in retrospect than in context. Alex's natural reflex of elation in the face of violence—inspired here by Beethoven—later becomes a conditioned reflex against violence after his bout with the "Ludovico technique," a name, I imagine, not chosen at random by Burgess. The distortion of intellect and intuition leads to an unresolvable Manicheanism: What are we, where are we when we can be programmed into calling evil what is so clearly the "good and beautiful?" In a clockwork-orange society we may as well surrender any pretense for distinguishing between good and evil; when we call them by the identical name we know we have been brainwashed past hope. In this respect, A Clockwork Orange shows refinements even beyond 1984. Winston Smith, having undergone physical tortures on a par with primitive atrocities and unrelenting mental cruelties predicated on external fears, quite naturally betrays the woman he loves and learns to love Big Brother. But Alex, robbed of his will, reduced to an automaton, taught to be sickened by violence, is made "good" only by killing in him what was already the good.
Both Winston and Alex "die" when they can no longer love. Yet, if 1984 is grimly conclusive in showing the death of a mind and heart at the hands of the state, A Clockwork Orange is equally effective in questioning the finality of the death. Burgess brings in (not for shock tactics alone) one of the original archetypes through which Alex finds salvation: the fall, or in this case, the jump. His attempted suicide is, according to Christian dogma, a transgression against God's will, grace, and judgment, and, existentially, the inexcusable surrender of human freedom. Alex, in other words, has been half-dragged, half-propelled down paths of problematical and actual evil to arrive at the lethal nadir of moral evil: sin. And having plumbed the depths, he can only rise. He is a slave to fate rather than choice (the things that happen to him in the last third of the book recapitulate those he initiated in the first third), a victim (no longer victimizer) without refuge, unsuited for Christ-like martyrdom ("If that veck had stayed I might even have like presented the other cheek"), physically coming apart at the seams and mentally wracked. From this condition, his try at "snuffing it" becomes the last desperate exertion of a murdered will and, paradoxically, the means to its resurrection.
Despite the unanswerable paradoxes and dilemmas of A Clockwork Orange, which remain unaltered in the ambiguity of its conclusion, my own notions as to the book's ultimate intent are perhaps slightly more irreverent than ambivalent. I cannot escape the idea that Burgess has intended Alex's sickness—the nausée lodged in nonchoice—to symbolize a new concept of Angst neatly antithetical to Kierkegaard's "sickness unto death," the "fear and trembling" accruing from the infinite possibilities of choice. And, further, I suspect Alex's jump, the fall by which he is redeemed (the resulting concussion undoes his conditioning), in some way approximates the Kierkegaardian "leap into faith": the intuitive passage from doubt to faith after the cold logic of intellect fails. Alex has done wrong, been evil, sinned, but all as preparation for his redemption. The faith he finds is a specimen of love, joy, freedom. Ironically, he must leave HOME in order to reach it in the same way a man must "lose his life [before] he save it." And his cure is both of the body and soul. "It was," says Alex, "like as though to get better I had to get worse." Burgess seems to be saying that, in a brutal, resigned, mechanical world—a world turned clockwork—love must come from hate, good from evil, peace from violence, and redemption from sin.
How? Unfortunately there are no panaceas for metaphysical or existential ills, and Burgess is not a prescriptive writer anyway. Human problems are inexhaustible so long as there are human beings; eradicate one and you eradicate the other. Short of that, one might find the answer to A Clockwork Orange in The Wanting Seed—and vice versa, but I very much doubt that either solution would serve for long. Give man unlimited choice? He will make a botch of it. Deprive him of all but the "right" choice? He is no longer a man. The seeds and fruits of freedom, both novels tell us, are bitter, but man is now harvesting only what he has sown.
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