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You are Viewing an Archived IssuePosted: 10/16/13
Above, Alicia and Auston Alexander of Almont enter the home stretch of the one mile walk with their daughter, Audrey, 2. Below, Barbara Schemanske of Washington sells raffle tickets to participants. Prizes included two quilts and a gift basket full of goodies from Romeo area merchants.
(Observer photos by Stacy Sobotka)
150 Walkers show up to
support Samaritan House
by STACY SOBOTKAA little bit of rain didn't stop walkers of the third annual Harvest Time Walk on Sunday.
Observer Special Writer
The Harvest Time Walk is a fundraiser for Samaritan House, which provides assistance to low-income individuals and families in northern Macomb County. The walk took place at St. John Lutheran Church on Benjamin Street.
Approximately 150 walkers participated by strolling through the rain soaked neighborhood. The Samaritan House hopes to reach a goal of $14,500.
"$14,500 is a little over a month's worth of food and that we give out three meals a day for 14 days for each member of a family. That's a lot of food," said Gretchen Monette, development coordinator for Samaritan House. "That speaks a lot for the good Samaritans of the community despite the unfriendly skies."
Prior to the walk, a raffle took place, with prizes including two quilts and a gift basket full of items from local businesses. Nancy Nevers, president of the Shelby-Macomb Daybreakers Kiwanis Club, subbed for the ailing Pastor Mark Evans by giving a prayer blessing for the walkers, and they were on their way.
Alicia Alexander of Almont walked the one mile walk with her husband and daughter and said Samaritan House was a good cause to support.
"We've done it for the past three years, and it's really nice," she said.
Sisters Rose Mertins and Sue Phalen of Macomb walked along the 5K portion of the walk.
"The Samaritan House is a good cause, and I thought it would be a good way to get some exercise," said Phalen.
As the 5K walkers were approaching the end of the walk, the sun briefly appeared through the clouds.
"The Lord is having fun with me," said Monette with a laugh.
No one went hungry during the event. Apple cider and donuts were donated by Verellen Orchards of Washington and hot dogs and chips were provided by the Shelby-Macomb Daybreakers Kiwanis Club.
Barbara Kiel of Oakland Township said the Daybreakers are already planning for next year's walk.
"If the weather's really nice next year, we'll be bringing a bigger grill to serve more people. We're a staple here," she said.
Nor did anything go to waste. All surplus food was then donated to Samaritan House.
The walk's main sponsor was Greenfield Collision, which has sponsored the walk in past years.
Those who wish to donate to Samaritan House may do so online via a PayPal link at www.samaritanhousemichigan.org.


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The Travels of Malcolm Cowley
He admitted with ready generosity that men like Sinclair Lewis and Dreiser had done something to point out the diseases with which laissez-faire economy had infected us; but he foresaw for the immediate future a literature of poems and manifestoes with which the factory hands, the farmers, and the office workers would be bombarded by revolutionists from airplanes. If a capitalist war were declared again, he believed it could be stopped by these means, and he was even taking lessons in flying.
—Edmund Wilson
Memoirs of Hecate County
"Convictions," Nietzsche observed in Human, All-Too-Human, " are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies." In our century of ideological ferment, the accuracy of that shrewd aphorism has often been disquietingly confirmed, not only in political assertion and action but also in intellectual life. The impingement of ideology on literature has been a particularly problematic instance of the relation between politics and art because it has laid upon novelists and poets and critics a heavy freight of "convictions" when, according to our stereotypical ideal, as serious writers they should have been moving unimpeded toward the discovery through language of at least some personal truth.
Obviously, no writer ever gives a really innocent account of the world: his assumed values necessarily determine what he sees and how he conceives of the truth; and since these values must to some extent be grounded in his relation to class, culture, society, and state, virtually any act of writing is ultimately implicated in political considerations. But if, as I would argue, an essential autonomy of perception lies at the heart of literary creation, the consequences of a writer's explicit adherence to an ideological system may be fundamentally different from the effects of his merely assuming or professing certain political values, however extreme or even repugnant those values may seem to us.
America in the 1930's presents an instructive instance of literature under the sway of ideology, for, at least in the major literary center of New York, this was the decade when revolutionary Marxism dominated writing as no formal ideology has dominated our literature before or since. The attractiveness of Marxism for American intellectuals in general during the years of the Great Depression had obvious enough causes, and it is a story that has often been told. The issue I should like to raise here is the particular attraction of radical politics for the American literary imagination, and the peculiar tension between the literary vocation which many of these writers emphatically professed and their commitment to the revolutionary ideal. Malcolm Cowley's newly published memoir of the 30's, The Dream of the Golden Mountains,1 offers valuable double-edged testimony on these questions, for it is a book equally instructive in its virtues of reportage and in its lapses and silences.
Cowley, like Stephen Spender in England, is one of those all-around men-of-letters—critic, editor, poet, memoirist—who somehow cast a larger shadow than their work because they manage to place themselves at the center of literary activity and literary politics. Throughout the 3O's, Cowley served as literary editor of the New Republic, in which capacity, both through his own weekly reviews and through his editorial decisions, he gave his section of the magazine a distinctly Marxist and often explicitly Stalinist tilt (when John Dewey broke with the magazine in 1937 because in his view it had betrayed its liberal heritage, Cowley's performance as editor was one of the principal points to which he objected). Cowley was in fact a kind of restless literary lion among fellow-travelers during the 30's, circulating petitions, composing manifestoes, attending congresses of the Left, organizing radical associations of writers outside the confines of the party but never inimical to it. Now in The Dream of the Golden Mountains he contemplates the radicalism of his circle not confessionally, as a God That Failed, but in a tone of experience-chastened wisdom and self-understanding, as a noble but naive illusion of his youth and that of his likeminded contemporaries. And having chronicled the sojourn in Paris during the 20's of his literary generation in Exile's Return (1934), he is himself centrally concerned, by way of providing a direct sequel to that earlier book, to explain in this new volume what radicalism meant to American writers as writers.
The Dream of the Golden Mountains makes engaging reading as a document of the 30's, though it is not altogether the kind of account one would have hoped to have from Cowley. He is not really a "literary historian," as he formally designates himself in And I Worked at the Writer's Trade (1978), but at his best as a memoirist he writes lucidly, gracefully, and with incisive aptness. Thus the group portrait of the Lost Generation that he offers in Exile's Return evokes the concrete experience of literary expatriation in the 20's and provides insight into its meaning. Given the nature of the earlier book, one would have liked to find in The Dream of the Golden Mountains a vivid and ample description of American literary life during the Depression years. In bits and pieces, Cowley seems on the point of doing this very well, but for long stretches, a much flatter political chronicle predominates.
He gives us a beguiling introduction to his own experience of the 30's in an initial description of the family-style existence of the New Republic in its old offices in a New York brownstone, complete with resident gourmet chef and butler (surely intellectual magazines have not had it so good since). In the subsequent chapters, there are some memorable local images of writers Cowley knew—Dos Passos, Sinclair Lewis, the Fitzgeralds, and, at greater length, Hart Crane, who was accompanied by Cowley's first wife on the trip from Mexico that ended in the poet's suicide. A single sentence on Dreiser shows how effective Cowley's prose can be in rendering such figures: "His mind, it often seemed to us, was like an attic in an earthquake, full of big trunks that slithered about and popped open one after another, so that he spoke sometimes as a Social Democrat, sometimes as a Marxist, sometimes as almost a fascist, and sometimes as a sentimental reformer."
But Cowley's principal aim, as I have said, is to provide an explanation—there are moments when it verges on apologia—for the gravitation of literary people toward Marxist politics, and with that purpose in mind, he devotes an inordinate amount of space to a simple review of public events in which for the most part he did not participate directly, and which have been the subject of innumerable historical accounts. Whole chapters are assigned to the epidemic of bank failures in 1932, the Bonus Army, the National Hunger March, the career of the NRA, and even Cowley's peripheral presence as observer on a couple of these political occasions does not help him to shed much new light on them. The amount of attention given to such events and movements produces a certain regrettable quality of diffuseness in the book, though of course what Cowley assumes is that the story has to be retold in order to make understandable the sharp turn to the Left on the part of American writers of the period.
First, just before the Crash, the Sacco-Vanzetti trial had raised grave doubts about justice in America. Then, the writers who had come of age during the 20's in a climate of hedonism, devil-may-care cynicism, elitist devotion to art, suddenly found themselves surrounded by a landscape of disaster. A million or more displaced Americans were on the road as hoboes; wretched shantytowns spread like a murrain at the outskirts of our cities; protesting unemployed veterans were treated like criminal subversives; striking workers were clubbed into submission, sometimes actually gunned down by thugs supposedly enforcing the law.
The 1932 visit to the striking miners of Pineville, Kentucky by a delegation of writers, including Cowley, Edmund Wilson, and Waldo Frank, which is effectively recounted here, was an emblematic event in the intellectuals' discovery of this hitherto ignored American reality. The writers were threatened, briefly arrested, a couple of them beaten, and then they were hustled out of town at gunpoint by the local police. There is an eloquent photograph in The Dream of the Golden Mountains of Waldo Frank's battered head, crisscrossed with surgical tape: writers were being taught with a vengeance about the brute force to which the powerless in their society were exposed.
On these crisis-ridden public grounds alone, it is not surprising that many intellectuals should have arrived at a radical diagnosis of the national malady. Thus Cowley, in a rejoinder to Archibald MacLeish in the New Republic (September 30, 1933),2 could proclaim that our men who gave their lives in the Great War had in fact died in vain; for "the invaders have come and taken our land in spite of those who died." It is a way of defining the national predicament at once propagandistically rousing and profoundly misconceived, and underlying it is an assumption characteristic of 30's radicals which we shall consider presently.
In any case, in The Dream of the Golden Mountains Cowley is not content to attribute the movement leftward to the brute impact of public events. Instead, he wants to argue that there was a unique fit between the revolutionary ideal and the deepest inner needs of his generation of writers. He characterizes that ideal in his foreword as a "daydream of revolutionary brotherhood," managing in this way both to expose the ideal as an illusion and to evoke its grandeur, its nobility, its sweetness, for the dreamers:
There was hope . . ., the apocalyptic hope that a City of Man would rise on the other side of disaster. By surrendering their middle-class identities, by joining the workers in an idealized army, writers might help to overthrow "the system" and might go marching with comrades, shoulder to shoulder, out of injustice and illogic into the golden mountains. That was the dream in an exalted form; I remember reading it in the shining eyes of younger people.
The way the rhetoric begins to go bad is symptomatic of Cowley's fundamentally sentimental approach to his subject. If a phrase like "shoulder to shoulder" may be attributed to a mildly satiric imitation of the political slogans used by the revolutionists themselves, that final reading of the ideal in the shining eyes of the young, which sounds like a line from a poshlost patriotic cantata, is solely the responsibility of the author and an awkward reflection of the stance he has assumed. Perhaps intellectuals always tend to sentimentality when they sound the theme of solidarity, for it generally issues from a sense of self-pity over their own condition of alienation. The prospect of comradeship is in fact Cowley's most recurrent explanation for the revolutionary politics of the American writers: one begins- to feel that they turned to Marx and Lenin and Stalin chiefly because they were lonely. In this mood, Cowley observes later on:
For Communism not only furnished a clear answer to the problems raised by the Depression—that was the economic side of it—and not only promised to draw writers from their isolation by creating a vital new audience for the fine arts in general—that was the professional side—but it also seemed capable of supplying the moral qualities that writers had missed in bourgeois society: the comradeship in struggle, the self-imposed discipline, the ultimate purpose (any action being justified insofar as it contributed to the proletarian revolution), the opportunity for heroism, and the human dignity. Communism offered at least the possibility to be reborn into a new life.
Communism so conceived provides the perfect sequel to the story Cowley had told in Exile's Return— and, in fact, this passage is close in substance to the original 1934 revolutionary epilogue of that book, wisely deleted in later editions. The 20's, at least in Cowley's account, had been a time of sick souls: he concludes his portrait of the generation with the exemplary tale of Harry Crosby, a poet who committed suicide at the age of thirty-one. The 30's then provided in Marxist doctrine a beautifully effective framework for conversionary experiences of a particularly millenarian character. The most prominent symptom, moreover, of the spiritual malaise of writers in the 20's, as Cowley describes it, was precisely their loneliness. In the America where they had grown up, they had no responsive audience for their work, no sense of deep connection with the national culture; and in Europe, from which most of them would finally be impelled to return, they were isolated by background and language, embarked on an exuberant but also vaguely uneasy intellectual holiday. If the Symbolist Tower, with its invitation to retreat from the vulgar masses, overshadowed serious Western writing in the 20's, as Edmund Wilson had argued in Axel's Castle, critics like Cowley in the 30's could feel a self-congratulatory sense of exultation in issuing revolutionary invitations for literature to descend from the Tower, as he did in 1938 at the conclusion of a piece on Yeats's Autobiography: the new social poets, he proposed, may have to surrender certain subtleties, "yet they might gain immeasureably from their closeness to a vast new audience whose language they speak and whose desires they express" (New Republic, September 28, 1938).
Much of this explanation of the appeal of revolution for writers seems valid enough, though I am inclined to suspect that the odd emphasis on loneliness may project on the face of the generation a personal preoccupation of Cowley's, and the repeated focus on rapturous images of golden mountains and brothers marching together leaves certain aspects of the radical experience entirely out of the picture. In any case, Cowley's own testimony as well as his retrospective interpretation demonstrates how different in many fundamental respects literary radicalism of the 30's was from its counterpart in the late 60's. The earlier wave of radicalism was rigorously ideological in character, possessing a precise technical vocabulary, a defined political program, and for party members and fellow-travelers, an ultimate allegiance to a specific political entity, the Soviet Union. The messianic hopefulness of the movement, as Cowley observes, was intermingled with a peculiar set of expectations about the vital part that writers as writers would play in the radical enterprise: the proletarian literature they were to create would help bring about the revolution, and the revolution fulfilled would in turn give them an ideal audience of true comrades as well as an ideal subject of human dignity at last realized in history (perhaps, if one may invoke the Soviet model, in a glorious vision of tractors rumbling into the crimson sunset).
Finally, the 30's radicals often evinced a kind of wistful Americanism, returning to their native heritage, paradoxically, through the vehicle of revolutionary doctrine. There is a self-conscious love of the American landscape, American lore, the poor and humble of the American people, the libertarian traditions of American history, in a good deal of this 30's writing. Cowley's image of a land invaded, a nation usurped, is symptomatic: the revolutionary program would restore America to itself. Elsewhere, Cowley praised Granville Hicks's The Great Tradition precisely for what he conceived to be its success in "show[ing] that revolutionary writing, instead of being alien to the American tradition, was always at the heart of it" (New Republic, November 8, 1933).
In contrast to all this, the radicalism of the 60's was less truly ideological than attitudinal, conceived the world less in socioeconomic terms than in racist categories. Like the more rigorously doctrinaire Marxism of the 30's, it divided humanity into schematically opposed forces of good and evil, but the former were generally identified by the darkness of their pigmentation: it often sufficed to be an ex-colonial nation populated by non-Caucasians or at least by non-Europeans in order to be seen as a beacon of liberty, no matter how murderously repressive the actual form of government, no matter how ruthlessly aggressive the intentions toward neighboring countries, dark-skinned or otherwise. The correlative of this bad conscience as Occidentals was a powerful revulsion from what the 60's radicals liked to call "Amerika"—meaning not only the notorious military-industrial complex that was said to rule the country, but also the look and feel and smell of American consumer culture with its middle-class comforts, which, after all, had been the dream of the golden mountains toward which the average American had been successfully advancing during the first two postwar decades. America was no longer imagined as a nation usurped but as a country eaten to the core with a malignant growth nurtured by its own corrupt character—a growth which now threatened to infect all mankind.
This rancorous vision had rather little of the messianic hopefulness that marked the radicalism of the 30's, and in any event literature was not imagined to have any pride of place in the unfolding order of Third World liberation. Some of the student revolutionaries of the 60's were in fact anti-intellectual, openly reviling the written word, even undertaking such idealistic projects as the destruction of library card-catalogues. There was now no ideal of a new proletarian literature to be fashioned as a revolutionary instrument, and the radicalism of the times was far from engulfing the major American literary centers. There was, admittedly, a certain vogue of poems that flaunted images of napalm-burned Asian peasants, and some poets were moved as far into disaffection as Adrienne Rich, who proclaimed in one memorable poem that she felt guilty for writing in the language of the oppressor. But these were exceptions to the general rule (perhaps encouraged in part by the practical consideration that the protest poem had a perfect audience and occasion in the teach-in). There was scarcely any substantial attempt to create a body of radical imaginative literature in the American 60's; most of our leading writers were touched only peripherally by the movement and some (like John Updike and Saul Bellow) remained quietly contemptuous of it.
The 60's revolutionaries, in their own term, were "radicalized"—a locution that probably reflects the increasing tendency of American English to describe human realities as mechanical process but that also reveals, I suspect, an assumption of instantaneous and total transformation. The 30's Marxists, in their more decorous idiom, "went Left"—in many cases, treading cautiously as they went because the formidable and not altogether trustworthy apparatus of the Communist party stood at the end of that path, and carrying their baggage of literary aspirations with them. Malcolm Cowley, because he places such emphasis on those idealistically shining eyes fixed on a golden horizon, does not give much sense of what happened morally to these leftward travelers when they arrived at the outskirts of the party. His memoir, that is, conveys little of the ruthlessness, the orgies of character assassination, the readiness to prostitute literature, the willingness to abandon individual conscience, that went on in the name of loyalty to the revolutionary cause. In these more disagreeable aspects of life on the Left, Cowley himself was frequently enough involved. One need not insist that a memoir be a confession, but Cowley's account of the 30's foreshortens and blurs the moral history of the times by breaking off around 1935, with merely a summary chapter to tie up the decade. What is chiefly omitted in this fashion is the impact of the Moscow Trials, which was the central trauma of the 30's for leftists, violently splitting the radical intellectuals in America between Stalinists, who found ways to justify mass murder of staggering proportions, and those who felt compelled to conclude that Soviet Russia had hideously perverted any conceivable revolutionary ideal.
Cowley himself, with minor reservations, remained essentially on the side of the Stalinists through the end of the decade, something about which he is not altogether candid in The Dream of the Golden Mountains. He could never bring himself to join the party, he tells us, because he was "a writer primarily and not a revolutionist or a politician," and was in fact dismayed by what party membership seemed to be doing to many writers' prose style; and by 1935, "I had developed other than literary doubts about what the party was doing in America and Russia too." Such doubts did not prevent him from defending the activities of the GPU in the Spanish Civil War, from attacking the anti-Stalinist Partisan Review as comparable to the worst organs of reaction, and, as late as 1940, in a review of W.B. Krivitsky's In Stalin's Secret Service, from asserting this of the Great Purge: "[Krivitsky] wants us to believe something that seems highly improbable—namely, that there was never any plot against Stalin and that all the victims of the purge were wantonly executed" (New Republic, January 22, 1940). In this particular review, Cowley does make gestures toward striking a balance, admitting that there are "gangsters" as well as "heroes" in the Soviet Union, whose existence has forced him to revise his earlier judgment of that country; but the general effect, as the sentence I have quoted indicates, is an apologia for the Soviet regime and, as Edmund Wilson objected in a vehement letter to Cowley, "Stalinist character assassination [directed at Krivitsky] of the most reckless and libelous sort."3
An earlier letter of Wilson's (October 20, 1938), occasioned by Cowley's attack on Partisan Review, touches on an essential ambiguity of the involvement of American writers in radical politics. Wilson, who himself had become increasingly disenchanted with the Soviet regime after his trip to Russia in 1935, first rebukes Cowley for both his polemical tactics and the positions he had been taking: "You're a great guy to talk about the value of a non-partisan literary review after the way you've been plugging the damned old Stalinist line, which gets more and more cockeyed by the minute." Then, Wilson goes on to a kind of moral exhortation which is not untypical of his letters to his literary friends and associates:
I wish you would purge your head of politics—revolutionary and literary alike—and do the valuable work of which you're capable. I think politics is bad for you because it's not real to you: because what you're really practicing is not politics but literature; and it only messes up a job like yours to pretend it's something else and try to use it like something else.
Precisely in this regard, it is important to draw some distinction between writers and non-literary intellectuals in the movement leftward. There were of course 30's intellectuals who lived and breathed politics, who conceived the world in political categories, like Sidney Hook or his friend Herbert Solow, whose progress from the Menorah Journal through Marxism to the staff of Fortune magazine constitutes a kind of paradigmatic career for New York intellectuals of his generation.4 But for many literary people, as Wilson argues in the case of Cowley, the politics was not altogether real, and giving oneself wholeheartedly to what wasn't real could lead both to unconscionable blindness in political activity and to the twisting or maiming of literature itself.
Perhaps the most egregious instance of the latter effect was the illusory ideal of proleterian literature with the parade of crude, schematic, tendentious works that it engendered. Cowley, at a retrospective distance of four decades, is appropriately satiric on the formulaic, hortatory features of this school, but he is still able to assert of Clifford Odets's Waiting for Lefty that "for all its faults, [it] comes as close to being a classic as anything that directly emerged from the proleterian school." One wonders what notion of a literary classic could lie behind this remark; for Odets's one-act play, with its noble, downtrodden workers, its sinister company bosses, its dialogue that is scarcely more than a pastiche of slogans ("Working class, unite and fight! Tear down the slaughterhouse of our old lives! Let freedom really ring," etc.), is a piece of agit-prop that only by some stretch of classification can be called literature at all. But then Cowley is allowing his perception of the play as a piece of writing to be submerged in his recollection of the first performances by Harold Clurman's Group Theater in 1935, with the participation onstage of Odets himself, Lee J. Cobb, and Elia Kazan. Even then, the play was not in the slightest degree a serious catalyst of revolution, whether among the American proletariat or the intelligentsia; but it did serve, one gathers, as a stirring ritual of solidarity for intellectuals who had gone Left, allowing them to experience as an audience the warm shoulder-to-shoulder feeling of brave comrades, and thus displacing literature with liturgy.
What is at issue finally is the capacity and the responsibility of serious literature—and of course seriousness by no means precludes all kinds of playfulness—to tell the truth. In the earlier 30's, a good many writers, Cowley among them, chose to believe that Marxism offered them a set of scientifically grounded principles for telling the truth, and that their personal observation might primarily provide striking illustrations for these general principles through which history could be given a progressive direction. By the end of The Dream of the Golden Mountains, Cowley can summarize the fading of this illusion in the following measured terms: "Gradually we should find that the movement might diminish a writer by giving him what seemed to be noble motives for concealing part of the truth." Nicely phrased as this is, it does not quite concede enough, for if truth-telling is the gravest, most demanding task to which the writer is called by his vocation, to conceal a part is to misrepresent the whole and thus fundamentally to betray one's vocation.
There is, let me suggest, a basic contradiction between ideology—any ideology—and literature, for ideology represents the world through general, programmatic, preconceived principles of explanation, while the literary imagination when it is fully alive uses the artful resources of language to make constant small or large discoveries about the general through a bold, unprejudiced evocation of the particular. This evocation will involve a considerable degree of openness to paradox, contradiction, inconsistency, unpredictability, enigma, all phenomena that ideology does not readily assimilate or even tolerate. Ideologically, Dostoevsky may have been a reactionary mystagogue, but as a writer of genius he dares to imagine his characters—socialists, anarchists, diabolists, orthodox believers, and confused hommes moyens sensuels— in the fullness of their wild and at times alluring individuality: he is great enough, that is, to listen to them instead of making them counters in a preconceived scheme.
A singleminded devotion to literature, of course, hardly places a writer above the political fray, and it certainly gives him no immunity to pernicious or merely foolish political ideas, as such notorious modern instances as Céline, Pound, Eliot, and Lawrence make clear. But there is an essential difference between a writer's appropriating from a climate of ideas and attitudes certain notions consonant with his own vision, and his adopting an ideological system; the former need not undermine his autonomy of perception while the latter necessarily does just that. Lawrence in Women in Love may have more than one axe to grind, but over the hum of the ideological whetstone he allows the urgent voices of his characters to speak out in the dramatic immediacy of their moral interplay (in such interplay, even the spokesman for his own ideas, Birkin, can be imagined with a measure of complicating irony). By contrast, Lawrence in The Plumed Serpent is working insistently with a neo-pagan, quasi-fascist ideology, and one feels too often that character, scene, and event have been forced out of shape to fit the rigid compartments of a prefabricated system.
Because literature is a representation of the world doubly mediated by the consciousness of the writer and the formal properties of his language, many of the greatest literary achievements, from Job to Joyce, have used the resonance of intricately patterned words conveying imagined acts to intimate both the unfathomable wonder and the wrenching contradictions of mind trying to grasp the world. When literature, however, becomes the handmaiden of ideology, this essential activity of our culture is aborted; for ideology evinces singularly little curiosity about the mind, being content to believe that the mind is a given which can be explained by class and economics, by national or racial traits, by biological determinism, or whatever the case may be.
When Edmund Wilson in 1938 exclaimed to Cowley, "I wish you would purge your mind of politics"—perhaps, with a half-conscious echo of Dr. Johnson's "clear your mind of cant"—he may have been addressing himself as well, though he would have been too fond of his habitually authoritative stance to have admitted that, possibly not even to himself. Wilson's own day-by-day observations during this decade of revolutionary fervor have just been made available for public inspection in the second volume of his notebooks and diaries to be published to date.5 Now, Wilson's journals must be taken with some caution as an index of what engaged his mind and feelings through this period, for in contrast to writers like Gide and Virginia Woolf, he did not use the journal form, apart from a few exceptional instances, for the considered, ample articulation of his attitudes and experience. Rather, these diaries are essentially a writer's workbook, largely comprised of fragmentary notes, sometimes in telegraphic style, which he thought he might use later, whether for something as immediate as a magazine article or something as indeterminate as a future piece of fiction, poetry, or drama. It is reasonable to assume, then, that at least some of what he was thinking and feeling was entirely left out of the notebooks, and much else is only intimated with cryptic terseness. Nevertheless, The Thirties does give us 800 pages of contemporaneous testimony by the foremost American literary intellectual of the period, and its evidence cannot be dismissed.
What might particularly surprise preconceptions about Wilson in the 30's is the paltry place, quantitatively and emotionally, that he allots in his journal to political reflection, radical or otherwise. The Thirties includes one fascinating document in this regard: a kind of private manifesto some 2,000 words in length which Wilson wrote to reason out for himself the considerations that were leading him to vote the Communist ticket in the presidential election of 1932. This statement jibes well enough with Cowley's general account of going Left. Capitalism is imagined to have arrived at a total and irretrievable catastrophe; liberalism and socialism ultimately align themselves with the ruling classes; while the Communists are seen as a brave brotherhood embodying the very virtues which the literary intelligentsia had never managed to possess: "They school themselves in austere living, in the discipline that makes possible united action, and in the courage required to declare openly their revolutionary objects and to lead the working class against the owners." Wilson would be disabused of these illusions more rapidly and more emphatically than many of his contemporaries, but what the rest of the record of The Thirties leads one to suspect is that the political ideal, however visibly and sincerely professed, was never at the real center of his concerns, never enveloped his life as a writer.
The dominant event in Wilson's emotional world during the 30's was not the trauma of the Great Depression but the bizarre accidental death in 1932 of his second wife, Margaret Canby. That sudden loss, which filled him with guilt and longing and despair, obsessed him throughout the decade, haunting his dreams, casting a threat of meaninglessness over the projects and pleasures of his life, still pursuing him as late as 1940, when he was already married to Mary McCarthy. More abundant, though less emotionally fraught, than these thoughts of Margaret Canby are the clinically explicit accounts (as in The Twenties) of Wilson's sexual encounters with a variety of pseudonymously masked women (some of these erotic episodes, with little modification, would be inserted into "The Princess with the Golden Hair;" the central novella of Memoirs of Hecate County that scandalized censors in 1946). I obviously do not want to suggest that Wilson between the ages of thirty-five and forty-five had little intrinsic interest in sex, only that he went into his sexual experiences with one eye to how they might become grist for the writer's mill, and I think this was even truer of his political experiences.
In the early 30's, Wilson was devoting a good deal of time to reportorial work of a radical, muckraking sort, but the notes he took on his expeditions into the urban and rural centers of American poverty are for the most part entirely continuous with the non-political entries in his writer's workbook, primarily motivated by the impulse of verbal mimesis. Whether the object of description is a skyline, a railroad bridge, the quality of light in a sunset, or urban destitution, the compelling task is to get the thing right in words, to find the aptest adjectives, the most revelatory metaphors, the most expressive cadences, and perhaps the single summarizing detail that catches the meaning of the scene as an immanent symbol. All these manifestations of the writer's attachment to mimesis are apparent in this record of a scene on Harrison Street in Chicago, observed during the winter of 1932-33 when Wilson was gathering material for a New Republic article:
The snow, big dull dark square industrial buildings around it—blackened weeds old springs, picked bones of old cars and black old metallic junk unsalvageable even for the scaly-scabrous-looking huts that have fastened to the vacant lot like barnacles, made out of old tar paper and tin, with stovepipes all slightly crooked and buttresses of packing boxes—people who can't stand for the shelters—a pole flying a black torn rag, the flag of despair.
Such notes, of course, are the work of a self-consciously engaged writer, but one whose deepest attention is given to the writerly shaping of the experience rather than to the political cause served by the reportage. By the second half of the decade, when Wilson was already "writing out" his intellectual involvement with Marxism in To the Finland Station and was becoming estranged from the practical politics of the Left, these exercises in literary perception would be focused more and more on non-ideological subjects. Indeed, some of the most arresting of the later journal entries are in content and emphasis what in a few years it would become fashionable to call "existential" reflections. Wilson the literary man, turning the page of a book, suddenly observes his hand and is shocked to see in it the prehensile paw of the immemorial primate, "stubby fingers with nails at the service of the dreaming horizonless mind." Getting out of an elevator in a darkened office building, he is "appalled" by the abrupt vision of a man's face, staring at him with the indelible stamp of a primitiveness that eons have not altered: "Humanity was still an animal, still glaring out of its dark caves, not yet having mastered the world, not even comprehending what he saw. I was frightened—at him, at us all. The horrible look of the human race" (Wilson's emphasis). These lines were written a few months after Wilson's return from Russia, where he and many of his friends had imagined that a new hopeful order of human society was being built in the light of reason. Now, increasingly, instead of vistas of golden mountains there were dark caves which simply could not be encompassed by Marxism or, for that matter, by the explanatory apparatus of any political ideology. Wilson lacked the gifts as a writer of fiction to find in that medium an adequate expression of these brooding thoughts, but they enter profoundly into the volume which would be his most enduring collection of critical essays, The Wound and the Bow (1940), with its acute sense of the link between art and anguish, and its brilliant pioneering study of the troubled Dickens, "The Two Scrooges."
The New York intellectuals, of course, despite their occasional illusions to the contrary, are not the whole of American literature, and at the very moment in which we have been observing Edmund Wilson, down in Mississippi Faulkner was putting the finishing touches on Absalom, Absalom! (1936), in which he fashioned a remarkable fictional instrument for sounding the depths of his own caves and chasms. With the passage of time, this novel stands out more strongly than ever as the masterwork of American fiction of the 30's. Granted, Faulkner had the distinct advantage of genius (however wild, unreliable, and self-subverting it could be in him), but he also must have experienced an appreciable measure of freedom to be so utterly removed from all those ideological wars, the endless cliques and petitions and writers' congresses, the compromising entanglements of imaginative literature in polemic journalism, the expectations that writing should carry out a defined program and exemplify set principles. Far from this shrill scene of conscripted writers, he worked away at inventing his own eccentric artistic idiom, using models as disparate as the Bible, Cervantes, Conrad, and Joyce, and with that idiom, he articulated his compelling doom-ridden vision of Southern history.
Faulkner seeks to represent in his fiction the decaying fabric of a whole culture, but only through the mental reality of his characters, for like other modernists (and unlike the proletarian novelists), he assumes that objects, people, and events do not submit themselves to bur unmediated knowledge but must necessarily be known in the multiple versions of the different minds that construe them, that constantly reinvent them. Here, for example, is how Quentin Compson in Absalom, Absalom! imagines the Sutpen mansion in 1865, just as the half-brothers Charles and Henry, back from the war, one bent on matrimony and the other on fratricide, are about to meet before its gate:
Inside the gate what was once a park now spread, unkempt, in shaggy desolation, with an air dreamy, remote and aghast like the unshaven face of a man just waking from ether, up to a huge house where a young girl waited in a wedding dress made from stolen scraps, the house partaking of the air of scaling desolation, not having suffered from invasion but a shell marooned and forgotten in a backwater of catastrophe—a skeleton giving of itself in slow driblets of furniture and carpet, linen and silver, to help to die the torn and anguished men who knew, even while dying, that for months now the sacrifice and the anguish were in vain.
As in many major novels, mimesis and memory are interfused, the object of representation seen under the aspect of a certain destiny, through the warp of a highly particularized dimension of time. The passage is all one sinuous, breathless sentence, down to the perfect concluding cadence of "were in vain," which resolves the meaning of the whole evocation. An uninhibited figurative imagination, akin to the macabre 17th-century wit of Donne and Sir Thomas Browne, discovers the reality of the imagined object from line to line by translating it into metaphor: the dreamy unshaven face of a man waking from ether, a marooned ship, a cannibalized skeleton. It was no doubt with such passages in mind that Malcolm Cowley, writing in 1940, objected to Faulkner's creating "allegorical melodramas dressed up with stormy but second-rate romantic poetry." (By 1946, Cowley would play an important role as editor of the Viking Portable Faulkner in consolidating the reputation of the Southern novelist, but at the end of this decade of Marxist criticism, he was still insisting—the occasion was a review of The Hamlet— that only Faulkner's "daylight" fiction could command any respect, and that Sanctuary was Faulkner's best novel.)
Faulkner's weakness for overblown and self-indulgent stylistic effects is notorious, but here I think his language exhibits a beautiful Tightness of intuition. For Faulkner the culture of the South after the Civil War is caught in a terrifying temporal paralysis, condemned constantly to look back on the traumatic events that destroyed all its illusions about itself, incapable—as Jean-Paul Sartre showed in his brilliant 1939 essay on The Sound and the Fury—of projecting any future toward which it might orient its movements. Quentin's perception of the Sutpen house, which is a small instance of Faulkner's larger enterprise, is not a "description" of the all-too-familiar white-columned Southern mansion, nor a mere embellishment of the usual picture with macabre imagery. Instead, precisely through the flamboyant figurative language, we get a sense of the mansion as a kind of synechdoche for the South trapped in the medium of historical time that has turned into a living death: an atmosphere of ether, a backwater of catastrophe, a skeleton crazily distributing, to no avail, in slow driblets, what were once its contents.
There is an object-lesson here in what a writer's devotion to his writing may at best achieve. Faulkner through Quentin gets at the innermost reality of his historical subject by abandoning himself with an artist's daring to the momentum of his language, to the submerged network of associations it touches within him. The Sutpen mansion thus represented is not the rehearsal of a picturesque stereotype of the fallen South, but a haunting image that somehow implicates the bizarre and contradictory predicament of evanescent man living in history. One sees why some critics have been led to argue that the impulses of fantasy and realism may have a common root. The eccentric and commanding counterexample of Faulkner in the midst of this decade of writing on the Left suggests how much literature surrenders of its capacity to tell the harsh, elusive, protean truth when it makes itself the means to political ends.
p>1 Viking, 328 pp., $14.95.
2 A generous selection of Cowley's New Republic pieces from the 30's has been assembled by Henry Dan Piper under the title, Think Back cm Us (Southern Illinois University Press, 1967).
3 Cowley has published the concluding paragraphs of a long letter he wrote in reply to Wilson in And I Worked at the Writer's Trade (Viking, 1978), pp. 154-157. Here he reiterates his skepticism toward Krivitsky (the review expressed a good deal more than that) and confesses that he is thoroughly sick of politics, would like to put it behind him forever. But he does not really answer 'Wilson's basic charge—that he was serving as an apologist for Stalinist policies.
4 Solow's story has been aptly recounted as an exemplary instance of the 30's milieu by Alan Wald in a carefully documented article, "Herbert Solow: Portrait of a New York Intellectual," Prospects, No. 3, 1977.
5 The Thirties, edited with an introduction by Leon Edel, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 800 pp., $17.50.


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For some people BC Day (Aug 6, 2012) is just another excuse for a long summer weekend. But for many, it means much more than that.
People who grew up in BC may sometimes take this province for granted but for those of us who are here by choice, it is really a very special place. We came here for many reasons but no matter the reason, most of us are totally enthralled by the weather, the natural beauty, the diversity of the population and the healthy lifestyle. Whether we moved from the East Coast, the Middle East or the Far East – British Columbia is special in so many ways.
Anybody who has ever visited BC goes away with tales of the beauty of the mountains, the ocean and the parks. But for those of us who live here, there is a great deal more to celebrate. We may get used to living in such amazing beauty. We may even complain about the weather. But given the choice most of us would not live anywhere else. (more…)


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General Education Learning Outcomes
All graduates of Southern Polytechnic State University will be able to:
Demonstrate an ability to analyze and interpret oral and written arguments and materials;
Demonstrate an ability to write and communicate effectively in various modes and media.
Express and manipulate mathematical information, concepts, and thoughts in verbal, numeric, graphical and symbolic form while solving a variety of problems;
Use statistics and/or formulae to understand quantitative data.
Demonstrate an ability to solve multiple-step problems through different (inductive, deductive and symbolic) modes of reasoning.
Describe the historical evolution and contemporary impact of political, economic, and social relationships within and between nations;
Demonstrate an ability to describe, and explain the significance of, commonalities and differences among human cultures;
Understand and apply basic scientific principles, theories, and laws;
Critically analyze the role in and impact of science and technology on society;
Demonstrate an ability to make informed aesthetic judgments about the arts, such as visual, performing, and literary.
Last update: October 22, 2007


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Can there be free will in a world where pre-destiny exists?
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Re: Can there be free will in a world where pre-destiny exists?
Originally Posted by
Your post made me think that karma is an extremely damaging concept, downright evil.
We have a Disneyland Western understanding of karma. In far Eastern religions it is used to justify an oppressive caste system, social injustice and repression. If you were born poor, diseased, malnourished and oppressed, you're living out bad karma from a previous life. If someone is wealthy and powerful, it is because of good karma in a past life. That is the natural order of things.
Not sure where karma fit into my post, but you can think of it as "what goes around comes around" or "as you sow, so shall you reap". It's a simple concept. Indians believe in rebirth, being born after you die in a cycle that is intended to purify your soul. Karma plays a role in balancing that out.
After that, there's a heaven and hell too, much in the same way that Christianity portrays them. In that sense, and I'm espousing views that might seem radical to many Hindus, rebirth on earth is similar to the concept of purgatory.
As far as oppressive caste systems or social injustice, etc., that's the fallout of historical battles won and lost. With a good dose of religious wrong-doing to boot.
Of course, believing that such behaviour and ways of life are limited to India or the Far East is the result of long periods of indoctrination via the news and other information flows, to be blunt.
When I was young, I watched the movies about happy American families and saw picturesque suburban neighbourhoods and communal harmony. And I thought it was just like that.
No one lived in an apartment, there was no smell of urine in the streets and subways, everyone went to college.
I never knew that until the 60s, if a black man rode in a bus, he would be thrown off. Or that women were forced to sell their bodies for money and were then beaten up by a pimp that would take the majority of their earnings for himself and give them drugs instead. Or that politicians took kickbacks and sold out their nation in return for money from Chinese Communists and wealthy Arabs that could buy up Wall Street and make sure that the small investor always loses.
I mean, look at Linda Lovelace. That woman to this date keeps screaming about how she was exploited. I have no doubt in my mind she and her family suffered on account of Deep Throat, even as others made money and it became a part of "popular culture".
And if I have to touch upon religion, it disgusts me that children were abused by men of the cloth and then protected by their peers.
I suppose the danger in making statements like the one you quoted was that it would be misinterpreted. The caste system has been abolished. Social injustice has been abolished too, apparently. That they still persist (albeit on a much smaller scale) speaks volumes about the regard for "human rights" and "moral values" in this place. Much in the same way that poverty and hunger do in America.
In that respect, the US threw off the yoke of colonial oppression over 200 years ago. India did it about 65 years ago. Systematic plundering of resources and subjugation of people without regard have left it a poor nation. You've heard of Mahatma Gandhi? Then you'll know that he was shot dead, much in the way of Abraham Lincoln, a good man. Why? Because he suggested that the Congress Party (which rules India now, but was originally fought to fight for Independence), should be dissolved once freedom was achieved. He was against untouchability and other superstitious nonsense.
People want these social evils to persist because they can benefit from it. But people with brains know it is wrong and should be stopped.
"... As war machine, crushes their balls, God have mercy..."
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Wild West Days
Come and Watch as The Old West Comes Alive during
Winnsboro Wild West Days, Nov. 15th & 16th
at the Jack Cross Pavilion in Winnsboro's City Park.
RGA Sanctioned Old West Reenactment Competitions,
Historical Portrayals, Shootouts, Historic Reenactments,
Vendors, Food and so much more.
This event is FREE to the public and is hosted by
The Legends of Crossroads.
Mr. Bill O'Neal, Renowned Author, Texas State
Historian 2012-2016 will be there from 12 noon to
1 pm on Saturday, the 15th to give a special program
on Gunfighters
For more info www.thelegendsofcrossroads.com
or call 903-347-1263 or email email@example.com
Authentic re-enactments will thrill your family during the
Wild West Days:
Friday, November 15 - Saturday, November 16, 2014.
There will be a variety of vendors to add excitement
with food, cold drinks, and handmade Western decor,
to add to the Wild West atmosphere.


text: Things to do in Bend OR - Day of Play, Free Family Fun @ Riverbend Park! Today is the Bend Parks and Recreation Day of Play. A free family event in Riverbend Park which is one of Bend's newer Parks located on the Deschutes River in the Old Mill District. Riverbend Park is next to the Parks and Recreation building and Dog Park. See the map below to find Riverbend Park. Day of Play Where: Riverbend Park When: Saturday, September 25, 2010 Time: 11am - 3pm Cost: FREE!! Day of Play is free for the whole family. Load up the kids and head outside for for a fun filled afternoon of archery, canoeing, football, music, wheelchair basketball, mural painting, obstacle course, flush a duck race, build a giant tinker toy, climb on a truck and more! Day of Play in Riverbend Park is sure to be a fantastic, did I say FREE family event. View Larger Map Head outside the weather calls for sunny in the 70's. We've got a summery day to celebrate this free fall activity. See you there. Thanks for reading Things to do in Bend Oregon! For more last minute fun check us out on Facebook and Twitter.Thanks for reading my Bend, OR Real Estate Blog! Kryste Adams, Broker Search the Central Oregon MLS with RE/MAX Key Properties cell: 541.706.1556 | email: email@example.com Check out this weeks favorite lunch spot in Bend, Pastrami Old World Deli.


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Carl Mays: Do you need to change anything?
During this first week of 2013 is a good time to conduct some self-inspection regarding what we do and why we do it. In our personal lives, jobs or careers, we sometimes become slaves of routine. We develop a tendency to forget that the mere fact something has been done the same way for a long time doesn't necessarily mean it has always been the right thing to do or that it is the right thing to do now.
Sometimes we may be like the army sergeant who was put in charge of maintaining a plot of grass in front of his camp's administrative headquarters in a particularly dry area of South Texas. The sergeant promptly delegated the job to a private and told him to water the grass every day at five o'clock. The private conscientiously did his task.
One day, however, when there was a terrific thunderstorm, the sergeant walked into the barracks and saw the private. "What's the matter with you?" the sergeant bellowed. "It's five o'clock and you're supposed to be out watering the grass!"
"But, sergeant," the confused private said, "it's raining. Look at that thunderstorm."
"So what!" the sergeant yelled. "You've got a raincoat, haven't you?"
Rain or shine, some people, like the sergeant, go about their routines the same way every day of the week, every week of the month, every month of the year, with never a thought regarding the possibility of doing something differently when conditions or situations call for it. In business, this can happen to employees and executives on all levels, just as it can happen to any of us in family, community, school, sports or any area of life.
Years ago, I heard the "example" story of how a woman and her teenage daughter had a ritual of making meatloaf together. They always cut off the end of the meatloaf right before putting it in the oven, leaving a space on one end of the pan. The teen finally asked her mother, "Mom, why do we always cut off the end of the meatloaf?" The mother was taken by surprise, and began to think. She had no immediate answer except that was the way her own mother made the meatloaf.
When the woman and her daughter asked the woman's mother why she cut off the end of the meatloaf, she said, "Because my mother did." So the three went to the nursing home to ask the oldest living family matriarch about it. When asked, she said, "I cut it off to perfectly fit the small pan I had."
Why do you do what you do? Why do you do it the way you do it? Does it still work as well as it did at one time? Would something else work better?
Of course, we need not change actions, procedures or tasks merely for the sake of change. The change should be to make things better, more efficient or more proficient. Such productive changes, done for a good reason, can contribute to fulfillment in business, sports, family and life.
© 2013 by Carl Mays, National Speakers Association Hall of Fame member and author, whose www.MyMerlin.net mentoring site is based on his "A Strategy For Winning" book and program. Contact firstname.lastname@example.com or view www.carlmays.com.


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One of the committees of the IRI is looking into the whole issue of metrics, primarily from the point of view of trying to understand how to evaluate the performance of R&D. Of course, it is looking not only at research, but also at the entire R&D process, for a number of different reasons. A lot of our corporate research budgets are under attack, and the directors of research need to be able to contribute good information about why these activities should be funded. Another reason is one of understanding more clearly what is going on in order to improve the quality of the processes that we are using and to improve our contribution.
The IRI experience is highly relevant to the issues discussed at this workshop because this organization has faced many of the same problems. NSF can learn a lot from the companies that have been successful in making a transition. Those companies have paid attention to understanding who their customers are, how they create value for those customers, and how to measure that value. They have become very good at improving the value they generate and at being able to demonstrate that they are doing so. That is highly persuasive in terms of obtaining funds. This process should be recognized as a real-world trend that is not going to go away.
Nevertheless, it is important not to make too strong an analogy between industry and NSF funding. One of the statements repeatedly made by industry is that long-range research is being cut back, and industries are looking more to the universities and to the government to support that kind of work. NSF should be funding exactly the kinds of research that industry is jettisoning now because of the very metrics that industry is using. To apply the same kind of metrics without a lot of correction would result in NSF's mimicking the decisions that have been made in industry when, in fact, the opposite decisions need to be made by government if it is to maintain an appropriate equilibrium. We need to be especially careful about how we calibrate what is happening in government against what is happening in industry.
One final point. We have been talking about industry success, but some of that success was at a cost that basic researchers want to avoid. The large corporate labs are much smaller than they were a decade ago. The cuts being discussed with regard to NSF funding are not nearly as extreme by comparison.
The forces for change are strong and they are having an impact. The industrial speakers discussed how they have responded, but those forces are affecting NSF and research universities differently than industry. There is a great tendency, a great pressure, especially with the end of the Cold War, for NSF to spread its support of research uniformly. This is not a new pressure. In 1947, when the Senate was contemplating a law to establish NSF, there was a debate between Senators Fulbright and Russell from Arkansas and Georgia, and Senator Saltonstall of Massachusetts. Senators Fulbright and Russell said, "You have got to put something in the legislation to make sure that this research support gets distributed properly around the country; otherwise Harvard and MIT will have it all within six months." Senator Saltonstall said, "Well, you want the best national security system, you want to buy the best research, and you are not interested in that other part." Senator Saltonstall won the argument, but Senators Russell and Fulbright were right and those forces have not gone away. Much more recently, there was a debate in the Senate about earmarking. Senator Inouye of Hawaii was a strong proponent of that. He argued that peer review was inherently unfair because it favored the haves over the have-nots and that everybody should have an equal break.
So the question is, Will these forces become more important now that the military security rationale is gone? The answer probably is yes. Here is one way in which those forces for change are going to act on research universities. The reason this country has the world' s best research universities is not because we are smarter than everybody else, but because we have a different system to execute that research. There is a direct link between the quality of research and infrastructure support, but many of the components of the research process are currently being questioned.
So what should NSF do? It may have to become more elitist than it is now. From a political standpoint, it cannot be simply elitist; it needs to take some resources and make it clear that those are to support whatever is truly excellent wherever it may be found. At the same time, there are other needs in the country that must be recognized.
One concern is that the separation between research and education is unnatural and damaging to NSF. Getting them back together and articulating this in a way that the people who are not researchers understand should be considered in this introspective process. It may be that everyone wants to separate them because no one trusts researchers to actually care about education. We all know, however, that research and graduate education are


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10 Home Decor Make-Over Tips for a Fresher Look
When you came home and you realized that the décor looks a little weary, then you can try to do some home makeovers. You do not have to remodel your entire house in order to renew the look. Also, you do not have to spend so much money for a makeover. Well, some people really opt for major home changes but it doesn't mean that all of us needs to do that just to get a new look. You can still bring more life to your dull room by doing some simple steps.
You do need to be an expert in order to create a home makeover. You just have to be imaginative and creative. Express yourself in your home design by using your ideas and by letting it suit to your taste and personality. Doing this can make your makeover work more fun and fulfilling. Here are some tips to help you redesign your home for a fresher new look.
1. Clean your home.
2. Have a focal point.
3. Rearrange the furniture.
4. Use some rugs.
5. Add some green.
6. Use new lamps.
7. Add accessories and personality to your home.
8. Change your fabrics.
9. Add new life to your walls.
10. Try new fixtures.
You merely need your own imagination and creativity in order to get a new look for your home. Also, you do not need to do the makeover in just one time! You can do that by renewing your home décor one room at a time. This way, it would not be hard for you and you can also get better ideas for every room. After doing the 10 tips we have above, you will surely be amazed on how beautiful your home have become!


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About the Author
Carilynn OHareI am a professional model, stylist, instructor, writer, and BOSL blogger. I am also an Executive of the Miss Virtual World Organization and work with both the Miss and Mister Virtual World Competitions. During my time in SL I have learned that although what you want is not always what you get; sometimes what you get is so much better than what you originally wanted! Enjoy this Second Life!
More articles by Carilynn OHare »


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Roger Ebert Full ReviewGood This is good sound family entertainment, a safe PG-13 but not a dumb one, and it's a refreshing interlude before we hurtle into the summer blockbuster season.
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Animals Matter
See what Express-News pets columnist Cathy M. Rosenthal has to say about animals.
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Cat miraculously survives being shot in face with arrow
This weekend, the Bandera County sheriff's department picked up a white cat who had been shot in the face with an arrow. The cat had been found along a dirt road in Pipe Creek, Texas. Deputies are asking for help in finding out who shot this cat, according to a story in the Bandera Bulletin. […] [Read More]
Reward for information leading to the arrest of those responsible for the death of George the Duck
San Antonio's Animal Care Services (ACS) says they are making headway in a cruelty case involving a beloved River Walk mascot — George the Duck, but they still needs the public's help. To that end, ACS has partnered with the Humane Society of the United States and Crime Stoppers to offer a cumulative reward of […] [Read More]
Texas cruelty laws may not protect George the Duck
I was off last week, but read in the newspaper on Friday about George, the River Walk duck that was killed by two unknown individuals. What a senseless tragedy. I felt sick to my stomach and very sorry for George who was obviously a friendly duck who learned to trust strangers, only to be abused and killed […] [Read More]
Can good people neglect their pets?
In Michigan, a "veterinary educator" was charged with neglect for the 17 dogs and 2 cats in her home. There are no details yet about the welfare of the animals in the article; only that they are in "poor condition." We do know, however, that they were in poor enough condition that the woman was […] [Read More]
5 easy ways you can prevent animal cruelty
April is Prevent Animal Cruelty Month. It's a reminder to people to speak out for animals who they think might be abused or neglected. Here are 5 easy ways you can help prevent animal cruelty. 1.Report animal abuse if you see it. If you witness someone abusing a dog or cat, whether they are physically […] [Read More]
Leaping Bunny Program celebrates 15 years of cruelty-free products
When you go shopping, do you look for the Leaping Bunny logo to ensure that the products you are purchasing are cruelty-free? This month, the Coalition for Consumer Information on Cosmetics, which manages the Leaping Bunny Program, celebrates its 15th anniversary. The Leaping Bunny Program administers a cruelty-free standard and the internationally recognized Leaping Bunny Logo for companies […] [Read More]
Nine-year-old accused of killing puppy
A nine-year-old boy in Wyoming County, New York, was alleged seen torturing and killing a puppy. He choked the puppy, swung the puppy around on it's leash, and hit the puppy up against a building, resulting in the puppy's death, according to WHAM-TV NEWS in Warsaw, New York. This is not the boy's first offense. Apparently, he struck a […] [Read More]
Man sprays "Raid" on dogs
In Lubbock, Texas, a man was caught spraying "Raid" on his dogs, claiming he was trying to get rid of the dog's fleas. The product claims to "kill bugs dead®," but it's certainly not meant for dogs and probably can kill dogs dead too. It's amazing that anyone would think it's okay to spray their dogs with […] [Read More]
11 puppies left to die in garbage dumpster
Imagine taking out the trash and just as you are about to swing the bag into the dumpster, you see something moving. You stop and listen. You hear small whimpers and to your horror, you suddenly realize that there is an entire litter of puppies in the dumpster. That's what happened to a staff person at the […] [Read More]


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Unlocking the Key to Deep Sleep
By Sarah Fenske
Making the Ferguson Commission Matter
By Danny Wicentowski
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Back at the farmhouse, Special Forces couldn't find Saddam or the hidden bunker.
"The farmers wouldn't tell us anything," says Samir. "We were beating the shit out of them, but they weren't talking."
Desperate, they pulled the bodyguard from the Humvee and demanded that he tell them the location of the bunker.
Samir thought the bodyguard was again trying to deceive them when he told the soldiers they were actually standing on top of Saddam's secret bunker.
"I gave him a few slaps on the face and said, 'What do you mean I'm standing on it?' We couldn't see anything. All there was was dirt and leaves. But we got some shovels off the trucks and started digging. Immediately we hit something."
Samir says a soldier fired several blank rounds into the bunker's exposed opening, and a man's voice cried out from the spider hole, pleading for his life.
"He said, 'Don't shoot. Don't kill me,'" recounts Samir.
Peering into the hole, Samir could make out only part of the man. In Arabic, Samir told the fugitive that if he wanted to live, he needed to get out now. When Samir asked to see the man's hands, he showed his right hand, and then his left, but he wouldn't show both at the same time.
"No, I want to see both your hands," Samir yelled.
Keeping an eye on the man's hands, Samir plunged into the hole and grabbed the prisoner. Samir says he knew right away that it was the deposed dictator.
"He smelled bad, like a homeless person, and had the long beard and hair, but I knew it was Saddam. I told everyone, 'It's Saddam. It's Saddam!'"
Unconvinced, Special Forces had Samir ask the captive his identity. When the man answered that his name was Saddam, Samir says he shook him by his hair and dirt-matted beard.
"I said, 'Yeah, Saddam what? Saddam what?' Finally he said, 'Hussein.'"
Upon hearing that, Samir unleashed years of pent-up rage.
"I told him that I was going to fuck him up the ass. That we were all going to fuck him up the ass. I told him he was a criminal and a murderer. I hit him and spit in his face. I stepped my foot on his head and his back. He wasn't crying, but I think he was shocked. No one had ever treated him this way."
The beating over, Samir tossed his digital camera to a nearby soldier, who quickly snapped a shot of Samir kneeling over the fallen despot.
Later, when the world's most wanted man was whisked onto an awaiting helicopter, Samir remembers Saddam muttering to himself in English, asking the same question again and again: "America, why? America, why?"
An hour later, as Saddam sat in the Baath Chair for his initial interrogation, Samir joined an adrenaline-fueled celebration taking place in a makeshift palace bar. Samir and his photos became the center of attention. Several members of Special Forces abandoned their Heinekens long enough to download the photos onto their laptops.
It was a hell of a party, Samir recalls, but amid the back slaps, toasts and laughter, he felt a nervous twinge in his gut. During the capture Samir's commanding officer scolded him for taking the photo of Saddam, and now he panicked that the attention surrounding the picture could raise further ire.
Before going to bed that night, Samir downloaded the photos onto his laptop, replaced the camera's memory card with a new one and hid the chip containing the images deep within his luggage.
Samir was a twenty-year-old college student living in the southern Iraqi city of Nasiriyah when he joined a civilian uprising against Saddam. It was 1991, and U.S. and coalition fighters had just declared a ceasefire after liberating Kuwait.
Encouraged by the Republican Guard's swift defeat, Samir grabbed the family AK-47 and joined thousands of southern Shiites organizing a massive rebellion. In hindsight, Samir says, the revolution was doomed from the start.
The ceasefire allowed Saddam to regroup and launch a counterattack against his own people. It soon became clear that the United States never planned to assist the Shiites with any tactical support. The failure of the U.S. government to provide military assistance during the uprising still strikes a sour chord with Samir and countless other Shiites.
"We were defenseless," fumes Samir. "Saddam began a retaliation campaign with tanks and helicopters. Our guns were useless."
Samir lost a cousin in the fighting. In other anti-Saddam strongholds, such as the southern city of Basra, Saddam's forces slaughtered thousands. Republican Guard tanks were reported to be painted with the message "After today, no more Shiites."
"I knew I had to leave," reflects Samir. "Everyone in my village knew I was part of the uprising. It was only a matter of time before [Saddam's forces] would kill me."
Three weeks after taking up arms, Samir told his parents he was going to flee the country. Reluctantly they agreed.
For 500 dinar (about $3.50 at the time) a smuggler hid Samir in the back of a van and drove him within twenty miles of U.S. military fortifications along the Iraqi-Saudi Arabian border. Samir would walk the rest of the journey, crossing desert and barren farmland before surrendering himself to a U.S. soldier.
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The next-gen Xbox will not be backwards compatible with Xbox 360 games, according to a report published on Bloomberg
Microsoft has decided to switch to new AMD chips for its next Xbox, fueling speculation that the company's next-gen console will play Xbox 360 games, a new report on Bloomberg has claimed.
The move is part of a strategy aimed at cutting the costs of manufacturing the new console and getting more developers interested in creating games for it, the report said, citing "people with knowledge of the matter" as its source of information.
The new console's architecture marks a shift to a new x86 format that means Microsoft is dropping the Power PC tech in the Xbox 360 console, effectively meaning the next-gen machine won't play the discs that run on its predecessor.
The news shouldn't come as too much of a shock to analysts and players alike. After all, the Xbox 360 didn't play games made for the original Xbox and Sony has already announced the PS4 won't be backwards compatible with the PS3 - although Sony has also said its exploring the possibility of making games on its other platforms available through Gaikai's cloud streaming technology.
The report on Bloomberg also backs up comments made by tech blogger Paul Thurrott in his 'What the Tech' podcast that the console's reveal date is May 21st. The new console will also be branded simply 'Xbox', the report said.


text: Clarion Hotel Seattle Airport Hotel rating Quick Specs Commissions 10.0%Rates $87-$167Year Built 1969Year Renovated 2003 View Large Interactive Map Address 3000 S 176th StSeattle, WA 98188-4090 Web http://www.clarionhotel.com/hotel-seattle-washington-WA012 Phone + 1 206-242-0200 Fax + 1 206-242-1998 Toll-free 800-4-CHOICE Email email@example.com OverviewMeeting SpecsPhotos & videos Description Pleasant 3-story motor inn adjacent to airport - 5 miles to Southcenter Mall, 8 miles to Museum of Flight, Space Needle 12 miles.Year Built: 1969Year Renovated: 2003Check in Time: 3:00 PMCheck out Time: 12:00 PMNumber of Floors: 3Total Number of Rooms: 214Rates: $87Commissions: Room Only 10.0%Chain: ClarionChain Website: http://www.clarionhotel.com GDS Hotel Reservation CodesAmadeus GDS: CC SEA012Galileo/Apollo GDS: CC 76168Sabre GDS: CC 005198WorldSpan GDS: CC WA012Reps: American Accommodation Network Clarion Hotel Seattle Airport Location & NeighborhoodIn Seattle, 15 miles from Seattle. International Blvd. Airport. Clarion Hotel Seattle Airport Rates & PoliciesClarion Hotel Seattle Airport rates are Daily in USDStandard: $87 Suite: $137-$167 (USD) Credit Cards Are AcceptedReservations must be guaranteed with a credit cardMeals: No Meals IncludedDeposit Policy: Deposit or credit card guaranteeCancellation Policy: Cancel 24 hr prior to arrivalHotel Discounts offered: Group discountCorporate discountGovernment/ Military discountAARP discountTravel Agents 30.0%Airline Personnel 25.0% Nearby AirportsSeattle/Tacoma Intl (0 mile southwest)Oak Harbor (58.50 miles northwest)Fairchild Intl (72.75 miles northwest)More Airports » Clarion Hotel Seattle Airport Room AmentitiesClarion Hotel Seattle Airport amenities are in All rooms unless noted otherwiseAir ConditioningCoffeemakerDaily Maid ServiceIron/Ironing BoardMicrowave Oven (some)Free Newspaper (some)Rooms for Non-smokersTelephoneVoicemailRefrigerator (some)Cable/Satellite TelevisionTelevisionWhirlpool (some)Internet Access (Wireless) Guest ServicesBarber/Hair StylistCar RentalComplimentary CoffeeComplimentary TransportationConcierge/Club FloorConcierge ServicesLaundry RoomLaundry/Dry Cleaning ServiceMulti-lingual StaffFree Onsite ParkingWheelchair Access to Common/Public AreasCommon Area Internet Access (Wireless) Security ServicesElectronic Key/LockParking Area Well LitSmoke Alarm in Rooms Pet ServicesPets AllowedAdditional Fee for Pets Nearby SightseeingSouthcenter Mall (5 miles east)Museum of Flight (8 miles north)Space Needle (12 miles north)More sightseeing »DiningTriple Seven (Onsite)More dining options » On-Site RecreationHealth ClubHot TubJogging TrailsPool (Indoor Pool)Nearby RecreationBeachBicyclingBoating/SailingCasinoFishingGolf CourseHealth Spa/MassageHorseback RidingShopping Mall/AreaWater Skiing Clarion Hotel Seattle Airport Meeting Rooms & Events4 Meeting Rooms holding 100 people.3,612 sq ft of Meeting SpaceOlympicLocation: Floor 2Flooring: carpetCapacity: Theater- 150, Classroom- 100, U-Shape- 45, Reception- 180, Banquet- 120RainierLocation: Floor 1Flooring: carpetCapacity: Theater- 120, Classroom- 70, U-Shape- 30, Reception- 120, Banquet- 100BakerLocation: Floor 2Flooring: carpetCapacity: Theater- 35, Classroom- 24, U-Shape- 15, Reception- 40, Banquet- 30AdamsLocation: Floor 2Flooring: carpetCapacity: Theater- 35, Classroom- 24, U-Shape- 15, Reception- 40, Banquet- 30 Clarion Hotel Seattle Airport Business ServicesA-V EquipmentBusiness CenterCopierFaxMeeting FacilitiesMeeting Room Internet Access (Wireless) Clarion Hotel Seattle Airport Images, Videos, & Virtual Tours Photos & Videos Clarion Hotel Seattle Airport ExteriorClarion Hotel Seattle Airport ExteriorClarion Hotel Seattle Airport LobbyClarion Hotel Seattle Airport LobbyClarion Hotel Seattle Airport LobbyClarion Hotel Seattle Airport RoomClarion Hotel Seattle Airport RoomClarion Hotel Seattle Airport RoomClarion Hotel Seattle Airport RoomClarion Hotel Seattle Airport PoolClarion Hotel Seattle Airport PoolClarion Hotel Seattle Airport MeetingClarion Hotel Seattle Airport RestaurantClarion Hotel Seattle Airport RestaurantClarion Hotel Seattle Airport RestaurantClarion Hotel Seattle Airport Health ClubClarion Hotel Seattle Airport Health ClubClarion Hotel Seattle Airport Other Images Powered by VFM Leonardo Nearby Seattle Hotels More Nearby Hotels Super 8 MotelDays Inn SeaTac AirportEcono LodgeLa Quinta Inn Seattle Sea-TacMotel 6 Seattle AirportMotel 6 Seattle Sea Tac Arpt SouthMotel 6 Seattle SouthQuality Inn Sea Tac AirportRed Roof Inn Seattle Airport SeatacRodeway InnComfort Inn & SuitesDays Inn Seattle North of DowntownHotel FiveQuality Inn & Suites Seattle CenterSeattle Pacific HotelTravelodge by the Space NeedleTravelodge UniversityUniversity InnExecutive Hotel Pacific Hoteliers! 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Compensation Management
Meta4 PeopleNet enables the design and implementation of compensation policies aligned with the company strategy and budget.
This module ensures all employees are paid in accordance with the established policies, taking into account the market value of a position, its internal value and productivity.
Key features
- Automatically create salary structures: grades, salary bands or levels of progression
- Update existing structures to reflect changes in market conditions
- Salary levels by job
- Analyze salary competitiveness in the organization compared to the market
- Update the compa-ratio matrix and establish internal equity according to salary structure
- Define base and variable compensation plans
- Create and assign market surveys (market salary rates)
- Assign positions to salary levels within a specific structure
- Assign budgets en masse
- Set indicators for salary increases: merit, compa-ratio, and budget
Benefits and Flexible Compensation
Meta4 PeopleNet can completely manage flexible compensation plans and employee benefits in a structured manner. It does this in two ways: at the level of payroll calculation and taxes and at the level of human resources.
This system is critical to the compensation strategy in organizations as it contributes towards improving the competitiveness of the company and secures loyalty from employees.
Key features
- Define corporate benefit plans or by group benefits (health insurance, life insurance, disability, etc.)
- Simulate inscription to benefit plans
- Determine which employees are eligible for certain benefits through a combination of eligibility criteria and rules.


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Ideas and tips on Christening Cakes, baptism cakes,communion cakes and special occasion cakes
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Birthday Cake Decoration Ideas . . . . . Cake Decorating Ideas on Pinterest www.pinterest.com/wvuwhit/cake-decorating-ideas/ Explore Whitney Ball's hand-picked collection of Pins about Cake…
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*Round-trip fares include all taxes, fees and surcharges.
*Fares include taxes & applicable surcharges. Fare is subject to exchange rate & changes.
Your benefit with Miles & More: earn miles, save your preferences and display bookings at a glance.
Palma de Mallorca offers fascinating scenery and a lively coastal culture. So there are a whole host of reasons why this Spanish city is one of Europe's most popular tourist destinations. Why not see for yourself?
* Round-trip fares include all taxes, fees and surcharges.
This is the lowest fare, inclusive of all taxes and fuel surcharges. Kindly be advised that fares may differ due to availability, different departure cities, currency fluctuations and/or government tax regulations.
Rebooking and refund: not permitted
Minimum stay: 6 days, Maximum stay: 3 months
Minimum / maximum stay: 6 day / 12 months
Stopover: One stopover permitted in each direction at EUR 75 each (MYR equivalent)
Cancellation: non refundable
Changes/Rebooking: Permitted at EUR 240 (MYR equivalent) per change
Rebookable at 400EUR
Refundable at 400EUR
Stopover not permitted
Turnaround open jaw is permitted
Min stay 6 days or past 1 Sunday
Enquire about the Business Class seat from 8 weeks before departure
Experience Premium Economy Class on the A380
Find out about the rules for carry-on baggage
Choose your seat online 23 hours prior to departure
Your digital travel companion when flying Lufthansa.
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Posted at: 11/15/2012 7:38 AM
Updated at: 11/15/2012 9:32 AM
By: Ellery McCardle
(ABC 6 NEWS) -- An Albert Lea company calls themselves the one-stop shop for customers.
Lou-Rich has been manufacturing metal parts for 40 years. Like many, it took a hit during the recession, but as the economy gets better, owners are facing a new challenge, looking for enough qualified workers.
More than 300 people clock in and out of Lou-Rich everyday. From Xray equipment to tractor parts for John Deere, you never know what will come down the assembly line next.
"Anybody that's looking for any metal parts for assembly we can provide that for them," said Mike Larson, president and CEO of Lou-Rich.
The company is employee-owned, something Larson says is a big factor in the success of the company.
"I think we have the best workforce in Freeborn County. The employees have a vested interest in the company. They're always trying to improve and make the product better for the customer," said Larson.
During the recession, some workers were laid off as business slowed but now employee levels are back to normal and there's room for more hands.
"One of the things we struggle with is finding skilled machinists and welders. We're constantly looking for people," said Larson.
An added workforce will come in handy soon.
"We've got a pipeline of new business that I've never seen before and it's huge," said Larson.
Lou-Rich began back in 1972 and it's first two employees still work there.
For employment information, click on the following link: http://www.lou-rich.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=category&layout=blog&id=56&Itemid=67


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Introducing CXN Zero, a technology designed specifically for fastpitch players and their unique hitting style. The 2015 Fastpitch Power Brigade bats have been reengineered with a new connection piece to eliminate all vibration for improved feel and confidence, so players feel nothing but power.
Fastpitch Videos
2015 Fastpitch ConneXion Zero Disruptors Video
- Video Categories:
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While many people have heard of the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009, the way in which it has been covered in the media has probably left most with the wrong idea about what the law actually does. From the coverage I've seen, the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act has simultaneously been portrayed as doing both more and less than it actually does. To clarify what the act does, I will bust some of the myths and then explain in simple terms exactly what this law does.
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You have clocked in to MySA.com's business news blog about San Antonio and South Texas businesses and business people.
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KCI creates new global executive position
San Antonio-based medical equipment maker Kinetic Concepts Inc. has hired an industry veteran to lead the company's wound therapy division. Michael Genau, a former vice president and general manager of GE Healthcare's Global Diagnositic X-Ray Division, will serve KCI in the newly created role of global president of wound therapy. In his new role, Genau […] [Read More]
KCI announces two new directors
Kinetic Concepts Inc. announced today that its board of directors will increase from 10 to 11, and appointed Craig R. Callen and Dr. Carl F. Kohrt to serve as directors. Callen will serve on the board's Nominating and Governance Committee and Kohrt will serve on the Compensation and Technology committees. Callen previously served as senior […] [Read More]
KCI profits down, revenue up
Kinetic Concepts Inc. reported fourth quarter profits down 21 percent from same quarter in 2007 because of costs related to restructuring and the acquisition of LifeCell. The San Antonio-based maker of wound-care medical devices had a profit of $52.1 million, or 74 cents a share, compared to $66.5 million, or 92 cents per share, for […] [Read More]
KCI is taking a ride with The American Diabetes Association
May 30-31 will be the "2009 Tour de Cure" cycling event from The American Diabetes Association. This year's ride marks the inaugural partnership between the ADA and Kinetic Concepts Inc. The local medical technology company has signed on as a presenting sponsor for the event. The ride begins Saturday morning at Pearson Corp., off Bulverde […] [Read More]
KCI to announce earnings Jan. 27
Investors, mark your calendars. Medical-equipment maker Kinetic Concepts Inc. today said it will report fourth-quarter earnings on Tuesday, Jan. 27. Top execs with the San Antonio-based company also will host an investor conference call to talk about the results that day. It starts at 7:30 a.m. CST. To access the call, dial 888-313-5249 at least […] [Read More]
KCI's Burzik to present at JPMorgan conference
Are you one of those investors that just can't get enough info on Kinetic Concepts Inc? If so, you're in luck. The San Antonio-based medical equipment firm's president and CEO, Catherine Burzik, will present at the 27th Annual JPMorgan Healthcare Conference in San Francisco next week. Burzik will address attendees on Monday, Jan. 12, at […] [Read More]
KCI adds more infringement claims
San Antonio-based medical equipment firm Kinetic Concepts Inc. has filed more patent infringement claims against rival Smith & Nephew in an ongoing lawsuit in Federal District Court in San Antonio. KCI filed the claims together with Wake Forest University Health Sciences. The two companies say a Smith & Nephew negative-pressure wound therapy foam dressing kit […] [Read More]
KCI conference call coming quickly
Local investors looking to fill up their holiday season with conference calls have yet another one to tune in. San Antonio's Kinetic Concepts Inc. will present at the Piper Jaffray 20th Annual Health Care Conference on Tuesday, December 2, 2008 in New York. Rich Cockrell, the medical-equipment firm's investor relations honcho, will provide a company […] [Read More]
Kinetic Concepts in New York
Interested in learning about Kinetic Concepts Inc.'s plans and outlook? A quick trip to New York might be the solution. KCI's vice president of investor relations, Rich Cockrell, will make a presentation to the Oppenheimer 19th Annual Healthcare Conference Tuesday in New York at 11:40 a.m. Central Standard Time. An easier way would be to […] [Read More]
Acquisition costs wound KCI earnings
San Antonio-based medical equipment maker Kinetic Concepts Inc. today reported a 5 percent drop in third-quarter earnings, attributed to costs from a recent acquisition. Net earnings for the third quarter were $56.6 million, or 78 cents per share, compared to $59.0 million, or 82 cents per share, for the same period a year ago. They […] [Read More]
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We have to focus way beyond the forest sector to save forests
What are the most threatening trends concerning forests worldwide?
- If you want a really high level answer to that question, you could boil it down to loss of forests, or deforestation, and degradation of forests. And broadly speaking the issue of forest loss is concentrated in the tropics where we have an expansion of the agricultural infrastructure frontier and basically conversion of forest to other land use such as palms. In the temperate regions we have less of a problem of outright forest loss, but we have much bigger problems around degradation of forests and disturbance to old-growth forests.
In what ways has the WWF's work on forests changed over the years?
- If you look at the history of WWF, we first started working on species protection, on parks for species. Then, as that evolved, we had a mantra of 'protect, manage and restore'. So that meant we were working in the forests on a combination of protecting them, improving the way they were logged and also restoration of forest where they have been severely damaged in the past. Then the third evolution is where we are now - when we recognize that many of the threats to forests are coming from outside of the forest. So this is the expansion of agriculture and infrastructure, investment flows. And it's a problem that forests can't compete with other land uses that get higher short term gain. So the third phase is to recognize that we have to focus way beyond the forest sector to save forests.
Some governments in Central and Eastern Europe say that they'd prefer to work for the economic development of their country and think later about nature or, say, protecting the forests. What are your thoughts?
- I think it's a dangerous strategy, because there are certain aspects of ecological services and biodiversity that are irreplaceable once they are lost. If you decline to a point, recovery of some sort may happen over the long term but certain things would be lost forever. And it's a bit like running down your natural capital. It's like having a bank account and running it down to zero. It's better to use your interest and to keep your capital and to use the "natural interest" which comes from the growth in forests. And that means to extract wood at a rate in which it can be replaced, stewardship strategy rather than run it down to the ground and to try to recover what can't be recovered.