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* * *
They sort of lumber on land, but in the water, the pygmy hippopotamus is as graceful as a ballerina.
Even if the hippo in question is a male and not quite 2 months old.
You can see for yourself in the Lied Jungle at Omaha's Henry Doorly Zoo & Aquarium.
There a pygmy hippo calf born Feb. 22 is now on view with his mother, 13-year-old Chomel, who has been on loan from the Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago since 2011. The father, Scooby, 22, belongs to the Omaha zoo.
This is Chomel's first calf, and "she couldn't be a more perfect mom," said Christie Eddie, curator of small mammals. "She's very protective."
Pygmy hippos don't swim at birth. The calf was slowly introduced to water in the display area, a little more added each day, and now swims alongside his mother. In fact, most of his nursing is done underwater.
The Omaha hippo calf weighed 15 pounds at birth — larger than average; 12 pounds is considered big — and now tips the scale at 50 pounds. He's healthy and a good eater, Eddie said. As an adult, he'll weigh up to 700 pounds.
The pygmy hippo shouldn't be confused with the river hippopotamus, which can be 10 times larger.
Another difference between pygmy hippos and river hippos is their lifestyles. River hippos tend to be found in herds in the rivers and lakes surrounded by grasslands all over sub-Saharan Africa. Pygmy hippos, which live in the rainforest and swamplands of western Africa, are solitary creatures. Males and females usually come together only for mating.
However, Chomel and Scooby are an unusual couple. "We're lucky. They get along and share the Lied Jungle display most of the time," Eddie said, adding that Scooby has been moved since the calf arrived.
Their solitary natures make them stubborn, easily spooked and ornery around people, Eddie said.
The calf brings the zoo's total to four (an older female also is separate), but he will belong to the Lincoln Park Zoo, too, and eventually will find a home at another zoo. He will become sexually mature in three years or so, Eddie said, and won't be able to reproduce with the hippos here.
Pygmy hippos, an endangered species, are native to Liberia, Sierra Leone and Ivory Coast. There may be colonies in Guinea and Nigeria. Because they are so solitary and mostly nocturnal, it's difficult to get an exact count of how many exist in the wild, Eddie said.
The fact that Omaha's calf is a male is important for the species. There are only 27 pygmy hippos in North American zoos; the calf is the 11th male. Only three calves have been born in North America in the past 2� years, Eddie said.
Contact the writer: 402-444-1067, email@example.com


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UK's Mossakowski Is Transferring
February 1st, 2011 09:41 AM║ Posted By: John Pennington ║ Permalink
║ Schools: Kentucky
Tags: Advantage Newton, Dan Mossakowski, Mike Hartline, Ryan Mossakowski
Redshirt freshman quarterback Ryan Mossakowski is leaving Kentucky in hopes of finding more playing time at another school.
"It's official," Joker Phillips said yesterday.
Mossakowski was a four-star prospect from Texas when he signed with the Wildcats. He redshirted in 2009 and last season competed with Morgan Newton and Mike Hartline for the starting job. He wound up #3 in the pecking order and saw only clock-killing action last season. Newton was the Cats' starter in the BBVA Compass Bowl following the suspension of Hartline.
"This is something I've been thinking about for a while, even before the bowl game," Mossakowski said. "I talked with the coaches and they said the job would be open in the spring and I'd have a chance to compete. I just had to make the decision that I thought was best for me. I really have to go somewhere where I know there's a 100% chance I'd get on the field."
Fans don't like that kind of talk, but let's face it… football players put in a lot of hours of work in exchange for the fun of actually playing. Some players are fine with just being a part of the team. Others — like former four-star quarterbacks — want the rewards that go along with all the sacrifice.
Mossakowski has worked his way back from a torn labrum and shoulder surgery following his senior season of high school ball. It's hard to fault him for wanting to find a place where he can play.
The quarterback has nothing but good things to say about UK on his way out the exit. "I have total respect for the coaching staff. And I'll still be good friends with all the players. I've really enjoyed it here. I just want to be somewhere where I know I'll get on the field."
The QB's father said good things as well. "There was a quarterback competition that was announced (after Hartline's suspension), but I'm not sure there really was on," Dan Mossakowski said. "In defense of those coaches, they have to do what they think is in the best interest of their program, so no hard feelings."
In the spring it's expected that Newton and freshman Maxwell Smith will compete for the starting quarterback job in Lexington. Advantage: Newton (based on experience).
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Discussion about math, puzzles, games and fun. Useful symbols: ÷ × ½ √ ∞ ≠ ≤ ≥ ≈ ⇒ ± ∈ Δ θ ∴ ∑ ∫ π -¹ ² ³ °
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#1 2007-12-08 12:56:49
from Java to C++
Java is, in my opinion, a ridiculously easy language to learn. C++ on the otherhand, can be rather confusing for a while, and there are many more pitfalls and slight differences which are easy to overlook if you're used to using java.
Last edited by mikau (2007-12-08 12:58:07)
A logarithm is just a misspelled algorithm.
#2 2007-12-08 13:38:59
Re: from Java to C++
Actually, I had a similar idea way back when. However, it was for the reverse direction. The idea was to write a book, or perhaps a series of books. It would assume knowledge of C++ and then teach only differences in syntax and structure. The idea is that once you know a language, it really only takes 2-3 hours to become familiar with another.
"In the real world, this would be a problem. But in mathematics, we can just define a place where this problem doesn't exist. So we'll go ahead and do that now..."
#3 2007-12-08 13:58:17
Pages: 1


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Manufacturer's Agents & Representatives >Bay Roads Marketing Group
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Discussion about math, puzzles, games and fun. Useful symbols: ÷ × ½ √ ∞ ≠ ≤ ≥ ≈ ⇒ ± ∈ Δ θ ∴ ∑ ∫ π -¹ ² ³ °
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Post a reply
Topic review (newest first)
And here's a plot
Here is it in Mathematica language:
Yes, I saw that. My first result:
Be careful, though. As we can see from the example above, how many prime factors a number has isn't the only thing it depends on.
I thought out an algoritm that can be used
Wow! Thank you for your help!
If n is product of two prime we have 2 combinations:
If n is prime we have only 1 combination:
Can we find formula for this?
you're absolutey right!
There are a few more combinations for 56 and 100, because 8 and 4 can be broken down more.
you're absolutely right!
Let there be x cubes. the volume of each is 1.2^3=1.728 =>


text:
Peter Rabbit™ Plates
No longer available
- Overview
Original artwork from Beatrix Potter's most beloved tale is re-created on our eco-friendly plates just in time for spring.
- 9" diameter.
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- Dimensions & Care
- Top-rack dishwasher-safe.
- Not for use with a microwave.
- Shipping Info
- Please allow 5-7 business days for delivery. Delivery estimate includes monogrammed and gift-wrapped items.
Easter is April 20th. Order by 4/15, 11PM PT for monogram shipping. Order by 4/16, 9AM for standard shipping.


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You must earn 10,000 points to post other members' whiteboard
Congratulations for Winning #10 Rank on 30 Day Points Leaders on 2/10/14 @ 01.30 AM
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MARQUETTE - An overheated connection resulted in a roughly 90-minute power outage this morning to over 800 Marquette Board of Light and Power customers in downtown Marquette, including The Mining Journal.
David Lynch, BLP superintendent of distribution, said a burnt conductor caused an electrical fault in the 300 block of West Washington Street. Protections in place cleared the circuit, Lynch said.
The outage occurred at 9:49 a.m. and affected 852 BLP customers. Power was restored 11:14 a.m.
Article Photos
Lynch said it took a while to make repairs as the affected electric line had to be raised and spliced.
John Pepin can be reached at 906-228-2500, ext. 206.


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Lithotripsy is a medical procedure that uses extracorporeal shock waves to break up and remove kidney stones that cause pain, urinary tract infections, bleeding or harm to the kidney. It is a commonly used procedure for treating kidney stones in the kidney, bladder or ureter (the tube that carries urine from your kidneys to your bladder). After the procedure, tiny pieces of stone pass out of your body in your urine. Your doctor can explain procedure guidelines and possible complication. Patients are in recovery for about two hours before being released.
Lithotripsy is performed in the surgery department, which is located on FMC's first floor. Contact your physician's office at (740) 687-8686 to schedule this procedure.


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CAMERON - Freshman Linda Hall tossed her second no-hitter of the season Tuesday as Cameron blanked Beallsville, 8-0, in prep softball action.
Hall struck out six and walked one for the Dragons (17-5).
Tara Paczewski homered and drove in three for Cameron, while Ashley Berardi homered, singled and knocked in two.
Shenai Wade added two singles and an RBI, while Lexi Aston and Nat


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Outstanding Results and New World Records at Scottsdale
Phoenix, Arizona (January 22, 2014) – At Russo and Steele Collector Car Auctions, we are thrilled to announce the achievement of outstanding results and world-record sales at our January 15-19 Scottsdale, Arizona Sports and Muscle auction event. Throughout the event's five action-packed days, beautiful weather helped draw record attendance numbers, estimated at 35% higher than 2013 levels. At the time of writing, preliminary sale results exceeding $21 million were generated with a very strong preliminary sell-through rate approaching 70%. With our specialists continuing to work hard to complete a multitude of pending post-block sales, we expect those figures to increase.
Representing classic European Sports and GT cars, the fastest-growing segment in today's market, we are thrilled to announce the world-record-setting sale of one of Lamborghini's very first road cars, the 350 GT, at $742,630 including commission. One of 120 mostly hand-built cars and boasting Giotto Bizzarrini's 3.5-liter DOHC V-12 engine, a race-bred chassis designed by Gian Paolo Dallara, and Touring's famous Superleggera bodywork penned by Franco Scaglione, 350 GT Chassis 211 was comprehensively restored to original standards with no detail overlooked, including an engine rebuild at Bob Wallace Cars, the shop of the late former Lamborghini chief test driver Bob Wallace.
Another new world record was set with the highly anticipated sale of a legendary 1963 Pontiac Tempest Le Mans Super Duty drag racing car, 1 of 2 known examples remaining today of the original 6 Coupes built by Pontiac to contest the NHRA's wild A/Factory Experimental (A/FX) class. Raced by Detroit's Stan Long Pontiac and tweaked with a heavy-duty driveline to handle the 421 engine's massive power and torque, the car remains famous as "The World's Fastest Tempest" after driver Stan Antlocer blasted to a brutal 11.93-second ET at 123.95 mph at Martin, Michigan's US 131 Dragway. After sending the Chevy, Ford, and Mopar contingents back to their respective trailers in 1963, the Tempest fell out of sight and in 2008, it was saved from the crusher and then expertly restored to its former glory by Scott Tiemann's Super Car Specialties. When the frenzied bidding finally ended, the Tempest garnered a world record-setting $335,630 including commission.
Another highly anticipated consignment, the "1 of 1" 2013 SRT Viper GTS Coupe, was offered at No Reserve on behalf of the Sons of Italy Foundation with proceeds to benefit its excellent charitable and educational programs. Beautifully and subtly customized, the 640-horsepower supercar celebrates the Foundation members' heritage with handsome Italian Tricolore accents, plus special Avorio Perla paintwork, Black Vapor custom wheels, and a virtually endless list of factory-equipped features and options. When the gavel fell for the last time, this exceptional Viper supercar garnered a winning bid of $236,500.
World-renowned for our exceptional lifestyle events to match the adrenaline-charged activity on the auction block, we held our annual Charity Gala on Wednesday, January 15th in support of the Boys & Girls Clubs of Greater Scottsdale. Kevin Martin's memorabilia auction provided additional celebrity flair over four days. Our highly popular seminars were led by Thursday's "Vintage Racing: Putting the Pedal to the Metal" session featuring guest panelists Lyn St. James, the famous IMSA, Indianapolis, and Le Mans driver, businessperson, and speaker, plus D. Randy Riggs, publisher of Vintage Motorsport magazine, historic racer Brian Ferrin, Mike McGovern, the Chief Driving Instructor at the Bob Bondurant School of High-Performance Driving, and Chris Hines of ArrowLane Racing. On Friday, the "Art of Restoration" panel discussion featured expert classic-car appraiser Lance Coren, and noted restorers Bob Smith and Alan Taylor.
Following a fantastic Scottsdale event, we now continue the momentum with a switch to California and our second Newport Beach auction, scheduled for June 19–21. For further supporting documentation, high-resolution images, or more information about the Russo and Steele Scottsdale '14 auction and our upcoming events, please contact us.


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P.G. Wodehouse on inherited wealth
The Adventures of Sally
, Chapter 1:
'If there are any young men whom inherited wealth improves, Fillmore was not one. He seemed to regard himself these days as a sort of Man of Destiny. To converse with him was for the ordinary human being like being received in audience by some more than stand-offish monarch.'
The Doggerel Manifesto
by John MacBeath Watkins
As those of you who follow us on facebook already know, Twice Sold Tales in Ballard is considering starting a Doggerel Night at Twice Sold Tales.
The only trouble is, several people to whom I've broached the idea have not known what doggerel is.
From the Merriam-Webster Learner's Dictionary:
: poetry that is poorly written and that often is not meant to be taken seriously.
In short, doggerel is a disparaging term for unpretentious poetry that aims to entertain, and has no pretension of being high art. I do not think it has to be written poorly; after all, Ogden Nash once said he'd decided to be a good bad poet rather than a bad good poet, and I think that captures the distinction between "poetry" and doggerel.
Consider an example of folk poetry that is not intended to be taken seriously:
What the Blind Man Saw
One fine day in the middle of the night
two dead boys got up to fight
Back to back they faced each other
drew their swords and shot each other.
If you don't believe what I say is true,
ask the blind man, he saw it too.
Iambic verse with four feet to the line, in rhyming heroic couplets. Nothing wrong with that, although the first line isn't Iambic all the way through, when voiced it scans well enough. Continuity errors aside, it's well written.
The idea of doggerel is different from what we now call poetry. It is a means to tell a story and often a means to tell a joke. At one time, poetry and jokes were our oral traditions, the poetry often put to music.
But we've elevated poetry to the status of high art. I've been to a reading where someone was throwing out random numbers and calling them a poem, sort of equivalent to Robert Rauschenberg's
White Painting
, a 1951 three-canvas work that the artists said represented nothing (more on the flight from meaning
White Painting
There was a time when poetry could be art, but this was not the essence of poetry. Its essence was that it was a way to tell a story. The tale could be told well or badly, and its popularity depended on the taste of the public, not on any arbiters of taste. Because it was a means of storytelling, most of it didn't have to be terribly good, it just had to tell a tale people wanted to hear.
Casey at the Bat
, that most American of poems, ran in a daily newspaper.
In some cases, popular poetry disparaged as doggerel produced parodies more famous than the original. When I was a lad, I learned this comic poem:
The boy stood on the burning deck, his feet were full of blisters
he could not find his own shoes, so he had to wear his sister's.
The ocean was deserted, not a streetcar was in sight
the forest fires were burning, for it rained all day that night.
It wasn't until a few years ago that I found
, the poem the one above parodied. It was first published in 1826, based on events that had occurred in 1798 at the Battle of the Nile. The dreadful thing came to be taught in American and British schools from about 1850 to 1950, mercifully disappearing from the syllabus about the time I was born, though I take no credit for that. It was thought the poem taught children to be virtuous:
The boy stood on the burning deckWhence all but he had fled;The flame that lit the battle's wreckShone round him o'er the dead. The boy in
stands on the deck where his father told him to, unaware that his father is dead and can't countermand the order, until the powder magazine blows up and kills him.
Generations of school children rebelled against this and produced several versions of parodies that had greater comic and artistic merit than the original.
And that's the beauty of doggerel. It can be awful, but if it is awful and pretentious, there's always someone willing to come along and burst the bubble.
The problem is, the entire institutional organism that supports poetry has become pretentious. It's time to burst the bubble, and write poetry that is intended to amuse, to tell a story or to tell a joke, that has no pretense of being written for the ages.
I say it is ominous that so little poetry written in the last century is worthy of parody. Our poetry has become so irrelevant that little of it is iconic enough to have people know what you're doing when you parody it. The only one that comes readily to mind is Robert Frost's
The Road not Taken
. And that was a parody that fit on a button -- "I took the road less traveled by -- what was I thinking!"
I say we need poetry worth repeating, the way a dirty joke is worth repeating, a return to the oral tradition that spread anonymous poems like
What the Blind Man Saw
without the backing of foundations or grants or small, incestuous poetry journals.
It doesn't have to be funny. In fact, without sincere, and popular, poems like
, we can't have brilliant parodies. Without
Against Idleness and Mischief
, by Isaac Watts:
How doth the little busy Bee
Improve each shining Hour,
And gather Honey all the day
From every opening Flower! ...we would not have Lewis Carroll's parody:
How doth the little crocodileImprove his shining tail,And pour the waters of the NileOn every golden scale!How cheerfully he seems to grin,How neatly spreads his claws,And welcomes little fishes inWith gently smiling jaws! I call both of these doggerel. I class the whole of Edgar Guest's
as doggerel, and so is Dorothy Parker's review of his work:
I'd rather flunk my
Wasserman test
Than read the poetry of Edgar Guest.But a
Reader's Digest
poet like Guest had his place in a healthy ecology of poetry. His poetry was maudlin, his language hackneyed, but if a thing is worth doing, there's a market for people who do it badly as well as for those who do it perfectly. Just as the romance and the mystery novel have a market for the less auspicious practitioners as well as for Jane Austen and P.D. James, a healthy market for poetry would have room for
as well as the works of W.S. Merwin.
I suggest we cease to regard poetry as an art form and return to viewing it as a storytelling technique. A poem may have artistic merit, but it need not have such merit to be a poem that gets passed around and enjoyed.
So let's tell stories with this technique we call poetry, either reading our favorites or writing our own. We won't aim to produce high art. We will aspire to amuse our friends.
In rememberance of the Goliard poets: Father Golias Lives for Bling
The Goliard poets were renegade priests in the 12th through the 13th centuries (and a little bit into the 14th) who wrote satiric verse about the corruption of the Catholic Church, usually featuring Father Golias, who exemplified all that was wrong with the Church.
more here: http://booksellersvsbestsellers.blogspot.com/2010/05/bohemians.html
In remembrance of their bravery and humor:
Father Golias Lives for Bling
Father Golias lives for bling
and covers up the "little things."
He knows some things he knows would shock
but doesn't wish to shock the flock
So Father Golias gets his bling
and silences the "little things."
Burning the booksellers: Religious freedom and the secular state
by John MacBeath Watkins
My copy of
Foxe's Book of Christian Martyrs
has a woodcut illustrating a particularly odious form of book burning -- a bookseller being burned with his books.
Not that the punishment was without an internal logic. The booksellers had been selling Holy Scripture in English. The Catholic Church objected to this, and any other Protestant heresy that involved removing the priest's mediation of scripture. The Bible, the Church decreed, was meant to be in Latin, a language taught mainly to the clergy.
The booksellers were therefore heretics, spreading the false gospel of a personal relationship with God. They had to be punished, and not just their bodies. At the time, the Church taught that to be resurrected on Judgement Day, your body needed to be buried more or less intact.
The booksellers were being burned so that they could not be resurrected on Judgement Day.
This dispute was part of the genesis of liberalism, of the separation of church and state and of free speech. It also relates to the belief in the literal interpretation of the Bible.
The Anglo-Saxons had translated the Bible into their language, no problem. But the Norman French did not speak their language, and the Catholic Church was trying to assert more control over peoples' religious lives. They cracked down on the Goliard poets in the late 13th century and early 14th, labeling them "Bohemians" in an effort to link them to the gypsies, who they called by that name. John Wycliffe, an Oxford don, translated the Vulgate Bible into English, and while he was allowed to die of natural causes in 1384, his body was burned to prevent his resurrection (ironically, the Vulgat Bible was translated from Hebrew and Greek into Latin so that citizens of Rome could read it in their own language.)
William Tyndale, a scholar born about a century after Wycliffe's body was burned, went back to the Hebrew and Greek text to produce a better translation into English. He did much of this while hiding in the Netherlands, but the Church caught up with him in 1535, and in 1536 he was sentenced to death by strangulation and his body was burned at the stake.
Two years later, Henry VIII broke with the Catholic Church and decreed that the Bible should be published in English, resulting in the Great Bible, largely based on Tyndale's work.
Hank8 did not intend to separate church and state. He intended for the state to take over the church. Thomas More, that martyr of conscience, died for the principle that the Pope should be able to tell monarchs whether they could have their marriages annulled, thereby ruling on who was a legitimate heir.
English kings continued to rely on religion for the legitimacy of their rule. James I wrote
The True Law of Free Monarchies
Basilikon Doron
Royal Gift
), both asserting the divine right of kings, and following the Gunpowder Plot in 1605, he required Catholics to sign an oath of allegiance denying the Pope's authority over the king.
But he married a French princess who was Catholic, and his son, Charles I was Catholic as well as being, like his father, a believer in the divine right of kings.
And that's where it gets interesting.
If you are a Catholic in a nation that is divided between Catholics, Anglicans, and non-conformist protestants such as Puritans, Quakers, Ranters, Anabaptists, Diggers, Muggletonians and other more obscure groups, whose God gives you the right to rule?
Chuck1 was an apostate to most of his subjects, but also an arrogant and high-handed ruler based on his claim of divine right. In the end, he
rather lost his head
Which led his son's tutor, the redoubtable Thomas Hobbes, to look for a
new source of legitimacy
for English kings.
He imported the values of the marketplace into politics, asserting that a nation needs a ruler to keep order, or chaos will reign, no life will be safe, there will be no point in planting crops or shipping merchandise, and in short, you will be reduced to a state of nature, which in his pessimistic view was nasty, brutish and short. In fact, his vision of the state of nature was similar to the breakdown of civilization that had been produced in many areas by the then recently concluded 30-Years-War.
Thus, the need for a secular government was created by a crisis in faith, the splintering of the Church into a dizzying array of churches. The blossoming of the Protestant churches could only happen in a secular state, because freedom of religion requires that you be free from the religions of others.
We tend to forget what the establishment of religion means. Here's an example from Wikipedia:
had long been controversial. Under the
1559 Act of Uniformity
, it was illegal not to attend official Church of England services, with a fine of one
(£0.05; about £16 today
) for each missed Sunday and holy day. The penalties for conducting unofficial services included imprisonment and larger fines. Under the policy of this time, Barrowe and Greenwood were
in 1593. The Pilgrims came to America in 1620, a generation before the English Civil War, to be free of the state religion of England, free to practice their religion as they saw fit. Not that they wanted a secular state; they wanted to set up their own colony with their own state religion.
One of my ancestors
was kicked out of this group for sheltering some Quakers from a storm, and became a Quaker as a consequence.
For different groups to share the new land with freedom to practice religion as they saw fit, they needed to be free of each other's religion. I've noticed that deeply religious people sometimes have trouble wrapping their brains around this. They tend to focus on the practice of their religion, and, not having been forced to practice the religion of others, not think about what this could mean.
After all, it was back in England that people were executed for conducting unofficial services, and that was a long time ago. And no one has been
executed for blasphemy
in the United Kingdom since 1697, nor has anyone been executed for it here.
But those were real penalties for holding the wrong religious beliefs under an established church. We still see them today in places like Iran where religious authorities reign supreme.
America's founding fathers knew what it was like to live under an established church. After British officers of the Catholic faith turned their positions over to their Catholic co-religionists during the war for the Netherlands' independence, Queen Elizabeth decreed that only Anglicans could be officers in the military or practice law or hold public office.
In the American revolutionary army, you could be of any faith.
Col. Mordecai Sheftall
, for example, was Jewish But how did our founding fathers feel about the role of religion after they got independence?
Well, the first amendment to the constitution decrees that congress shall make no law regarding establisment of religion. That seems clear enough. And in 1797, congress unanimously passed the Treaty of Tripoli, which decreed that:
As the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion,--as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquility, of Mussulmen [Muslims],--and as the said States never entered into any war or act of hostility against any Mahometan [Mohammedan] nation, it is declared by the parties that no pretext arising from religious opinions shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries.
That seems clear enough.
However, not everyone respects history or the original intent of the founders. For example, World Net Daily confronts us with the headline,
America: A Christian Nation, Like it or Not
. An Evangelical group points to some 19th century
Supreme Court decisions
that indicated that at the time, a majority of justices viewed America as a Christian nation.
Just as kings never had to make the argument that they possessed their power by divine right until that was in doubt, conservative Christians seldom had to make that argument until an increasingly large proportion of the population were either unchurched or belonged to non-Christian faiths.
The percentage of the population
professing no religion in 1953 was 1 percent, the number in 2013 was 15 percent. In the same period, the percentage of the population identifying as Protestant declined from 70 percent to 41 percent. Non-specified Christian, a group not counted in 1953, is now 9 percent, and Catholic has held steady at 24 percent.
The percent Jewish has declined from 4 percent to 2 percent, and the percentage "other" has risen from 1-2 percent to 5 percent.
This has accompanied a radical change in our nation's ethnic makeup. The reason Catholics have held up as a percentage of the population is the vast number who have immigrated from Latin America. The reason "other" keeps increasing is that we have so many immigrants from areas where Christianity is a minority religion, in Asia, the middle east, and Africa.
The drive to define this country as a Christian nation is not led by traditionally black denominations. It is led by traditionally white denominations who are concerned about how America is changing.
Most people would say that after WW II, America came into its own as the most powerful nation in the world, supplanting the battered British Empire. Yet to those who wish to define America as a Christian nation, this appears to be a period of decline, starting with a 1947 ruling:
From the time of Everson until today, decisions by the U.S. Supreme Court have helped to bring about the greatest decline in American civilization. It was as if the Supreme Court had declared a bloodless revolution in America -- a revolution more subtle than yet just as destructive as the Russian revolution under Lenin. Over the next three decades, we witnessed a stream of liberal court rulings that gradually reshaped who we are as a nation.
The author quotes Alexis de Tocqueville saying that America's greatness is connected with America's goodness, which the author claims is lost when we don't regard America as a Christian nation. This ignores Tocqueville's own views on religion, as revealed in an interview he did with an American newspaper:
Q. In your opinion, what would be the best way to render to religion its natural empire?
A. I believe the Catholic religion less apt than the reformed to accord with ideas of liberty. However, if the clergy were entirely separated from all temporal power, I cannot but believe that with time it would regain the intellectual influence which naturally belongs to it. I think that to appear to forget the church, without being unfriendly to it, is the best way and even the only way to serve it. Pursuing this policy you will see public education little by little falling into its hands, and the youth will with time adopt a different attitude....
It seems he was right. The nations which had established churches are not typically as religious as America. Separating the church from all temporal power may well be what's made it so influential in our culture.
But there does seem to be a group of people who really want to define America as a Christian nation, and in effect, establish Christianity as the national religion. First, there are the Dominionists, relatively few in number, who believe that God gave Christians dominion over the earth, so they should rule. Then, there is the broader public of the Christian right, which World Net Daily appeals to, who long for a time when white protestants dominated our culture and politics more than they do now. This is a larger, and in fact, vast group, though far from a majority in the country.
This is the group that supported Rick Santorum for president, and he provided them with a suitably Dominionist critique of President Obama, which I've
mentioned before
Obama's agenda is "not about you. It's not about your quality of life. It's not about your jobs. It's about some phony ideal. Some phony theology. Oh, not a theology based on the Bible. A different theology," Santorum told supporters of the conservative Tea Party movement at a Columbus hotel.
He enlarged on the theme when talking about environmentalism:
"When you have a worldview that elevates the Earth above man and says we can't take those resources because we're going to harm the Earth ... it's just all an attempt to centralize power, to give more power to the government."
Santorum's supporters, in addition to wanting Christianity to dominate our government, have shown themselves intent on riding the Republican Party of people they consider RINOs -- Republicans In Name Only. Put them in charge, give them their wish of a theocratic state, and soon you'd see them suppressing those they consider CRINO -- Christian In Name Only. This would doubtless apply to the church my 89 year old mother has attended for 42 years, which has a female preacher and is happy to accommodate gay marriage.
There is a reason the people who want to define America as a Christian nation don't want to include churches like hers. Evangelical churches didn't become politically active until the IRS started cracking down on "white academies" -- private schools, often associated with a historically white church, which sprang up in the South after school integration began to spread to the region. The Christian right has long been tainted by an association with this effort to revive segregation. In short, the problem isn't just a desire to see Christianity dominant, it is also an element of
ethnic panic
, a fear that the identity of their nation will no longer be associated with their ethnicity.
That's why the more tolerant Christian sects are anathema to those who want to see America defined as a Christian nation. As a political matter, these sects tend to belong to different parties. Stanley Greenberg, a pollster, has described the Democratic coalition as
"diverse America and the whites who are comfortable with diverse America."
And the Republican Party, because of its reliance on a conservative Christian movement associated with the white academies, consists in part of whites who are not comfortable with diverse America.
I should note that there are many white evangelicals, often Northern, who don't have a problem with diverse America, or with sending their kids to public schools. They remain culturally conservative, and generally fall in the Republican camp politically. But then, most of them aren't big on gaining temporal power for religion.
Perhaps they should remember where the freedom to start their churches came from, and what could happen to that freedom.
Books to prescribe for the convalescent
by John MacBeath Watkins
Recovering from abdominal surgery is taking longer than I had anticipated, and has given me an opportunity to test various books for their medicinal effects.
For the first week or so, I was taking narcotic pain killers at four-hour intervals and spending most of my time sleeping. Even this was not enough to tamp down my brain activity sufficiently to make television intellectually stimulating. I requested the same books I prescribe to others for periods of recuperation, the light romantic comedies of P.G. Wodehouse.
These books work very well at keeping you sitting still while your wounds heal, and the mood is light enough to raise your spirits. Mood and pacing are important aspects of a book for treating illness. If your attention wanders, it will be difficult to get enough rest. If the mood is too dark, it will not help you evade the financial worries that often accompany a period of illness, or counteract the effects of the central nervous system depressants often prescribed as painkillers.
Humor is an important aspect in keeping your mood up, so authors like Tom Holt and Terry Pratchett are good as well, but humor is hard, so Wodehouse is sovereign in the treatment of almost any illness, because he was the greatest humorist in the English language. There are non-fiction works that function pretty well in this regard, such as
They Call Me Naughty Lola: Personal Ads from the London Review of Books
, by David Rose.While American personal ads tend to be earnest and aspirational, telling how good a prospect you are, the English seem to prefer a display of wit such as:
"Shy, ugly man, fond of extended periods of self-pity, middle aged, flatulent and overweight, seeks the impossible" Or:
"Bald, fat, short, and ugly male, 53, seeks short-sighted woman with tremendous sexual appetite."Or:
"Blah blah, whatever. Indifferent woman. Go ahead and write. Box no. 3253. Like I care." Or
"Your stars for today: A pretty Cancerian, 35, will cook you a lovely meal, caress your hair softly, then squeeze every damn penny from your adulterous bank account before slashing the tyres of your Beamer. Let that serve as a warning. Now then, risotto?"The other thing a book must have is the ability to grip your attention and not let you go. Remember, one of the reviews of Robert Ludlum's first books was "this is a terrible book, so I stayed up until 3 a.m. reading it." A book need not have a great literary reputation to have the therapeutic effect of making your stay in bed tolerable. I read several of Steven Brust's books about his cheerful assassin/gangster, Vlad Taltos, with enjoyment during my convalescence on this principle.
There is a book about a police officer recuperating while trying to solve a crime committed centuries earlier,
The Daughter of Time
, by Josephine Tey. I find the history a bit suspect -- Richard III probably did
kill those lads or have them killed
-- but the book is enjoyable.
And of course, any mystery by Agatha Christie, Raymond Chandler or Dashiell Hammett will grip you enough to keep you occupied while you must remain in bed.
Steer clear of episodic, long books, like
Moby Dick
, a book I think should be read in small bites over a long period of time. Few of the great books are as easy as a person taking large doses of painkiller needs. Convalescent boredom is not like ordinary boredom, it is accompanied by the fact that you are not at your intellectual peak.
So, give yourself a break and read something enjoyable and easy.
Inequality in two charts
by John MacBeath Watlkins
Inequality went down at a time when taxes were more progressive, up when they became less progressive. Should we go back to that model?
(from Voteview:
Wodehouse on optimism
Cyril frowned. But a man who has spent most of his life trying out a series of patent medicines is always an optimist.
Strychnine in the Soup
, by P.G. Wodehouse
Apologies for the hiatus
by John MacBeath Watkins
Sorry we haven't been posting. I was sick all last week, finally went into the hospital, and had my appendix removed. I'd left the thing a little late, and the ghastly organ was deeper in my abdomen than is common, so when they rummaged around and found it, it was swollen up like an over-filled water balloon and it burst before they could get it out.
Many thanks to the good folks at Group Health Urgent Care, especially my surgeon, Gakyung Chung, and to my business partner, Jamie Lutton, and her boyfriend, Bernard Chester, for taking care of me.
And, of course, to my mother, my sisters, and all my friends for their support. And Thad Higa for stepping up and taking care of the store.
And since this is starting to sound like one of those interminable Oscar acceptance speeches, I suppose I should end this before they cut off the mike.
A plan to reduce inequity: Working versus owning
by John MacBeath Watkins
Everyone talks about inequity, but no one does anything about it. I propose to examine how we got where we are, and what we should do to reverse the situation. It seems to me that on both left and right, there is a longing for a time when the economy worked better for the average Joe, and I mean to find out how we lost it and how to get it back.
I am now well stricken in years. My legs are grey.
My ears are gnarled
. My eyes are old and bent. I remember the time conservatives long for, when a man could call his home his own, his wife would be waiting with a martini when he got home, everyone smoked, even your doctor, and if you worked hard and remembered to be white and male, the world was your oyster or some similar mollusk.
One feature of this world was that the middle class had a decent income. A one-income family could afford to own a house, run a couple of cars and even send the kids to college.
Things have changed. Median income for male workers has been declining since 1973, while women are more likely to be working and are making better money.
(from here:
For a while, two-income households managed to keep the median household income rising until 2000. Now, median household income has fallen to the level of about 1979.
(from here:
As you can see from this chart, most of the increases in income have gone to those at the higher end of the income scale, while the poor haven't gained much since the mid-1980s, and the median have gained some, then lost some. As society as a whole has become more prosperous, the gains have mostly gone to those at the higher end of the scale. How did that happen?
Part of the story is taxes. During World War II, congress imposed a 94% top tax bracket. Few people paid it, but it was a way of saying, we're all making sacrifices, we're all in this together. Now, say what you will about Arthur Laffer, the Laffer Curve, which he did not invent (that honor belongs to an Arab thinker about 1,000 years ago) if you have high enough taxes, it does apply. Recent research indicates it
applies to rates above 70%
, which means that Jack Kennedy took care of that problem in the 1964.
Attempts to apply the Laffer Curve after the problem was already solved did nothing but help increase the share of national income the richest people got to keep. It did not stimulate the economy so much that tax revenues actually increased, as Laffer promised. It just resulted in more debt.
from here.
During the Reagan Administration, we lowered the top marginal tax rate from 70% to, eventually, 28%. But some taxes were increased. When Reagan entered office, payroll taxes (Social Security and Medicare) were 9.9%. By the time George H. W. Bush left office, they were 12.4%.
Now, something that occasionally makes the rounds is the idea of a flat tax, as if calculating our tax rate were particularly difficult after we'd worked out all our deductions. Usually, the idea is to not tax incomes below a certain level, so that it's fairer for the poor. The payroll tax is a flat tax turned upside down: It applies to the first dollar you make, but any amount you make above the base wage ($117,000 for 2014) isn't taxed.
Since payroll taxes are part of the unified budget, this amounted to cutting the top tax rate while increasing the regressive inverted flat tax of the payroll tax. Meanwhile, the capital gains tax, which peaked above 40% during the Ford Administration, is now 15%, the lowest it has been since shortly after Herbert Hoover left office.
People who make a living by owning things, which used to be called the
class, tend to be the ones paying the capital gains tax rather than the payroll tax or ordinary income tax. The system can also be manipulated to turning what looks like ordinary income into "capital gains" for tax purposes. Greg Mankiw provides an example of that in what I suppose was intended to be a defense of capital gains taxation of, for example, hedge fund managers.
Here are some of Mankiw's examples:
o Carl is a real estate investor and a carpenter. He buys a dilapidated house for $800,000. After spending his weekends fixing it up, he sells it a couple of years later for $1 million. Once again, the profit is $200,000
o Dan is a real estate investor and a carpenter, but he is short of capital. He approaches his friend, Ms. Moneybags, and they become partners. Together, they buy a dilapidated house for $800,000 and sell it later for $1 million. She puts up the money, and he spends his weekends fixing up the house. They divide the $200,000 profit equally.
o Earl is a carpenter. Ms. Moneybags buys a dilapidated house for $800,000 and hires Earl to fix it up. After paying Earl $100,000 for his services, Ms. Moneybags sells the home for $1 million, for a profit of $100,000....
This brings us to Dan and his partnership with Ms. Moneybags. The tax law treats this partnership as exactly equivalent to Carl's situation. In this case, however, the $200,000 capital gain is divided into halves: some of it goes to Ms. Moneybags, who provided the cash, and some goes to Dan, who provided the sweat equity. Once again, nothing is treated as ordinary income.
In some ways, this treatment makes sense. After all, Dan is doing half of what Carl did, so why should he have to pay a higher tax rate than Carl did on that half of his income? On the other hand, it seems that Dan is getting off easy. Dan does not seem very different from Earl, because both are getting $100,000 for fixing up the house.
Now, here's a question. If it's hard to say which tax applies, why are we charging different rates? It appears we have decided to reward owning over working, and tax dodges designed to make it look like we're owning over admitting that we're working.
In fact, we're so sure owning is better than working, we have a top marginal rate of 39.6% on earned income, and a top capital gains tax rate of 15%. We are so in love with the virtues of owning, we reward it by charging a lower tax rate for it, and charge 2.64 times as much tax for those misguided saps who work for a living. Add in the payroll taxes, it's more like 3 times the tax rate if you're working instead of owning.
Well, what makes owning better than working? The oft-repeated theory is that if we encourage investment, the economy will be better and we'll all be better off. Another version of the argument is that we should use consumption taxes to encourage savings, because saving is better than consuming. This is an odd argument, because encouraging saving is also encouraging borrowing. In national income accounting, savings has to equal investment -- government borrowing and private borrowing have to equal private savings and foreign capital inflows. This isn't controversial, it's how the
savings accounting identity
is defined.
So when you complain about the financialization of the economy, remember, all that investment income is savings, and when you have a
giant pool of money
, it has to be loaned in order to make it grow. One reason that the pool of money in the 2000s was so giant was that China was operating its economy much the way America was in the 1920s. They were exporting mightily, and when you earn a lot of money this way, it usually means that lots of money comes into your country and that causes inflation, so that the low wages that made you a super-competitive exporter increase, and you lose your advantage.
The people running China didn't want that to happen. So, they didn't keep the money in China. They "
" their export income by buying securities in countries they wanted to export to. America and France did something similar in the 1920s, and it ultimately undermined international trade and contributed to the financial collapse that led to the Depression. The problem is, these actions produce a giant pool of money -- excess savings -- chasing good investments in the country targeted for sterilization. And that produces financial bubbles.
A model that says savings and investment are better than working and consuming will tend to this sort of thing. And surely, the whole point of an economy is to produce things and consume them. So why have we valorized owning things over making and consuming them?
Well, one way of justifying this view is to say that if we encourage people to invest and realize capital gains instead or working for a living, we'll have a more prosperous society in the end, and a rising tide sinks raises all boats. A low capital gains tax will encourage this sort of prosperity, we're told.
Only there's no actual evidence this is so. Len Burman, a professor of economics at Syracuse University's Maxwell School, has run the numbers on all the natural experiments we've had in this regard as the capital gains tax has gone up and down. Here's what he found:
If low capital gains tax rates catalyzed economic growth, you'd expect to see a negative relationship-high gains rates, low growth, and vice versa-but there is no apparent relationship between the two time series. The correlation is 0.12, the wrong sign and not statistically different from zero. I've tried lags up to five years and also looking at moving averages of the tax rates and growth. There is never a statistically significant relationship. - See more at: http://taxvox.taxpolicycenter.org/2012/03/19/no-obvious-relationship-between-capital-gains-tax-rates-and-economic-growth/#sthash.SX6N1KCe.dpuf
If low capital gains tax rates catalyzed economic growth, you'd expect to see a negative relationship-high gains rates, low growth, and vice versa-but there is no apparent relationship between the two time series. The correlation is 0.12, the wrong sign and not statistically different from zero. I've tried lags up to five years and also looking at moving averages of the tax rates and growth. There is never a statistically significant relationship. - See more at: http://taxvox.taxpolicycenter.org/2012/03/19/no-obvious-relationship-between-capital-gains-tax-rates-and-economic-growth/#sthash.SX6N1KCe.dpuf
If low capital gains tax rates catalyzed economic growth, you'd expect to see a negative relationship-high gains rates, low growth, and vice versa-but there is no apparent relationship between the two time series. The correlation is 0.12, the wrong sign and not statistically different from zero. I've tried lags up to five years and also looking at moving averages of the tax rates and growth. There is never a statistically significant relationship.
Does this prove that capital gains taxes are unrelated to economic growth? Of course not. Many other things have changed at the same time as gains rates and many other factors affect economic growth. But the graph should dispel the silver bullet theory of capital gains taxes. Cutting capital gains taxes will not turbocharge the economy and raising them would not usher in a depression.
If low capital gains tax rates catalyzed economic growth, you'd expect to see a negative relationship-high gains rates, low growth, and vice versa-but there is no apparent relationship between the two time series. The correlation is 0.12, the wrong sign and not statistically different from zero. I've tried lags up to five years and also looking at moving averages of the tax rates and growth. There is never a statistically significant relationship. - See more at: http://taxvox.taxpolicycenter.org/2012/03/19/no-obvious-relationship-between-capital-gains-tax-rates-and-economic-growth/#sthash.SX6N1KCe.dpuf
That's from here:
At a minimum, Leonard Burman has shown that raising or lowering the capital gains tax doesn't seem all that influential. So why penalize earning money as wages relative to making money on investments?
Well, it may have something to do with power. People who make the bulk of their money as capital gains tend to be wealthier and better connected. And they tend, more than wage earners do, to be U.S. senators.
About 1% of Americans have a net worth of $1 million or more. In the U.S. Senate,
66 of 100
, or two-thirds, are millionaires. High net worth individuals, by definition, own a lot of stuff, so capital gains taxes are important to them. Both your senator and his or her biggest campaign donors and bundlers tend to care a lot about capital gains. So if you expect them to be treated no better than working for a living, you're starting in hard luck. The people writing the laws are rich, the people writing the checks to the people writing the laws are rich, and the rich get most of their income from capital gains.
We've had enough experience to know Burman is right, so the only possible explanation for the continued coddling of the rich is that the tax laws are written for and by them. The way to change that is to bring it front and center in our national conversation, so that they can stop lying about their reasons for treating their investments better than your wages.
If we're going to value work as much as owning, we need to do something about the upside-down flat tax on wages. We ought not to be charging any payroll taxes on people's earnings below the poverty line. We can make up for that by raising the base wage, and by taxing all income the same for social insurance purposes. If you are making less than $11,490 and you are a single person, why should you pay 12.4 percent tax, when the Koch brothers, when they sell off a $100 million block of stock, pay hardly any more tax on it (if their accountants haven't found a way to make sure they pay no tax at all.)
Now, suppose they paid $90 million for that stock, and their profit is $10 million. Should they pay less tax on that $10 million than a basketball player with a $10 million salary? I can't see why they should. They didn't work any harder, and even if they didn't make a dime on that stock, they'd still have $90 million.
And why should there be no payroll tax on earned income above $117,000 a year? Why not $500,000 a year? The higher the base wage, the lower the rate needs to be. We can make up for the payroll taxes lost by not taxing the poor by taxing the affluent a bit more. Reagan sold an increase in the tax rate on payrolls as needed to keep the Social Security Fund solvent, but raising the base wage would have worked as well. For that matter, when the Highway Trust Fund became insolvent, congress didn't increase taxes, they just topped it up from the general fund. Keep this in mind when you hear people hyperventilating about the Social Security trust fund.
In effect, he raised taxes on working families and lowered taxes on the rich, with the revenues from tax increase on workers making the lost revenue of his tax cuts on the rich look less like an invitation to bankrupting the country.
This represented a major transfer of wealth from people who make less than the maximum basis wage to those who make a whole lot of money. And since then, we've lowered taxes on the way the rich tend to make money -- capital gains -- while keeping that higher payroll tax in place on people working for wages.
George W. Bush pushed for what he called an "ownership society," in which, for example, we'd all own investments in a retirement account instead of having a guaranteed benefit through Social Security. But as we've seen, one man's savings is another man's debt, unless, like Smaug, you choose to
sleep on a bed of gold
. And by taking his wealth out of circulation (and by frying anyone who tried to work the land) Smaug made the world poorer.
The alternative to owning investments and building up debt is the "pay as you go society." That's how Social Security is designed, so that it works as a compact between the generations. People of working age are taking care of old people, knowing that the next generation will take care of them.
While savings and debt certainly have a place, no one has yet explained to me why a pyramid of savings and debt is better than paying your way, which makes our treatment of investing as contributing more to wealth than working all the more puzzling.
Wealth tax:
Redistributing earnings from the middle class and the poor to high earners is one way of increasing inequity. We might redress some of this with a tax on wealth.
Henry George, a 19th century political economist, advocated a "single tax," a tax on land value, which he argued would go some way to solving the problem of inequity.
George argued that the reason increasing poverty accompanied increasing wealth was that as population increased, land values increased, so that working men had to pay more for the privilege of working the land.
There are some problems with this idea. Study after study has shown that property valuations are essentially regressive. When properties sell, you can compare their valuation to their selling prices. High-value properties are consistently under valued by this standard, and low-value properties are typically over valued.
The only place something like this has been made to work was Hong Kong, where the colony leased the land from China and subleased it to businesses and homeowners. Leases went for market rates, and by all accounts, the system worked very well. Without those special circumstances, I doubt the single tax is really workable.
Other than property taxes, the wealth tax we have now is the estate tax, which has been under assault by certain politicians and their paymasters for years. In 2001, it applied to estates above $675,000 in value, and the top rate was 55%. Currently, it applies to estates of more than $5.25 million, and the top rate is 40%. This has had a predictable effect on the number of estates to which the estate tax applies:
(The chart is from here:
As you can see, the number of estates affected by the tax went down dramatically during the Reagan and George W. Bush administrations, up during the George H.W. Bush and Clinton administrations. Reagan and Bush II both exploded the national debt, while Bush I and Clinton worked to reduce it.
We have, in effect, reduced taxes on high incomes, investment incomes, and large estates, while increasing taxes on low and ordinary incomes and on wages.
And we wonder why inequity increases.
A Plan
So, to start with, let's lower taxes on working and on low wages, by exempting wages below the poverty line from the payroll tax. We can make up for this by applying payroll taxes to higher incomes than we do now.
Let's stop privileging owning over working. Tax capital gains like earned income. Face it, creating giant pools of money leads to financial bubbles, and in a mature economy, to have investment opportunities, you need consumption. That means you need people working and paying as they go, not just saving and lending. We've got the balance wrong right now, and we need to move it back toward working.
As I write this, we're slowly coming out of a recession, which means we have too much unemployment because of a lack of aggregate demand in the economy. But there is such a thing as a "natural rate" of unemployment, defined as the rate at which lowering interest rates produces more inflation without producing more jobs. To a great extent, this means workers' skills don't match the remaining work that needs doing. We can reduce the natural rate of unemployment by increasing worker skills.
Unfortunately, we've been moving in the other direction, defunding schools and forcing people to go deeply into debt to acquire the skills they need to develop a career.
We need to provide funds for educating our workforce. Public universities can't push tuition up indefinitely and students can't take on unlimited debt. A skilled workforce works and pays taxes. We seem to have forgotten the public benefit of helping people get better skills.
There's been some speculation that we are entering a
period of stagnation
. Bullshit. If we didn't invest in our factories, we'd enter a period of stagnation. We've greatly slowed our investment in public goods, and that's producing stagnation. Dwight Eisenhower thought the greatest achievement of his presidency was the Interstate Highway System. He understood that to mobilize a great nation, you need to get the logistics right, and building the highways would make the country more productive.
But since the late 1960s, we've spent too little on public goods. Democrats cared more about programs like Social Security, Republicans cared more about defense spending and cutting taxes. Here's the result:
(from this source:
President Obama has the right idea with his notion of an infrastructure bank, but the loyal opposition seems to think that only private investment increases productivity. Next time you're stuck in a traffic jam, think of all the hours being lost for the want of some transportation spending. Another problem is that we don't get as much per dollar for our infrastructure spending as other developed countries, so we should take a good hard look at the way they do this and learn what we can.
It's always easier to divvy up a growing pie, and we can grow the pie. In doing so, we can put the country back to work.
And if we're to get back to an economy where we work and pay our way, growth and greater equality will have to go hand in hand. As economist Walter Frick
, "given the diminishing marginal utility of income, it's hugely wasteful for the super rich to have so much income."
Poor laws: Would the death penalty make poor people get jobs?
by John MacBeath Watkins
THE IDLE 'PRENTICE AT PLAY IN THE CHURCH YARD, William HogarthDuring the reign of Edward VI of England, the poor laws imposed the death penalty for those twice found guilty of vagrancy. First offense was just two years of servitude and being branded with a V, which surely must have helped former vagrants find a new position.
After all, if you want people to stop being poor, you must make being poor more horrible than hunger, cold and want already are, right?
Nowadays, Republicans argue that extending unemployment insurance makes people more dependent, causing them to remain unemployed. I believe this reflects our English legal and cultural heritage. They aren't yet heating up the branding iron, though I suppose I should hesitate to bring up that old custom in certain company.
At this writing, there are three job seekers for every open job, so it's hard to see how motivating people to look harder for a job would reduce the rate of joblessness. I suspect most people haven't really examined past approaches to the problems of poverty, so perhaps a quick review is in order.
One pipe dream for conservatives is that the poor will be supported voluntarily, preferably through religious organizations. And in fact, in Medieval England, that's how it was done. Monasteries ministered to the poor and the infirm.
This pretty much stopped when Henry VIII broke with the Catholic Church, set up the Anglican Church, closed down the monasteries and used the property to reward those who helped him with this high-handed highjacking of things ecclesiastic. I know of no advanced economy where churches have the kind of wealth and power the pre-Reformation Catholic Church had, so that model appears to be irretrievably broken. Let's review the history of England trying to deal with poverty in the absence of such a powerful church.
Henry VIII's move to privatize the monasteries meant that there were no more monasteries to minister to the poor. Instead, their care went to the government, and was paid for by a tax.
Just to be clear, the state was already involved, not in dealing with poverty
per se
, but in dealing with idleness. When the Black Plague wiped out as much as 40% of the population of Europe in the 1340s, there was a labor shortage. The cost of labor went up dramatically, causing the cost of food and clothing to go up, and changing the balance of power between landholder and laborer.
To keep the cost of labor from going up too much, the 1351 Statute of Laborers passed, requiring that everyone who could work did so and restricting wages to pre-plague levels, so that landowners would not be faced with a choice of raising wages or leaving land fallow.
And it was these laws that the Tudor kings built upon in their approach to the poor. In 1495, under Henry VII, the law was modified so that "vagabonds, idle and suspected persons shall be set in the
for three days and three nights and have none other sustenance but bread and water and then shall be put out of Town." This provision led to a system where if you were poor and received any assistance, such as staying in a shelter, you had to walk to the next town to get another meal and another roof over your head. You would, as they say, have to tramp from town to town, giving us a new noun based on the word
. Now, a person who was poor was known as a tramp.
Some people were still unemployed, so Henry VIII tried substituting whipping for the stocks. You might think, "that will teach the blighters not to be unemployed!" but in fact, people continued to be periodically out of work.
During the short and unhappy reign of Edward VI, the monarch saw that people still persisted in being poor, so in 1547 he instituted the branding and penal servitude for the first offense of vagrancy and the death penalty for second offense, as mentioned above. You might think that would keep people from being caught unemployed more than twice, because after that they'd be dead, but justices proved squeamish about sentencing people to death for not having a job.
English law made no provision for those able-bodied persons unable to find a job until fairly late in the day. Under Queen Elizabeth I, able-bodied poor who refused to work would be sent to a house of correction, where they would be beaten to mend their attitude. But what of those willing to work, but unable to find a job?
The next approach was the
, where people were fed the bare minimum, worked in harsh conditions, and experienced a shortened lifespan, which made them an example to all. It seems throughout the Tudor period and later, poverty was deemed necessary so that people would be motivated to work, so the authorities did not wish to make poverty tolerable. Keep those workhouses in mind the next time someone proposes that the poor should have to work to get welfare.
In fact, the whole root of this approach to poverty was based on those laws passed after the Black Plague, which were aimed not at poverty, but at idleness. A worker able to demand higher pay might choose to spend the money on relaxing for a while, and these little vacations would reduce the size of the work force for their duration, putting further pressure on wages. Soon, the laborer might think himself as good as his master!
This approach was never about the relief of poverty, only about power relationships within society. Under Elizabeth I, the law came to recognize the existence of the "deserving poor," at first called the impotent poor because they did not have the power to improve their situation.
The approach of punishing the poor, the approach of making them work, and the approach of making life as a poor person as difficult as possible have all been tried. We've had debtor's prisons, even indentured servitude for debtors. None of this seems to keep people from becoming poor, and many who are poor from remaining so.
Laws can change quickly, but culture changes slowly. The attitudes behind those laws are still with us, still bubbling up in our politics. But as Edward VI showed, even the death penalty will not keep people from being poor.
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"List price" is the suggested retail price provided to us by our vendors. We make no representation that a substantial number of these products have been sold or offered for sale at the list price. Actual retail prices in your area may be substantially different. Since we sell products on a national basis, it is not possible to know if our merchandise is sold at list price in any particular location or at any particular time. "You Save" reflects the difference between our price and the vendor provided list price shown on our sites. Since the list price may be different than the actual retail prices in your area, you may not actually realize a savings of this amount.
Manufacturers sometimes ask that retailers not display a price if it drops below a certain amount. The "Click here to see Lowest Price" message indicates that the price of the item is so low that the manufacturer requested that it not be advertised (that is, displayed). In a brick-and-mortar store, you would probably have to ask a salesperson what the price of the product is. At eCOST, by clicking on "Click here to see Lowest Price" you are essentially asking to see the price, at which point we show it to you.
Ultimate Ears 600vi
Fit, Form and Frequency plus a Microphone and On-Cord Controls for Music and Crisp, Clear Phone CallsUltimate Ears 600vi Noise-Isolating Headset features a microphone and on-cord controls for calls and music. It produces extended high-frequency response and a fuller soundstage.
Delivers a noise-isolating, 3D soundstage experience so real it feels live. Allows crisp, noise-reducing talk with an integrated microphone. Answers calls from accessible on-cord controls for your iPhone or smartphone
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ADA Press Release
Find an American Dental Association Member Dentist Online
Good oral health is essential to good overall health
Contact Information:
Telephone: 312-440-2806
E-mail: email@example.com (Journalists) or Contact ADA (All Others)
CHICAGO, August 10, 2010—Whether you are searching for a dentist in your neighborhood, a specialist or you need dental care while traveling out of state, the American Dental Association's (ADA) online Find-a-Dentist feature will provide you with a list of member dentists based on a zip code search.
"Good oral health is essential to good overall health, and that is why it is very important to see a dentist regularly," says ADA consumer advisor, Dr. Sally Cram, a Washington, DC based periodontist who treats gum disease. "If you are looking for a general dentist or an accredited dental specialist, the ADA's Find a Dentist includes features such as office hours, insurance accepted, languages spoken and photos of the dentists. Finding one is as close to you as your keyboard or mobile device."
Dentists are your doctors specializing in oral health
In addition to diagnosing and treating teeth and gums, dentists also specialize in the muscles and nerves of the head, neck and jaws; the tongue; and the salivary glands. During a comprehensive examination, dentists look for abnormalities inside and outside the mouth, such as lumps, swellings, discolorations and ulcerations. When appropriate, dentists perform biopsies and diagnostic tests for infectious diseases and salivary gland function.
They also screen for oral cancer and can recognize early warning signs in the mouth that may indicate disease elsewhere in the body.
"It is estimated that 164 million work hours are lost each year because of dental disease," Dr. Cram says. "Much of this can be avoided if people receive routine preventive care from their dentist, brush twice a day with fluoride toothpaste, floss once per day and eat a balanced diet."
The ADA's website at www.ada.org provides important information on dental health. According to a recent ADA survey, consumers' dental health concerns include cavities, bad breath, swollen gums that bleed and sensitive teeth. Other oral health topics on ADA.org range from baby's first tooth to oral health needs of older Americans. An extensive video collection of oral health subjects also is available on ADA.org.
About the American Dental Association
The not-for-profit ADA is the nation's largest dental association, representing more than 157,000 dentist members. The premier source of oral health information, the ADA has advocated for the public's health and promoted the art and science of dentistry since 1859. The ADA's state-of-the-art research facilities develop and test dental products and materials that have advanced the practice of dentistry and made the patient experience more positive. The ADA Seal of Acceptance long has been a valuable and respected guide to consumer dental care products. The monthly Journal of the American Dental Association (JADA) is the ADA's flagship publication and the best-read scientific journal in dentistry. For more information about the ADA, visit www.ada.org.


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SCX-3405 20CPMMono LaserMultifunction Printer
SCX-3405With a Samsung SCX-3405 multifunction printer, you'll enjoy fast and versatile printing that's easily optimised for your budget and needs. One touch of the Eco Button takes you to Eco Mode, conserving paper, toner and power. Easy Eco Driver lets you preview your print, and adjust and monitor toner use, print quality and more, as well as removing unnecessary page elements. Administration is easy, too, with integrated Easy Printer Manager software to streamline tasks like application linking and device discovery. And, with print speeds of up to 20ppm,you don't have to wait long to see great results. 4.307 5 75 reviews
Recycling Batteries Responsibly
The European Directive on Batteries and Accumulators aims to minimise the impact of batteries on the environment and encourage the recovery of the materials they contain. In the UK, regulations on the recycling of batteries and accumulators (rechargeable batteries) were Introduced in 2009. The Waste Batteries Regulations aim to significantly increase UK collection and recycling of used portable batteries from 3% in 2007 to 25% by 2012, rising to at least 45% in 2016.
The battery symbol on a product or on its packaging indicates that the product must not be disposed of with general household waste. Instead, it is the consumer's responsibility to dispose of their waste batteries at a designated collection point so that they can be recycled. The separate collection and recycling of batteries at the time of dispo sal will help to conserve natural resources and ensure that they are recycled in a manner that protects human health and the environment. A comprehensive list of battery recycling centres can be obtained from: www.recycle-more.co.uk
All Samsung products that are subject to the Batteries Directive are compliant with the UK battery and accumulator Requirements. In accordance with national law, SAMSUNG Electronics (UK) Ltd is a member of an approved batteries producer compliance scheme. This scheme collects, treats and disposes of batteries on Samsung's behalf.
- Optimise printing with One Touch Eco Button
- Tailor output to your needs with Easy Eco Driver
- Set up and monitor with Easy Printer Manager
- Print at speeds of up to 20 pages per minute
Push the button. Save on print costs
Optimise your printing with Easy Eco Driver
Simple and efficient printer management made easy
Achieve more with Samsung's Fast Print
From the monitor to the page with just One Touch
Give your print-outs standout detail
Unleash your workforce with 3-in-1 functionality
Improve efficiency with compact design
- FunctionPrint, Copy, Scan
- Value Added FunctionOne-touch Screen Print, Eco Mode
- Speed (Mono)Up to 20 ppm in A4 (21 ppm in Letter)
- First Print Out Time (Mono)Less than 8.5 seconds (From Ready Mode)
- ResolutionUp to 1200 x 1200dpi effective output
- EmulationSPL (Samsung Printer Langauge)
- DuplexManual
- Speed (Mono)Up to 20 ppm in A4 (21 ppm in Letter)
- First Copy Out Time (Mono)Less than 14 sec (Platen)
- Zoom Rate25 - 400% (ADF, Platen)
- Multi Copy1 - 99 pages
- Duplex CopyManaul
- Copy FeaturesID Copy
- CompatibilityTWAIN Standard / WIA Standard
- MethodColour CIS
- Resolution (Optical)Up to 600 x 600dpi
- Resolution (Enhanced)Up to 4800 x 4800dpi
- Scan toPC
Paper Handling
- Input Capacity and Types150-sheet Standard Tray
- Output Capacity and Type100-sheet Face Down
- Media SizeA4 / A5 / Letter / Legal / Executive / Folio / Oficio / ISO B5 / JIS B5 / Envelope (Monarch, Com10, DL, C5) / Custom (76 x 127mm - 216 x 356mm / 3" x 5" - 8.5" x 14")
- Media TypePlain / Thick / Thin / Cotton / Colour / Preprinted / Recycled / Lables / CardStock / Bond / Archive / Envelope
- Envelope CapacityUp to 10-sheet
General Features
- Processor433MHz
- Display2-digit LED
- InterfaceHigh-Speed USB 2.0
- Noise LevelLess than 50dBA (Printing, Platen Copying) / Less than 26dBA (Standby)
- Memory/Storage64 MB
- OS CompatibilityWindows 2000 / XP / Vista / Win7 / 2003 Server / 2008 Server / Mac OS X 10.4 - 10.7 / Various Linux OS
- Duty Cycle, MonthlyUp to 20000 pages
- Dimension (WxDxH)389 x 274 x 249mm (15.3" x 10.8" x 9.8")
- Weight6.7kg (14.7lbs)
- Power Consumption310W (Printing) / 1.2W (Sleep Mode) / 30W (Standby)
- Black Toner CartridgeAverage Cartridge Yield 1500 *Standard pages (Ships with 700 pages Starter Toner Cartridge) *Declared cartridge yield in accordance with ISO/IEC 19752
- CompatibilityNo
- OptionNo
Ratings and Reviews (75)
Arizona, USA - Gender: - Age:
This printer works great and easy to set up wireless. I've had Lexmark and HP and had problems with wireless and the ink was always dry when I went to use them.
This laser printer is great!!!Show more +
liberty mo - Gender: - Age:
works great in linux or windows, full featured and quick, i have no complaints and of course no running out for 39.95 print cartridges every time youturn around.
Atlanta, GA, USA - Gender: - Age:
I purchased this printer because it provided the Fax, Scan, Copy and Print functions. It is ready to go in just a few seconds from the time you turnit on.
I was very pleasantly surprised that the scan to computer function also has a scan to email. I really like that. No more scanning into a file and getting that file into an email. Wow. All the other functions are also easy to use and provide very good results. I would recommend this unit to a friend and anyone that does not absolutely require color copying. This is so much more economical to use.Show more +
- Gender: - Age:
this is my first laser printer and i am very happy i went with this printer. its very fast, scans amazingly, and was really easy to set up. i dont really print that often but when i do i print at least 50 pages, so now i dont have to worry if the ink dried up or not.
Samsung SCX-3405FW
Samsung's mono laser all-in-one is a multi-talented beast....Read More
Samsung SCX-3405W
A small, neat, mono laser all-in-one with easy, direct wireless print and useful eco-mode....Read More
Mono Laser Multifunction : Samsung SCX-3405W
When compared to the other Samsung mono laser printers I have reviewed, the SCX-3405W model is substantially larger. The reason for this increase in... size, and weight, as my back can confirm, is down to the fact that this particular offering from...Read More
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The Paige Diaries
IWA Revolution Creative Team
IWA Vanities Champion: Juno Mercury!
2013: Women's Wrestler of the year Juno Mercury (IWA)
2013: Vanity of the Year Juno Mercury (IWA)
Disciple of Asher Presents - DEATH BUNNY
Originally Posted by NiallF96
#temamodest are the nicest people aboit. get outa here team ego! its not that my spelling gets shit when ikm drunk, just that i canr be bothered correctin the many mistakes i make while typing !
Hey.. I'm not telling you anything that you don't already know.
S.E. Zero is now Luizero. Look him up
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Thursday, April 24, 2014
By Doug Harlow firstname.lastname@example.com
Staff Writer
MADISON -- A Madison Avenue family lost their home and belongings early Friday in a fire fought in sub-zero temperatures by six area fire departments.
Becky Williams, 40, becomes emotional as she looks at the second floor her parents' Madison Avenue home, which was destroyed by fire around 3 a.m. Friday. "I can't believe no one was hurt," Williams said, through her the hand over her mouth as she fought back tears.
Staff photo by Michael G. Seamans
Becky Williams, 40, walks through the iced-over entryway of her parents' Madison Avenue home, in Madison, which was destroyed by fire around 3 a.m. Friday. Six area fire departments responded to the blaze in temperatures below 0 degrees.
Staff photo by Michael G. Seamans
No one was injured in the blaze that ripped through the second story of Bill and Betty Perry's home about 3:15 a.m., collapsing part of the upstairs into the lower level.
"It was fire coming down from upstairs; coming from the ceiling down -- big black and orange smoke," said the Perrys' son, Michael Williams, who lives next door. "I tried to put it out with water that was on the stove, but I couldn't do it. I've got a few burns here and there. It was wicked cold."
The metal roof kept the fire "like an oven" inside the building, Madison Fire Chief Roger Lightbody Sr. said.
Overnight temperatures in the area were in the single digits above zero, with a wind chill of minus 4, according to meteorologist Chris Kimble at the National Weather Service office in Gray.
Lightbody said wet firefighters' gear froze solid in the cold and had to be changed.
"Ice on the ground was the big problem, walking around, that was terrible," he said "The gauges on the trucks froze up, but they still could pump. We had good operators on there so they knew what they were doing."
The State Fire Marshal's Office said faulty electrical wiring in the attic caused the fire.
Betty Perry said she, her husband and a house guest were asleep when the fire started, but the smell of smoke woke her and she yelled at the others inside to leave. The friend, Michelle Jacques, brought Bill and Betty Perry next door to their son's home and he made the call reporting the fire.
The Perrys' daughter, Becky Williams, who lives on Shusta Road, was told of the fire in a telephone call from her brother.
"It was scary," Williams said. "It was pretty bad with lots and lots and lots of smoke."
She said her father grew up in the house and she lived there with her son Cole until last year.
"The Fire Department was amazing," she said. "They were fighting the fire and taking family pictures off the wall for us. I lost all of my stuff upstairs."
She said her parents will stay with her brother next door until a mobile home is in place in the spring.
The homeowners were not insured. Three dogs were saved and a small cat was still missing by late morning.
The American Red Cross will assist the family, Lightbody said.
Doug Harlow -- 612-2367
click image to enlarge
A tear streams down Becky Williams' cheeck as she tours tour what's left of her parents' Madison Avenue, Madison home, with her son Cole, 16.
Staff photo by Michael G. Seamans
click image to enlarge
Cole Williams, 16, left, and his mother, Becky Williams, 40, tour what's left of a Madison Avenue home destroyed by fire around 3 a.m. Friday.
click image to enlarge
Icicles hang from the ceiling of the living room in Becky Williams' parents' Madison home, which was destroyed by fire around 3 a.m. Friday.
Staff photo by Michael G. Seamans
click image to enlarge
Becky Williams, 40, inspects the ice-covered walls of the second floor of her parents' Madison home, which was destroyed by fire around 3 a.m. Friday morning. Officials believe the fire started near this room, because of faulty electrical wiring.
Staff photo by Michael G. Seamans


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'Good product, pleased with it. Bought as it is one of few on market that is pressure fix'
bennydad - norwich
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Mummy to 3 - Norfolk
'Easy to install and use.'
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'The gate fits brilliantly in the opening of one of our patio doors, also in our little 'uns doorway....'
Agglebum - Portsmouth
'This gate is really a good item, it shuts itself locking into position. Very sturdy and would recommend.'
jamie - Lincolnshire
'We needed a sturdy stair gate for a wider than average staircase and after a disappointing purchase of...'
MamaG - Essex
'Happy with this stair gate. THe indicator is reassuring and it seems very secure. Even I could follow the...'
Mum2LittleMonkey - Birmingham
'I love this product! I have it fitted in my lounge and it looks great. Really stylish and modern - much...'
Fayelouise - Weston Super Mare
'it took a wee while to get the idea of how to use it there was not enough written information about it but...'
flower - inverurie


text:
We found 5 additional articles filed under Ubuntu. They're listed below, most recent first.
- Day of Service
05/01/2010 -- Women volunteer ahead of Assembly, putting love into action.
- Serving the City of St. Louis
04/30/2010 -- Photos capture the experience of Ubuntu Day of Service, where United Methodist Women members served St. Louis, Mo. preceding United Methodist Women's Assembly 2010.
- Ubuntu Day of Service: Their Hands Were Full
04/30/2010 -- St. Louis was overrun with United Methodist Women members volunteering at local community organizations April 29.
- Mission in Action
04/30/2010 -- The Ubuntu volunteers worked in 17 nonprofits in the St. Louis area, including two United Methodist Women national mission institutions.
- New Times, New Challenges, New Technologies: United Methodist Women at the Forefront in the Use of Technology
11/01/2005 -- United Methodist Women has always been at the forefront of innovation and the use of technology. This year is no exception!
Return to the original article.


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Home | Our Story | Communities | Photo Gallery | Contact Us
Custom Home in Manchester, MD | Custom Home in Catonsville, MD | Custom Home in Owings Mills, MD
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Phone: (443) 827-9500 | Fax: (410) 496-3211 | Email: email@example.com
|*Disclaimer: The material provided on this website is intended for informational purposes only. Regional Homes has put forth effort to insure that all information on this site is accurate to date. Nevertheless, inaccuracies may exist. Regional Homes takes no responsibility for any oversights, nor do they guarantee the accuracy of information, graphics, text, links, or other items contained within these materials. All materials and prices are subject to change without notice. Regional Homes reserves the right to make any changes to the home and/or plans and specifications as they deem necessary.


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Reaction in Taiwan
Jeremy Lin with Ma Ying-jeou, the president of ROC a.k.a. Taiwan at a meeting in 2010. Keep in mind, that both are Harvard graduates, which is quite interesting.
Reaction in Taiwan
I stumbled upon your blog a while back. I enjoy reading your blog, time permitting and thank you for portraying Taiwan from various angles. I am also quite touched by your professed love for your wife.
I am a Taiwanese expat residing in the good ole U.S. of A. I have been married to an absolute American sweetheart and now have been residing in America longer than in Taiwan.
That being said, I am absolutely thrilled about the Linsanity fever here in America. His unexpected rise to NBA super stardom is really a breath of fresh air. Most of all, his Lin-derella story plus his faith and the take-home-message-of-the-day - "Believe in your dreams, even if no one does." really tuck at people's heartstrings.
Not so much an NBA fan as an NFL fan, ever since Linsanity, my interest in NBA games is significantly piqued. His official FB page has, in my last visit, 973,908 likes. I would encourage everyone to show his or her support on his "official" FB page at http://www.facebook.com/jeremylin7.
Jeremy Lin has put Taiwan on the map for a change. For the longest time, people keep on confusing Taiwan with Thailand. And that is my biggest pet peeve.
In addition to further honing his skills, Jeremy Lin still has a mountain to climb amid today's racial bias and stereotype, particularly in regard to the word of 'athlete' being associated with Asians. Of course, in general, the exception is applied when martial arts come to mind with masters like Bruce Lee, or Jackie Chan that automatically pop into people's minds here.
Thanks for blogging the Linsanity fever in Taiwan. Having not visited Taiwan for more than 10 years, my curiosity of Taiwan's recent development is satisfied via your blog.
The media and the public never tire of coming up with Jeremy Lin monkiers. My absolute all-time favorite one is Super Lin-tendo. Go Jeremy!
Correction -
I think Jeremy Lin's FB page link I wrote in my previous comment may be a spoof. Please don't publish that link in my previous comment on this blog entry.
I think Jeremy Lin's new FB Page is http://www.facebook.com/jeremylin17.
Honestly, deep down I think of Jeremy Lin as a superb human being that brings grace and humility to the NBA arena. Debating his ancenstry is a moot point, really. What is at issue here is he cracks open a door to Asian stereotyping. He's got both brains and brawn.
Tonight's game against Miami Heat will be a litmus test for Jeremy and the Knicks. Go Jeremy!!!!!
Two seperate nations but not two different ethnicity . Many taiwanese have been using the british-american civil war as an example by saying we do not call americans british , buts that nationality . Fact is they are still white . As much as we are still chinese in ethnicity . My parents are from taiwan , but I still consider myself an overseas chinese .
I'm thinking of doing a comedy blog post about how the Chinese are even stealing basketball jobs from Americans! LOL!
@ Anonymous #3. Unfortunately, J-Lin didn't do so well against the Miami Heat.
@ Anonymous #4. We are all, white, black, Asian, Australian, Native American, part of the same human family. We are all brothers and sisters.
Please read my comment policy, before you comment.


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Ivman is a flexible userspace volume manager for Linux. Originally an automounter, it can also be used to run arbitrary commands when certain devices are added to or removed from the system, when properties on existing devices change, or when devices emit conditions. Unlike gnome-volume-manager, it runs from a console. It uses D-BUS and HAL to listen for new devices, and uses pmount for mounting.
The Qt XInput Extension is a C library adding support for XInput devices (like tablets or joysticks) to Qt-based X11 applications. QXi supports devices with up to six valuator axes in absolute mode, up to 32 buttons, and any number of keys. It is built using autoconf and libtool, and comes with a simple example application.
A Java Database Application Library.
A C implementation of NTRUEncrypt.


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Valentine Diners - Ohio
- Business name: Toledo White Tower #7
- Street address: St. Clair & Jackson streets
- Open or closed: Closed, destroyed
- History: Valentine made 15 buildings for the White Tower hamburger chain in the early 1950s. Three of those were in Toledo, including White Tower #6. This one opened in July 1953 and was closed and demolished in 1968 for an urban renewal project.
- Model / serial number: White Tower / Unknown


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The best way to determine the accuracy of your rifle and ammunition is to shoot them from a solid bench - with a quality shooting rest. With precise repeatability of shots as your goal,The Rock™ Rest is the right tool for the job! The Rock helps eliminate the "human factor" in shooting and will help you shoot tighter groups.
Take aim:
Order yours ONLINE today!
Caldwell® The Rock™ Rest
You qualify for a free gift. It will be added to your cart automatically.
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Marie Mayhew Designs Woolly Pumpkin
- Pattern Type
- All Knitted
- Home
This life-size pumpkin measures about 10-inches wide by 9-inches high using worsted weight yarn and after felting. It has knitted curlycues rather than beaded ones. Have fun turning the dining room table into your family's very own pumpkin patch!
This pumpkin lends itself to decorating with a Jack-o-lantern face or covered with leaves cut out of acrylic felt!
Yarn: Worsted Weight felting yarn (like Cascade 220) in your favorite orange and green.
We currently have 3 copies in stock and available — we first started selling this in December 2008.