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Tuesday, June 28, 2011
Fu Hualing on "The Varieties of Law"
Professor FU Hualing of the University of Hong Kong's Faculty of Law has recently written a very interesting meditation on the varieties of law in China. He has kindly permitted me to post it here.
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The Varieties of Law
Fu Hualing
The University of Hong Kong
It is well known that the Chinese government's budgetary process is a messy one. The concept of a "budget" in China includes: a formal and legal budget; an official but quasi-legal extra-budget; and an informal, occasionally illegal, extra-extra budget. The government budget is thus a complex mix of budgets of various sources and degrees of legality and legitimacy.
As with China's government budget, Chinese law also comes in different varieties. There is the official/formal law made pursuant to the constitution and, in the shadow of the official law, there is quasi-formal extra-law with questionable legality and constitutionality. Parallel to law and extra-law, one also finds an increasingly visible layer of informal "extra-extra law," which is developing a life of its own.
Law is defined here as a constitutional legal regime in which properly constituted authorities make and state legal norms (in a legal format) which are subsequently applied fairly by independent tribunals. There is a credible process of legal representation and judicial deliberation and a degree of transparency, and external accountability throughout the decision-making process.
China has been building a legal order based on law since the late 1970s and the achievement is very visible. There is, for instance, a comprehensive legal framework, in the formalistic sense at least, governing commercial transactions. A more developed legal system can be found in ordinary civil justice in dealing with a wide range of issues, such as family law and small tort claims. Chinese public law has also witnessed a gradual but significant development in enhancing regularity, transparency and juridification. Even in criminal law which is traditionally police-centric and highly politicized, there is a tendency toward increasing certainty, more effective judicial oversight, and stronger legal representation. Building a legal order is a long process and China has experienced its due share of setback and frustration in the process. But the larger trend had been clear: until recently, the sphere of law had been expanding, reaching out to and occupying more fields. The legal system had been used, and through the daily usage, strengthened and improved. The government, until recent years, had been encouraging legalization of social-economic life and trying to bring social problems to a legal resolution.
An extra-law is a system in which power is neither directly derived from properly constituted authorities nor subject to independent oversight (judicial or otherwise). In contrast with law, extra-law does not allow deliberation, representation and decision-making that can be regarded as judicial. It has a strong political or policy orientation and the whole system is geared to political expediency or convenience.
China's legal reform in the past 30 years is characterized by a slow transition from extra-law to law. Yet, after 30 years of law reform and improved legality, the size of extra-law still looms large, especially in core policy areas, such as criminal law and public law.
Examples of extra-law abound. The first example is criminal law. A significant proportion of criminal justice matters are still governed by extra-law. There has been a large gray area when it comes to police powers to punish. Due to ideological commitment and historical legacy, criminal law punishes only "serious offences", leaving "minor offences" to the prerogatives of the police. While approximately 100,000 criminal cases go through the criminal justice process each year, millions of offenses of different severity and nature are dealt with administratively by the police under the name of punishment, treatment, or rehabilitation. The hodgepodge of administrative penalties targets prostitutes, drug addicts, and a wide range of minor offenders, and the penalties may vary from a verbal warning to three years' incarceration (in the form of laojiao/Re-education-Through-Labor). This administrative punishment regime is characterized by relative severity in penalty, lack of representation and due process, and uncertain legislative authorization.
The second example is anti-corruption enforcement. Further away from law, the in-house disciplinary mechanism of the Communist Party of China (the Party) for its members openly challenges China's legal foundations. The Party's disciplinary mechanism was initially designed to investigate and punish Party members for their misbehavior, but it has morphed into a powerful anti-corruption institution. Legal institutions are officially made subsidiary and accountable to this political mechanism. The disciplinary detention measure, shuanggui, which allows the Party to detain its members for interrogation, is particularly questionable and lies within the extra-extra law zone. While the Administrative Supervision Law of the People's Republic of China appears to permit shuanggui (by ironically permitting "voluntary" detention), it can never be stretched to justify the extensive detention as practiced in the shuanggui system.
A final example is media governance. Media governance is essentially a lawless business in China. Traditional media is totally state-owned and controlled tightly by the Party. There is a well-established political mechanism, armed with strong organizations and detailed procedures, to guide and manage all media outlets in China on an on-going basis. Media governance is particularly an area in which Party norms and organs, instead of legal rules and institutions, are the ultimate authorities in the running of the media.
Extra-Extra Law
Extra-extra law comprises government measures that exist in some dark space, seemingly unrelated to any legal framework and devoid of any legal authority. Extra-extra law is an informal political institution characterized by a total lack of legality. It is used to advance some predatory and repressive government policies which cannot be justified by any law or extra-law. As such, extra-extra law is covered in secrecy and operates with no legal accountability. Except occasional and indirect admissions, such as the quasi-official admission of the existence of "black jails" for petitioners, extra-extra law does not officially exist, and, as such, extra-extra law survives and thrives because it is effective in achieving certain policy goals which cannot otherwise be achieved through law or extra-law. The legal system is regarded as weak and ineffective when it comes to sensitive issues. In these situations, intimidation through extra-extra law becomes expedient and even indispensible.
Again, examples abound. In the countryside, local governments are known to collect illicit fees and levies and have operated "black jails" (in the name of "study classes") to detain and incarcerate peasants who are defiant. "Black jails" are also used to detain peasants in violation of family planning policies; to detain and intimidate petitioners who air their grievances in Beijing; and, more recently, to detain Tibetan monks for their alleged challenges of the official policy on religions. These repressive policies are extra-extra law because powers are exercised by the government on an ad hoc basis without any legal authorization or procedure, and little accountability.
The recent enforced disappearance of human rights lawyers illustrates law's vulnerability and the readiness of the Party to resort to extra-extra law. Lawyers were typically snatched by internal security authorities in plain clothes, and detained in unknown places where they were interrogated for an extended period of time. They reappeared as quietly as they disappeared. Forced disappearance took place mainly in Beijing and was inflicted on lawyers who had represented clients in cases which were regarded as politically sensitive.
There is a fundamental difference between disappearance (extra-extra law) and abuse of criminal procedure (law). When the government uses, or even abuses the law, it still signals a commitment to law and a degree of fidelity to legal rules. There is also a degree of legal accountability and responsibility. That explains why human rights lawyers and others who were kidnapped may have demanded their day in court – so that abuses could be brought to the attention of the law and public scrutiny. A mere legal trapping may not be sufficient to convert a political persecution to a fair legal process, but it is a necessary first step in developing a rule of law.
Legal rhetoric is important in both justifying and constraining state powers. It may not be possible to reduce law to total irrelevance without incurring a cost. Think about the judicial interpretation of the Supreme People's Court (SPC) on the application of sedition and subversion to the 1989 democratic movement activists; think about the legal trappings that the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress and the SPC painstakingly created to justify its prosecution of the Falun Gong (FLG), and think about the courtroom tension between judges and lawyers in some of the FLG trials. The mere fact that a criminal charge is laid necessarily means a degree of accountability. The path of law is a tortuous one, but as long as we have confidence that we are walking on that path, there is some degree of control and accountability, hence hope.
Extra-extra law also serves a fundamentally different objective. Enforced disappearance differs from criminal punishment in fundamental ways. In criminal punishment, the law targets past offences that an individual may have committed and the objective is to punish. In enforced disappearance, the focus is instead on the "risk" of an individual to the Party-state, regardless of what offences she or he may or may not have committed. Extra-extra law is thus applied here not for the purpose of punishing past offences, but to reduce future risk, with measures taking against individuals according to the specific personal profile to maximize intimidation.
Torture may also be used in both law and extra-extra law. But in law, torture is typically used to extract confession to establish criminal liability; while in extra-extra law, it is to inflict fear so that lawyers and others would not speak or act out. Intimidation is at the core of the extra-extra law. As such, in the enforced disappearance cases, no general norms apply; instead, there is only particularistic stratagem, tailor-made for a particular individual case. With intimidation at the center of the equation, we see a quantitative change of the method of repression.
The recent repressive episode may be surgical and limited in its scope of application and in the degree of brutality. But these may not be the core issues. The core questions are: is China moving towards a different doctrine of governance in the name of the 'Chinese model' where legal constraints are regarded as redundant and ineffective, and power is unconstrained in achieving its objectives? Is there a bottom line that must be maintained? What happens if the lawyers/activists cannot be silenced through enforced disappearance, and the intimidation backfires and generates more resistance? There is the ominous early sign that the state is willing to resort to the ancient concept of collective responsibilities in maximizing intimidation, so that pressures are brought to bear on spouses, parents, children, friends, colleagues, and even landlords to achieve the objectives. But a lingering question is: what's next and how far an authoritarian state can go in silencing dissenting voices? There is no need to refer to the massive enforced disappearance cases in Argentina decades ago. Taiwan offered a vivid illustration of downward spirals toward extra-extra law — the Guomindang regime resorted to political assassination before its monopoly on power ended.
Repressive episodes are recurring events in the post-Mao era, and each generation of leaders have their repressive moments during their terms, especially towards the end of their terms when they hand power to the next generation of leaders. Deng Xiaoping sent tanks to suppress the 1989 democratic movements and Jiang Zemin smashed the FLG and wiped out the China Democracy Party (CDP), sending most of the CDP members to lengthy prison terms and into exile. New leaders when they come to power appear to be politically open and reform-minded. This appearance enhances expectations and invites challenge. Once that happens, the new leaders typically move decisively to demolish the challenges, creating their repressive moments and leaving a conservative legacy.
What distinguishes the most recent repressive episode from the previous ones may be the potential to institutionalize extra-extra law and a strong sense of entitlement. China is gaining impressive economic power under the Party's leadership and the Party has become more confident in its legitimacy and ability to rule in its own way. At the same time, the Party is facing unprecedented social, economic and, to a lesser degree, political challenges. It feels its vulnerability strongly. But law is not currently perceived to be the most effective tool to handle the emerging crisis.
It is the combination of the Party's confidence and its vulnerability that has produced the recent repression and explains China's recent turn against the law. But at what medium- to long-term cost? It is hard to see the deployment of extra-extra law as being part of any sort of thought-through, long-term strategy to shore up political support and ability — the use of extra-extra law is, above all, a grimly expedient policy. The more widely and longer it is used, the less effective it becomes because it generates entrenched resistance. Exhibit A in 2011 for the veracity of this theory, albeit drawn from a wide array of choices, is Syria.
China is well placed, far away from the sort of wretched spiral of state-driven political violence that is convulsing Syria in 2011. A very good reason, amongst many others, is that China has seen for some time that some genuine striving towards a society based on real law offers one of the best political buffers against being drawn down the appalling political pathway epitomized by Syria today. The increasing deployment of extra-extra law, however, undermines that buffer in a frightening way.


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by Geoff Broughton, Colorado Tenth Amendment Center
There is a line from a pop song that goes, "Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose…â€, but is that Freedom? Is it the ability to do whatever you want to do? "If it feels good, do it?†Is that Freedom? I think before we agree to fight for it, we should agree what it is we are fighting for so we can decide if it is worth it. In other words, what are you willing to sacrifice to secure it, not only for yourself, but for future generations?
The leaders of the movement that led to our founding were made up of successful financially secure people who risked everything for liberty. The World War II generation sacrificed personal ambition for the idea of freedom. I think that same sentiment is in us today. For example, while doing some precinct walking I talked to a woman whose husband works for the city. While talking about the different candidates she lowered her voice and pointed to her neighbors "Vote no on 60, 61, and 101†yard sign and said in a hushed tone, we are voting yes on those, even though it may mean my husband would lose his job. On that same measure, I have a friend who works for the government who said the same thing. These people equate tax relief to freedom, and are willing to risk their livelihood for it.
Would any of the above have sacrificed anything for "if it feels good, do it?†I don't think so. I believe that what all of those people wanted was the ability to self-govern. Reading the words of the founders and you will find references such as:
"But what is liberty without wisdom, and without virtue? It is the greatest of all possible evils; for it is folly, vice, and madness, without tuition or restraint… Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains on their own appetites.â€
Edmund Burk
"We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge or gallantry would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution is designed only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate for any other.†John Adams
But today, any time morals are brought up; people immediately jump to their views on the "social†issues of the day as if these issues defined morality. How about greed, unchecked ambitions, integrity, aren't these the moral issues that have had such a profound effect on our society? Take the on-going housing crises, when you really look at it, its roots are found in ambitious politicians passing laws to force banks to make loans to people who couldn't pay them back, greedy banks using government guarantees on those loans to bundle bad loans into securities and selling them as derivatives, none of which would have mattered if people would have had a little integrity and not taken out an unsecured loan, a loan they could not pay back because they thought they would be able to resell the home in a year or two for a quick buck.
So today, while all three of these groups who brought this mess on us point fingers of blame at each other, the average American is waking up to the fact that there is a problem, and something is very wrong. We know instinctively that something has been lost, and that we have to accept not only our own culpability in this crisis, but the burden of getting it back. Freedom will not be won by quibbling over whatever wedge issues are put before us to divide us; it will only be regained when "we the people†restore the true meaning of the words "freedom†and "libertyâ€. For only then will we be willing to sacrifice our material comforts to win it back for ourselves and our posterity. Freedom is not "nothing left to loseâ€, it is not self-indulgence and it is not "freeâ€.
I joined the Tenth Amendment Center last year because I believe there is no hope to be found in Washington DC, even if the Tea Party candidates get elected, the reform will be slow if at all, as each one will have to choose between being a "gadfly†or going native and trying to sell the art of "compromise†to their soon to be bewildered base as they explain "this is how it's done†while defending a bad bill they voted for. How many of these new activist will stay determined to work the system after the certain betrayal of at least of few of the new politicians who sell out for power. I may be cynical, but it's only because I remember the "Contract with America†in 1994, and how the Demacrats wailed and gnashed their teeth over the Patriot Act in 2005 only to vote to continue it in 2009, or maybe it was after I listened to a surprisingly honest Tom Tancredo as he talked about the tactics GOP party leaders used on Republican law makers to tow the party line with the Medicaid D vote.
The Tenth Amendment Center takes the fight to a more local level, our State House District and Senators, and although there is pressure from above put on these politicians as well, our opportunity to engage these people is much higher. While passing out fliers at the Health Freedom Rally, I talked to State Senator Greg Brophy who told me thank you for being active, and asked that we continue to put the pressure on if the Republicans took the Assembly in the upcoming election. He understands these problems are not a partisan issue. And while I believe there are some real leaders in the State Senate,I agree with Joseph Farah who wrote in. "The Tea Party Manifestoâ€
"What conservative activists need to understand – because they are good people who need to be involved in the constructive process of moving the Country forward – is that politicians follow; they do not lead."
You see it is "we the peopleâ€, who have been more concerned with getting our piece of the pie then fulfilling our moral obligation of passing true freedom to the next generation, who will need to carry the load of getting us back on track. We cannot wait for a Political Hero to swoop in and save us from ourselves. In Colorado, that means supporting the minority of State legislators who share our vision of America and give them the courage to use the principles of 98 to interpose the Sovereign State of Colorado between an out of control Federal Government and its freedom loving citizens. We need to understand how difficult it will be and that things may get worse before they get better, but have the courage of our convictions that we should bear the burdens of our own inequities instead of passing them to the next generation.
History will tell future generations if we were up to the task at hand, if were willing to pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor. Look yourself in the mirror and instead of asking what you "can†do, ask what you "will†do. What sacrifices are you willing to make to secure freedom not only for yourself, but for your posterity?
Geoff Broughton [send him email] is the State Chapter Coordinator for the Colorado Tenth Amendment Center
Copyright © 2010 by TenthAmendmentCenter.com. Permission to reprint in whole or in part is gladly granted, provided full credit is given

subset: commoncrawl


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Sarah Palin on DrugsRepublican Governor (AK); 2008 nominee for Vice President | |
You'd think an evangelical Christian mother such as Sarah would have agreed. You'd be wrong. The bar owners argued that the hours between 2 AM and 5 AM were particularly lucrative and that city government didn't have the right to interfere with free enterprise. Sarah wholeheartedly agreed. She saw the bill that would mandate a 2 AM closing as a classic example of government interference with personal freedom.
But barely anything like that exists in Wasilla. You certainly can have a great time swigging beer in two bars that are allowed to stay open until 5 AM. It was Mayor Palin who rejected attempts to make them close earlier. (If Palin had completely had her way, in fact, you could have sidled up to the bar with a gun.)
For all that, Wasilla is not a bad place. Rather, it�s an unexceptional, gritty town, bisected by a four-lane highway where used-car lots sit next to fast-food joints next to pawn shops.
The Governor also signed House Bill 118, sponsored by Representative Kevin Meyer. The bill closes a gap in statute by making it a non-criminal violation to permit underage people to possess alcohol in your home. Under current law (AS 04.16.050), a parent who allows their own child to possess alcohol is not subject to the violation because they are allowed to provide alcohol to their children. Under HB 118 however, a person throwing a party where an underage person possesses alcohol, even if they were not responsible for providing the alcohol, would face a $500 fine.
Palin worried about the law�s new tax on gambling while ships are in state waters. �Currently casino gambling is prohibited in Alaska. So what are we getting ourselves into?� Palin also asked.
Though she didn�t say how she would do it, Palin told the ATIA she would work with the tourism industry to �mitigate some of the impacts� from the new law. Knowles spokeswoman Patty Ginsburg said Friday that her boss supported taxing the cruise industry but he was unhappy with the law�s other provisions.
Palin doesn�t support legalizing marijuana, worrying about the message it would send to her four kids. But when it comes to cracking down on drugs, she says methamphetamines are the greater threat and should have a higher priority.
A: 1. Creating an atmosphere where parents feel welcome to choose the venues of education for their children.
2. Preserving the definition of �marriage� as defined in our constitution.
3. Cracking down on the things that harm family life: gangs, drug use, and infringement of our liberties including attacks on our 2nd Amendment rights.


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Highlights of Route 66 with International Mother Road Festival
Follow legendary Route 66 and see how Americans traveled from the 1920s through the 1960s. This historic route begins in Chicago, travels through eight states, and ends in Los Angeles. On this Route 66 tour, you'll get the opportunity to travel to some of the cities along Route 66, visit many of the Route 66 museums, and step back in time to when the journey was part of the fun.Visit Pontiac's Route 66 Hall of Fame & Museum, featuring memorabilia from Route 66's heyday. In Oklahoma, visit Pops, a landmark building selling gas, sodas, shakes, and diner food. At the National Route 66 Museum in Elk City, antique cars and historic documents help you feel what it was like to travel Route 66. In New Mexico, visit Russell's Car Museum, featuring classic cars and memorabilia. Travel though Williams—in Arizona—listed in the National Register for Historic Places and where you'll see neon signs of the intact circa 1940s "Motel Row." Before arriving at the end of Route 66 in Santa Monica, California, visit the Barstow Route 66 Museum, which houses a collection of historic Route 66 artifacts and photographs. On this special departure, be a part of the International Route 66 Mother Road Festival in Springfield, Illinois, where the streets come alive with the rumble of engines from hot cars, cool trucks, and vintage motorcycles. This tour also deviates from Route 66, so you can see breathtaking scenery at the Grand Canyon and experience the excitement of Las Vegas. In St. Louis, witness amazing views from the top of the 630-foot-tall Gateway Arch.These are just some of the many highlights of this Route 66 tour designed for value-minded travelers. Sit back, relax, and let Cosmos handle the driving and details while you enjoy!
City Highlights
Sightseeing:In Chicago, Oklahoma City, and Los Angeles; orientation in St. Louis, Route 66 Hall of Fame & Museum, Abraham Lincoln Presidential Museum, International Route 66 Mother Road Festival, Gateway Arch, Will Rogers Memorial Museum, Elk CIty National Route 66 Museum, Pops Landmark Diner & Gas Station, Russell's Car Museum, and Barstow Route 66 Museum. Inside visits as shown in UPPERCASE in the tour description, including admission charges where applicable.
CHICAGO Holiday Inn Chicago Mart Plaza (F)SPRINGFIELD State House Inn (MF)ST. LOUIS Pear Tree Inn Union Station (ST)BRANSON Comfort Inn at Thousand Hills (ST)OKLAHOMA CITY Sheraton Oklahoma City Downtown Hotel (SF)AMARILLO Drury Inn & Suites Amarillo (ST)ALBUQUERQUE Best Western Plus Rio Grande Inn (MF)FLAGSTAFF Drury Inn & Suites Flagstaff (ST)GRAND CANYON NATIONAL PARK Grand Canyon National Park Lodges (NP)LAS VEGAS Harrah's Las Vegas Casino & Hotel (F)LOS ANGELES L.A. Hotel Downtown (SF)
1 breakfast, 5 continental breakfasts
NOTE:On vacations that include an overnight stay in Las Vegas, at least one member of the traveling party must be 21 years of age or older.
Transportation:Private, deluxe air-conditioned motorcoach while touring.


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June 21, 1992
The End of Books
By ROBERT COOVER
n the real world nowadays, that is to say, in the world of video transmissions, cellular phones, fax machines, computer networks, and in particular out in the humming digitalized precincts of avant-garde computer hackers, cyberpunks and hyperspace freaks, you will often hear it said that the print medium is a doomed and outdated technology, a mere curiosity of bygone days destined soon to be consigned forever to those dusty unattended museums we now call libraries. Indeed, the very proliferation of books and other print-based media, so prevalent in this forest-harvesting, paper-wasting age, is held to be a sign of its feverish moribundity, the last futile gasp of a once vital form before it finally passes away forever, dead as God.
Which would mean of course that the novel, too, as we know it, has come to its end. Not that those announcing its demise are grieving. For all its passing charm, the traditional novel, which took center stage at the same time that industrial mercantile democracies arose — and which Hegel called "the epic of the middle-class world" — is perceived by its would-be executioners as the virulent carrier of the patriarchal, colonial, canonical, proprietary, hierarchical and authoritarian values of a past that is no longer with us.
Much of the novel's alleged power is embedded in the line, that compulsory author-directed movement from the beginning of a sentence to its period, from the top of the page to the bottom, from the first page to the last. Of course, through print's long history, there have been countless strategies to counter the line's power, from marginalia and footnotes to the creative innovations of novelists like Laurence Sterne, James Joyce, Raymond Queneau, Julio Cortazar, Italo Calvino and Milorad Pavic, not to exclude the form's father, Cervantes himself. But true freedom from the tyranny of the line is perceived as only really possible now at last with the advent of hypertext, written and read on the computer, where the line in fact does not exist unless one invents and implants it in the text.
"Hypertext" is not a system but a generic term, coined a quarter of a century ago by a computer populist named Ted Nelson to describe the writing done in the nonlinear or nonsequential space made possible by the computer. Moreover, unlike print text, hypertext provides multiple paths between text segments, now often called "lexias" in a borrowing from the pre-hypertextual but prescient Roland Barthes. With its webs of linked lexias, its networks of alternate routes (as opposed to print's fixed unidirectional page-turning) hypertext presents a radically divergent technology, interactive and polyvocal, favoring a plurality of discourses over definitive utterance and freeing the reader from domination by the author. Hypertext reader and writer are said to become co-learners or co-writers, as it were, fellow-travelers in the mapping and remapping of textual (and visual, kinetic and aural) components, not all of which are provided by what used to be called the author.
Though used at first primarily as a radically new teaching arena, by the mid-1980's hyperspace was drawing fiction writers into its intricate and infinitely expandable, infinitely alluring webs, its green-limned gardens of multiple forking paths, to allude to another author popular with hypertext buffs, Jorge Luis Borges.
Several systems support the configuring of this space for fiction writing. Some use simple randomized linking like the shuffling of cards, others (such as Guide and HyperCard) offer a kind of do-it-yourself basic tool set, and still others (more elaborate systems like Storyspace, which is currently the software of choice among fiction writers in this country, and Intermedia, developed at Brown University) provide a complete package of sophisticated structuring and navigational devices.
Although hypertext's champions often assail the arrogance of the novel, their own claims are hardly modest. You will often hear them proclaim, quite seriously, that there have been three great events in the history of literacy: the invention of writing, the invention of movable type and the invention of hypertext. As hyperspace-walker George P. Landow puts it in his recent book surveying the field, "Hypertext": "Electronic text processing marks the next major shift in information technology after the development of the printed book. It promises (or threatens) to produce effects on our culture, particularly on our literature, education, criticism and scholarship, just as radical as those produced by Gutenberg's movable type."
Noting that the "movement from the tactile to the digital is the primary fact about the contemporary world," Mr. Landow observes that, whereas most writings of print-bound critics working in an exhausted technology are "models of scholarly solemnity, records of disillusionment and brave sacrifice of humanistic positions," writers in and on hypertext "are downright celebratory. . . . Most poststructuralists write from within the twilight of a wished-for coming day; most writers of hypertext write of many of the same things from within the dawn."
Dawn it is, to be sure. The granddaddy of full-length hypertext fictions is Michael Joyce's landmark "Afternoon," first released on floppy disk in 1987 and moved into a new Storyspace "reader," partly developed by Mr. Joyce himself, in 1990.
Mr. Joyce, who is also the author of a printed novel, "The War Outside Ireland: A History of the Doyles in North America With an Account of their Migrations," wrote in the on-line journal Postmodern Culture that hyperfiction "is the first instance of the true electronic text, what we will come to conceive as the natural form of multimodal, multisensual writing," but it is still so radically new it is hard to be certain just what it is. No fixed center, for starters — and no edges either, no ends or boundaries. The traditional narrative time line vanishes into a geographical landscape or exitless maze, with beginnings, middles and ends being no longer part of the immediate display. Instead: branching options, menus, link markers and mapped networks. There are no hierarchies in these topless (and bottomless) networks, as paragraphs, chapters and other conventional text divisions are replaced by evenly empowered and equally ephemeral window-sized blocks of text and graphics — soon to be supplemented with sound, animation and film.
As Carolyn Guyer and Martha Petry put it in the opening "directions" to their hypertext fiction "Izme Pass," which was published (if "published" is the word) on a disk included in the spring 1991 issue of the magazine Writing on the Edge:
"This is a new kind of fiction, and a new kind of reading. The form of the text is rhythmic, looping on itself in patterns and layers that gradually accrete meaning, just as the passage of time and events does in one's lifetime. Trying the textlinks embedded within the work will bring the narrative together in new configurations, fluid constellations formed by the path of your interest. The difference between reading hyperfiction and reading traditional printed fiction may be the difference between sailing the islands and standing on the dock watching the sea. One is not necessarily better than the other."
I must confess at this point that I am not myself an expert navigator of hyperspace, nor am I — as I am entering my seventh decade and thus rather committed, for better or for worse, to the obsolescent print technology — likely to engage in any major hypertext fictions of my own. But, interested as ever in the subversion of the traditional bourgeois novel and in fictions that challenge linearity, I felt that something was happening out (or in) there and that I ought to know what it was: if I were not going to sail the Guyer-Petry islands, I had at least better run to the shore with my field glasses. And what better way to learn than to teach a course in the subject?
Thus began the Brown University Hypertext Fiction Workshop, two spring semesters (and already as many software generations) old, a course devoted as much to the changing of reading habits as to the creation of new narratives.
Writing students are notoriously conservative creatures. They write stubbornly and hopefully within the tradition of what they have read. Getting them to try out alternative or innovative forms is harder than talking them into chastity as a life style. But confronted with hyperspace, they have no choice: all the comforting structures have been erased. It's improvise or go home. Some frantically rebuild those old structures, some just get lost and drift out of sight, most leap in fearlessly without even asking how deep it is ( infinitely deep) and admit, even as they paddle for dear life, that this new arena is indeed an exciting, provocative if frequently frustrating medium for the creation of new narratives, a potentially revolutionary space, capable, exactly as advertised, of transforming the very art of fiction, even if it now remains somewhat at the fringe, remote still, in these very early days, from the mainstream.
With hypertext we focus, both as writers and as readers, on structure as much as on prose, for we are made aware suddenly of the shapes of narratives that are often hidden in print stories. The most radical new element that comes to the fore in hypertext is the system of multidirectional and often labyrinthine linkages we are invited or obliged to create. Indeed the creative imagination often becomes more preoccupied with linkage, routing and mapping than with statement or style, or with what we would call character or plot (two traditional narrative elements that are decidedly in jeopardy). We are always astonished to discover how much of the reading and writing experience occurs in the interstices and trajectories between text fragments. That is to say, the text fragments are like stepping stones, there for our safety, but the real current of the narratives runs between them.
"The great thing," as one young writer, Alvin Lu, put it in an on-line class essay, is "the degree to which narrative is completely destructed into its constituent bits. Bits of information convey knowledge, but the juxtaposition of bits creates narrative. The emphasis of a hypertext (narrative) should be the degree to which the reader is given power, not to read, but to organize the texts made available to her. Anyone can read, but not everyone has sophisticated methods of organization made available to them."
The fictions developed in the workshop, all of which are "still in progress," have ranged from geographically anchored narratives similar to "Our Town" and choose-your-own-adventure stories to parodies of the classics, nested narratives, spatial poems, interactive comedy, metamorphic dreams, irresolvable murder mysteries, moving comic books and Chinese sex manuals.
IN hypertext, multivocalism is popular, graphic elements, both drawn and scanned, have been incorporated into the narratives, imaginative font changes have been employed to identify various voices or plot elements, and there has also been a very effective use of formal documents not typically used in fictions — statistical charts, song lyrics, newspaper articles, film scripts, doodles and photographs, baseball cards and box scores, dictionary entries, rock music album covers, astrological forecasts, board games and medical and police reports.
At our weekly workshops, selected writers display, on an overhead projector, their developing narrative structures, then face the usual critique of their writing, design, development of character, emotional impact, attention to detail and so on, as appropriate. But they also engage in continuous on-line dialogue with one another, exchanging criticism, enthusiasm, doubts, speculations, theorizing, wisecracks. So much fun is all of this, so compelling this "downright celebratory" experience, as Mr. Landow would have it, that the creative output, so far anyway, has been much greater than that of ordinary undergraduate writing workshops, and certainly of as high a quality.
In addition to the individual fictions, which are more or less protected from tampering in the old proprietary way, we in the workshop have also played freely and often quite anarchically in a group fiction space called "Hotel." Here, writers are free to check in, to open up new rooms, new corridors, new intrigues, to unlink texts or create new links, to intrude upon or subvert the texts of others, to alter plot trajectories, manipulate time and space, to engage in dialogue through invented characters, then kill off one another's characters or even to sabotage the hotel's plumbing. Thus one day we might find a man and woman encountering each other in the hotel bar, working up some kind of sexual liaison, only to return a few days later and discover that one or both had sex changes. During one of my hypertext workshops, a certain reading tension was caused when we found that there was more than one bartender in our hotel: was this the same bar or not? One of the students — Alvin Lu again — responded by linking all the bartenders to Room 666, which he called the "Production Center," where some imprisoned alien monster was giving birth to full-grown bartenders on demand.
This space of essentially anonymous text fragments remains on line and each new set of workshop students is invited to check in there and continue the story of the Hypertext Hotel. I would like to see it stay open for a century or two.
However, as all of us have discovered, even though the basic technology of hypertext may be with us for centuries to come, perhaps even as long as the technology of the book, its hardware and software seem to be fragile and short-lived; whole new generations of equipment and programs arrive before we can finish reading the instructions of the old. Even as I write, Brown University's highly sophisticated Intermedia system, on which we have been writing our hypertext fictions, is being phased out because it is too expensive to maintain and incompatible with Apple's new operating-system software, System 7.0. A good portion of our last semester was spent transporting our documents from Intermedia to Storyspace (which Brown is now adopting) and adjusting to the new environment.
This problem of operating-system standards is being urgently addressed and debated now by hypertext writers; if interaction is to be a hallmark of the new technology, all its players must have a common and consistent language and all must be equally empowered in its use. There are other problems too. Navigational procedures: how do you move around in infinity without getting lost? The structuring of the space can be so compelling and confusing as to utterly absorb and neutralize the narrator and to exhaust the reader. And there is the related problem of filtering. With an unstable text that can be intruded upon by other author-readers, how do you, caught in the maze, avoid the trivial? How do you duck the garbage? Venerable novelistic values like unity, integrity, coherence, vision, voice seem to be in danger. Eloquence is being redefined. "Text" has lost its canonical certainty. How does one judge, analyze, write about a work that never reads the same way twice?
And what of narrative flow? There is still movement, but in hyperspace's dimensionless infinity, it is more like endless expansion ; it runs the risk of being so distended and slackly driven as to lose its centripetal force, to give way to a kind of static low-charged lyricism — that dreamy gravityless lost-in-space feeling of the early sci-fi films. How does one resolve the conflict between the reader's desire for coherence and closure and the text's desire for continuance, its fear of death? Indeed, what is closure in such an environment? If everything is middle, how do you know when you are done, either as reader or writer? If the author is free to take a story anywhere at any time and in as many directions as she or he wishes, does that not become the obligation to do so?
No doubt, this will be a major theme for narrative artists of the future, even those locked into the old print technologies. And that's nothing new. The problem of closure was a major theme — was it not? — of the "Epic of Gilgamesh" as it was chopped out in clay at the dawn of literacy, and of the Homeric rhapsodies as they were committed to papyrus by technologically innovative Greek literati some 26 centuries ago. There is continuity, after all, across the ages riven by shifting technologies.
Much of this I might have guessed — and in fact did guess — before entering hyperspace, before I ever picked up a mouse, and my thoughts have been tempered only slightly by on-line experience. What I had not clearly foreseen, however, was that this is a technology that both absorbs and totally displaces. Print documents may be read in hyperspace, but hypertext does not translate into print. It is not like film, which is really just the dead end of linear narrative, just as 12-tone music is the dead end of music by the stave.
Hypertext is truly a new and unique environment. Artists who work there must be read there. And they will probably be judged there as well: criticism, like fiction, is moving off the page and on line, and it is itself susceptible to continuous changes of mind and text. Fluidity, contingency, indeterminacy, plurality, discontinuity are the hypertext buzzwords of the day, and they seem to be fast becoming principles, in the same way that relativity not so long ago displaced the falling apple.


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One of the worst things we can do to another person is make their struggle a universal either/or issue. Here's how we can avoid that. read more
How Churches Can Respond to Teens and Their Smartphones
Many Christian leaders are realizing the church can redeem technology and use it for a spiritual purpose. Find out how technology can enhance relationships instead of replacing them. read more


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I keep all my files on a seperate harddrive which Tomahawk fails to read which makes it useless to me. I dont have this problem with most music players which is why I use audacious and vlc.
The trick to designing an all-purpose music player is to make it work the way you want. The Tomahawk Music Player performs that trick very well.It could well be a better listening choice than any other cross-platform music player application. It runs on a variety of Linux distros, Microsoft Windows and the Apple OS platforms. This flexibility is important to me as a user because I work on all three.
Tomahawk is intuitive, with a very uncluttered display. That holds true for its interface on all of its supported platforms.
Another performance factor is its ability to separate the song title from the source. This creates a universal translation layer across music repositories, streaming services and geographic territories.
The latest version is 0.7.0 for all supported Linux distros except Fedora and Debian. For those two distros the current version is 0.6.0.
Dual Sources
Tomahawk is a very young Linux music player, but it makes up for its youth with a surprisingly mature level of performance.
It handles local and Internet-based music collections as a single music platform across all three computing platforms. This is a standard that should be met in all modern music players.
Tomahawk seamlessly integrates YouTube, Spotify, Jamendo, Grooveshark, LastFM, OfficialFM and a dozen more. This latest edition makes plugging in Internet music sources easy through a system of third-party resolvers. Just open the Settings panel and click the Services button. Select the corresponding resolver from the list and click the Install>From File button. The same process lets you connect Tomahawk to your social networks.
Look and Feel
Some music players I have liked had a glaring problem with putting too much information into too little display space. That does not happen with Tomahawk.
Its interface has a menu bar you can hide. It is replaced with an icon that opens the tools and settings menus.
A sidebar helps reduce the display clutter. It has to show the local collection, online playlists and radio stations. Playback controls are at the bottom.
What You See
The Queue display expands as you add more titles to play from your collections. You can view the open queue list or keep it closed but see the number of titles waiting to play.
A nice touch is the ability to remove songs or change their order by dragging and dropping them around the list.
Depending on what sidebar labels you select, other expandable windows open in the right side of the player window. For instance, when a title is playing, the display shows the top hits, related artists and a condensed version of the Wikipedia entry for that artist.
Screen Real Estate
Hold the mouse over any item in the sidebar to see a floating option to hide it. The sidebar serves as the functional control panel for what you see in the display window.
For example, the first label is the Dashboard. It shows recent additions to the local catalog, the newest playlists from both local collections and online sources, stations and recently played tracks.
The Super Collection label combines the local libraries of all included online friends also using Tomahawk. This might be the least-used feature, depending on your social status, but if you use it, Top Loved Tracks shows the tracks loved the most by all of your friends. Recently Played Tracks shows the last tracks they've played. I'm not a huge social media fan, so pardon my big yawn here.
More Sidebar Navigation
Charts is somewhat more useful, as it shows the currently best-selling songs on selected services activated by your choice of subscriptions. The New Releases and Search History features are more of those love-it or hate-it options.
Perhaps the most useful part of the sidebar display choices are the My Music and My Collection options. You can hide or show the sublists.
This is where you click to see your local and online music lists. You also can create playlists and radio station lists for regular listening.
Searching Success
Tomahawk's seamless searching feature is very impressive. Just enter your search term in the slender window at the top of the application window. Including filters makes the searching even more efficient.
Tomahawk searches through all of your enabled services. The results list is very expansive and uses columns to show artists, albums, songs, tracks and much more.
Clicking the information icon that appears on hover pops up related details about your listening history for that selection. A Footnote button at the bottom of the information pop-up shows more details about related artists, top hits and more.
You can click on a song or other related album or artist. If that title is not already in your local collection, Tomahawk will connect you to its location on your enabled online music outlets and play it for you.
Getting It
Installing Tomahawk is about the only part of using it that is a bit of a hassle. It is not routinely available in many distro repositories. If you do luck out and find it included in your distro, it will be several versions out of date.
Instead, go to the developer's website and click the download button. Then check the download page for distro-specific installation instructions.
Tomahawk is available for a wide range of distros, but you must install your flavor through the terminal by adding distro-specific repository commands. So far Tomahawk installs on Linux Mint, Ubuntu, Fedora, openSUSE, Arch Linux, Chakra, Gentoo and Exherbo. Debian is coming soon.
For other Linux distros, you can download the tarball from the developer's website or get it from github.
Bottom Line
If you are looking for the next generation of music players, Tomahawk is a good choice. It is still a young effort with lots of areas its developers need to finesse, but that maturity will continue to come with each new release.
Meanwhile, Tomahawk performs well in its current release state. It has some usability quirks that are more annoying than dysfunctional.
Want to Suggest a Linux Application for Review?
Is there a Linux software application you'd like to suggest for review? Something you love or would like to get to know?
Please send your ideas to me at [email protected], and I'll consider them for a future Linux Picks and Pans column.
And use the Talkback feature below to add your comments!


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What HomeBuyers Say Is A Cool & Sexy Home In 2016
Kitchen islands are getting bigger so friends can sit around and be entertained and families can share a casual meal.
Larger islands are also practical, many include recycling centers. The recycling and garbage centers, aren't pretty but you have to put them somewhere, the new family home is about convenience, not always pretty.
Larger islands are also replacing the breakfast table. Granite is also slipping in popularity, being replaced by Quartz and Corian on countertops that may absorb food and liquids.
Stainless steel also holds a slim slice of the kitchen market.
Traditional cabinets are gone, replaced with a Shaker style that is contemporary and urban. Ecru and Grey tones are the hot colors for cabinets.
Eclectic styling is also warming up contemporary kitchens Rustic stools, matte-finished brass light fixtures and multiple work spaces and big pantries are what is in.
Natural stone is popping up in spa-inspired bathrooms and indoor hot tubs are becoming the "cool thing" to have in executive homes.
Also a natural product called Thinset is used on kitchen backsplashes and fireplaces where there is no mantel, so the fireplace is contemporary and again very simple and Zen.
Stone used in the kitchen areas are being repeated outside, connecting the two areas, says Ms. Chapman. Large windows are also connecting the spaces, while adding lots of natural light.
Lighting that floods through large windows that come down and touch the kitchen countertops, built in areas for small gardening projects is also popular, especially in warm climate states. The dedicated cooks and gardeners step out onto a back deck and down into their garden.
Are borrowed ideas from California and Florida's pre-occupation with outdoor living and creating a private courtyard.
The homes industry has gone green, with front-loading washing machines that use a cup or two of water, low-flush toilets and low-flow showerheads. While green is good and people expect it, buyers are not willing to pay more for all the "green" amenities, exception, buyers want high-tech windows and the super-efficient HVAC and hot water heaters.
When it comes to flooring, there is no compromise. Buyers expect hardwood flooring throughout the main floor of two story homes and in the dining, study and living areas in 1 story homes, game rooms and media rooms in executive homes. Buyers continue to choose carpet for the bedrooms and tile for the bathrooms.
Smaller homes under 2500 sqft is the new "Your Cool Home" Natural light, open floor plans, outdoor living areas with room for a pool or other outdoor living such as screened in porches that have double pane windows that can be opened or closed is a recipe for the new "vacation at home" living space that is slowing inching up on all buyers home lists as fewer people have time or money for vacations away they are vacationing at home in their private paradise anytime they want. It is all about a casual lifestyle, where people like to entertain around an oversized kitchen island and look through an energy-efficient, wide, plate-glass window to a garden beyond.
All Entire Staff Uses Infix Pdf Creator Pro!!
We Constantly Change Our Listing Flyers,
Infix Pro Saves us Tons of Time It will for You Too!!!


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Here is what I have been working on this week. Chalkboards! I have been re-purposing some old pictures with frames and freshening up the frames with some paint and then covering over the artwork with a couple of coats of chalkboard paint. Let me show you some of the ugliness that lies beneath on the "Baby it's cold outside" piece. :)
Quite the transformation if I do say so myself. I also scored some amazingly old and in great shape Mason Jars that I am busy with. I hope to have something to show you in the next few days on that front. I am so happy the weekend is here! I haven't even started decorating the house yet for Christmas. I am hoping to catch some seriously lacking Christmas spirit soon! How about you? Are you all decorated and ready for the holidays this year?


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PHILADELPHIA — Sen. John McCain may find himself facing serious questions following the disclosure that the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee helped fund research utilized in the infamous, largely discredited 35-page dossier on President Donald Trump.
In December, it was McCain who notoriously passed the controversial dossier documents produced by the Washington opposition research firm Fusion GPS to then FBI Director James Comey, whose agency reportedly utilized the dossier as some of the basis for its probe into alleged Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.
McCain's office did not immediately respond to Breitbart News phone and email requests for comment about whether the Arizona senator was aware that the research he passed to the FBI was paid for by the DNC and Clinton's campaign.
McCain's office also did not immediately respond to a request for information on how he first obtained the dossier.
The Washington Post on Tuesday reported that in April 2016, attorney Marc E. Elias and his law firm, Perkins Coie, retained Fusion GPS to conduct the questionable research on behalf of both the Clinton campaign and the DNC. Through Perkins Coie, Clinton's campaign and the DNC continued to fund Fusion GPS until October 2016, days before Election Day, the Post reported.
Fusion GPS went on to hire former intelligence agent Christopher Steele to do the purported research. Steele later conceded in court documents that part of his work still needed to be verified.
On January 10, CNN was first to report, based on leaked information, that the contents of the dossier were presented during classified briefings one week earlier to then-President Obama and President-elect Trump.
Just after CNN's January 10 report on the classified briefings about the dossier, BuzzFeed published the dossier's full unverified contents.
Last week, McCain denied providing the dossier to BuzzFeed and said that he only gave the material to the FBI. "I gave it to no one except for the director of the FBI. I don't know why you're digging this up now," McCain told The Daily Caller during what the news website described as a testy exchange.
It is not immediately clear how McCain obtained the dossier in the first place.
A January 11 statement from McCain attempted to explain why he provided the documents to the FBI but did not mention how he came to possess the dossier or whether he knew who funded it.
"Upon examination of the contents, and unable to make a judgment about their accuracy, I delivered the information to the director of the FBI," McCain said at the time. "That has been the extent of my contact with the FBI or any other government agency regarding this issue."
Sir Andrew Wood, a former British ambassador to Moscow, said McCain first consulted him about the claims inside the dossier at a security conference in Canada shortly after last November's presidential election. Wood stated that McCain had obtained the documents from the senator's own sources. "I told him I was aware of what was in the report but I had not read it myself, that it might be true, it might be untrue. I had no means of judging really," Wood further told BBC Radio 4 in January.
In March, Vanity Fair raised questions about the alleged involvement of David J. Kramer, a former State Department official, in helping to obtain the dossier directly from Steele. The issue was also raised in a lawsuit filed against Steele by one of the individuals named in the dossier.
The dossier contains wild and unproven claims that the Russians had information regarding Trump and sordid sexual acts, including the widely mocked claim that Trump hired prostitutes and had them urinate on a hotel room bed. It also claimed there was an exchange of information between Trump surrogates and intermediaries for the Russian government.
Those allegations remain unsubstantiated following numerous public hearings. Indeed, former CIA Director John Brennan made clear in testimony last May that after viewing all of the evidence that was available to him on the Russia probe he is not aware of any collusion between Russia and members of Trump's 2016 presidential campaign.
Dossier was reportedly basis for Obama administration moves
According to the BBC, the dossier served as a "roadmap" for the FBI's investigation into claims of coordination between Moscow and members of Trump's presidential campaign during the Obama administration.
In April, CNN reported that the dossier served as part of the FBI's justification for seeking the FISA court's reported approval to clandestinely monitor the communications of Carter Page, the American oil industry investior who was tangentially and briefly associated with Trump's presidential campaign.
Senior Republican members of the Senate Judiciary Committee have reportedly requested that the FBI and Department of Justice turn over applications for any warrants to monitor the communications of U.S. citizens associated with the investigation into alleged Russia interference in the 2016 presidential election.
In testimony last month, Comey repeatedly refused to answer questions about his agency's ties to the dossier.
In testimony last month to the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Comey admitted he pushed back against a request from President Donald Trump to possibly investigate the origins of "salacious material" that the agency possessed in the course of its investigation into alleged Russian interference.
Dossier discredited
Major questions have been raised as to the veracity of the dossier, large sections of which have been discredited.
Citing a "Kremlin insider," the dossier, which misspelled the name of a Russian diplomat, claimed that Trump lawyer Michael Cohen held "secret meetings" with Kremlin officials in Prague in August 2016.
That charge unraveled after Cohen revealed he had never traveled to Prague, calling the story "totally fake, totally inaccurate." The Atlantic confirmed Cohen's whereabouts in New York and California during the period the dossier claimed that Cohen was in Prague. Cohen reportedly produced his passport showing he had not traveled to Prague.
In testimony in May, the FBI's Comey confirmed that the basis for the intelligence community's assessment that Russia allegedly wanted Trump in office was not because the billionaire was, as Sen. Al Franken (D-MN) claimed during a hearing, "ensnared in" Russia's "web of patronage" – just as the dossier alleged. Instead, the FBI chief provided two primary reasons for Russia's alleged favoring of Trump over Clinton during the 2016 presidential race.
One reason, according to Comey, was that Putin "hated" Clinton and would have favored any Republican opponent. The second reason, Comey explained, was that Putin made an assessment that it would be easier to make a deal with a businessman than someone from the political class.
Comey's statements are a far cry from the conspiracies fueled by the dossier alleging Putin held blackmail information over the billionaire.
Citing current and former government officials, the New Yorker reported the dossier prompted skepticism among intelligence community members, with the publication quoting one member saying it was a "nutty" piece of evidence to submit to a U.S. president.
Steele's work has been questioned by former acting CIA Director Michael Morell, who currently works at the Hillary Clinton-tied Beacon Global Strategies LLC.
NBC News reported on Morell's questions about Steele's credibility:
Morell, who was in line to become CIA director if Clinton won, said he had seen no evidence that Trump associates cooperated with Russians. He also raised questions about the dossier written by a former British intelligence officer, which alleged a conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia. …
Morell pointed out that former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said on Meet the Press on March 5 that he had seen no evidence of a conspiracy when he left office January 20.
"That's a pretty strong statement by General Clapper," Morell said.
Regarding Steele's dossier, Morell stated, "Unless you know the sources, and unless you know how a particular source acquired a particular piece of information, you can't judge the information — you just can't."
Morell charged the dossier "doesn't take you anywhere, I don't think."
"I had two questions when I first read it. One was, How did Chris talk to these sources? I have subsequently learned that he used intermediaries."
Morell continued:
And then I asked myself, why did these guys provide this information, what was their motivation? And I subsequently learned that he paid them. That the intermediaries paid the sources and the intermediaries got the money from Chris. And that kind of worries me a little bit because if you're paying somebody, particularly former FSB officers, they are going to tell you truth and innuendo and rumor, and they're going to call you up and say, "Hey, let's have another meeting, I have more information for you," because they want to get paid some more.
I think you've got to take all that into consideration when you consider the dossier.
Aaron Klein is Breitbart's Jerusalem bureau chief and senior investigative reporter. He is a New York Times bestselling author and hosts the popular weekend talk radio program, "Aaron Klein Investigative Radio." Follow him on Twitter @AaronKleinShow. Follow him on Facebook.
Written with research by Joshua Klein.


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MVP candidate Matt Ryan struggled. The running game bogged down after the first quarter. And yet the Atlanta Falcons still pulled off their biggest win of the season Thursday night in the Georgia Dome, 23-13 over the New Orleans Saints.
This Falcons team doesn't always pass the eye test. They often seem to be outplayed -- like against the Arizona Cardinals and Oakland Raiders -- yet find a way to win. They win games in the final seconds, like against the Carolina Panthers and Tampa Bay Buccaneers. And they beat their biggest division rivals this week in a sloppy, often inexplicable affair.
This is just how the Falcons are going to be. Get used to it, because they're headed for the No. 1 playoff seed in the NFC, and we're going to be talking a lot about them. They officially will clinch the NFC South if the Buccaneers lose or tie Sunday against the Houston Texans.
On Thursday night, the Falcons showed they can win games with their defense. On a night when Ryan threw for just 165 yards and had plenty of wayward passes, the Falcons picked off Drew Brees five times. Defensive coordinator Mike Nolan's unit gave up a lot of yards but buckled down in the red zone. The Falcons knocked down 12 passes with swarming pass coverage. They got a huge sack from John Abraham in the fourth quarter when the Saints were driving, only down by seven points. Yes, the Falcons got their share of luck.
At 11-1, the Falcons clearly aren't a perfect team. But they do have a perfect record at home. After this win over their most hated rivals, they should be playing at home through the NFC playoffs. That matters a lot more than any eye test.
Follow Gregg Rosenthal on Twitter @greggrosenthal.


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Showing 1 to 30 of 31 results
In a sentence is a great way to study & learn actual grammar which is used for making sentences. If you don't have the knowledge about making sentences then you can simply make them by this website. Eg- if you want to make (word) in a sentence then search it in the input bar you will get many examples of sentences.


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Onyx Asphalt
Driveway Sealing and Asphalt Repairs
Onyx Asphalt is here to help with all your pavement repair needs. Whether that's sealing a driveway, repairing a parking lot, patching cracks, or painting new lines, our team will assist you with the utmost attention to quality and customer service.
Whitby is a town in Durham Region. Whitby is located in Southern Ontario east of Ajax and west of Oshawa, on the north shore of Lake Ontario and is home to the headquarters of Durham Region. It had a population of 138,501 at the 2021 census. It is approximately 20 km (12 mi) east of the eastern border of Toronto, and it is known as a commuter suburb in the Greater Toronto Area. While the southern portion of Whitby is predominantly urban and an economic hub, the northern part of the municipality is more rural and includes the communities of Ashburn, Brooklin, Myrtle, Myrtle Station, and Macedonian Village.
Agincourt North, Ashburn Community Park, Bendale, Birch Cliff, Birch Cliff Heights, Brooklin, Brown's Corners, Cedar Grove, Central Oshawa, Clairlea, Clairlea-Birchmount, Cliffcrest, Cliffside, Cullen Central Park, Curran Hall


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Fairness is not always the most important priority for small retailers. In an international study, University of Missouri researchers found that some small retailers are less concerned about whether they are treated fairly by business suppliers than other factors, such as cash flow and company survival.
Lisa Scheer, the Emma S. Distinguished Professor of Marketing in the MU Trulaske College of Business, notes that what retailers consider to be fair business practices differ greatly across cultures and situations.
"It is presumed that fairness, however it is defined by individual businesses, is important to all businesses," Scheer said. "Our research challenges that presumption and reveals that the importance placed on fairness can vary greatly among retailers."
Scheer says businesses who partner with other businesses might have contrasting ideas about what fairness means, which could challenge business relationships.
"Businesses constantly are concerned about the importance of fairness in their relations with customers," Scheer said. "However, less emphasis is placed on views of fairness among different business partners. In some cases, one business partner may be less interested in being treated fairly and more concerned about receiving adequate cash flow or profit for the business to survive. Investing time and effort to 'be fair' in those situations is wasted and even counter-productive if it undermines the factors that are more important to the other business partner."
Scheer surveyed small retailers in 10 culturally diverse countries, including the United States, to determine their views on fairness in their relationships with suppliers. They found that, although most small business owners were concerned with fairness, the degree of importance placed on fairness varied greatly.
"The data from our study show that retail managers with low tolerance for uncertainty place much greater importance on fairness than those comfortable with uncertainty, an effect which is enhanced when the managers have had greater exposure to cultures other than their home countries," Scheer said. "It is particularly short-sighted to extrapolate one's own perspectives about fairness when doing business with partners in other cultures and in countries at different stages of development."
Scheer suggests that businesses should learn about one another's stances on fairness and other competing goals and business practices.
"Retailers should not assume that the priorities of their business partners match their own," Scheer said. "The managers may be surprised to discover that their business partners place much less importance on fairness than other factors. If business partners discuss their values and probe to determine what is most important for each party, contracts and interactions can be designed to better match each participant's needs, thereby building more effective business relationships. Everyone can ensure that they are on the same page and know what to expect when conducting business together."
Scheer's research team included former MU doctoral students Donald Lund, now assistant professor at the University of Alabama-Birmingham, and Irina Kozlenkova, now assistant professor at Michigan State University. The study, "Culture's Impact on the Importance of Fairness in Interorganizational Relationships," was published in the Journal of International Marketing.
Story Source:
Materials provided by University of Missouri-Columbia. Original written by Jerett Rion. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.
Journal Reference:
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ANTELOPE VALLEY – NASA's Dryden Flight Research Center is known for aircraft and science research, but a recent center-funded study is examining an air-borne disease found in the Mojave Desert.
Microscopic spores found in the soil of the arid regions of California and Arizona can lead to a serious fungal infection called Valley Fever, also known as coccidioidomycosis.
Reported Valley Fever cases in the Antelope Valley increased 545 percent when comparing 2000 – 2003 (49 cases) to 2008 – 2011 (316 cases), according to Ramon E. Guevara, Ph.D., epidemiologist with the County of Los Angeles Department of Public Health.
The disease is contracted after tiny spores are inhaled into the lungs from disturbed soil. There is no vaccine for this non-transmittable disease. Although it can be debilitating, it is rarely fatal.
A large number of those who live in the arid Southwest may become infected when exposed to the spores, but do not notice symptoms. Others develop symptoms similar to the flu that can last for months. In extreme cases, the infection can spread from the lungs to other parts of the body.
Especially vulnerable are visitors or new residents of an area where Valley Fever is prevalent, such as the Antelope Valley area of the Mojave Desert. NASA Dryden, located on Edwards Air Force Base in that region, hosts hundreds of temporary contract employees or guest scientists who come to the center to conduct research using Dryden's aircraft.
"What makes the Antelope Valley significant is that it has the largest potential for population growth in Los Angeles County. In the Antelope Valley from 1996 to 2005, the correlation between the number of Valley Fever cases and the number of newly constructed privately owned buildings is 0.95, which is very strong as the perfect correlation is 1.00," Guevara added.
All NASA centers have identified strategies for dealing with potential negative effects of climate change and formed the Climate Adaptation Science Investigator (CASI) working group. This group is tasked with identifying climate-change risks – such as drought, flooding, hurricanes, wildfires – at each center and developing strategies intended to minimize the impact to NASA missions. Dryden's representatives are meteorologist Ed Teets and occupational health scientist Miriam Rodon-Naveira, who holds a doctorate in microbiology.
Teets and Rodon-Naveira continue research this year into the spread of Valley Fever by funding a scientist to gather soil samples in the region. Thomas Mace, retired NASA scientist and CASI member, procured original funding in 2012.
"NASA is enabling this research, hoping to provide the scientific community with data to better understand how climate increases or decreases outbreaks of Valley Fever," said Rodon-Naveira. "That information can then be translated and provided to public health communities so they can use the data to make more informed decisions concerning Valley Fever."
Antje Lauer, who has a Ph.D. in biology and is an assistant professor at California State University in Bakersfield, recently gathered soil samples from a variety of locations at Edwards Air Force Base with the goal of learning if one area held more Valley Fever spores than another. For example, is there an increase in the number of spores at the edge of a dry lake where moisture may have at times been greater than on the sloping hillside? A looming question is whether the current drought is increasing the number of Valley Fever cases when the dry soil is disturbed and releases the spores that are carried by desert winds.
"Antje Lauer's work is very important to public health as she and her team lead the research in characterizing the soil where the Coccidioides immitis fungus grows," commented Guevara. "Such information can contribute to strategies such as construction worker protection and population education."
The Dryden CASI working group members brought together Lauer, Vic Etyemezian, who approaches his work with a doctorate in civil and environmental engineering, and George Nikolich of the Desert Research Institute (DRI) in Las Vegas, as the type of research the groups were conducting was complimentary.
As part of a NASA Research Opportunities in Space and Earth Sciences (ROSES) grant studying climate change at Dryden, Etyemezian is researching how soil behaves at different wind speeds. The pair collected dust samples using a small portable wind tunnel creating a situation similar to what occurs in the desert when the dust blows. They also studied the plants in the area of dust sampling because soil in that area may react differently from that sampled away from vegetation.
Additional DRI research funded under NASA's Impacts of Climate Variability and Change on NASA Centers and Facilities Program grant includes development of regional climate projections for the Antelope Valley and characterization of the hydrology of the local watershed for the possibility of extreme storm events and flooding at Dryden. The latter included deploying meteorological sensors on and around Rogers Dry Lake.
Valley Fever also caught the attention of Public Broadcasting Services' News Hour producers who interviewed the researchers while they collected soil samples on the edge of Rosamond Dry Lake at Edwards in mid-May.
NASA Dryden is enabling the California State University – Bakersfield and the Desert Research Institute studies to gain more information about where this particular organism lives. The ability to determine the type of soil, wind levels and moisture content required to reproduce and spread Valley Fever spores may lead to a healthier population in the arid Southwest.


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Speculation over whom the College of Cardinals will elect as the new pope is focusing on the geographic distribution of the world's Catholics. Only 16 percent of the world's population is Catholic, but some 42 percent of these believers are Latin American and 15 percent African. And here's a few more numbers : according to the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, 432 million Latin Americans, fully 73 percent of the region's population, identify (if not practice) as Catholics. Some 134 million Brazilians identify as Catholic, making Brazil the world's largest Catholic population in the world, with 12.2 percent of the global share. Mexico has the second largest Catholic population. While in Colombia, only the sixth globally, 38 of its 42 million people identify as Catholic.
We won't know until Easter if the heavily Latin American and African concentration of Catholics will penetrate Europe's long history of running the papacy. It might take longer for the Vatican's leadership to become more representative than for the UN Security Council, where Brazil and Latin America as a whole can likewise make a similarly legitimate claim for more representative distribution of permanent seats.
But beyond the national or regional origin of Pope Benedict's successor, and quite apart from the separate matter of how the Vatican copes with (or perhaps is inadvertently prompting) the rise of evangelicals in both regions, it seems to me that the Catholic Church remains unprepared to adjust its doctrine to the way people live and love today. Gay marriage and civil unions, women's rights and contraception to prevent pregnancy or disease : I don't have the statistics but it is a good guess that some Catholic-identified Latin Americans are also gay, lesbian, women, or users of contraception, or all of the above. Or simply modern human beings : men, women, gay, straight, or somewhere else on the gender/sexuality continuum. The same can be said for the United States, where the Church's evangelical priorities are running smack into its rigidity on social doctrine, its hypocrisy in sheltering child molesters while preaching a gospel of protecting the most vulnerable among us.
But is it really necessary for the Catholic Church to become less rigid, more progressive ? We all know practicing or quasi-practicing Catholics for whom the spiritual strength they derive from prayer far outweighs their doctrinal disagreements. If believers themselves can live with the contradictions, is pining for a more modern Vatican just a little too secular, even naïve ? I don't think so. Although the Vatican no longer has the geopolitical weight of the UN Security Council, it exercises enormous cultural power. And that power still affects us all.


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NEW YORK — Thinking about getting a new flat-screen TV, or a dresser for the baby's room? Factor safety into your choice.
The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission warns TVs and furniture like dressers and chests pose tip-over risks if they are not properly anchored to walls. This is especially true in households with young children, who can be tempted to climb on anything. But plenty of adults get injured, too.
Emergency rooms treat an average of 30,700 people — 52 percent of them children — each year for injuries related to falling televisions, furniture and appliances, according to a 2017 CPSC report. Between 2000 and 2016, 514 people were killed by tip-overs, more than 80 percent of them children.
The CPSC's "Anchor-It!" campaign encourages families to attach TVs and top-heavy furniture to walls.
"This is really kind of a hidden hazard," said Ann Marie Buerkle, acting chairman of the CPSC.
With that in mind, here are some things to consider while shopping.
Take a look at the room where you want the item to go. What kind of walls does it have? In most homes, bedrooms have sheet rock walls, making it relatively simple to install anti-tip devices. It's just a matter of finding the studs and following the instructions properly.
Things get more complicated if you have an older home with plaster or brick walls. Stud finders are useless for plaster walls and drilling into brick can be tricky. That might mean a dresser may have to go against another wall than the one you had in mind. So, take that into account before settling on the size and shape of a dresser.
If plaster or brick walls are the only option, consider hiring a professional to avoid mistakes that will leave a bunch of holes, said Peter Kerin, owner of Minnesota-based Foresight ChildProofing Inc.
Keep the same considerations in mind for old furniture or TVs that might get moved to make room for the new piece. Many families end up putting old TVs on top of furniture not meant to hold it and then forget to anchor it, Buerkle said.
Most American furniture manufacturers adhere to safety standards developed by ASTM International for a wide range of products. Manufacturers' compliance is voluntary, however. Ikea has recalled more than 17 million chests and dressers that didn't meet the standards, after eight children were killed by toppled Ikea furniture. The Swedish retailer says it no longer sells furniture in the U.S. that doesn't meet the standards.
Dressers must pass two stability tests to meet the standards. The first requires the piece not to tip over when all drawers are opened to the "stop," or two-thirds of the way if there is no "stop." The furniture also must not tip over when all of its doors are opened 90 degrees. For the second test, the furniture must not fall over when a 50-pound weight — the average weight of a 5-year-old — is gradually applied to the front of the drawer. The furniture must also be sold with anti-tip restraint kits.
Check to see if the furniture has a permanent tip-over warning label attached, usually inside the top drawer. That will let you know it adheres to the standards.
If you are buying furniture online, avoid any product that does not specifically say it meets the standards, says Pat Bowling, vice president for communications of the American Home Furnishings Alliance.
There is also no need to blow your budget. Furniture that complies with the ASTM guidelines is widely available in all price ranges, Bowling said.
Most new furniture comes with anti-tip restraints and instructions for installing them. But don't forget about the older furniture or TVs in your home. Anti-tip brackets are available at hardware stores, major big-box retailers and online. A stud finder and a drill are also a good idea.
Look for restraints that are detachable, for easy cleaning, and that comply with their own ASTM standards. Kerin says he prefers metal buckle and nylon straps but the most important thing is to install them properly. For furniture, make sure to put the screws into solid wood, rather than the thin paneling usually found on the back.


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Are Mental Disorders the Result of Neuroinflammation?
Case Adams, Naturopath
Waking Times
New research is increasingly finding that not only are many cognitive disorders such as Alzheimer's and other forms of dementia related to inflammation among brain tissues, but classic mental diseases such as schizophrenia and depression may also be connected to brain inflammation.
Recent research from Japan's Kyushu University Medical School and Saga University have been revealing that many mental disorders are produced by inflammation involving the microglia cells of the brain.
What are microglia?
The microglia are immune cells categorized as macophages, but they are focused upon the health of the central nervous system – particularly the brain and spine. Microglia roam the neurons of these areas in search for toxins, intruders and possible infections.
Particularly at issue in cognitive issues such as dementia and Alzheimer's disease is the build up of amyloid plaque among brain cells. The microglia are the immune cells that prevent and clean up plaque build up among brain cells.
When the microglia populations are damaged or otherwise altered, the brain and CNS becomes increasingly susceptible to mental disorders such as dementia, schizophrenia, depression and mental fatigue.
Neuroinflammation and microglia
Neuroinflammation is the result of damage among brain cells. Healthy microglia populations are focused upon preventing inflammation among neurons, in turn preventing damage to brain cells.
However, when brain cells are damaged, microglia work harder to repair the damage by producing a variety of inflammatory factors. The damage to neurons, evidenced by these inflammatory factors, hamper the brain's function.
Like other types of macrophages, the microglia are formed within the bone marrow. Once they migrate to the brain, they differentiate into particular responsibilities and different regions. Some microglia are focused on infections, others are focused upon toxins or damaged cells. Others stimulate the repair of brain tissues.
Plaque and neuroinflammation
The build-up of plaque among brain cells – connected to dementia – stimulates the microglia as they work to try to remove the damage. Damage from oxidative stress and glycation byproducts have been linked to this build up of plaque among brain cells.
Research by Dr. Akira Monji and associates has connected mental disorders such as schizophrenia, depressive states and cognitive issues to these increases in microglia inflammatory factors such as nitric oxide and cytokines. When the microglia have rapidly expanded in the face of damage to brain cells, they produce these inflammatory factors. Dr. Monji's research has shown that the brain tissues of schizophrenia, depression and dementia patients have increased levels of these microglia inflammatory factors.
Furthermore, their research has found that one of the central mechanisms of psychiatric drugs is that they reduce levels of these inflammatory factors – temporarily.
Like most pharmaceuticals, this temporary reduction of inflammatory factors does little to prevent or reduce the cause of the inflammation. Furthermore, by blocking inflammatory factors, the drugs work to interfere with the damage repair that is taking place, driven by the microglia immune cells. This is often the scenario for drugs that are focused upon the symptoms rather than the causes of a condition.
What causes neuroinflammation?
The cause of neuroinflammation, as shown in numerous dementia studies, relates to oxidative damage. Oxidation is produced through an imbalance between toxins that form oxidative radicals and those antioxidants that neutralize those radicals. When the system is not balanced, oxidation takes place, not only among tissues among the cardiovascular system, but also among brain tissues.
This of course is why recent research, such as a new French and Finnish INSERM study, has linked cognitive decline to increased obesity, diabetes and heart disease.
The study, led by Dr. Mika Kivimaki and associates from the French government's investigative body, INSERM, with support from the U.S. National Institutes of Medicine, studied 6,401 adults between 39 and 63 years old. They found that people who were obese and suffered from metabolic disorder (cardiovascular disease and/or diabetes) had more than a 22% greater cognitive decline than those who were of normal weight with no metabolic disorder.
This study has been confirmed by others that have related cognitive decline to cardiovascular disease, sedentary lifestyles, obesity and increased levels of toxins.
These issues have all been connected to higher levels of inflammation in the body.
The bridge to these relationships has been provided by the Japanese research, finding that neuroinflammation is one of the key factors affecting mental disorders of many types.
Antioxidants and mental disorders
Numerous studies have shown that antioxidants neutralize oxidative radicals that produce inflammation. The very term "antioxidant" is founded upon research showing that particular phyto-chemicals directly neutralize the oxidative effects of radicals formed by toxins.
This is supported by the research.
For example, in another large French study published this March in the Journal of Nutrition, researchers found that a healthy diet with greater antioxidant intake was associated with reduced risk of cognitive decline after the researchers removed factors relating to exercise, alcohol intake, calories, gender, age, education and obesity.
This is of course despite the fact that other research has found that smoking and lack of exercise both increase the rate of cognitive decline, as illustrated in a study by some of the same INSERM researchers that linked obesity and cognitive decline.
What this all means is that mental disorders are no longer conditions that necessarily fall within the abstract domain of behavioral psychology and psychiatry, where treatments such as lobotomy, electric shock and psychotropic drugs have produced a myriad of adverse mental and physical effects.
Rather, the research is conclusive: Many mental disorders are in fact produced by poor diets and poor lifestyles, and thus are to a great degree preventable.
This research also brings mental disorders within the realm of natural health and nutrition. What is now known is that a person with a healthy diet containing plenty of antioxidants, together with an active lifestyle, has a significantly reduced risk of having a mental disorder.
More importantly, a person with a healthier, antioxidant-rich diet will also stand a better chance of remaining alert into their elderly years.
Learn more about natural and gentle cleansing.
Related Research on GreenMedInfo
- Monji A. The neuroinflammation hypothesis of psychiatric disorders. Seishin Shinkeigaku Zasshi. 2012;114(2):124-33.
- Sabia S, Elbaz A, Dugravot A, Head J, Shipley M, Hagger-Johnson G, Kivimaki M, Singh-Manoux A. Impact of Smoking on Cognitive Decline in Early Old Age: The Whitehall II Cohort Study. Arch Gen Psychiatry. 2012 Feb 6.
- Singh-Manoux A, Czernichow S, Elbaz A, Dugravot A, Sabia S, Hagger-Johnson G, Kaffashian S, Zins M, Brunner EJ, Nabi H, Kivimaki M. Obesity phenotypes in midlife and cognition in early old age: The Whitehall II cohort study. Neuro. 2012; 79 (8): 755.
- Kesse-Guyot E, Andreeva VA, Jeandel C, Ferry M, Hercberg S, Galan P. A healthy dietary pattern at midlife is associated with subsequent cognitive performance. J Nutr. 2012 May;142(5):909-15.
- McCrimmon RJ, Ryan CM, Frier BM. Diabetes and cognitive dysfunction. Lancet. 2012 Jun 16;379(9833):2291-9.
- Chen SJ, Chao YL, Chen CY, Chang CM, Wu EC, Wu CS, Yeh HH, Chen CH, Tsai HJ. Prevalence of autoimmune diseases in in-patients with schizophrenia: nationwide population-based study. Br J Psychiatry. 2012 May;200(5):374-80.
About the Author
Case Adams is a California Naturopath and holds a Ph.D. in Natural Health Sciences. His focus is upon science-based natural health solutions. He is the author of 20 books on natural health and numerous print and internet articles. His work can be found at http://www.caseadams.com.
This article originally appeared at GreenMedInfo.com, an excellent source for news and information about natural, preventative medicine.
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int CMarkup::GetElemIndex() const;
returns the current main position element's internal index. If there is no current main position, it returns 0
. See ElemIndex Navigation for the full story on all the ElemIndex methods.
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Waiting on Wednesday is hosted by Jill from Breaking the Spine.
Between the Lines by Jodi Picoult
Release Date:
June 26th, 2012
Release Date:
June 26th, 2012
What happens when happily ever after…isn't?
Delilah is a bit of a loner who prefers spending her time in the school library with her head in a book—one book in particular. Between the Lines may be a fairy tale, but it feels real. Prince Oliver is brave, adventurous, and loving. He really speaks to Delilah.
And then one day Oliver actually speaks to her. Turns out, Oliver is more than a one-dimensional storybook prince. He's a restless teen who feels trapped by his literary existence and hates that his entire life is predetermined. He's sure there's more for him out there in the real world, and Delilah might just be his key to freedom.
Delilah and Oliver work together to attempt to get Oliver out of his book, a challenging task that forces them to examine their perceptions of fate, the world, and their places in it. And as their attraction to each other grows along the way, a romance blossoms that is anything but a fairy tale.
I've always been a fan of Jodi Picoult's other books. I've only read a few but they have a deep spot in my heart and they always make me cry. Jodi Picoult is famously known for her book, My Sister's Keeper. This book seems different from her other works and I'm looking forward to reading it!


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Eager to expand their European investment to Italy, a Qatari fund have expressed their interest in the purchase of Roma.
The Giallorossi meet all the requirements set by Qatar, as Rome is one of the most popular capital cities on the continent, as well as being a famous tourist attraction.
According to L'Equipe, the Italian club's president, James Pallotta, has already turned down an offer to sell Roma, but the investors are eager to push for a deal.
Although Qatar Sports Investments group have been owners of Paris Saint-Germain since 2011, the investment will come from another fund to comply with UEFA's rules.