title: Simon Mayo

text: Mayo hosted a revival of the classic quiz show "Blockbusters", which began airing on Challenge on 14 May 2012 until 3 August 2012.


title: Simon Mayo

text: He was the announcer for the concert celebrating Queen Elizabeth II's Diamond Jubilee on 4 June 2012.


title: Simon Mayo

text: "Confessions", based on the hit feature from his BBC Radio 2 drivetime show, and his former BBC Radio 1 breakfast and mid-morning shows. was released in October 2011. The book is a compilation of the best confessions sent to the show by listeners.


title: Simon Mayo

text: Mayo's debut novel, "Itch", was released on 1 March 2012. The titular protagonist is a fourteen-year-old boy who discovers a previously unknown chemical element. "The Guardian" called it 'a great and thrilling book with an easy to read storyline that will help kids to understand elements!' His second novel "Itch Rocks" was released in February 2013 and the third instalment, "Itchcraft", came out in September 2014.


title: Simon Mayo

text: Mayo's first novel for adults, "Mad Blood Stirring", was published in April 2018 and received mixed reviews. It is a historical novel set in Dartmoor Prison in 1815. Clare Clarke, for "The Guardian", said: "With its huge, amorphous cast and little interior characterisation, its pages rich with Shakespeare’s poetry and the rousing gospel music for which Block 4 was reputedly renowned, the dialogue-heavy "Mad Blood Stirring" reads more like a first-draft film treatment than a finished novel. Mayo has served up all the ingredients he could find, but longer cooking would have given it greater depth and subtlety of flavour." The novelist John Boyne said: "Bristling with energy, written with passion, "Mad Blood Stirring" is a joy to read."


title: Simon Mayo

text: In 2020 "Knife Edge", a first thriller for Mayo, was published. Its setting is drawn from his experiences when an undergraduate at Warwick University, and the denouement is in the neighbouring city of Coventry. The book was promoted as a "Sunday Times" Top 10 bestseller. "Tick Tock", a thriller based on a mysterious global illness, was published in 2022.


title: Simon Mayo

text: While at university, he was a presenter on the student radio station, Radio Warwick. In 2005 the university awarded him an honorary Doctor of Letters.


title: Simon Mayo

text: Mayo is married to Hilary Bird, who had worked at Radio Nottingham since 1984 on "Action Line", and also worked for BBC Radio 2 as a producer for Canon Roger Royle and later Don Maclean on "Good Morning Sunday" from 1987 to 1990. The wedding took place on Saturday 11 October 1986 at St Helen's Church in Burton Joyce, Nottinghamshire. They have two sons and a daughter. Mayo is a supporter of Tottenham Hotspur, and lives in London.


title: Simon Mayo

text: Mayo was appointed Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) in the 2021 Birthday Honours for services to broadcasting.


title: Mickey Rooney Jr.

text: Mickey Rooney Jr. (July 3, 1945 – July 16, 2022) was an American actor. He was the eldest son of the actor Mickey Rooney, and operated the Rooney Entertainment Group, a film and television production company. He was a born-again Christian who had an evangelical ministry in Hemet, California.


title: Mickey Rooney Jr.

text: Rooney was born on July 3, 1945, in Birmingham, Alabama, to actor Mickey Rooney (1920–2014) and a past Miss Birmingham and singer Betty Jane Rase (1927–2002).


title: Mickey Rooney Jr.

text: After appearing as a "Mouseketeer" in "The Mickey Mouse Club" in 1955 along with his brother Tim, he played his first film role in 1967 in "Hot Rods to Hell". He later appeared in the television film "Beyond the Bermuda Triangle" in 1975 and in the film "Honeysuckle Rose" in 1980.


title: Mickey Rooney Jr.

text: Rooney once was married to "Playboy" Playmate of the Month, Merci Montello. Rooney met Laura Hollander in 1986 and they married on December 30, 1986. They were married until her death in 2006.


title: Horseshoe Falls

text: Horseshoe Falls is the largest of the three waterfalls that collectively form Niagara Falls on the Niagara River along the Canada–United States border. Approximately 90% of the Niagara River, after diversions for hydropower generation, flows over Horseshoe Falls. The remaining 10% flows over American Falls and Bridal Veil Falls. It is located between Terrapin Point on Goat Island in the US state of New York, and Table Rock in the Canadian province of Ontario.


title: Horseshoe Falls

text: When the boundary line between the United States and Canada was determined in 1819, based on the Treaty of Ghent, the northeastern end of the Horseshoe Falls was in New York, United States, flowing around the Terrapin Rocks, which were once connected to Goat Island by a series of bridges. In 1955, the area between the rocks and Goat Island was filled in, creating Terrapin Point. In the early 1980s the United States Army Corps of Engineers filled in more land and built diversion dams and retaining walls to force the water away from Terrapin Point. Altogether, of the Horseshoe Falls was eliminated. Due to erosion, the falls will continue to move in relation to the boundary line in the future.


title: Horseshoe Falls

text: The official national maps for both Canada and the United States indicate that a small portion of the Horseshoe Falls is located within the United States.


title: Nectanebo II

text: Nectanebo II (Egyptian: ; ) was the last native ruler of Ancient Egypt, as well as the third and last pharaoh from the Thirtieth Dynasty of Egypt. He reigned from 358 to 340 BC.


title: Nectanebo II

text: Under Nectanebo II, Egypt prospered. During his reign, the Egyptian artists developed a specific style that left a distinctive mark on the reliefs of the Ptolemaic Kingdom. Like his indirect predecessor Nectanebo I, Nectanebo II showed enthusiasm for many of the cults of the gods within ancient Egyptian religion, and more than a hundred Egyptian sites bear evidence of his attentions. Nectanebo II, however, undertook more constructions and restorations than Nectanebo I, commencing in particular the enormous Egyptian temple of Isis (the Iseum).


title: Nectanebo II

text: For several years, Nectanebo II was successful in keeping Egypt safe from the Achaemenid Empire. However, betrayed by his former servant, Mentor of Rhodes, Nectanebo II was ultimately defeated. The Persians occupied Memphis and then seized the rest of Egypt, incorporating the country into the Achaemenid Empire under Artaxerxes III. Nectanebo fled south and preserved his power for some time; his subsequent fate is unknown.


title: Nectanebo II

text: "Nectanebo" is derived from the Greek form of his name, (, or in later sources). His Egyptian name was "Nḫt-Ḥr-Ḥbt", which means "victorious is Horus of Hebyt". Although convention in English assigns identical names to him and his grandfather, Nectanebo I, the latter was in fact called ().


title: Nectanebo II

text: Except for the small-scale greywacke statue in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which shows Nectanebo II standing before the image of Horus, no other annotated portraits of Nectanebo II are known. In the greywacke statue, Nectanebo II is shown in a "nemes" and "uraeus." His bent arm with the sword stands for the hieroglyph "nakht", the falcon represents Horus, while the hieroglyph in Nectanebo's right hand stands for "heb". Other portraits attributed to Nectanebo II (all featuring the "khepresh") include a quartzite head in the museum of the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, a basalt head in Alexandria, a granite head acquired by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and a damaged quartzite head.


title: Nectanebo II

text: In 525 BC, Egypt was conquered by the Achaemenid Empire. Because of internal struggles for the Persian imperial succession, Egypt managed to regain independence in 404 BC. In 389 BC, Pharaoh Hakor negotiated a treaty with Athens and for three years (from 385 to 383 BC) managed to withstand Persian aggression. However, following the conclusion of the Peace of Antalcidas in 387 BC between the Achaemenids and the Greek city-states, Egypt and Cyprus became the only obstacles to Persian hegemony in the Mediterranean.


title: Nectanebo II

text: At the beginning of 360 BC, Nectanebo's predecessor, Teos, started preparations for war against intruders. In the same year, the Egyptian army set off, traveling along the coast by land and sea. Nectanebo II accompanied his uncle Teos in that campaign and was in charge of the "machimoi".


title: Nectanebo II

text: In an attempt to quickly raise finances for the war, Teos imposed taxes on Egyptians and seized temple property. Egyptians, particularly the priests, resented these measures but supported Nectanebo II. Teos asked Spartan military leader Agesilaus and Athenian general Chabrias to support him. Agesilaus, however, said he was sent to aid Egypt and not to wage war against it. Chabrias returned home with his mercenaries. Teos decided to flee to the Achaemenid court, where he ultimately died of natural causes.


title: Nectanebo II

text: Nectanebo contended with an unnamed pretender to the throne from the town of Mendes, who proclaimed himself pharaoh. The revolt was probably led by one of the descendants of Nepherites I, whose family had ruled the town before. The claimant sent messengers to Agesilaus in an attempt to persuade Agesilaus to his side. Agesilaus remained loyal to Nectanebo, fearing to become a turncoat. At one of the towns in the Nile Delta, the troops of Nectanebo and Agesilaus were besieged by the usurper, who had gained many sympathisers. Despite the enemy's numerical superiority, Nectanebo and Agesilaus were victorious and the revolt was put down in the fall of 360 BC. Acknowledging Agesilaus, Nectanebo sent him 220 talents of gold.


title: Nectanebo II

text: Religion played an important part in Nectanebo's domestic policy. He began his reign by officiating over the funeral of an Apis bull in Memphis. There, Nectanebo added a relief decoration to the eastern and western temples of Apis. Among notable sanctuaries erected under Nectanebo II are a temple of Khnum in Abu and a temple of Amun at Sekhtam. He also dedicated a diorite "naos" to Anhur-Shu (a fragment of it was found in the temples of Tjebnutjer). Nectanebo II was responsible for the increasing popularity of the Buchis cult. Under Nectanebo II a decree forbidding stone quarrying in the so-called "Mysterious Mountains" in Abydos was issued.


title: Nectanebo II

text: Foreign affairs under Nectanebo II were thwarted by repeated Achaemenid attempts to reoccupy Egypt. Before the accession of Nectanebo II to the throne, the Persians attempted to reclaim Egypt in 385, 383, and 373 BC. Nectanebo used the peace to build up a new army and employed Greek mercenaries, which was a common practice at the time. In about 351 BC, the Achaemenid Empire embarked on a new attempt to reclaim Egypt. After a year of fighting, Nectanebo and his allied generals, and Lamius of Sparta, managed to defeat the Achaemenids. Having scored a resounding victory, Nectanebo II was acclaimed "Nectanebo the divine falcon" by his people, and cults were set up in his name.


title: Nectanebo II

text: In 345/44 BC, Nectanebo supported the Phoenician rebellion against the Achaemenid Empire, led by the king of Sidon, Tennes, and dispatched military aid in the form of 4,000 Greek mercenaries, led by Mentor of Rhodes. However, having heard of the approach of the forces of Artaxerxes III, Mentor opened communication with the Persians in collusion with Tennes.


title: Nectanebo II

text: At the end of 344 BC, ambassadors of Artaxerxes III arrived in Greece, asking for the Greeks' participation in a campaign against Egypt. Athens and Sparta treated the ambassadors with courtesy, but refrained from committing to an alliance against Egypt. Other cities, however, decided to support the Persians: Thebes sent 1,000 hoplites and Argos 3,000.


title: Nectanebo II

text: In the winter of 343 BC, Artaxerxes set off for Egypt. The Egyptian army, headed by Nectanebo, consisted of 60,000 Egyptians, 20,000 Libu, and as many Greek mercenaries. In addition, Nectanebo had a number of flat-bottomed boats intended to prevent an enemy from entering the Nile mouths. The vulnerable points along his Mediterranean sea border and east boundary were protected by strongholds, fortifications and entrenched camps. Persian forces were strengthened by Mentor and his men, well acquainted with the eastern border of Egypt, and by 6,000 Ionians.


title: Nectanebo II

text: Nectanebo II was ultimately defeated and, in the summer of 342 BC, Artaxerxes entered Memphis and installed a satrap. Nectanebo fled to Upper Egypt and finally to Nubia, where he was granted asylum. He, however, preserved a degree of power there for some time. With the help of Khabash, Nectanebo made a vain attempt to regain the throne.


title: Nectanebo II

text: Though placed in an unfortunate period of Egyptian history, and with his legacy perhaps marred by being "the last pharaoh" to rule an autonomous Egypt, Nectanebo was an extensive builder, likely on a scale that would equal many kings of the glory days of the New Kingdom. References to either Nectanebo II or his grandfather have been found almost ubiquitously at the premier religious centres, and the piety of the two kings matched those of the great kings of the past, attested to by the numerous monuments across Egypt bearing their names. Nectanebo II, specifically, built and improved temples across the country, and he donated extensively to the priesthoods of the plethora of sites which he donated to. Nectanebo's name has been found at Heliopolis, Athribis, and Bubastis in the Nile Delta, among other places, but he built most extensively at Sebennytos, including the modern site of Behbeit El Hagar. The reliefs of the temples at Sebennytos would leave a distinct mark on the art of the later Ptolemaic Kingdom. The religious focus of his building campaigns, however, may not be solely due to sheer piety; because Nectanebo was an usurper, he likely sought to legitimise his rule over Egypt religiously.


title: Nectanebo II

text: There is an apocryphal tale appearing in the pseudo-historical "Alexander romance" that details another end for the last native pharaoh. Soon after Alexander the Great's godhood was confirmed by the Libyan Sibyl of Zeus Ammon at the Siwa Oasis, a rumor was begun that Nectanebo II, following defeat in his last battle, did not travel to Nubia but instead to the court of Philip II of Macedon in the guise of an Egyptian magician. There, while Philip was away on campaign, Nectanebo convinced Philip's wife Olympias that Amun was to come to her and that they would father a son. Nectanebo, disguising himself as Amun, slept with Olympias and from this event came Alexander.


title: Nectanebo II

text: This myth would hold strong appeal for the Egyptians, who desired continuity and harbored a strong dislike for foreign rule. In art of this event, Nectanebo is usually depicted as having dragon-like features, for example in the "Speculum Historiale".


title: Nectanebo II

text: In the early Ptolemaic tale of Nectanebo and Petesis, preserved only in a Greek fragment from the Serapeum of Saqqara, the pharaoh has a prophetic dream of Isis in which the god Onuris is angry with him because of his unfinished temple in Sebennytos. Nectanebo calls in the best sculptor of the realm, Petesis, to finish the job, but he bungles his assignment when he gets drunk and chases a beautiful girl instead. The narrative ends abruptly here, but this is probably the preface to the fall of Egypt. Al-Biruni's "A History of India" reproduces the story.


title: Nectanebo II

text: The legend of Nectanebo (or Nectanebus, or Natanabo, as reported in some versions of the "Alexander Romance") left a profound mark on European culture up to the Renaissance and beyond. It is no coincidence that this character is included in the Sola Busca tarot (with the name Natanabo) together with other important "actors" of the same legend: Alexander, Philip of Macedon, Olympias and Ammon. An alchemical interpretation of this character was provided by the Italian scholar Sofia Di Vincenzo in a study on the Sola Busca Tarot, where she explains that Natanabo represents a celestial messenger who came to earth with a gift, the helmet, which is a symbol of invulnerability and both physical and mental potency.


title: Fecal vomiting

text: Fecal vomiting or copremesis is a kind of vomiting wherein the material vomited is of fecal origin. It is a common symptom of gastrojejunocolic fistula and intestinal obstruction in the ileum. Fecal vomiting is often accompanied by an odor of feces on the breath and other gastrointestinal symptoms, including abdominal pain, abdominal distension, dehydration, and diarrhea. In severe cases of bowel obstruction or constipation (such as those related to clozapine treatment) fecal vomiting has been identified as a cause of death.


title: Fecal vomiting

text: Fecal vomiting occurs when the bowel is obstructed for some reason, and intestinal contents cannot move normally. Peristaltic waves occur in an attempt to decompress the intestine, and the strong contractions of the intestinal muscles push the contents backwards through the pyloric sphincter into the stomach, where they are then vomited.


title: Fecal vomiting

text: Fecal vomiting does not include vomiting of the proximal small intestine contents, which commonly occurs during vomiting.


title: The Liberator (miniseries)

text: The Liberator is an American adult animated war drama miniseries created and written by Jeb Stuart. It is based on the book "The Liberator: One World War II Soldier’s 500-Day Odyssey" by Alex Kershaw.


title: The Liberator (miniseries)

text: "The Liberator" takes place during World War II where maverick U.S. Army officer Felix Sparks and the 157th Infantry Regiment fought for over five hundred days alongside the Allied forces during the Italian campaign.


title: The Liberator (miniseries)

text: "The Liberator" is a character-driven action miniseries based on the true story of World War II infantry commander Felix "Shotgun" Sparks (played by Bradley James), who led the members of the 157th Infantry Regiment of the 45th Infantry Division, an integrated group of white cowboys, Mexican Americans and Native soldiers drawn from across the west. Sparks and his battalion of "Thunderbirds" were classic citizen soldiers, and for over 500 days they led a special group of American soldiers from Italy to France to the liberation of the Dachau concentration camp, through some of the most grueling battles of the war, becoming one of the most decorated American combat units of World War II. The unit received eight combat awards for service in Italy, France, Germany and Central Europe


title: The Liberator (miniseries)

text: Announced in November 2018, the miniseries's production would be handled by A&E Studios and Unique Features with animation services by Atlanta-based studio School of Humans. In January 2019, Bradley James was cast in the leading role of Felix Sparks and Martin Sensmeier was cast as Samuel Coldfoot. Later, the animation team behind the series launched Trioscope Studios, with the show as its first series in production. On November 9, Brandon Barr, chief content officer at Trioscope Studios, was interviewed. He stated that the project was "particularly challenging" and a lot of work, while arguing that anime opened the door for other visual techniques and styles. He also hoped that the company could be part of "bringing nuanced emotional drama to that broader adult animation push."


title: The Liberator (miniseries)

text: The miniseries was the first to use Trioscope Enhanced Hybrid Animation, a technique that blends live-action actors with CGI. According to its developers, L.C. Crowley and Grzegorz Jonkajtys, the technique gives off “unprecedented level of emotion and fidelity to the animated drama experience.”


title: The Liberator (miniseries)

text: On Rotten Tomatoes, the miniseries holds an approval rating of 64% based on 11 reviews, with an average rating of 7.15/10. The website's critics consensus reads, ""The Liberator" eccentric animation gives it some creative gloss, but clichéd storytelling and stock characters keep this World War II tale from being wholly salute-worthy." On Metacritic, it has a weighted average score of 59 out of 100 based on 7 reviews, indicating "mixed or average reviews".


title: The Liberator (miniseries)

text: Reviewing the miniseries for "Rolling Stone", Alan Sepinwall gave it 3.5 out of 5 stars and said, ""The Liberator" more often than not is an effective reminder about why pop culture keeps revisiting World War II material again and again." On contrast, Daniel Fienberg of "The Hollywood Reporter" called the show a series which is "very watchable" but is infuriating due to its "inconsistent focus and narrative choices" even though his interest never wavered due to the interesting and "eye-popping" animation. Fienberg concluded that people should check out the show for the animation, for a commemoration of Veterans Days but to be prepared for frustration over "how much more complicated, and how much richer" the actual history is and how the show could have been better.


title: Jacque Fresco

text: Jacque Fresco (March 13, 1916 – May 18, 2017) was an American futurist and self-described social engineer. Self-taught, he worked in a variety of positions related to industrial design.


title: Jacque Fresco

text: Fresco wrote and lectured his views on sustainable cities, energy efficiency, natural-resource management, cybernetic technology, automation, and the role of science in society. He directed the Venus Project and advocated global implementation of a socioeconomic system which he referred to as a "resource-based economy".


title: Jacque Fresco

text: Jacque Fresco was born on March 13, 1916, and grew up in a Sephardi Jewish household, at the family's home in Bensonhurst, in the Brooklyn borough of New York City. Fresco's father was an agriculturist born in Constantinople (now Istanbul, Turkey), while his mother Lena was an emigrant from Jerusalem. He later turned his attention to technocracy. A teenager during the Great Depression, he spent time with friends discussing Charles Darwin, Albert Einstein, science, and the future. Fresco attended the Young Communist League before being "physically ejected" for loudly stating that "Karl Marx was wrong!" after a discussion with the league president during a meeting. He left home at the age of 14, hitchhiking and "jumping" trains as one of the so-called "Wild Boys of the Road".


title: Jacque Fresco

text: Fresco worked at Douglas Aircraft Company in California during the late 1930s. He presented designs including a flying wing and a disk-shaped aircraft. Some of his designs were considered impractical at the time and Fresco's design ideas were not adopted. Fresco resigned from Douglas because of design disagreements.


title: Jacque Fresco

text: In 1942, Fresco was drafted into the United States Army. He was assigned technical design duties for the United States Army Air Forces at Wright Field design laboratories in Dayton, Ohio. One design he produced was a "radical variable camber wing" with which he attempted to optimize flight control by allowing the pilot to adjust the thickness and lift of the wings during flight. Fresco did not adjust to military life and was discharged.


title: Jacque Fresco

text: Fresco was commissioned by Earl "Madman" Muntz, to design low cost housing. Muntz invested $500,000 seed money in the project. Fresco, 32 years old at the time, along with his associates Harry Giaretto and Eli Catran conceived, designed and engineered a project house called the "Trend Home". Fresco came closest to traditional career success with this project. Built mostly of aluminum and glass, it was on prominent display at Stage 8 of the Warner Bros. Sunset Lot in Hollywood for three months. The home could be toured for one dollar, with proceeds going to the Cancer Prevention Society. In the summer of 1948, a Federal Housing Administration official met Muntz about the project. The official's proposal, according to Muntz, would add a bureaucratic overhead negating the low production costs. Without federal or further private funding the project did not go into mass production. This experience led Fresco to the conclusion that society would have to be changed for his inventions to reach their potential.


title: Jacque Fresco

text: In the late 1940s, Fresco created and was director of Scientific Research Laboratories in Los Angeles. Here he also gave lectures, and taught technical design, meanwhile researching and working on inventions as a freelance inventor and scientific consultant. During this period, Fresco struggled to get his research funded and faced setbacks and financial difficulties. In 1955, Fresco left California after his laboratory was removed to build the Golden State Freeway.


title: Jacque Fresco

text: In 1955 Fresco moved to Miami, Florida. He opened a business as a psychological consultant, but had no formal schooling in the subject. Receiving a "barrage of criticism" from the American Psychological Association Fresco stopped that business. In a newspaper article from that time period Fresco claimed to have a degree from Sierra University, Los Angeles, California, which is unverified.


title: Jacque Fresco

text: Fresco described white supremacist organizations he joined to test the feasibility of changing people. He tells of joining a local Ku Klux Klan and White Citizens Council in an attempt to change their views about racial discrimination.


title: Jacque Fresco

text: In Miami Fresco presented designs of a circular city. Fresco made his living working as an industrial designer for various companies such as Alcoa and the Major Realty Corporation.


title: Jacque Fresco

text: In 1961, with Pietro Belluschi and C. Frederick Wise, Fresco collaborated on a project known as the Sandwich House. Consisting of mostly prefabricated components, partitions, and aluminum, the project sold houses for $2,950, or $7,500 with foundation and all internal installations. During this period, Fresco supported his projects by designing prefabricated aluminum devices through Jacque Fresco Enterprises Inc.


title: Jacque Fresco

text: "Looking Forward" was published in 1969. Author Ken Keyes Jr., and Jacque Fresco coauthored the book. "Looking Forward" is a speculative look at the future. The authors picture an ideal 'cybernetic society in which want has been banished and work and personal possessions no longer exist; individual gratification is the total concern'.


title: Jacque Fresco

text: Fresco formed "Sociocyberneering", a membership organization claiming 250 members, according to an interview with Fresco. He hosted lectures in Miami Beach and Coral Gables. Fresco promoted his organization by lecturing at universities and appearing on radio and television. Although Fresco is presented as a 'Doctor' on the Larry King show there is no evidence of that being the case. Fresco did not complete high school. Fresco's "sociocyberneering" as a membership group was discontinued and land was purchased at another location in rural Venus, Florida. He established his home and research center there.


title: Jacque Fresco

text: Fresco, with his partner Roxanne Meadows, supported the project in the 1990s through freelance inventing, industrial engineering, conventional architectural modeling, and invention consultations.


title: Jacque Fresco

text: In 2008, Peter Joseph featured Fresco in the film "Zeitgeist Addendum" where his ideas of the future were given as possible alternatives. Peter Joseph, founder of the Zeitgeist Movement began advocating Fresco's approach. In April 2012, the two groups disassociated due to disagreements regarding goals and objectives.


title: Jacque Fresco

text: In June 2012, Maja Borg screened her film, "Future My Love", at the Edinburgh International Film Festival featuring the work of Fresco and Roxanne Meadows.


title: Jacque Fresco

text: Fresco was born to immigrants from the Middle East, Isaac and Lena Fresco. His father was born in 1880 and around 1905 immigrated from Istanbul to New York where he worked as a horticulturist. He died in 1963. Fresco's mother was born in 1887 in Jerusalem and also migrated to New York around 1904. She died in 1988. Fresco was brother to two siblings, a sister, Freda, and a brother, David.


title: Jacque Fresco

text: Fresco had two marriages when he lived in Los Angeles and carried his second marriage through his first couple of years in Miami. He divorced his second wife in 1957 and remained unmarried thereafter. His second wife, Patricia, gave birth to a son, Richard, in 1953 and a daughter, Bambi, in 1956. Richard was an army private and died in 1976. Bambi died of cancer in 2010.


title: Jacque Fresco

text: Fresco died on May 18, 2017, in his sleep at his home in Sebring, Florida, from complications of Parkinson's disease at the age of 101.


title: Jacque Fresco

text: Roxanne Meadows assisted Fresco from 1976. As Fresco's domestic partner and administrative colleague, she oversees much of the management of the Venus Project.


title: Jacque Fresco

text: It's a "lack of professional engagement", William Gazecki who in 2006 completed "Future by Design", a feature-length profile of Jacque Fresco says, that hurt Fresco the most. "The real missing link in Jacque's world is having put Jacque to work," Gazecki says, "[It's] exemplified when people say: 'Well, show me some buildings he's built. And I don't mean the domes out in Venus. I mean, let's see an office building, let's see a manufacturing plant, let's see a circular city.' And that's where he should have been 30 years ago. He should have been applying his work, in the real world ... [but] he's not a collaborator, and I think that's why he's never had great public achievements."


title: Jacque Fresco

text: When asked by a reporter why he had such difficulty actualizing his many ideas, Fresco responded, "Because I can't get to anybody."


title: Jacque Fresco

text: Fresco's critical view of modern economics has been compared to Thorstein Veblen's concept of "the predatory phase in human development", according to an article in the journal "Society and Business Review." Grønborg has labeled other facets of Fresco's ideology a ""tabula rasa" approach".


title: Jacque Fresco

text: Synergetics theorist Arthur Coulter called Fresco's city designs "organic" and "evolutionary", rather than revolutionary. Coulter posits such cities as the answer to Walter B. Cannon's idea of achieving homeostasis for society.


title: Jacque Fresco

text: Fresco described his form of governance in this way: "The aims of The Venus Project have no parallel in history, not with communism, socialism, fascism or any other political ideology. This is true because cybernation is of recent origin. With this system, the system of financial influence and control will no longer exist."


title: Jacque Fresco

text: Ludwig von Mises Institute scholar Robert P. Murphy has raised the economic calculation problem against a resource-based economy. In a resource-based economy, Murphy believes there would be no ability to calculate the availability and desirability of resources because the price mechanism is not utilized. Addressing this aspect, another article in the "Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics" states criticism of "central plannings" computation problem applies to the ideas of Fresco.


title: Jacque Fresco

text: The Venus Project states on its website that it is not utopian. Writing for the Copenhagen Institute for Futures Studies, Nikolina Olsen-Rule supports this idea, writing: "For most people, the promise of the project sounds like an unattainable utopia, but if you examine it more closely, there are surprisingly many scientifically founded arguments that open up an entire new world of possibilities."


title: Jacque Fresco

text: Morten Grønborg, also of Copenhagen Institute for Futures Studies, comments that the Venus Project is "this visionary idea of a future society has many characteristics in common with the utopia. ... the word utopia carries a double meaning, since in Greek it can mean both the good place (eutopia) and the nonexisting place (outopia). A good place is precisely what Fresco has devoted his life to describing and fighting for."


title: Jacque Fresco

text: Hans-Ulrich Obrist wrote that "Fresco's future may, of course, seem outmoded and his writings have been subject to critique for their fascistic undertones of order and similitude, but his contributions are etched in the popular psyche and his eco-friendly concepts continue to influence our present generation of progressive architects, city planners and designers."


title: Jacque Fresco

text: Fresco's work gained the attention of science fiction enthusiast and critic Forrest J Ackerman. Fresco later attracted "Star Trek" animator, Doug Drexler, who worked with Fresco to produce several computer renderings of his designs.


title: Jacque Fresco

text: Commenting on Fresco, physicist Paul G. Hewitt wrote that Fresco inspired him toward a career in physical science.


title: Jacque Fresco

text: In July 2016, Jacque Fresco received a Novus Summit award for City Design/Community. Novus Summit is supported by the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UN DESA).


title: Bath Rugby

text: Bath Rugby is a professional rugby union club in Bath, Somerset, England. They play in Premiership Rugby, England's top division of rugby.


title: Bath Rugby

text: Founded in 1865 as Bath Football Club, since 1894 the club has played at the Recreation Ground in the city centre.


title: Bath Rugby

text: The club has won 18 major trophies and was particularly successful between 1984 and 1998 when it won 10 Domestic Cups, 6 League titles and were the first English side to win the European Cup in 1998. In 2008 they also won the European Challenge Cup, the continent's second tier of competition. Bath is one of only three clubs never to have been relegated from the top division of English rugby.


title: Bath Rugby

text: For the 2022–23 Premiership Rugby season, Bath will also compete in the 2022–23 European Rugby Challenge Cup.


title: Bath Rugby

text: The current Head of Rugby is Johann van Graan, having started in role ahead of the 2022-23 pre-season in July 2022.


title: Bath Rugby

text: Bath Football Club is one of the oldest clubs in existence, having been founded in 1865 by members of Lansdown Cricket Club in Bath (founded 1825) for 'something to do in the winter'. This is the reason why the club colours of the two clubs are identical. With an original home base at North Parade, Bath then led a nomadic existence during the 1800s playing at Claverton Down, Lambridge Meadows, Taylor's Field and Henrietta Park. They then leased a plot of land at Pulteney Meadow, where today's Rec stands. With most games played against local opposition: Weston-super-Mare, Gloucester, Clifton and the "Arabs" from Bristol. By the 1890s, Welsh clubs were starting to become regular opponents, with Cardiff and Penarth regularly appearing in the fixture list. With a traditionally lightweight pack, they would suffer regular defeats. The club played its first fixture against overseas opposition in 1907, as Racing Club de Bordelais crossed the Channel to play at the Rec. 1954 saw a first overseas tour by Bath, who beat the French teams St Claude (23–3). Givors (9–6) and Tour du Pin (17–0).


title: Bath Rugby

text: The trip was repeated the following year with wins against St Claude (13–8), Dijon (14–0) and Macon (8–3) as captain Peter Sibley was the first to develop the ethos for fast, attacking rugby in the Sixties.


title: Bath Rugby

text: With six-foot four-inch players such as England international back row David Gay, Peter Heindorff, Sibley had players with physique to impose this style of play. With the mercurial John Horton and the incisive Mike Beese, the side continued to develop Bath's reputation in the early Seventies with wins over the top Welsh sides. However, the revolution began with the arrival of coach Jack Rowell in 1978. Rowell transformed the ethos of a club that had traditionally drawn its players from the immediate locality. When formalised competitions started in the 1980s Jack Rowell brought premature professionalism to Bath and began to assemble a side with power and precision. The power, provided by Gareth Chilcott and Roger Spurrell was complemented by the precision of John Horton and winger David Trick.


title: Bath Rugby

text: By 1984, the first of ten knock-out cup successes had been achieved, at the expense of Bristol. Bath dominated the John Player Cup winning it four years on a trot, from 1984 to 1987. The cup sponsor changed to Pilkington, and Bath after a blip in 1988 dominated that cup as well winning it a further six times.


title: Bath Rugby

text: The formal league structure started in 1987 and Bath dominated the early years of the competition winning six times in eight years and doing the "double" four times. Bath were an unstoppable force in 1988–89 and ran away with the league title, winning the first ten of their eleven league matches. Their only defeat was at Leicester in the last game of the season, when Bath, with the title already won, rested several key players. The two sides met again a week later in the Pilkington Cup final at Twickenham which Bath won 10–6 to become the first English club to wrap up the double of winning both League and Cup.


title: Bath Rugby

text: 1993–94 saw a unique "Grand Slam" of titles. In addition to the league (played on a home and away basis for the first time), the team won the Pilkington Cup (beating Leicester, with tries from Tony Swift and a youthful Mike Catt), the Middlesex Sevens (beating Orrell in the Final) and the Worthington Tens. Arguably the most "professional" amateur club side in English history, Bath has struggled to match the achievements of the Eighties and early Nineties.


title: Bath Rugby

text: In May 1996, Bath Rugby and Wigan RLFC made history by playing against each other at both codes. The first match was at Maine Road, Manchester under League rules and saw Bath struggle, eventually losing 82-6. In the return fixture under Union rules at Twickenham, Bath were able to regain a measure of pride by beating Wigan 44-19.


title: Bath Rugby

text: Jack Rowell's departure (to take control of the England team) in 1995 and rugby union becoming a professional sport in 1996 has seen Bath struggle to find consistency either on or off the field. With regular changes in the coaching staff (including Andy Robinson's appointment as England's head coach) and with a seemingly steady turnaround of players, the formula that led to past successes is still being sought. However, Bath captained by Andy Nicol still managed to be the first British club to lift the Heineken Cup, in the 1997–1998 season. Bath beat French club Brive 19–18 in an exciting final in Bordeaux with Jon Callard scoring all the points for Bath.


title: Bath Rugby

text: Despite European glory, Bath slumped to sixth in the league the next season. In the disastrous league campaign of 2002–03, relegation was avoided by only a single point on the last day.


title: Bath Rugby

text: Having narrowly avoided relegation and merger with bitter rivals Bristol in the 2002–03 season, the club invested heavily in its squad, with no fewer than 15 changes in personnel during the summer of 2003. Jack Rowell and Michael Foley recruited wisely and the appointment of John Connolly as head coach helped gel the players into a formidable unit and the team ended the regular season at the top of the table six points clear of Wasps, but lost in the play-off final match at Twickenham.


title: Bath Rugby

text: Bath finished 4th at the end of the 2004–05 season. The club reached the Powergen Cup final after a dramatic extra-time try by Andy Williams in the semi-final against Gloucester, but lost to Leeds at Twickenham after a poor display. The pack continued to dominate but, with a backline once again decimated by injuries, many bemoaned the 10-man rugby displayed by Bath. Two players, Matt Stevens and Danny Grewcock, were selected for the Lions tour to New Zealand.


title: Bath Rugby

text: By the end of the 2004–05 season, Coach John Connolly had announced his intention to return to his native Australia, having created one of the most dominant packs in club rugby. The appointment of ex-England National Academy Manager Brian Ashton as the new head coach was announced in November 2005, and marked the return of the popular coach, who helped lead Bath to six league titles and six cup titles between 1989 and 1996. In May 2006, rumours of Ashton's return to the England coaching setup were rife. These rumours were confirmed on 25 May 2006, when Bath agreed to release Ashton from his contract for an undisclosed compensatory figure, to return to the RFU fold as attack coach for the England team.


title: Bath Rugby

text: Well known Bath players from the recent history of the club include Jeremy Guscott; Dan Lyle, one of the first Americans to play regularly in Britain; England captain Phil de Glanville; and Andy Robinson, an assistant coach of the Rugby World Cup – winning England side, who went on to be the England team's head coach and head coach of Scotland.


title: Bath Rugby

text: Throughout the 2004–05 and 2005–06 seasons, Bath Rugby played in the Heineken Cup – a European cup tournament. In 2006 they controversially defeated Leicester Tigers in the quarter finals at a sold out Walkers' Stadium in Leicester, being reduced to 13 men for the last ten minutes of the match for continual infringements at the scrummage. Bath then went on to lose the semi-finals against Biarritz. As they finished 9th in the league that year, Bath were ineligible for the 2006–07 HC competition, instead contesting the European Challenge Cup.


title: Bath Rugby

text: Bath were forced to find a new coaching team in the summer of 2006 after head coach Brian Ashton joined the England national team, forwards coach Michael Foley returned to Australia and skills coach Richard Graham joined Saracens. Backs coach, Steve Meehan, was appointed the new acting head coach. His appointment was later made permanent.


title: Bath Rugby

text: In 2008 Bath won their first silverware in 10 years, beating Worcester to win the European Challenge Cup. After defeat in the 2003 and 2007 finals, it was third time lucky for the English team who ground out an impressive win over Worcester Warriors at Kingsholm. Outgoing skipper Steve Borthwick led by example and was a tower of strength in the lineout on his way to becoming FedEx Man of the match. Borthwick, who went on to join Saracens the following season, was carried aloft by his jubilant teammates after a titanic tussle in appalling conditions. Worcester won the toss and opted to play with the wind at their backs in the first period. It mattered not as Bath dominated possession and territory in the first quarter, and deservedly took the lead on 15 minutes with an Olly Barkley penalty. Barkley went on to score a second penalty a drop goal and a conversion, but it was tries from Jonny Fa'amatuainu and Nick Abendanon that put the game beyond the reach of brave Worcester. Bath won 24–16.


title: Bath Rugby

text: On 14 April 2010, Bath Rugby announced a change of ownership and set out new plans for the future of the club, including a proposal to create a new club headquarters at Farleigh House and a commitment to build a new 20,000–25,000-seat stadium.


title: Bath Rugby

text: In 2011 the new owners brought in Gary Gold as head coach to replace the short-lived Ian McGeechan, who had briefly replaced Meehan. After a poor first season Gold was promoted to a director of rugby while defence coach Mike Ford became head coach. In December 2013 Gold left the club under unclear circumstances.


title: Bath Rugby

text: After a disappointing season seeing Bath finish 9th in the table, Mike Ford left the club at the end of the 2015–2016 season after an in depth review of the club was carried out, Neal Hatley joined Eddie Jones with the England team and Danny Grewcock left as Bath's Academy Director. On the 28 July 2016 Bath announced that Todd Blackadder would be taking over as director of rugby and Tabai Matson as head coach. This would see Blackadder reportedly signing a 3-year deal and Matson a 4-year deal.


title: Bath Rugby

text: On the 15 December 2021, Bath announced the appointment of Johann van Graan as their new Head of Rugby, following a wholesale review and restructuring of the coaching and conditioning teams. Van Graan joined Bath from Irish provincial rugby club Munster on a long-term contract, with the aim of stabilising and rebuilding the club's fortunes following the disappointing 2021-22 season.


title: Bath Rugby

text: Bath play at the Recreation Ground, also known as "The Rec". The stadium is in the centre of the city, next to the River Avon. For the 2009–10 season the ground capacity was expanded to 11,700, and Bath play all of their home matches there during the club season. During summer, the ground is adjusted to make it capable for holding cricket matches. This cricket field is used for local contests and by Somerset County Cricket Club for one match a year.


title: Bath Rugby

text: In November 2009 the new chief executive, Nick Blofeld, stated the club is now seeking a mostly seated stadium for 20,000 to suit modern professional rugby, with potential for future expansion, containing "restaurants and cafés, hospitality suites, conference facilities and good food and beverage outlets and other potential retail outlets".


title: Bath Rugby

text: The issue of the charitable status of the Rec has prevented progress, but in 2013 the Charity Commission recommended a scheme to allow the club's former training ground at Lambridge to be exchanged for an extended footprint on the Rec free from the charitable rules. While a few appeals remain to be heard, the club is pushing on with designs for an 18,500-seat stadium, and intends to apply for planning permission in 2014.


title: Bath Rugby

text: The First Tier Tribunal decided to limit the land available to the club which has meant that pending leave to appeal the club's development plans have had to be put on ice. As a result, the club has put in a planning application to extend its capacity to 14,000 on a temporary basis for next two seasons to cover their 150th anniversary celebrations in 2015.


title: Bath Rugby

text: After being successful with recent planning applications, the club has been able to increase capacity by 1,000 for the 2016/17 season onwards – taking the capacity to 14,500 spectators for home games. The works took place during the 2016 off-season and saw the West Stand partially demolished and improved facilities provided, including bars, food outlets and toilets. The new consents will last for four years and will enable Bath to focus solely on resolution of a permanent redevelopment solution for the Rec, without on-going debate around temporary stands during this period. Permanent development proposals are intended to be brought forward long before the expiry of the four-year period.


title: Bath Rugby

text: Au updated decision in December 2016 from the Charity First-Tier Tribunal relating to a revised Scheme for the governance of the Bath Recreation Ground, including the use of the Recreation Ground site, was said by the club to "re-open the door to redevelopment at the Rec".


title: Bath Rugby

text: Since the 2016-17 season, Bath Rugby have played an annual home fixture at Twickenham Stadium. The fixture; dubbed The Clash is normally played around Easter and forms part of a five-year deal to host games at Twickenham. The 2017 match had an attendance of 61,868, and the 2018 match had 60,880 spectators.


title: Bath Rugby

text: The kit is supplied by Macron. On the front of the shirt, Dyson is at the centre. Compeed appears on the left sleeve. On the back of the shirt, Thatchers is at the top with Avon Protection on top of the squad number and Grant UK at the bottom. On the back of the shorts, Dyson (who is also at the centre on the front of the shirt) is on the top while on the bottom, the Bendac Group is on the left and Your Red Car is on the right.


title: Bath Rugby

text: The following are players which have represented their countries at the Rugby World Cup, whilst playing for Bath, players in bold won the tournament:


title: Bath Rugby

text: Only includes players appointed club captain for the season. Individual game captains are not included.


The Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party, officially the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, is a political body that comprises the top leaders of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). It is currently composed of 205 full members and 171 alternate members (see list). Members are nominally elected once every five years by the National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party. In practice, the selection process is done privately, usually through consultation of the CCP's Politburo and its corresponding Standing Committee.


title: Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party

text: The Central Committee is, formally, the "party's highest organ of authority" when the National Congress is not in a plenary session. According to the CCP's constitution, the Central Committee is vested with the power to elect the General Secretary and the members of the Politburo and its Standing Committee, as well as the Central Military Commission. It endorses the composition of the Secretariat and the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection. It also oversees the work of various executive national organs of the CCP. The administrative activities of the Central Committee are carried out by the Central Committee's General Office. The General Office forms the support staff of the central organs that work on the Central Committee's behalf in between plenums.


text: The Committee usually convenes at least once a year at a plenary session ("plenum"), and functions as a top forum for discussion about relevant policy issues. The Committee operates, however, on the principle of democratic centralism; i.e., once a decision is made, the entire body speaks with one voice. The role of the Central Committee has varied throughout history. While it generally exercises power through formal procedures defined in the party constitution, the ability for it to affect outcomes of national-level personnel decisions is limited, as that function has generally been, in practice, carried out by the Politburo and retired party elders who retain influence. Nonetheless, Central Committee plenums function as venues whereby policy is discussed, fine-tuned, and publicly released in the form of "resolutions" or "decisions".


text: The Central Committee's plenums typically open and close in the State Banquet Hall of the Great Hall of the People, with the working meetings of the plenum being held at the military run Jingxi Hotel in Beijing.


text: According to the Constitution of the Chinese Communist Party, the Central Committee is tasked with "carrying out the decisions of the National Congress, leading the work of the party, and representing the party internationally." The Central Committee is therefore technically the "party's highest organ of authority" when the National Congress is not in session. The National Congress is convened only once every five years, so the Central Committee can be called upon in the interim to make extremely far-reaching decisions, or at least legitimize a change in direction mandated by the Politburo or other party leaders. The Central Committee must also be theoretically convened to prepare for a National Congress; for example, to determine its dates, delegate selection, agenda, and so on.


text: The Central Committee has the power to elect the General Secretary and the members of the Politburo, its Standing Committee, and the Central Military Commission. These elections take place in the form of confirmation votes; i.e., there is only one candidate, a delegate can choose to vote for or against or abstain for that candidate. In some instances write-in candidates may also be allowed. In practice, for important posts such as the General Secretary or the Politburo Standing Committee, there is no known occasion since 1949 where the Central Committee voted against a candidate already vetted by the top party leadership in advance.


text: The Central Committee also confirms membership of the Secretariat, the organ in charge of executing party policy, whose membership is determined through nomination by the Politburo. The Central Committee oversees the work of many powerful national organizations of the party, including the Propaganda, Organization, International Liaison, and United Front departments, among others.


text: The Central Committee's role has varied throughout history. It was founded in 1927 as a successor organization to the "Central Executive Committee" (), a group of party leaders charged with executing party work during the pre-revolutionary days of the CCP. Over the next several decades it served to confirm the party leadership lineup and legitimize military, strategic, and foreign relations decisions of the party. In practice, power was concentrated in a small group of military and political leaders (the Secretariat or the Politburo), and, beginning at the Zunyi Conference in 1935, Mao held great power personally. Moreover, during the Second Sino-Japanese war and the Chinese Civil War between 1937 and 1949, the Central Committee rarely convened, partly because of the logistical difficulties of bringing together leading cadres involved in different theatres of war and agitation.


text: Beginning in 1949 at the founding of the People's Republic of China, the Central Committee gradually transformed from a revolutionary organ to a governing one, though again the day-to-day work and most political power resided with a few leaders, most notably the Politburo, then "de facto" chaired by Liu Shaoqi, and the Secretariat, then under Deng Xiaoping. Although the Central Committee was required to convene at least once a year, it did not convene at all in 1951–53, 1960, 1963–65, and 1967. Informal and 'extraordinary' mechanisms were sometimes used for the purposes of discussing party policy, for example, the Seven Thousand Cadres Conference in 1962, meant to be a summation of the lessons of the Great Leap Forward. Mao did not hold absolute power over the Central Committee, as evidenced by the debates surrounding the policies of the Great Leap Forward, as well as the economic policies of the early 1960s. However, Mao used Central Committee meetings as a platform to project authority or legitimize decisions which have been made in advance, such as at the Lushan Conference of 1959, when the Central Committee ratified the decision to denounce Peng Dehuai, who had spoken out in opposition of the Great Leap Forward.


text: During the early stages of the Cultural Revolution, the Central Committee essentially ceased to function; it was convened in August 1966 (11th Plenum of the 8th CC) to cement decisions already made by Mao on launching the Cultural Revolution. Mao faced some opposition at the 11th Plenum but ultimately most delegates were goaded into ratifying Mao's decisions. Many members were politically disgraced or purged thereafter. The Committee was then convened again in October 1968 (12th Plenum) to ratify the decision to expel then head of state Liu Shaoqi from the Party. At the 12th plenum, less than half the members actually attended, as many had fallen victim to the Cultural Revolution. In a letter to Mao "evaluating" the members of the Central Committee at the time, Kang Sheng wrote that some 70% of CC members were considered "traitors, spies, or otherwise politically unreliable". The Central Committee membership at the 9th Party Congress in April 1969 was largely handpicked by Mao and a small group of radical allies. The decisions at the Congress were later deemed to be "wholly and absolutely wrong" by official party historians.


text: Since economic reforms began in 1978, the Central Committee has usually been composed of the leading figures of the party, government, the provinces, and the military. In contrast to Party Congresses, which have always been essentially ceremonial exercises, full meetings of the Central Committee have occasionally emerged as arenas in which there were substantive debates and decisions on party policy. An example of this was the Third Plenary Session of the 11th CCP Central Committee in 1978, at which China formally embarked on a project of economic reform. Deng Xiaoping also attempted to increase the level of "intra party democracy" in the 1980s by introducing so-called "more candidates than seats" election method ("Cha'e xuanju"). The "Cha'e" method meant that not everyone who was nominated would be elected to the Central Committee.


text: Despite experimenting with power separation on a broad scale in the 1980s, including the separation of party and state leadership positions, real decision-making power continued to reside in the hands of a dozen or so party elites, including party elders that formed the Central Advisory Commission (later abolished). For instance, the decision to crack down on the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, and on top leadership changes in its aftermath, such as the purge of then General Secretary Zhao Ziyang, were made by "party elders" and a small group of top leaders, without first convening the Central Committee. Zhao questioned the legality of his removal in his memoirs released in 2006.


text: While Central Committee meetings do not usually serve as forums for substantive debate, they have sometimes 'fine-tuned' the policies agreed upon at the Politburo level. But the Central Committee does not, by convention, overturn policies decided at higher levels. The Central Committee is larger and has a somewhat more diverse ideological spectrum than the Politburo. Since its plenary sessions is a rare event that concentrates almost all of China's top leaders in one location, it could also be seen as a convenient venue for informal deal-making.


text: Hu Jintao's administration (2002–2012) attempted to embrace collective leadership, as well as more "intra-party democracy"; Hu was not a strong "core" figure in the same sense as Mao or Deng Xiaoping. The Central Committee thus gained more prominence as a "bona fide" consultation body. In 2003, Hu also cancelled the traditional August leadership retreat at the coastal town of Beidaihe, while giving more media coverage to the Central Committee plenums held in the fall. This was seen as an indication that Hu wanted to eschew informal decision-making by the handful of elites in favour of "inner-party democracy" involving bodies such as the Central Committee. However, the Beidaihe meetings resumed in July 2007, when political deliberation took place in anticipation of the 17th Party Congress; the same Bedaihe retreat also took place in 2011 in anticipation of the 18th Party Congress. This indicated that important personnel and policy decisions continued to be the domain of a small group of elites at the very top of the party hierarchy.


text: Since the 17th Party Congress, the Central Committee has seen an increase in the number of regional leadership figures. The 17th Central Committee formed with every province-level Party Secretary and Governor gaining a full seat on the Central Committee. The rise of regional party representation came at the expense of that of government ministries. Since Xi Jinping's rise to power at the 18th Party Congress, the Central Committee plenums in 2013 and 2014 were given significant media coverage, as they marked the beginning of another round of comprehensive economic and social reforms (2013) and legal reforms (2014), respectively.


text: In 2016 session of the Central Committee plenum, focus was mainly on in-party discipline and supervision, which gained a significant media coverage in China and abroad.


text: The Central Committee has full members (委员 – "weiyuan") and alternate or candidate members (候补委员 – "houbuweiyuan"). The practice of having "full" and "alternate" members is consistent with other Leninist parties in history, such as the Communist Party of the Soviet Union or the Communist Party of Vietnam. Members are elected by National Congresses through a confirmation vote (i.e., vote "yes", "no", or abstain) on a candidate list, where the number of candidates exceed the number of available seats. Unlike the Politburo, whose membership has historically been determined by informal deliberations that include incumbent Politburo members and retired Politburo Standing Committee members, the method of candidate selection for the Central Committee membership receives less coverage, though it appears to be managed by the incumbent Politburo and its Standing Committee. Since the 1980s membership patterns in the Central Committee have gradually stabilized. For example, provincial governors and party secretaries are almost guaranteed a seat on the Central Committee.


text: The primary difference between full members and alternate members is that full members have voting rights. Alternate members attend Central Committee plenary sessions, and can presumably voice their views on issues, but do not have the right to vote. At party plenary sessions, members of the Politburo seats at the front of the auditorium or meeting hall, facing the rest of the Central Committee. Full members are ordered by protocol, and seated, according to "surname stroke order" ("xingshi bihua paiming"), an impartial ordering system that is roughly equivalent of alphabetizing the names. Alternate members follow a different protocol sequence: they are arranged by the number of votes received when they were elected at the previous Party Congress.


text: Alternate members may be elevated to full members if a full member dies in office, resigns, or is removed from the body. Priority of ascension to full member status is given to the alternate member who received the highest number of votes in favour at the previous Party Congress.


text: Membership changes, such as the expulsion of a full member or an elevation of an alternate member, are confirmed through passing a formally adopted resolution at Central Committee plenary sessions.


text: While it is not a requirement in theory, the body has been customarily composed of officials of provincial-ministerial ranking and above, with a few exceptions. For example, officials holding, or expected to hold the following positions at the time of a new party congress can be generally expected to hold a seat on the Central Committee:


text: Occasionally officials of vice-ministerial rank could also hold membership on the Central Committee, though only in rare and exceptional circumstances. For example, Ma Xingrui, the party chief of Shenzhen (as of 2015), was a member of the 18th Central Committee.


text: While institutional rules has, since the 1980s, played a major role in the selection of Central Committee members, it does not "guarantee" that holders of a specific office will gain a seat on the CC. If a CC member is transferred to a different post, they maintain their CC membership. For example, a Governor of Shandong who is transferred to a position of less significance does not lose his seat on the CC, neither will his successor gain a seat on the CC. This has created situations in which individuals who do not sit on the Central Committee assume provincial leadership positions. An individual already provisionally named to a provincial leadership post may also be rejected by the "more candidates than seats" voting method – as appeared to be the case with Li Yuanchao (then Jiangsu party chief) in 2002, and Yang Xiong (mayor of Shanghai) in 2012.


text: In contrast to full membership, alternate membership of the Central Committee is more varied in its composition, and there are fewer institutional rules governing its membership list. Generally speaking, since the 1980s, alternate membership in the Central Committee is composed of officials of provincial-ministerial rank or sub-provincial (vice-minister) rank. They are selected based on a combination of experience and the institutions that they represent. Many are heads of provincial party departments or party chiefs of big cities. Prominent academics with no political experience and state-owned enterprise chief executives often hold alternate seats on the Central Committee. Some alternate members therefore hold no other political positions. Younger alternate members are also generally seen to be "up-and-coming" national leaders.


text: Though all nominations for the Central Committee are decided beforehand, since the 13th Party Congress in 1987, in the spirit of promoting "inner-party democracy", the number of candidates up for election for both full members and alternate members have been greater than the number of available seats. Nominees for the Central Committee who receive the lowest number of votes from Party Congress delegates are thus unable to enter the Central Committee. At the 18th Party Congress, a total of 224 candidates stood for election for full membership for a total of 205 seats. A total of 190 candidates stood for election for a total of 171 alternate seats. This meant that 9.3% of full member candidates and 11.1% alternate member candidates were not elected.


text: Since the 1980s, the membership of the Central Committee has experienced rapid turnover, mostly due to the institutionalization of the system of promotions for party officials as well as an informally mandated retirement age, currently set at 65 for minister-level officials (which comprise the majority of the members of the Central Committee). The average age of members in the 18th Central Committee is 56.1 years. From the 1980s onwards, an average of 62% of the membership of the outgoing Central Committee has been replaced at each party congress. Since most members are at least 50 years old when they enter the body, the mandatory retirement age essentially serves as a 'term limit' on the entire membership of the Central Committee, whereby no member or group of members could conceivably serve longer than three terms on the Central Committee. It also makes forming enduring political factions difficult. Chinese politics analyst Cheng Li noted that this makes the body much more fluid than most national legislatures, for which term limits do not generally apply. This has prevented the emergence of a gerontocracy as was common in the Soviet Union, Cuba, and North Korea; by the same token, officials younger than 45 have next to no chance of being elected onto the body.


title: Sevoflurane

text: Sevoflurane, sold under the brand name Sevorane, among others, is a sweet-smelling, nonflammable, highly fluorinated methyl isopropyl ether used as an inhalational anaesthetic for induction and maintenance of general anesthesia. After desflurane, it is the volatile anesthetic with the fastest onset. While its offset may be faster than agents other than desflurane in a few circumstances, its offset is more often similar to that of the much older agent isoflurane. While sevoflurane is only half as soluble as isoflurane in blood, the tissue blood partition coefficients of isoflurane and sevoflurane are quite similar. For example, in the muscle group: isoflurane 2.62 vs. sevoflurane 2.57. In the fat group: isoflurane 52 vs. sevoflurane 50. As a result, the longer the case, the more similar will be the emergence times for sevoflurane and isoflurane.


title: Sevoflurane

text: It is one of the most commonly used volatile anesthetic agents, particularly for outpatient anesthesia, across all ages, as well as in veterinary medicine. Together with desflurane, sevoflurane is replacing isoflurane and halothane in modern anesthesia practice. It is often administered in a mixture of nitrous oxide and oxygen.


title: Sevoflurane

text: Sevoflurane is a potent vasodilator, as such it induces a dose dependent reduction in blood pressure and cardiac output. It is a brondilator, however, in patients with pre-existing lung pathology it may precipitate coughing and laryngospasm. It reduces the ventilatory response to hypoxia and hypercapnia and impedes hypoxic pulmonary vasoconstriction. Sevoflurane vasodilatory properties also cause it to increase intracranial pressure and cerebral blood flow. However, it reduces cerebral metabolic rate.


title: Sevoflurane

text: Sevoflurane has an excellent safety record, but is under review for potential hepatotoxicity, and may accelerate Alzheimer's. There were rare reports involving adults with symptoms similar to halothane hepatotoxicity. Sevoflurane is the preferred agent for mask induction due to its lesser irritation to mucous membranes.


title: Sevoflurane

text: Sevoflurane was discovered by Ross Terrell and independently by Bernard M Regan. A detailed report of its development and properties appeared in 1975 in a paper authored by Richard Wallin, Bernard Regan, Martha Napoli and Ivan Stern. It was introduced into clinical practice initially in Japan in 1990 by Maruishi Pharmaceutical Co., Ltd. Osaka, Japan. The rights for sevoflurane worldwide were held by AbbVie. It is now available as a generic drug.


title: Sevoflurane

text: Sevoflurane is an inhaled anaesthetic that is often used to put children asleep for surgery. During the process of waking up from the medication, it has been known to cause agitation and delirium. It is not clear if this can be prevented.


title: Sevoflurane

text: Studies examining a current significant health concern, anesthetic-induced neurotoxicity (including with sevoflurane, and especially with children and infants) are "fraught with confounders, and many are underpowered statistically", and so are argued to need "further data... to either support or refute the potential connection".


title: Sevoflurane

text: Concern regarding the safety of anaesthesia is especially acute with regard to children and infants, where preclinical evidence from relevant animal models suggest that common clinically important agents, including sevoflurane, may be neurotoxic to the developing brain, and so cause neurobehavioural abnormalities in the long term; two large-scale clinical studies (PANDA and GAS) were ongoing as of 2010, in hope of supplying "significant [further] information" on neurodevelopmental effects of general anaesthesia in infants and young children, including where sevoflurane is used.


title: Sevoflurane

text: In 2021, researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital published in Communications Biology research that sevoflurane may accelerate existing Alzheimer's or existing tau protein to spread: "These data demonstrate anesthesia-associated tau spreading and its consequences. [...] This tau spreading could be prevented by inhibitors of tau phosphorylation or extracellular vesicle generation." According to Neuroscience News, "Their previous work showed that sevoflurane can cause a change (specifically, phosphorylation, or the addition of phosphate) to tau that leads to cognitive impairment in mice. Other researchers have also found that sevoflurane and certain other anesthetics may affect cognitive function."


title: Sevoflurane

text: The exact mechanism of the action of general anaesthetics has not been delineated. Sevoflurane acts as a positive allosteric modulator of the GABA receptor in electrophysiology studies of neurons and recombinant receptors. However, it also acts as an NMDA receptor antagonist, potentiates glycine receptor currents, and inhibits nAChR and 5-HT receptor currents.


title: Sevoflurane

text: Sevoflurane is a greenhouse gas. The twenty-year global-warming potential, GWP(20), for sevoflurane is 349.


title: Rhinoceros (play)

text: Rhinoceros () is a play by Eugène Ionesco, written in 1959. The play was included in Martin Esslin's study of post-war avant-garde drama "The Theatre of the Absurd", although scholars have also rejected this label as too interpretatively narrow. Over the course of three acts, the inhabitants of a small, provincial French town turn into rhinoceroses; ultimately the only human who does not succumb to this mass metamorphosis is the central character, Bérenger, a flustered everyman figure who is initially criticized in the play for his drinking, tardiness, and slovenly lifestyle and then, later, for his increasing paranoia and obsession with the rhinoceroses. The play is often read as a response and criticism to the sudden upsurge of Fascism and Nazism during the events preceding World War II, and explores the themes of conformity, culture, fascism, responsibility, logic, mass movements, mob mentality, philosophy and morality.


title: Rhinoceros (play)

text: The play starts in the town square of a small provincial French village. Two friends meet at a coffee shop: eloquent, intellectual and prideful Jean, and the simple, shy, kind-hearted drunkard Bérenger. They have met to discuss an unspecified but important matter. Rather than talk about it, Jean berates Bérenger for his tardiness and drunkenness, until a rhinoceros rampages across the square, causing a commotion. During the discussion that follows, a second rhinoceros appears and crushes a woman's cat. This generates outrage and the villagers band together to argue that the presence of the rhinoceroses should not be allowed.


title: Rhinoceros (play)

text: Bérenger arrives late for work at the local newspaper office. Daisy, the receptionist, with whom Bérenger is in love, covers for him by sneaking him a time sheet. At the office, an argument has broken out between sensitive and logical Dudard and the violent, temperamental Botard. The latter does not believe a rhinoceros could appear in France.


title: Rhinoceros (play)

text: Mrs. Bœuf (the wife of an employee) says that her husband is unwell and that she was chased all the way to the office by a rhinoceros. Botard scoffs at the so-called "rhinoceritis" movement and says that the local people are too intelligent to be swayed by empty rhetoric. A rhinoceros arrives and destroys the staircase that leads out of the office, trapping all the workers inside. Mrs. Bœuf recognizes the rhinoceros as her husband, transformed. Despite a warning, she joins him by jumping down the stairwell onto her husband’s back. Daisy has called the firemen. The office workers escape through a window.


title: Rhinoceros (play)

text: Bérenger visits Jean in order to apologize for the previous day's argument. He finds Jean sick and in bed. They argue once more, this time about whether people can transform into rhinoceroses and then about the morality of such a change. Jean is at first against it, then more lenient. Jean begins to gradually transform. Finally, Jean proclaims that they have just as much of a right to life as humans, then says that "Humanism is dead, those who follow it are just old sentimentalists". After


title: Rhinoceros (play)

text: Bérenger is at home having a nightmare. He fears transforming like Jean, earlier. He has a sip of brandy and retires to bed. Dudard visits him and they have nearly the same exchange as with Jean earlier. Only this time, Dudard is accepting of the transformation and Bérenger resists the idea and defies that he will change.


title: Rhinoceros (play)

text: Daisy arrives with a basket of love. Both Dudard and Bérenger desire her. Botard, Daisy reveals, has also changed. Many villagers, including firemen, have begun to transform. Dudard leaves, wanting to see firsthand. Bérenger tries to stop him. Dudard turns into a rhinoceros himself.


title: Rhinoceros (play)

text: Bérenger laments the loss of Dudard. Daisy tells Berenger that they have no right to interfere in others’ lives. Bérenger says he will defend her. He blames both himself and Daisy for aiding, through lack of sympathy, the transformations of Jean and Papillon, respectively. Daisy allays his guilt.


title: Rhinoceros (play)

text: The phone rings, but they hear only rhino trumpeting on the line. They turn to the radio for help, but the rhinos have taken that over, too. Bérenger professes his love for Daisy. She seems to reciprocate. They attempt to have a normal life amongst beasts. Bérenger suggests that they attempt to repopulate the human race. Daisy begins to move away from him, suggesting that Bérenger does not understand love. She has come to believe the rhinoceroses are truly passionate.


title: Rhinoceros (play)

text: Bérenger slaps Daisy without thinking and then immediately recants. Bérenger exclaims that, "in just a few minutes we have gone through twenty-five years of married life!" They attempt to reconcile, but once more fight. As Bérenger examines himself in a mirror for any evidence of transformation, Daisy slips away to join the animals.


title: Rhinoceros (play)

text: Now alone completely, Bérenger regrets his actions towards Daisy. In his solitude, he begins to doubt his existence. He attempts to change into a rhinoceros but cannot, then regains his determination to fight the beasts, shouting, "I'm not capitulating!"


title: Rhinoceros (play)

text: American scholar Anne Quinney argues that the play, which obviously was based on real events, was autobiographical, and reflected Ionesco's own youth in Romania. Ionesco was born in Romania to a Romanian father and French mother. Ionesco's father was a Romanian ultra-nationalist of the Orthodox faith with few political scruples, who was willing to support whatever party was in power – while his mother was a French Protestant who came from a family of Sephardic Jews who had converted to Calvinism to better fit into French society. In the increasing antisemitic atmosphere of Romania in the interwar period, being even partly ethnically Jewish was enough to put Ionesco in danger. The Israeli historian Jean Ancel states that the Romanian intelligentsia had a "schizophrenic attitude towards the West and its values," yet considered the West, especially France, to be their role model. At the same time antisemitism was rampant in Romania. Most Romanian Jews were descendants of Ashkenazi Jews who had moved to Romania in the 18th and 19th centuries from Poland. A recurring claim of the Romanian radical right was that most Romanian Jews were illegal immigrants or had obtained Romanian citizenship fraudulently. In the 19th century, the newly independent Romanian state proved very reluctant to grant citizenship to Romania's Jews, and a volatile atmosphere of antisemitism flourished with many intellectuals like A. C. Cuza claiming the Jews were a foreign and alien body in Romania that needed to be removed.


title: Rhinoceros (play)

text: In interwar Romania, the most virulent and violent antisemitic movement was the fascist Iron Guard (formed as the paramilitary branch of the Legion of the Archangel Michael), founded in 1927 by Corneliu Zelea Codreanu. As a university student, Ionesco saw one of his professors, Nae Ionescu, who taught philosophy at the University of Bucharest, use his lectures to recruit his students into the Legion. In an interview in 1970, Ionesco explained the play's message as an attack on those Romanians who become caught up in the "ideological contagion" of the Legion:


title: Rhinoceros (play)

text: University professors, students, intellectuals were turning Nazi, becoming Iron Guards one after another. We were fifteen people who used to get together, to find arguments, to discuss, to try to find arguments opposing theirs. It was not easy ... From time to time, one of the group would come out and say 'I don't agree at all with them, to be sure, but on certain points, I must admit, for example the Jews ...' And that kind of comment was a symptom. Three weeks later, that person would become a Nazi. He was caught in a mechanism, he accepted everything, he became a Rhinoceros. Towards the end, it was only three or four of us who resisted. In 1936, Ionesco wrote with disgust that the Iron Guard had created "a stupid and horrendously reactionary Romania".


title: Rhinoceros (play)

text: Romanian university students were disproportionately over-represented in the Iron Guard, a fact which rebuts the claim that the Iron Guard attracted support only from social "losers". Romania had a very large intelligentsia relative to its share of the population with 2.0 university students per one thousand of the population compared to 1.7 per one thousand of the population in far wealthier Germany, while Bucharest had more lawyers in the 1930s than did the much larger city of Paris. Even before the Great Depression, Romania's universities were turning out far more graduates than there were jobs for, and a mood of rage, desperation and frustration prevailed on campuses as it was apparent to most Romanian students that the middle class jobs that they were hoping for after graduation did not exist. In interwar Romania, Jews played much the same role as Greeks and Armenians did in the Ottoman Empire and the ethnic Chinese minorities do in modern Malaysia and Indonesia, namely a commercially successful minority much resented for their success. The Legion's call to end the "Jewish colonization" of Romania by expelling all the Jews, who the Legion claimed were all illegal immigrants from Poland, and confiscate their assets so that Christian Romanians could rise up to the middle class, was very attractive to many university students. Codreanu's call for a Romania without individualism, where all Romanians would be spiritually united together as one, greatly appealed to the young people who believed that when Codreanu created his "new man" ("omul nou"), it would be the moment that a utopian society would come into existence. Ionesco felt that the way in which so many of his generation, especially university students, had abandoned the French ideas about universal human rights in favor of the death cult of the Legion, was a "betrayal" both personally and in a wider political sense of the sort of society Romania should be. As a young writer and playwright in 1930s Bucharest who associated with many leading figures of the "intelligentsia", Ionesco felt more and more out of place as he clung to his humanist values while his friends all joined the Legion, feeling much as Bérenger does by the end of "Rhinoceros" as literally the last human being left on an earth overrun by rhinoceroses. In an interview with a Romanian newspaper shortly before his death in 1994, Ionesco stated how "Rhinoceros" related to his youth in Romania: It is true. I had the experience of an "extrême droite". And of the second hand left, which had been a radical socialist...Maybe I should have belonged to the left for a while, maybe I should have been of the left before being-not of the right-of the non-left, an enemy of the left. But at a certain moment, the left was no longer the left, at a certain moment the left become a right of horror, a right of terror and that's what I was denouncing, the terror.


title: Rhinoceros (play)

text: In "Rhinoceros", all of the characters except Bérenger talk in clichés: for example, when first encountering the rhinoceros, all of the characters apart from Bérenger insipidly exclaim "Well, of all things!", a phrase that occurs in the play twenty-six times. Ionesco was suggesting that by vacuously repeating clichés instead of meaningful communication, his characters had lost their ability to think critically, and were thus already partly rhinoceros. Likewise, once a character repeats a platitudinous expression such as "It's never too late!" (repeated twenty-two times in the play) or "Come on, exercise your mind. Concentrate!" (repeated twenty times), the other characters start to mindlessly repeat them, which further shows their herd mentality. In the first act, the character of the logician says: "I am going to explain to you what a syllogism is ... The syllogism consists of a main proposition, a secondary one and a conclusion". The logician gives the example of: "The cat has four paws. Isidore and Fricot have four paws. Therefore, Isidore and Fricot are cats". Quinney sums up the logician's thinking as: "The logic of this reasoning would allow any conclusion to be true based on two premises, the first of which contains the term that is the predicate of the conclusion and the second of which contains the term that is the subject of the conclusion". Based on this way of thinking as taught by the logician, the character of the old man is able to conclude that his dog is in fact a cat, leading him to proclaim: "Logic is a very beautiful thing", to which the logician replies as "As long as it is not abused". It is at this moment that the first rhinoceros appears. One of the leading Romanian intellectuals in the 1930s who joined the Iron Guard was Emil Cioran who in 1952 published in Paris a book entitled "Syllogismes d'amertume". After Cioran joined the Legion in 1934, he severed his friendship with Ionesco, an experience that very much hurt the latter. The character of the logician with his obsession with syllogisms and a world of pure reason divorced from emotion is a caricature of Cioran, a man who claimed that "logic" demanded that Romania have no Jews. More broadly, Ionesco was denouncing those whose rigid ways of thinking stripped of any sort of humanist element led them to inhumane and/or inane views.


title: Rhinoceros (play)

text: In the first act of the play, the characters spend much time debating whether the rhinoceroses that have mysteriously appeared in France are African or Asian rhinoceroses, and which of the two types were superior to the other – a debate that Ionesco meant to be a satire on racism. Regardless of whether the rhinoceros are African or Asian, the French characters comfortably assume their superiority to the rhinoceros; ironically the same people all become rhinoceroses themselves. Bérenger's friend Jean judges the superiority of African vs. Asian rhinoceroses by their number of horns (making him a caricature of those people who judge other people by the color of their skin) and at one point shouts at Bérenger: "If anybody's got horns, it is you! You are an Asiatic Mongol!" A recurring theme in Nazi propaganda was that the Jews were an "Asiatic" people who were unfortunately living in Europe, a message that many of the French became familiar with during the German occupation of 1940–1944. Ionesco alludes to the atmosphere of that period in his depiction of Jean taunting Bérenger over his supposed horns, and being "Asiatic". Ionesco intended the character of Jean, an ambitious functionary whose careerism robs him of the ability to think critically, to be a satirical portrayal of the French civil servants who served the Vichy government. At various points in the play, Jean shouts out such lines as "We need to go beyond moral standards!", "Nature has its own laws. Morality against Nature!" and "We must go back to primeval integrity!" When Jean says "humanism is all washed up", Bérenger asks: "Are you suggesting we replace our moral laws with the law of the jungle?"


title: Rhinoceros (play)

text: Lines such as these show that Ionesco also created the character of Jean as a satire of the Iron Guard, which attacked all the humanist values of the modern West as "Jewish inventions" designed to destroy Romania, and claimed that there was a "natural law" in which "true" Romanians would discover their "primal energy" as the purest segment of the "Latin race" and assert their superiority over the "lower races". Notably, the more Jean rants about "natural laws" trumping all, the more he transforms into a rhinoceros.


title: Rhinoceros (play)

text: When Romanian nationalism first emerged in the late 18th century – at a time when the Romanians in Bukovina and Transylvania were ruled by the Austrian Empire while the Romanians in Moldavia, Wallachia and the Dobruja were ruled by the Ottoman Empire – there was an intense emphasis on the Latinity of the Romanians, who were depicted as a lonely island of Latin civilization in Eastern Europe surrounded by "Slavic and Turanian barbarians". The reference to "Turanian barbarians" was to both the Turks and the Magyars who both "Turanian" peoples from Asia. This tradition of seeing Romania as a bastion of Latinism threatened by enemies everywhere culminated in the 1930s where the Iron Guard argued there were "natural laws" that determined Romania's struggle for existence, which allowed the Legion to justify any act of violence no matter how amoral as necessary because of the "natural laws". Ionesco parodied the Legion's talk of "natural laws" and "primeval values" by putting dialogue that closely resembled the Legion's rhetoric into Jean as he transforms into a green rhinoceros.


title: Rhinoceros (play)

text: At the same time, Ionesco also attacked in "Rhinoceros" the French "intelligentsia", a disproportionate number of whom were proud members of the French Communist Party in the 1950s. As an anti-Communist Romanian émigré living in France, Ionesco was often offended by the way in which so many French intellectuals embraced Stalinism and would either justify or deny all of the crimes of the Stalin regime under the grounds that the Soviet Union was a "progressive" nation leading humanity to a better future. Ionesco satirized French Communist intellectuals with the character of Botard, who is clearly the most left-wing character in the play. Botard professes himself to be the champion of progressive values, saying about the debate in regards to the debate over the superiority of African vs. Asian rhinoceros that: "The color bar is something I feel strongly about, I hate it!". But at the same time, Botard shows himself to be rigid, small-minded and petty in his thinking, using Marxist slogans in place of intelligent thought. Most notably, Botard is unable to accept the fact of rhinoceritis despite overwhelming evidence of its existence. For an example, Botard dismisses rhinoceritis as: "An example of collective psychosis, Mr. Dudard. Just like religion-the opiate of the people!". Despite seeing the rhinoceroses with his own eyes, Botard convinces himself that rhinoceritis is all a gigantic capitalist plot, dismissing rhinoceritis as an "infamous plot" and "propaganda". Ionesco created the character of Botard as a caricature of French Communist intellectuals who managed to ignore overwhelming evidence of Stalin's terror and proclaimed the Soviet Union to be the "Worker's Paradise, dismissing any evidence to the contrary as mere anti-Soviet propaganda. A further attack on Communism was provided by the character of the pipe-smoking intellectual Dudard. Ionesco stated in an interview that: "Dudard is Sartre". Ionesco disliked Jean-Paul Sartre – France's most famous intellectual in the 1950s – for the way in which he sought to justify Stalin's murderous violence as necessary for the betterment of humanity as a betrayal of everything that a French intellectual should be, and intended the character of Dudard who always finds excuses for the rhinoceros as a caricature of Sartre who always found excuses for Stalin.


title: Rhinoceros (play)

text: Ionesco also intended "Rhinoceros" as a satire of French behavior under the German occupation of 1940–1944. The green skin of the rhinoceros recalled not only the green uniforms of the Iron Guard, but also the green uniforms of the "Ordnungspolizei" who enforced German power in France during the occupation. Several French critics when they saw the première of "Rhinoceros" in 1960 wrote in their reviews that the green skin of the rhinoceros invoked memories of the Occupation, with the "Ordnungspolizei" in their green uniforms and the Wehrmacht in their muddy-green uniforms. During the Occupation, the French applied nicknames to the Germans that often used the word "vert", calling the Germans "haricots verts" (green beans), "sauterelles verts" (green locusts), and "race verte" (green race). In France during the occupation, the color green was indelibly associated with the Germans.


title: Rhinoceros (play)

text: For the French people, the defeat of June 1940 came as a very profound shock, something that they could never imagine would actually happen. The experience of the Occupation was a deeply psychologically disorienting one for the French as what was once familiar and safe become strange and threatening. Many Parisians could not get over the shock experienced when they first saw the huge swastika flags hanging over the Hôtel de Ville and on top of the Eiffel Tower. The British historian Ian Ousby wrote:Even today, when people who are not French or did not live through the Occupation look at photos of German soldiers marching down the Champs Élysées or of Gothic-lettered German signposts outside the great landmarks of Paris, they can still feel a slight shock of disbelief. The scenes look not just unreal, but almost deliberately surreal, as if the unexpected conjunction of German and French, French and German, was the result of a Dada prank and not the sober record of history.


title: Rhinoceros (play)

text: This shock is merely a distant echo of what the French underwent in 1940: seeing a familiar landscape transformed by the addition of the unfamiliar, living among everyday sights suddenly made bizarre, no longer feeling at home in places they had known all their lives. Ousby wrote that by the end of summer of 1940: "And so the alien presence, increasingly hated and feared in private, could seem so permanent that, in the public places where daily life went on, it was taken for granted". At the same time France was also marked by disappearances as buildings were renamed, books banned, art was stolen to be taken to Germany and as time went on, various people, especially Jews were arrested and deported to death camps.


title: Rhinoceros (play)

text: Afterwards, many of the French learned to accept the changes imposed by the German occupation, coming to the conclusion that Germany was Europe's dominant power and the best that could be done was to submit and bow down before the might of the "Reich". The more difficult and dangerous choice of becoming a "résistant" to the German occupation was taken only by a minority of brave people; estimates of those French who served in the Resistance varied from 2%–14% of the population depending on the historian and what one chooses to define as resistance. Many historians argued that such activities like writing for an underground newspaper, sheltering Jews and Allied servicemen, providing intelligence to the Allies or sabotaging the railroads and factories counts as resistance. Only about 2% of the French population or about 400,000 people engaged in armed resistance during the Occupation. In "Rhinoceros", the characters are shocked and horrified that people are turning into brutal rhinoceros, but during the course of the play learn to accept what is happening, as just the French people were shocked by their defeat in 1940, but many learned to accept their place in the "New Order" in Europe. Dudard expresses collaborationist feelings towards the rhinoceros, saying: "Well, I'm surprised, too. Or rather I was. Now I am getting used to it". Dudard also says of the rhinoceros: "They don't attack you. If you leave them alone, they just ignore you. You can't say they are spiteful". Dudard's statements recall those feelings of the French who were initially shocked to see German soldiers, policemen and the SS marching around their cities and towns in 1940, but swiftly learned that if offered no resistance, the Germans would usually leave them alone to live their lives (provided that they were not Jewish).


title: Rhinoceros (play)

text: Along the same lines, Bérenger wonders "Why us?", asking how rhinoceritis could possibly be happening in France. Bérenger goes on to say:If only it happened somewhere else, in some other country, and we'd just read about it in the papers, one could discuss it quietly, examine the question from all points of view and come to an objective conclusion. We could organize debates with professors and writers and lawyers, blue-stockings and artists and people and ordinary men in the street as well—it would be very interesting and instructive. But when you're involved yourself, when you suddenly find yourself up against brutal facts, you can't help feeling directly concerned—the shock is too violent for you to stay detached. Besides alluding to the German occupation, lines such as these also recall Ionesco's youth in Romania in the 1930s. Bérenger, the hard-drinking, slovenly, kindly everyman is regarded as the alter ego of Ionesco.


title: Rhinoceros (play)

text: The rhinoceroses, rhinoceritis and rhinoceration are current matters and you single out a disease that was born in this century. Humanity is besieged by certain diseases, physiologically and organically, but the "spirit" too is periodically besieged by certain diseases. You discovered a disease of the 20th century, which could be called after my famous play, rhinoceritis. For a while, one can say that a man is rhinocerised by stupidity or baseness. But there are people—honest and intelligent—who in their turn may suffer the unexpected onset of this disease, even the dear and close ones may suffer...It happened to my friends. That's why I left Romania.


title: Rhinoceros (play)

text: Aspects of Bérenger who stubbornly remains human and vows never to give in recall Ionesco's own youth in Romania in the shadow of the Iron Guard. Jean and Dudard both mock Bérenger for weakness because he drinks too much and believes in love which they view as signs of lack of self-control, but Ionesco said about Bérenger that the strength of the modern hero "stemmed from what may be taken for weakness". When Bérenger declares his love for Daisy, it is a sign that he still retains his humanity, despite the way that others mocked him for believing in love. Ionesco wrote during his youth, he had the "strange responsibility" of being himself, feeling like the last (metaphorical) human being in Romania, as "all around me men were metamorphosed into beasts, rhinoceros... You would run into an old friend, and all of sudden, right before your eyes, he would start to change. It was if his gloves had become paws, his shoes hoofs. You could no longer talk intelligently with him for he was not a rational human being". Quinney noted that in both French and English, the word rhinoceros is both a singular and plural term, and argued that Ionesco made people transform into rhinoceros in his play as indicating that when an individual becomes part of a herd mindlessly following others, such a man or a woman lose part of their humanity.