text:
Literary labours lent
The uncertain economics of lending virtual books
LIKE a tired marriage, the relationship between libraries and publishers has long been reassuringly dull. E-books, however, are causing heartache. Libraries know they need digital wares if they are to remain relevant, but many publishers are too wary of piracy and lost sales to co-operate. Among the big six, only Random House and HarperCollins license e-books with most libraries. The others have either denied requests or are reluctantly experimenting. In August, for example, Penguin will start a pilot with public libraries in New York.
Publishers are wise to be nervous. Owners of e-readers are exactly the customers they need: book-lovers with money (neither the devices nor broadband connections come cheap). If these wonderful people switch to borrowing e-books instead of buying them, what then?
Electronic borrowing is awfully convenient. Unlike printed books, which must be checked out and returned to a physical library miles from where you live, book files can be downloaded at home. Digital library catalogues are often browsed at night, from a comfy sofa. The files disappear from the device when they are due (which means no late fees, nor angst about lost or damaged tomes).
Awkwardly for publishers, buying an e-book costs more than renting one but offers little extra value. You cannot resell it, lend it to a friend or burn it to stay warm. Owning a book is useful if you want to savour it repeatedly, but who reads "Fifty Shades of Grey" twice?
E-lending is not simple, however. There are lots of different and often incompatible e-book formats, devices and licences. Most libraries use a company called OverDrive, a global distributor that secures rights from publishers and provides e-books and audio files in every format. Some 35m titles were checked out through OverDrive in 2011, and the company now sends useful data on borrowing behaviour to participating publishers. Yet publishers and libraries are worried by OverDrive's market dominance, as the company can increasingly dictate fees and conditions.
Publishers were miffed when OverDrive teamed up with Amazon, the world's biggest online bookseller, last year. Owners of Amazon's Kindle e-reader who want to borrow e-books from libraries are now redirected to Amazon's website, where they must use their Amazon account to secure a loan. Amazon then follows up with library patrons directly, letting them know they can "Buy this book" when the loan falls due.
This arrangement nudged Penguin to end its deal with OverDrive earlier this year. The publisher's new pilot involves 3M, a rival distributor that does not yet support the Kindle. "Ultimately Amazon wants to control the library business," says Mike Shatzkin, a publishing consultant.
Library users—nearly 60% of Americans aged 16 and older, according to Pew, an opinion researcher—are a perfect market for Amazon. It woos them by making loans on the Kindle uniquely easy. Late last year Amazon also unveiled its Kindle Owners' Lending Library, which lets its best customers (called "Amazon Prime" members) borrow free one of thousands of popular books each month.
Library boosters argue that book borrowers are also book buyers, and that libraries are vital spaces for readers to discover new work. Many were cheered by a recent Pew survey, which found that more than half of Americans with library cards say they prefer to buy their e-books. But the report also noted that few people know that e-books are available at most libraries, and that popular titles often involve long waiting lists, which may be what inspires people to buy.
So publishers keep tweaking their lending arrangements in search of the right balance. Random House raised its licensing prices earlier this year, and HarperCollins limits libraries to lending its titles 26 times. Penguin plans to keep new releases out of libraries for at least six months, and each book will expire after a year. Hachette is engaged in some secret experiments, and the others are watching with bated breath. In Britain the government will soon announce a review of the matter. The story of the library e-book is a nail-biter.
This article appeared in the Business section of the print edition under the headline "Literary labours lent"
From the July 28th 2012 edition
Discover stories from this section and more in the list of contentsExplore the edition
More from Business
Can Adidas ever catch up with Nike?
The German firm's new boss has his work cut out
How to get flexible working right
It is about schedules as well as locations
What Barbie tells you about near-shoring
Supply chains are neither global nor local. They are both


text:
This article was originally published in the May/June 1996 issue of Home Energy Magazine. Some formatting inconsistencies may be evident in older archive content.
| Back to Contents Page | Home Energy Index | About Home Energy |
Home Energy Magazine Online May/June 1996
Installing and Maintaining Evaporative Coolers
by Roy Otterbein
Roy Otterbein is president of Otterbein Engineering in Phoenix, Arizona. He holds three patents in indirect evaporative cooling and is a member of the ASHRAE Standards Committees on direct and indirect evaporative coolers.
Evaporative coolers cost only one-tenth to one-fourth as much to operate as refrigeration air conditioning and are much cheaper to buy ($400-$800). This makes them an excellent option, particularly in hot, dry areas of the country.
An evaporative cooler is a simple device consisting of a fan and a water-wetted pad. A small pump recirculates water from a sump (which is part of the cooler cabinet) to keep the pad wet. The fan draws outside air through the wet pad, making the air more humid but colder. This air is blown into the house, forcing the warmer air in the house to be exhausted out open windows or through a vent into the attic (see Figure 1). This is quite different from refrigeration air conditioning, which cools inside air and returns it to the house.
Although the use of outside air is one major benefit of evaporative coolers, it also complicates their installation and operation. The evaporative cooler must be installed outside the house, ducted into the house, and freeze protected and isolated from the house during the winter months.
Figure 1. Evaporative coolers bring outside air into a house and exhaust it through open windows or ceiling-mounted barometric dampers.
Cooler Performance
Evaporative coolers are most popular in areas with the coldest summer wet-bulb temperatures, which tend to be in the western United States. Figure 2 shows 1% wet bulb isolines--the wet bulb temperature that is exceeded only 1% of the time during the summer months in a given area.
Figure 2. Wet bulb temperature isolines at the 1% level. Summer wet bulb temperatures indicate where evaporative coolers will work best. If an area has a 1% summer wet bulb temperature of 70°F or below, an evaporative cooler should be able to provide most of a house's cooling needs. However, they are still very popular in areas with wet bulbs between 70°F and 75°F.
A quick check for evaporative pad performance is to compare the temperature of the water in the cooler sump (approximately the wet-bulb temperature of outside air) to that of the air entering and leaving the cooler (see Figure 3). The following equation can be used:
Saturation effectiveness = ( TOSA-TLA)/( TOSA -TSUMP ) x 100where TOSA = Temperature of outside air entering cooler
TLA = Temperature of air leaving pad (air inside cooler)
TSUMP = Temperature of sump water
Figure 3. The saturation effectiveness of evaporative cooler pads can be checked with a thermometer. In this example, a cooler has 70°F air leaving the pad during a 100°F day, and has a sump water temperature of 60°F. Saturation effectiveness = (100-70) / (100-60) x 100 = 75%.
An alternate way to determine pad performance is to check the temperature of the air leaving the cooler against the cooler index (see Table 1). The cooler index is the anticipated temperature of the air leaving an aspen pad cooler (described below) and accounts for heat added to the air by the pump and fan motors and a cabinet exposed to the sun. The cooler index has the advantage of enabling the homeowner to check cooler performance by watching the news and checking the temperature of the air leaving the diffuser in the house. If this temperature is 3°F or more higher than the cooler index indicates as normal, the cooler is not operating as well as it should be, probably due to a malfunctioning water distribution system, sagging pads, or poorly manufactured aspen pads.
Table 1. Evaporative cooler index for standard aspen-pad coolers. Enter the table from the left with outside air temperature and the top with outdoor humidity. Where the row and column meet is the temperature of air a typical evaporative cooler will produce. The cooler index can also be used to check the performance of cooler pads.
Homeowners can also use the cooler index to decide when to switch between evaporative cooling and air conditioning. As a general rule, if a cooler produces air colder than 70°F, it will create a comfortable environment; if it produces air hotter than 75°F, it will not. Between 70°F and 75°F is a gray range in which some people are comfortable and some are not.
Evaporative Cooler Types
Fiber Pad CoolersThe most common pads are shredded aspen wood fibers packed in a plastic net. This material (also known as excelsior) was once widely used to ship delicate items like glassware. There are a number of synthetic-fiber pads; however, few perform as well as high-quality aspen pads, which have a naturally wettable surface. These pads are 1 to 2 inches thick. Quality and cost vary substantially; the least expensive pads are usually the thinnest. If thin pads are used, each pad frame should be double-packed, using two pads to improve saturation effectiveness.
Fiber pads must operate at low air velocities to prevent water from being pulled off the pad by the airstream. They are therefore used on coolers that have air inlets on many sides. The pads are simply discarded every year or two and replaced with new ones. Fiber pad coolers usually cost the least and require the most maintenance.
Rigid-Sheet Pad CoolersThe other main type of cooler uses a rigid-sheet pad--a stack of corrugated sheet material that allows air to move through at higher velocities than is possible with aspen pads. These pads are usually 8 or 12 inches thick. Twenty years ago they were found only in large expensive commercial coolers, but they are now common in residential coolers as well.
Coolers using rigid-sheet pads usually have a single air inlet (and are often referred to as single-inlet coolers). The pads have a corrugation pattern that forces water to flood the pad's air inlet side where most of the evaporation of water (and scaling) occurs (see Figure 4). These pads are substantially more expensive than aspen pads, but they can last for many years if water quality is properly maintained with a bleed-off or sump dump system (discussed below). Therefore the life cycle cost for these pads can equal the cost of aspen pads (not to mention the labor savings from not having to change the pads every year or two).
Two-Stage CoolersTwo-stage (also called indirect/ direct) evaporative coolers usually use a rigid pad and have an indirect evaporative precooler. The indirect coolers precool the air without adding humidity to the air going into the house. To understand this concept, imagine blowing air through the core of a pipe. Then sprinkle water on the outside of the pipe, and blow air across the pipe. The air inside the pipe is cooled by contact with the cool pipe, but it is not in contact with the water, so its humidity does not increase. Since this precooling adds no humidity to the air, it can still be subsequently direct-evaporatively cooled. However, because the precooled air cannot hold as much moisture, the result is both colder and drier air.
A rather startling feature of two-stage evaporative coolers is that they can produce air colder than outside wetbulb. Two-stage coolers are the highest priced and best-performing evaporative coolers. They are at their best during extremely hot (110°F-plus), dry days.
Cooler Maintenance
Since evaporative cooler pads are designed to provide wet-surface contact with all the air moving through them, they are also remarkably good air filters (hence the term air washer or scrubber). Many rigid-sheet pads can filter out 90% of particles 10 microns (µ) and larger, including most pollens and dust. Fewer data are available on aspen pad filtration; however, in my personal experience, these pads also perform well as filters.
Maintaining Water QualityAs the water in an evaporative cooler evaporates, fresh water (makeup water) is brought into the cooler. A float valve controls delivery. However, the minerals (salts) brought into the cooler with the makeup water do not evaporate, and the water in the sump becomes brackish. Eventually the water becomes saturated with minerals and the minerals precipitate out (usually at the air inlet side of the pad). During operation, most of the water evaporation and filtration occur at the air inlet side, leaving a combination of scale and previously airborne dirt on that surface. When a pad has failed, the inlet face is usually clogged while the downstream face can appear brand new. A trick to lengthen the life of rigid sheet pads is to rotate and turn the pad upside down, so that the previously downstream face becomes the upstream face.
To prevent the water from becoming saturated with minerals, a bleed-off or sump dump system should be installed.
A bleed-off system is simply a tee installed in the water distribution discharge, with a hose to a nearby drain or to the ground. Whenever the pump turns on, a small amount of the water is diverted.
A sump dump system (referred to as a blow-down in cooling tower jargon) evacuates the water from the sump every six hours or so while the cooler is operating. The dumping is done by a second pump (most commonly) or by a power-activated sump drain valve.
Sump dump systems are better than bleed-off systems because they discharge not only brackish water but also some of the enormous amount of filtered dirt that collects on the bottom of the sump. Some coolers have sloped bottoms so that minerals and dirt will gravitate toward the sump dump.
A water treatment system is a good idea for fiber pad coolers. Often it enables the user to keep a set of pads for two years. For rigid-sheet coolers, a water treatment system is essential, because rigid pads cost up to $100 to replace.
In reality, it is rare for water in a cooler not to become saturated with minerals in most desert environments. Hard water is very common in areas where evaporative cooling is used, and maintaining ideal water conditions in a cooler would consume too much water. Bleed-off systems can use as much as 5 gallons of water per hour, but if water is particularly expensive in the area, even 1 gallon of water discharge is substantially better than trapping all the minerals in the cooler.
A technique to minimize the effects of water waste from bleed-off and sump dump systems is to send the discarded water to a consumer of potentially low-quality water. Sending this water to a garden is ideal, because the cooler discharges more water when the weather is hottest and the watering needs of the garden are greatest. (Mineral-sensitive plants could be harmed, but I have watered a standard vegetable garden with no trouble.) Someone should develop a system for using this water to flush toilets.
Sizing Evaporative Coolers
Evaporative coolers are assigned an Industry Standard CFM by the manufacturer. This CFM (cubic feet per minute air flow), which is usually a number between 2,000 and 6,500, is approximately 50% higher than the highest air flow the cooler can actually produce with no ductwork restriction. Although the Industry Standard CFM claims much more air flow than a cooler can deliver, this approach to defining cooler sizes has been used for years by many manufacturers and shocks only the novice specifier. It is not unlike the technique used to define lumber sizes; most people know that a 2 x 4 is actually smaller than 2 inches x 4 inches. Most manufacturers also provide the actual air flow the cooler produces at various duct resistances.
The ideal evaporative cooler installation is an engineered system--a room-by-room heat load is calculated, a cooler is selected, and a corresponding duct system is designed. In reality, this is rarely done, because coolers are so inexpensive. Here's an alternate way to size three basic systems common in residences.
A/C Add-OnAn add-on evaporative cooler blowing into the refrigeration cooling duct system is most common in low elevation desert areas that have high cooling needs. It has a refrigeration cooling system and ductwork sized to meet the needs of that system. The ductwork is smaller than the ideal size for an evaporative cooler, but the system offers many advantages over straight refrigeration air conditioning:
Independent Ducted SystemAnother type is an evaporative cooler blowing into a single diffuser in the hall ceiling or into a dedicated duct system in the ceiling space. This is most common in areas with modest cooling needs and in houses that have floor-based heating-duct systems entirely too small for evaporative-cooling ductwork.
The sizing guide for these systems is to use 2-3 CFM (Industry Standard) per ft2 of floor space in most climates. Use 3-4 CFM per ft2 in hot desert areas.
Window-Mounted CoolersThe third type is a window-mounted evaporative cooler. This is a low-cost installation and is found wherever coolers are common. These coolers should be sized in the same way as an independent ducted system.
Blower Orientation
- 1

subset: commoncrawl


text:
I know, I know- I'm so late with this! Joke's on all of you who called me "organized" on Amanda's post. But I finally have a moment to breathe and tell you about the world's most amazing present. From none other than Carey from Me Jump Pretty One Day!
I knew I was in for a treat when I got this teaser card:
Who can resist that face??? And the drool was a perfect touch- no joke, I have this hanging in my office and I've had people stop in the middle of sentences to ask what that is. I tend to start stuttering about how fun and silly horses are and try to get back on topic. They don't get it. I love it.
A short while later, I opened up my package to reveal a personalized desk calendar!! The time and effort Carey put into this was so so so beyond thoughtful, and I love it so much. It's even already come in handy flipping through the year as I'm wedding planning! Here's the cover:
I quickly flipped through and ooh-ed and aah-ed over the pretty pictures of me and Francis.
And then I spotted something. And I turned back to the front. And I spotted those little letters: "Olivia and To Be Frank 2018. (and Cosmo)"
Ladies and gentlemen, as if this couldn't get any better, we have Mo joining us in every. single. picture. Here's January:
Hah! There he is!!! I cackle with glee every time I look at this!!!
Carey was kind enough to share the digital files she used, so here's a selection of my favorites (though let's be real, they're all my favorites because this is AMAZING).
I'm pretty sure this is the Secret Santa gift to beat all Secret Santa gifts. I'm still giggly about it every day, and I get to giggle about it all year! Thank you SO MUCH Carey for this wonderfully thoughtful and hilarious and amazing present!!!
And of course a huge big thank you to Tracy of The Printable Pony for hosting this every year- this was a huge highlight of my holiday season, and I already can't wait until next year!!
I gotta go stare at this some more and chortle like a bubbling-over teapot. I'll be back in a bit.


text:
Nick Hogan -- I Was Ridden for $130,000
Nick Hogan is as bad of an investor as he is a driver -- in a brand new lawsuit, Nick claims two guys he tried to start a business with rode him for a grand total of $130,767.75.
Nick is suing Louis Adkinson and Damon Elliot for breach of contract after he agreed to invest $50,000 in a record production company called "Confidential South, LLC" back in January -- a company Nick says never even got off the ground.
According to the suit, filed in L.A. County Superior Court, Nick claims Adkinson and Elliot both promised to invest 50k of their own ... AND told Nick everyone would get their money back if the company never formed. Surprisingly, the suit says neither of those things happened.
To make it worse, Nick alleges the evil duo ran up $80,767.75 on his American Express card without his permission -- so he's also suing them for fraud. Nick wants the 130k back -- at least.


text:
A long lost Cambodian tribe has left only one trace behind, but it's a significant one. Human remains have been found in jars. The latest have been found about one hundred and sixty feet up a cliff.
The Cardamom Mountains hide an unappetizing secret. Scattered over the hills are bodies, or what remains of them, stored in jars. Some of the jars are just hollowed out logs with bones and teeth in their hollows. Others are more elaborate ceramic works, with skulls peeking out of the necks. They're always in the mountains, some perched on shelves that seem to be cut into the stone near the bottom of the mountain, and some are just barely pushed into the shelter of caves.
It's no question that it's a burial ritual. The highest of the bodies are placed one hundred and sixty feet up cliff sides, probably to keep them from being accessible to anyone but the most determined. The jars show signs of being part of a ritual, too. The bottom or each jar has a hole drilled into it, either to make it of no value to anyone other than as a burial vessel, or just to let fluids or any water that leaked in drain quickly.
The sites are dated as being from the fourteenth to the seventeenth century, which means the occupants must have lived during the Khmer Empire, a powerful and unified society that dominated much of Southeast Asia. These people, however, don't show any signs of being part of that empire. Perhaps their life in the mountains kept them independent, or just practically separate from the people around them. Still, it means that all we know today about them comes from their sky burials. We may never know more about them. Perhaps, given the lengths they went to hide their dead, they would have wanted it that way.
Top Image: Cardamom Mountains at Sunset
Via National Geographic.


text:
In keeping with the Library's mission and core values, meeting rooms are available for use by the public when not needed for Library purposes. Use of the Library meeting rooms in no way constitutes endorsement by the Library staff or board of trustees of the viewpoints presented or of the policies or beliefs of those using the meeting rooms.
Only local non-profit groups, units of government, and appointed or elected government officials may use meeting rooms in the Main Library and Branch Libraries without charge. Such use must occur during hours the Library is open. For purposes of this policy, "non-profit group" means a group that is eligible for tax-exempt status under sections 501(c)(3)-(11) of the Internal Revenue Code. Certain groups, as described in the Library Meeting Room Policy, are not eligible for tax exempt status under sections 501(c)(3)-(11): Library Meeting Room Policy
You can request a meeting room using the button below.
See the chart below for meeting room prices for groups that are not eligible for tax exempt status or tax exempt groups wanting to use the meeting rooms during Library closed hours.
|Open Hours Fee
|Closed Hours Fee
|Seating for 425, basic lights and sound support, AV capabilities, etc.
|Meeting Room 1
|Seats 50 (chairs only) or 25 (chairs and tables); AV capabilities (projector and screen).
|Meeting Room 2AB
|Seats 100 (chairs only) or 50 (chairs and tables); AV capabilities (projector and screen).
|Meeting Room 3
|Seats 50 (chairs only) or 25 (chairs and tables); AV capabilities (projector and screen)
For meeting room inquiries or to make a reservation, please contact the Events team at (330) 643-9095 or send us an email.
Please provide your name, phone number, group name, date/time requested and the purpose of your event. Please allow 1-2 business days for a response from our team.
Please review full Library Meeting Room Policy before making your reservation.
For inquiries regarding reservations at any of the Library's branches, please contact that branch's location.


text:
|Slony-I 2.0.8 Documentation
|Fast Backward
|Chapter 6. Schema schemadoc
|Fast Forward
6.16. Table: sl_setsync
SYNC information
Structure of sl_setsync
- ssy_setid
integer PRIMARY KEY REFERENCES sl_set
ID number of the replication set
- ssy_origin
integer REFERENCES sl_node
ID number of the node
- ssy_seqno
Slony-I sequence number
- ssy_snapshot
TXID in provider system seen by the event
- ssy_action_list
action list used during the subscription process. At the time a subscriber copies over data from the origin, it sees all tables in a state somewhere between two SYNC events. Therefore this list must contains all log_actionseqs that are visible at that time, whose operations have therefore already been included in the data copied at the time the initial data copy is done. Those actions may therefore be filtered out of the first SYNC done after subscribing.


text:
Friday, 28 August 2009
Madonna Criticizes Discriminations Against Gypsies, Booed In Bucharest
At first, fans politely applauded the Roma performers sharing a stage with Madonna. Then the pop star condemned widespread discrimination against Roma, or Gypsies — and the cheers gave way to jeers.
The sharp mood change that swept the crowd of 60,000, who had packed a park for Wednesday night's concert, underscores how prejudice against Gypsies remains deeply entrenched across Eastern Europe.
Despite long-standing efforts to stamp out rampant bias, human rights advocates say Roma probably suffer more humiliation and endure more discrimination than any other people group on the continent.
Sometimes, it can be deadly: In neighboring Hungary, six Roma have been killed and several wounded in a recent series of apparently racially motivated attacks targeting small countryside villages predominantly settled by Gypsies.
"There is generally widespread resentment against Gypsies in Eastern Europe. They have historically been the underdog," Radu Motoc, an official with the Soros Foundation Romania, said Thursday.
Roma, or Gypsies, are a nomadic ethnic group believed to have their roots in the Indian subcontinent. They live mostly in southern and eastern Europe, but hundreds of thousands have migrated west over the past few decades in search of jobs and better living conditions.
Romania has the largest number of Roma in the region. Some say the population could be as high as 2 million, although official data put it at 500,000.
Until the 19th century, Romanian Gypsies were slaves, and they've gotten a mixed response ever since: While discrimination is widespread, many East Europeans are enthusiastic about Gypsy music and dance, which they embrace as part of the region's cultural heritage.
That explains why the Roma musicians and a dancer who had briefly joined Madonna onstage got enthusiastic applause. And it also may explain why some in the crowd turned on Madonna when she paused during the two-hour show — a stop on her worldwide "Sticky and Sweet" tour — to touch on their plight.
"It has been brought to my attention ... that there is a lot of discrimination against Romanies and Gypsies in general in Eastern Europe," she said. "It made me feel very sad."
Thousands booed and jeered her.
A few cheered when she added: "We don't believe in discrimination ... we believe in freedom and equal rights for everyone." But she got more boos when she mentioned discrimination against homosexuals and others.
"I jeered her because it seemed false what she was telling us. What business does she have telling us these things?" said Ionut Dinu, 23.
Madonna did not react and carried on with her concert, held near the hulking palace of the late communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu.
Her publicist, Liz Rosenberg, said Madonna and other had told her there were cheers as well as jeers.
"Madonna has been touring with a phenomenal troupe of Roma musicians who made her aware of the discrimination toward them in several countries so she felt compelled to make a brief statement," Rosenberg said in an e-mail. "She will not be issuing a further statement."
One Roma musician said the attitude toward Gypsies is contradictory.
"Romanians watch Gypsy soap operas, they like Gypsy music and go to Gypsy concerts," said Damian Draghici, a Grammy Award-winner who has performed with James Brown and Joe Cocker.
"But there has been a wave of aggression against Roma people in Italy, Hungary and Romania, which shows me something is not OK," he told the AP in an interview. "The politicians have to do something about it. People have to be educated not to be prejudiced. All people are equal, and that is the message politicians must give."
Nearly one in two of Europe's estimated 12 million Roma claimed to have suffered an act of discrimination over the past 12 months, according to a recent report by the Vienna-based EU Fundamental Rights Agency. The group says Roma face "overt discrimination" in housing, health care and education.
Many do not have official identification, which means they cannot get social benefits, are undereducated and struggle to find decent jobs.
Roma children are more likely to drop out of school than their peers from other ethnic groups. Many Romanians label Gypsies as thieves, and many are outraged by those who beg or commit petty crimes in Western Europe, believing they spoil Romania's image abroad.
In May 2007, Romanian President Traian Basescu was heard to call a Romanian journalist a "stinky Gypsy" during a conversation with his wife. Romania's anti-discrimination board criticized Basescu, who later apologized.
Human rights activists say the attacks in Hungary, which began in July 2008, may be tied to that country's economic crisis and the rising popularity of far-right vigilantes angered by a rash of petty thefts and other so-called "Gypsy crime." Last week, police arrested four suspects in a nightclub in the eastern city of Debrecen.
Bulgaria, the Czech Republic and Slovakia also have been criticized for widespread bias against Roma.
Madonna's outrage touched a nerve in Romania, but it seems doubtful it will change anything, said the Soros Foundation's Motoc.
"Madonna is a pop star. She is not an expert on interethnic relations," he said.
(From Associated Press)
Posted by PublicInformationProjects at 01:20
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)


text:
Spider Girl bodypaint
Finally she is here. After Super girl and Bat girl, we have Spider girl.
View - Spider Girl bodypaint
Views: 55282
Shared: 3 times
(39 Votes)
Sacramento Kings Jersey
Marisa Miller sporting a Sacramento Kings body paint jersey.
View - Sacramento Kings Jersey
Views: 41005
Shared: 3 times
(22 Votes)
Big Eye Boobs illusion
An optical illusion of a face paint of the upside down body of a female with the eyes bodypaint on her large boobs.
View - Big Eye Boobs illusion
Views: 43177
Shared: 15 times
(39 Votes)
Libra Zodiac Sign - Astrology
Libra September 24th - October 23rd
Body painting of the Libra sign on a sexy nude female body.
View - Libra Zodiac Sign - Astrology
Views: 20060
Shared: 4 times
(24 Votes)
Marisa Miller Bikini Collection
Marisa Miller in a body painted bikini
View - Marisa Miller Bikini Collection
Views: 9959
Shared: 0 times
(20 Votes)
Coca Cola Zero - Real look - no clothes
Coca Cola Zero. Real taste, zero sugar!
She came with no clothes, body paint, that looked like gear
Coca Cola Zero Bodypaint, Real ...
View - Coca Cola Zero - Real look - no clothes
Views: 14192
Shared: 6 times
(20 Votes)
Emma and Natalie Criket Legs before wicket
Legs before wicket: Emma (left ) and Natalie pose at the crease with Alastair Cook.
Kate's former teammates Emma Sayle and Natalie Sisson ...
View - Emma and Natalie Criket Legs before wicket
Views: 27397
Shared: 5 times
(19 Votes)
Dallas Cowboys apparel
Not all Dallas Cowboys apparel must be bought for extremely high prices, it can also be sprayed on as body paint.
View - Dallas Cowboys apparel
Views: 14393
Shared: 1 times
(21 Votes)
Happy 4th of July Greetings
Happy 4th of July
Come and celebrate July 4th with these flag wearing blonde triplets.
View - Happy 4th of July Greetings
Views: 9865
Shared: 1 times
(25 Votes)
Sexy She Hulk
Sexy She Hulk lounging by Northwatch.
Lets Go Green.
View - Sexy She Hulk
Views: 33074
Shared: 22 times
(35 Votes)


text:
Energy Secretary Steven Chu Will Soon End His Experiment in Washington
The Nobel-winning physicist brought an empirical focus to the Department of Energy. But after struggling to solve the formulas behind Beltway politics, the star scientist will reportedly step down.
As a Nobel-winning physicist, Steven Chu brought an empirical focus to the Department of Energy. But the star scientist—who will reportedly step down as Energy Secretary for Obama's second term—often struggled to solve the formulas behind Beltway politics. Bloomberg's Hans Nichols & Jim Snyder today cited two people familiar with the matter who say that an announcement could come as soon as this week, confirming previously reported expectations that Chu will leave his Cabinet position.
Before joining the Obama cabinet, Chu directed the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and taught at Stanford University. His contributions toward the discovery of laser cooling techniques (ways to trap atoms using light, basically) earned him a Nobel Prize in 1997 and wide respect amongst researchers. But Washington shot callers weren't always impressed by his egghead credentials. Chu was a vocal advocate of renewable energy projects, and his legacy in the federal government will always be tainted by the Solyndra scandal. Chu helped push to loan $535 million to the Californian solar panel company, even though its ledgers were shady and its financier, George Kaiser, had political ties to the Obama reelection campaign. When Solyndra went bankrupt, House Republicans brought Chu in for a thorough grilling. Department of Energy employees had to resign. The whole thing was a mess.
But, as an outcome-oriented technocrat, Chu stayed focussed on solar panels for the rest of his term. "It's very important we stay in this game," he reminded everyone when the dust cleared. And for every enemy he made in DC, Chu picked up a few admirers. "What he could have done, he did a great job with, which was implementing the stimulus bill and getting 30 some billion spent out of DOE, and doing it without fraud and doing it effectively," the Center for American Progress' director of clean energy investment Richard Caperton told Bloomberg reporters.
News of Chu's departure puts every environment-related position in Obama's Cabinet up for grabs. Seats currently vacant include Lisa Jackson's post at the Environmental Protection Agency and Ken Salazar's old gig as Interior Secretary. Tom Steyer, the head of major hedge fund Farallon Capital Management, is widely believed to be Obama's next choice for Energy Secretary. And if Steyer does get tapped, he'll bring the proportion of white maleness in the new Obama cabinet up even higher.


text:
The Marcolin Eyeglasses Eyewear collection offers a broad and deep line of high RX styles that appeals to the value minded consumer. The Marcolin line is not one broad collection; it is more a series of Eyeglasses Eyewear sub-collections designed specifically for the mature man and woman.Also See: Eyeglasses | Sunglasses
Give us a call or fill out our contact form. We will place a special order just for you.


text:
Most smartphone cases strive to provide as much protection for your device as possible without adding too much bulk or extra weight. But that's not the approach Bandai has taken with this monstrosity. Squarely targeted at die-hard Batman fans, this case is a perfect replica of the Tumbler Batmobile featured in Christopher Nolan's films, but designed to protect your iPhone—not the Dark Knight.
It's not all flash, though. This case will certainly protect your phone from drops, bumps, and Hollywood-caliber supervillain capers. It's also got a set of extra glowing LEDs so it's easier to find your phone in the dark, and the front wheels extend and retract so you have access to the phone's lock button and other functionality. There's little chance it will squeeze into your pocket, but should be just fine for a well-equipped utility belt.
At $57 it's not impossibly expensive either. In fact, you definitely don't need to have inherited a monstrous corporation to afford one. But if the price tag has you debating whether or not it's really worth it, consider this: instead of a flame blasting out of the back, the case features a tiny flashlight that projecting the bat symbol. Who could pass that up? [Bandai via Damn Geeky]


text:
So far in our VoIPowering Your Office series, we've focused
on big fat setups: Trixbox (formerly Asterisk@Home), which is Asterisk + the
CentOS operating system + a host of management tools, database backend, customer
management, and gobs of other programs, all nicely integrated; and plain-vanilla
Asterisk on CentOS Linux. These typically occupy 2–3 gigabytes of disk
space, a sizable portion of which is just the operating system. While this isn't
much by modern standards—for example, this article is being written on
a Kubuntu PC with a 250-gigabyte SATA hard drive—there's a lot of unnecessary
Naturally, any Linux admin worth a sack of peas knows how to slim things down.
I have a Debian system running Asterisk, and nothing else, that weighs in at
less than 400 megabytes. No sissy X Windows, no unneeded services or packages,
just Debian with a build environment and essential utilities—and Asterisk
with all the bells and whistles.
But for some people—like Kristian Kielhofner—this is still just
so much obesity. And so he created AstLinux.
Mr. Kielhofner has assembled a fully functional Asterisk PBX that includes the
operating system and useful utilities, and whittled it down to less than 50
megabytes. That's right, folks, small enough to fit on a 64-megabyte Compact
Flash card with room to spare.
Why so small? Well, why not? It's a fundamental security principal to keep servers as lean as possible, especially Internet-facing servers. It makes system administration and troubleshooting simpler. Even better, this makes it possible to run it on single-board computers like Soekris, PC Engines WRAP boards, and even the cool new Gumstix way small computers.
AstLinux also runs on mini-ITX computers and ordinary PC hardware, so you can scale your hardware according to your needs. Because you're starting from a minimalistic installation, you have the pleasant option of adding features as you need them, rather than pruning away cruft.
You might look at something like the Soekris net4801 and laugh. "Haha!" you
say, "I have more computing power in my wristwatch!" Which may be true. If so,
it means AstLinux can be ported to your wristwatch for the all-time great conversation
piece. But don't underestimate these little boards. They are tough as nails
and tolerate conditions that kill off ordinary PC hardware. They don't consume
much power, are surprisingly configurable, and are able performers.
For one example of their adaptability, the Soekris 4801 also comes bundled
with the Sangoma A101u E1/T1 single-port WAN card, which is designed for both
data and voice traffic. If you don't see the hardware configuration that you
really want, talk to the manufacturer about available customizations.
Taking it for a spin
Download the live CD image, burn it to disc, pop it into a PC and boot up. If
you enter the usbkd boot option, AstLinux will save data and configuration
files to a USB device. You probably want to specify the exact location of the
device to avoid conflicts, so use a boot command like this:
livecd astkd=/dev/sda1
How do you know the correct /dev name? Good old fdisk -l will tell you. If your USB stick is formatted with the ext2 filesystem, AstLinux will attempt to automount it at /mnt/kd.
You can even skip the middleperson and put AstLinux on a USB stick, and boot it instead.
Integrated access device
Mr. Kielhofner has ambitions for AstLinux beyond merely processing phone calls,
and is turning it into a multi-service, multi-protocol router. Rather like the
Cisco 2811, but without the $2,500 price tag and licensing hassles. The tools
are already available: Linux and x86 hardware provide abundant raw material,
so the challenge is creating useful, attractive packages. Slap a Digium or Sangoma
card into a good-quality PC and you have the makings of a first-rate integrated
PBX with all the necessary networking features built in:
- Multiple VLAN support
- SIP NAT traversal (sip-conntrack, Asterisk, OpenSER)
- QoS
- Session-balancing Internet connections
- Firewalling and routing
This device could easily be tailored to support DHCP and DNS, wireless access, VPN (Virtual Private Network) access, encrypted tunnels, Gigabit Ethernet, whatever the customer needs. Of course it's not a good idea to load up a border router with all manner of services, and especially not an Asterisk server, because call quality suffers when the hardware is overloaded.
Because Compact Flash is fast and durable, you could have non-writable CF storage on your nice AstLinux IAD, and use it only as a router. Then have a separate internal voice mail and logging server to handle data storage. This will speed up your overall PBX performance and add some security and flexibilty.
Come back next week to learn how to install AstLinux for real and make it go.
with Kristian Kielhofner
AstLinux User's Guide


text:
Rigged New Jersey tax-lien auctions 'harmed thousands' of homeowners
For at least 11 years, bidders on tax-sale certificates in New Jersey systematically rigged municipal auctions, defrauding thousands of already hard-pressed homeowners or businesses.
First revealed in August 2011 as the result of an ongoing FBI investigation, the extent of the conspiracy grows with every new guilty plea. The latest admission came just before Christmas from Mercer S.M.E. Inc. of Burlington, N.J. the 11th company or individual to plead guilty.
Tax-lien certificates provide a lifeline for municipalities, which often need outside help to collect back taxes. They sell these rights to bidders by auctioning certificates on delinquent properties.
As described by federal authorities, the conspirators distorted this market, piling exorbitant surcharges on property owners who might otherwise have paid quickly.
One result is that some New Jerseyans unfairly lost property or overpaid to keep it, said Michael Perle, one of the attorneys coordinating a federal class-action suit naming four dozen individuals or companies as conspirators. Although local tax collectors run the auctions, they are not targeted in the suit, he said.
"We see the municipalities as victims here, too," Perle said.
While collecting interest and fees from delinquent taxpayers, holders of the tax certificates also pay municipalities a share of the proceeds, he said. But those amounts also are part of the bidding process, so collusion among bidders probably cost towns money, Perle said.
While obtaining admissions of violations of the Sherman Antitrust Act, the U.S. Department of Justice has left it to the victims to pursue civil claims for restitution. Each new plea announcement has forced a rewrite of the lawsuit to include the latest revelations about participants and their actions.
Both the federal investigation and the civil suit present straightforward allegations.
Conspirators agreed among themselves to charge the highest possible interest rates to people already having trouble paying their taxes. In the words of the suit, this "harmed thousands of distressed homeowners throughout the state of New Jersey."
Because the Justice Department does not reveal details of ongoing investigations, attorneys in the civil suit have been negotiating settlements with some conspirators who already have pleaded guilty, trying to learn more details. Already, the plaintiffs contend that some of the conspirators' discussions took place at meetings of the National Tax Lien Association, based in Washington, D.C.
One of the lawsuit defendants, John Garzone, is a past president of both that association and Plymouth Park Tax Services, also known as Xspand,. No one from that company has pleaded guilty, but it has acknowledged being under investigation.
Now a subsidiary of JP Morgan Chase, Plymouth Park was previously owned by former New Jersey Gov. Jim Florio. Its board included a former Pennsylvania governor, Mark Schweiker. Florio sold the company in 2006 to Bear Stearns, a giant investment bank that soon collapsed in the Wall Street meltdown and was acquired by Morgan.
In 2011, Morgan announced it would "begin exiting" the New Jersey tax-lien business because it "wasn't central" to its operations. But that was just weeks before the Justice Department announced the first guilty plea from the ongoing investigation.
Bradley Westover, who took over as the NTLA's executive director in October 2011, said the group itself promotes proper bidding practices and was not involved in any of the irregularities.
"If some very foolish people had conversations over cocktails or whatever, that's something they did on their own," Westover said.
New Jersey is not the only place where the tax-lien market was compromised. In the past three years, other guilty pleas have resulted from investigations of rigging of tax-lien bids in Illinois, Maryland and San Joaquin County, Calif.
"The thing that distinguishes New Jersey is that these are municipal auctions, often very small, not county level or larger," Westover said. "When Palm Beach County, Fla., holds an auction, there are hundreds of bidders and maybe 20,000 liens, not six liens and six bidders."
As laid out in court documents, these schemes have been straightforward and the victims — hard-pressed homeowners and local governments – have been easy marks.
With interest rates depressed on many other investments, municipal tax-sale certificates are a lucrative alternative, offering purchasers returns of as much as 18 percent interest on the back taxes, plus penalties.
The catch is that they are offered in dribs and drabs at municipal auctions throughout New Jersey. Under state law, municipalities must hold auctions at least annually, and tax collectors are required to put the available properties up for bid or face possible sanctions.
In these auctions, the bidder willing to accept the lowest interest rate is the winner. But if no one else bids, the rate stays at 18 percent. Across the nation, $4 billion to $6 billion worth of unpaid property taxes are offered for sale each year.
The system was established during the Great Depression, at a time when tax collections fell in many communities. Rather than stretch municipal resources to pursue delinquent taxpayers, 26 states, plus Washington, D.C., and the U.S. Virgin Islands, decided to auction collection rights to bidders.
Historically, New Jersey allowed bidders to charge up to 8 percent interest. During the 1980s, though, investors left the tax-lien market, lured by 20 percent interest rates on other investments. The Legislature responded, raising the allowable rate, which has remained at 18 percent even as interest on most other investments has flat-lined.
Plymouth Park has been one of major buyers of New Jersey tax-sale certificates, along with M.D. Sass Investor Services and related firms in New York; Crusader Servicing Corp., owned in part by Royal Bank America of Narbeth, Pa.; American Tax Funding of Jupiter, Fla.; BankAtlantic Bancorp, now known as BBX Capital, of Fort Lauderdale, Fla.
According to the suit, representatives of those firms attended "most, if not all" of the New Jersey auctions during the period under investigation. Before the proceedings, conspirators would divvy up the properties, ensuring that little or no competitive bidding took place, according to federal authorities and the civil plaintiffs. Crusader is among those that have pleaded guilty.
"The conspirators agreed to coordinate their bids and allocate the tax liens amongst themselves, at the expense of distressed property owners," said Deputy Assistant Attorney General Scott D. Hammond, in announcing the Mercer company's guilty plea.
While not one of the biggest players, Mercer participated in the conspiracy from 2003 to 2009, according to its guilty plea. Its background is more colorful than most of the other defendants.
According to court documents, Mercer was established to accept tax-sale certificates assigned by a nonprofit "spiritual oasis," the Fountain of Life Center established by the Burlington Assembly of God.
The suit alleges that Mercer's president, Susan Esposito, and another executive, David Boudwin, participated in various rigged auctions. They are among four dozen individual and corporate purchasers currently named as defendants. Some are affiliated with banks or investment funds.
The lawsuit depicts their impact on several property owners.
In 2005, Robert E. Rothman of New York, who has pleaded guilty in the federal case, bought a lien with 18 percent interest on an Ogdensburg property that owed $1,048 in water bills. As of November 2012, the total had risen to $21,284.
In 2007, Sass groups acquired liens at 18 percent on two properties owned by Frances and Donald Schmidt, who owed $4,234 in property taxes to Woolwich. Five years later, the bill was $75,019, according to the suit.
As with other municipal activities, the state Department of Community Affairs nominally oversees the auction system. Aside from holding seminars for collectors and reminding them to report suspected collusion to law enforcement, the department has not policed the local proceedings. DCA spokeswoman Lisa Ryan said the federal probe proves the system works.
"These prosecutions should be serving the dual purpose of punishing bad actors and chilling future unlawful activity," she said. "No new laws are being pursued at this time."
Aside from a 32-minute streaming video about anti-trust laws, the National Tax Lien Association plans to feature a Justice Department presentation at its 2013 national conference in Miami Beach, Westover said.
But its most basic advice to members who find themselves at an auction with only single bids on properties is "get out of the room as quickly as possible," he said.
NJ Spotlight, an independent online news service on issues critical to New Jersey, makes its in-depth reporting available to NewsWorks. Joe Tyrrell is the founder of the New Jersey Foundation for Open Government, which unites civic groups, citizens and journalists to promote transparency and ethics.
WHYY is your source for fact-based, in-depth journalism and information. As a nonprofit organization, we rely on financial support from readers like you. Please give today.


text:
by Todd Walker
There are many scenarios where you may be separated from your backpack and gear. Tipping a canoe or tumbling down a ravine come to mind. These types of accidents can quickly relieve you of the gear which makes for a comfortable wilderness outing. Having essential gear in your pockets and attached to your belt could turn your luck around, and, not being too dramatic here, could literally save your life.
I leave my main pack at base camp on short scouts on backcountry outings. Depending on the purpose of my trek, I usually grab my canteen set and head out. Of course, the ring belt I made is secured around my waist… always! No matter what happens to my other gear, essential stuff is attached to my ring belt. That's right, I wear two belts: 1.) A traditional belt to prevent me from looking like a hip-hopper "who be sagging" in the woods; 2.) My ring belt to keep self-reliance tools secure and accessible.
Here is what's on my belt…
Belt Kit Items
First, let's look at the ring belt itself. I bought a strip of leather and crafted the belt using a D-ring, Chicago screws, and waxed thread. It's a simple design I first learned from Justin Wolfe at Wolfe Customs. To make your own, use a leather belt blank which measures about 20 inches longer than your normal belt. Attach a ring or D-ring and your set.
To tie a ring belt, thread the end through the ring around your waist. Run the end under the belt from the bottom creating a loop. Pass the end back through the loop and cinch tight. If you don't have a ring belt, traditional belts will work. However, one advantage of ring belts is their ability to be worn over heavy winter clothing for easy access to frequently used tools in the field.
One alternative use for the leather ring belt is a strop for cutting tools. Loop the belt around a tree and pull tight. Strop your knife by moving the blade up and down the leather with the cutting edge facing the opposite direction of the stropping motion.
Arguably one of the most important tools for outdoor self-reliance, a sharp knife is essential. Whatever knife rides on your belt, testing its abilities and limits is paramount. Before depending on a particular knife, put it through blue-collar woodcraft work for several months. By the end of your test period, you'll know whether or not it fits your needs.
If you're just new to bushcraft/woodcraft, I'd recommend reading my article on Bloated Bushcraft to give you some perspective on knives and skills.
My main belt knife is a L.T. Wright Genesis I purchased for my lovely Dirt Road Girl at the 2015 Blade Show. Ya see, I'm just running it through its paces to see if it'll be dependable for her. 😉 This article isn't a Best-Knife discussion. There's no such thing. However, I have found her Genesis to be very robust and resilient over the last year in the field.
Fire Kit
At our last Georgia Bushcraft Campout, I was fortunate enough to win a really well crafted possibles pouch made by Reliance Leatherworks in a fire challenge. This pouch replaced an old military pouch I carried for five years which had previously housed my fire kit.
The contents of my fire kit pouch consist of multiply methods to burn sticks.
- Bic Lighter – open flame ignition
- Flint and Steel – spark ignition
- Tonteldoos (Tinder box) – redundant spark ignition
- Magnifying Lens in a birch bark container with a small bed of dried natural tinder – solar ignition
- Char Container with charred material – next fire kit
- Small piece of Fat Lighter'd – the best natural fire starter in south
- Sure Fire material – commercially made fire starter that will burn floating in water
You may have noticed that my ferrocerium rod is not in the pouch content list. The reason is that I carry a rather large ferro rod in a leather sheath alongside my folding saw. More on those items later.
The idea behind a good fire kit is to carry multiple methods of starting a fire in various weather conditions. Having different ignition sources gives you options. You can read about the advantages and disadvantages of each source in our Bombproof Fire Craft Series.
Ferrocerium Rod and Folding Saw
Being resourceful, I shop antique stores, thrift shops, and yard sales. I found a one-dollar leather sheath which was used to hold screw drivers and re-purposed it to hold my Bacho folding saw and large ferro rod. A carabiner connects the sheath to my belt. A pair of leather work gloves also hang from the carabiner.
For a handle on my ferro rod, two feet of one inch Gorilla Tape is wrapped around the end of the rod with a loop of paracord taped into the wrap. Here's my reasoning for this handle:
- Extra Gorilla Tape is never a bad thing
- Epoxied handles tend to come loose with heavy use over time – not so with this tape
- The loop allows me to clip the rod to the carabiner on the ring belt and insert into the folding saw sheath
I carry a sidearm in the woods and everywhere legally allowed. You just never know what you'll walk up on in the woods. Four-legged predators don't concern me much in Georgia. Walking to my base camp recently I saw gang graffiti painted on rocks in the pristine creek. Just up the creek my semi-permanent shelter was tagged in red spray paint as well. This happened on 70 acres of private land.
Not all who wander the woods are there to enjoy nature. Paying attention to human nature, I choose to pack heat in the back country.
Pocket Stuff
Pants pockets serve as a redundant reservoir. I carry a Swiss Army Knife, chap stick, and a mini Bic lighter in one front pocket. My truck keys are in the opposite pocket with a spare ferro rod attached. My wallet is in my back pocket. Yes, my wallet contains survival items like duct tape. My cell phone rides in the opposite pocket. Even without cell service in the hinter boonies, the camera feature is invaluable to me in documenting my adventures.
Canteen Kit
I can attach my 32 ounce canteen kit to my ring belt if necessary. However, I prefer wearing it over my shoulder with a paracord shoulder strap for emergency cordage. The front pouch of the carrying case has redundant fire starters, an EmberLit stove, and an eating utensil.
My backcountry belt kit, coupled with the last two items mentioned above, gives me essential tools to enjoy my time in the woods. What do you wear on your backcountry belt?
Keep Doing the Stuff of Self-Reliance,
P.S. – You can also keep up with the Stuff we're Doing on Twitter, Pinterest, Google +, YouTube, Instagram, and Facebook… and over at the Doing the Stuff Network.
P.P.S – If you find value in our blog, Dirt Road Girl and I would appreciate your vote on Top Prepper Sites! You can vote daily by clicking here or on the image below. Check out all the other value-adding sites while you're there…
Thanks for Sharing the Stuff!
Copyright: Content on this site (unless the work of a third-party) may be shared freely in digital form, in part or whole, for non-commercial use with a link back to this site crediting the author. All links in articles must remain intact as originally posted in order to be republished. If you are interested a third-party article, please contact the author directly for republishing information.


text:
2006 Olympic Cross Country Skiing
Updated August 5, 2020 | Infoplease Staff
There are two techniques in cross country: classical (parallel skis) and freestyle (skating style). The Sprint features a qualification round with the fastest 16 skiers moving on to elimination heats. Top two finishers in each heat advance until there is a four-skier final. The Combined Pursuit is held on one day and consists of a classical race (10-km for men, 5-km for women) followed by a freestyle race (10-km for men, 5-km for women). The starting order in the freestyle portion of the Combined Pursuit is determined by the classical leg finish.
Information Please® Database, © 2007 Pearson Education, Inc. All rights reserved.
Sources +
See also:
Here are the facts and trivia that people are buzzing about.


text:
Alfa Laval Front 15
Front15-FRH 344PL 4SEC
Alfa Laval FrontLine is the premium range of heat exchangers used in dairy, food, beverage and other hygienic applications requiring gentle product treatment, long operating times or superior cleanability. A large range of plate and gasket types is available. The Clip plate has a chevron type of plate pattern designed for hygienic conditions. The entry points, the distribution area and the shape and pressing depth of the plate pattern give optimal performance. WideStream plates with special plate pattern and a limited number of contact points are available for viscous products and products containing pulp and fibres. In addition to normal single plate configuration, this model is also available with Gemini double wall plates. Gemini plates are fully cleanable and accessible and are used as an extra precaution to avoid intermixing of fluids.
Technical details
Heat recovery90%
Flow rate primary side (kg/h)70000 kg/h
Temp primary side (°C)4 → 74 → 4 °C
Pressure drop primarySide (kPa)338 kPa
Cooling mediaIce water
Flow rate cooling (kg/h)120000 kg/h
TempCooling (°C)2 °C
Pressure drop cooling (kPa)111 kPa
Heating mediaHot water
Flow rate heating (kg/h)70000 kg/h
TempHeating (°C)76 °C
Pressure drop heating (kPa)78 kPa
Min. CIP flow rate (kg/h)78000 kg/h
Pressure dropCIP (kPa)413 kPa


text:
Pecan pie is a bit of a tradition in my family of origin, since my parents both grew up in the South. My Dad's mother used to send us a big box of pecans for Christmas every year, so pecan pie is a holiday treat I remember enjoying very much as a child. It's always been a favorite for holidays in my husband's family, too.
The first dish Jaymz and I ever cooked together was rattlesnake pasta, but the second was a pecan pie. Over the past few years, this pie has become our contribution to the Thanksgiving gathering of our family here in the Pacific Northwest. When I gave up wheat and gluten for the month, I didn't think much about how it would impact our Thanksgiving pie offering. But then I realized I was going to have to come up with an acceptable gluten-free alternative to the usual pie crust. I think I did a bang-up job, for someone who doesn't really like baking (I don't like to measure things). Even though we were too sick to go to Seattle this year, I'll definitely be making this again to share next Thanksgiving.
So here, I share with you, a version of our traditional dessert: gluten-free pecan pie.
For the crust, you will need:
2 ½ cups gluten-free all-purpose flour (I used Bob's Redmill brand)
1 teaspoon salt
2 Tablespoons sugar
¾ cup (a stick and a half) unsalted butter, chilled, cut into 1/4 inch cubes
½ cup (8 Tablespoons) vegetable shortening
6-8 Tablespoons ice water
(This makes enough for two pie crusts, so you can make two pecan pies, use this for a double-crust pie, freeze half for later, or half the recipe. I went with the first option and made two pies.)
For the filling, you will need:
2 cups roasted pecans, halved
1 cup white corn syrup
1 cup brown sugar
⅓ teaspoon salt
⅓ cup melted butter
1 teaspoon vanilla
3 eggs
First, get your pecans roasting:
- Preheat your oven to 225°F. Spread pecans out evenly in a single layer on a cookie sheet and bake in your preheated oven until toasted and fragrant, stirring every 15 minutes, (it'll take about 1 hour).
- Cool on pan, then chop most of them in half, leaving a handful of whole ones.
- Set aside.
While the pecans are roasting, make the pie crust:
- Combine flour, salt, and sugar in a food processor; pulse to mix. (Or, you can use a pastry blender or, like I did, two knives.)
- Add the butter and pulse four times. Add shortening in tablespoon sized chunks, and pulse four more times:
- Sprinkle 6 tablespoons of ice water over flour mixture, and incorporate it into the dough. You'll know the dough is ready when you pinch it and it holds together. If it doesn't hold together, keep adding water, a tablespoon at a time, until the dough just begins to hold together.
- Remove dough from the food processor or bowl and place in a mound on a clean surface. Divide the dough into two balls. Wrap each one in plastic and refrigerate for at least an hour before rolling them out. (You will only need one of them if you are making just one pecan pie.)
While the crust is chilling, make the pie filling:
- Combine corn syrup, brown sugar, salt, melted butter, and vanilla in a large bowl. Stir until well blended:
- Beat eggs in a separate bowl, then add to the corn syrup mixture. Stir until the mixture looks as it did before you added the eggs.
- Set aside.
Next, roll out the pie crust:
- Sprinkle a bit of flour on a flat, clean surface and on top of the dough you're working with. (You may have to let the dough sit out of the refrigerator for 5-10 minutes so it can soften before you roll it out.)
- Using a rolling pin, roll the dough out from the center of the mound, until it is large enough that, when you place your pie pan/dish on top of it, it extends about two inches all around.
- Transfer your dough to your pie pan or dish.Here's the trick we had to use with the gluten-free dough: Since it's not very elastic—having no gluten will do that—it was quite crumbly. To make transfer of the dough to the pie pan easier, we rolled the dough out on top of a piece of plastic wrap, so that then it could be gently lifted off of the counter without crumbling apart. It worked like a charm!
- Pinch with your fingers all the way around the edge of the crust, making an even rippling pattern along the edge. You may have to trim off a bit of excess dough to make it even on the edges:
You're almost finished!
- Preheat your oven to 350°F.
- Fill the pie crust by putting the roasted pecans in the bottom, then pouring the pie filling over them:
- Wrap the crust edges in foil to prevent them from burning:
- Bake for 30 minutes, then remove the foil and bake for another 30-40 minutes, or until a knife stuck in the middle comes out clean:
- Allow to cool, then serve.
There it is, my friends: our new and different, but still traditional pecan pie. I hope this recipe will add a little extra sweetness to your holiday celebrations this year!
Linked up at Vegetarian Foodie Fridays at Breastfeeding Moms Unite!, Friday Food at Momtrends, Food on Fridays at Ann Kroeker, Friday Favorites at Simply Sweet Home, and Recipe Swap at Prairie Story.


text:
Electronic Cigarettes Will Never Be Cool
As a connoisseur of cultural detritus, you've probably seen this ad in which purported actor "Stephen Dorff," looking weary from days of dogged stubble-trimming, juts his chin repeatedly in your direction while explaining why he chooses to smoke Blu™ brand e-cigarettes, besides the fact that he is their paid spokesman. "Negative! One! I'm tired of being a walking ashtray," says "Stephen Dorff," no doubt bathed in Tom Ford cologne at that very moment.
I'm afraid that actor "Stephen Dorff" and all of his glamorous compatriots are lying to you, friends. No matter how many attractive models pose for pictures exhaling clouds of electronically vaporized nicotine solution, and no matter how many sixteenths of an inch "Stephen Dorff" allows his stubble to grow while striding down a beach with the alien-looking neon blue tip of his Blu™ brand e-cigarette glowing betwixt his fingertips, electronic cigarettes will never be cool.
"With Blu, you can smoke at a basketball game if you want to," says actor "Stephen Dorff." Exactly, person writing Stephen's lines. Exactly. You can smoke at a basketball game, if you wanted to, for some reason. And do you know what that tells us? That tells us that electronic cigarettes are not cool. Because they are inoffensive. They are safer. They are not as dangerous. Exactly. Cigarettes were never cool just because of their phallic connotations, and the fact that they gave you something to do with your hands. They were cool because they are dangerous. They surround you in a protective cloud of deadly poison. By smoking a real cigarette, you symbolically tell the world: "I am too badass or, more likely, dumb to care that I am killing myself and others right for no particular reason. I am, in other words, the type of person that you want to fuck."
E-cigarettes just don't say that. And they never will. Electronic cigarettes say, "I can't decide whether to stop or not." Nobody wants to fuck a wishy-washy school crossing guard.
Plus, the glowing neon thing on the end. Come on.


text:
The daughter of a Duke alumnus has filed a lawsuit against her sister, her brother-in-law, and Duke University for her inherited right to sit among these fine young men and women at Cameron Indoor Stadium all season long. Katina Dorton is seeking damages for the "fraudulent transfer" of two season tickets that had belonged to her late father. Duke, it seems, is only a family institution when the family is not interfering with the institution's basketball team:
John Dorton, a Duke graduate and dentist who treated athletes and coaches over the years, bought tickets through longtime contributions to the Iron Dukes — the fundraising arm of the school's athletic department. He was "ill and unable to act for himself" when the transfer occurred in July 2008, according to the complaint, and died in January 2010 at age 81.
The Iron Dukes allow members to pass on tickets to family members willing to meet financial obligations, according to the complaint. In this case, that meant a $50,000 transfer donation and a $6,000 annual contribution. The lawsuit seeks to void the Caudles' arrangement while allowing Katina Dorton to assume the transferred ticket rights.
The complaint alleges that Gordon Caudle — son of former Duke football player Lloyd Caudle — had no authority to arrange the transfer because he wasn't yet married to Sophia Caudle when he signed the agreement. It also states that Duke never inquired whether there were other family members with a possible claim to the tickets.
The best part of this public family feud, aside from the fact that, yes, the patriarch Dookie in question was actually a dentist, is that Sophia Caudle "notified the family of the transfer in an email" just before her marriage. I would love to know how she chose to phrase that news: "Sorry, y'all, but we're taking the tickets because dad liked me best. Catch your girl on SportsCenter!" She may have been more tactful.
Katina alleges that when her father agreed to the transfer at some point before September 2008, he was "suffering from diminished capacity" and, accordingly, cannot be held accountable for the deal. We'll never know what father Dorton really wanted out of all this — he passed away in January 2010 — and frankly, we do not care. But we would like to think that all he wished for was to have two dedicated, blue-bodied Duke fans in his seats, chanting "Start the tractor!" late in a game against N.C. State. If his daughters can't find common ground in pursuit of that honorable mission, then maybe they're just not true Crazies.


text:
The new world of porn is revealing eternal truths about men and women.
As recently as 15 years ago, if somebody wanted vivid depictions of, say, two men simultaneously performing anal penetration on the same woman, securing such a delicacy would require substantial effort because the pornographic repertoire was still limited by the costs and imprecision of distribution. Leaving aside matters of taste and propriety, just how big an audience of horny derelicts or hurried businessmen would wriggle into a Pussycat Theater, with its sticky floors, and, in the company of others, watch a double-anal double feature? Most likely, the producers were more comfortable knowing they could aggregate a much larger audience with an hour of good old-fashioned blow jobs and randy nurses. Even as porn migrated from film reels to videocassettes, there lingered some thorny logistical problems to overcome. The clunky videotape still had to be smuggled into the family residence, had to be viewed in a secured environment from which nosy children and spouses were barred, and then had to be stored in a crawl space, safe, or dedicated dungeon—or reluctantly tossed in the trash.
The difficulty of acquiring this material may have hinted at a great, and therefore pent-up, demand. Then, technology produced the Second Coming: the Internet. And then the Rapture itself: broadband. Pornography is now, indisputably, omnipresent: in 2007, a quarter of all Internet searches were related to pornography. Nielsen ratings showed that in January 2010, more than a quarter of Internet users in the United States, almost 60 million people, visited a pornographic Web site. That number represents nearly a fifth of all the men, women, and children in this country—and it doesn't even take into account the incomprehensible amount of porn distributed through peer-to-peer downloading networks, shared hard drives, Internet chat rooms, and message boards.
So, perhaps it's no surprise that, for those who crave the more drastic masturbatory aid, the Internet offers easy access to a Grand Guignol of the outright bizarre (Midget Porn, Clown Porn, Girl-Fight Gang-Bang Porn). What is surprising is what now constitutes widely available, routine stuff in the major porn portals: episodes of men—or groups of men—having sex with women who are seven months pregnant; the ho-hum of husbands filming their scrawny white wives having sex with paunchy black men in budget motels; simulations of father-daughter (or mother-daughter) incest; and of course, a fixture on any well-trafficked site: double anal.
When a 13-year-old girl can sit in math class, hide her Hello Kitty smart phone behind her textbook, and pull up such an extreme video in less time than it would take her to text a vote for her favorite American Idol contestant, we've certainly reached some kind of new societal landmark. It's important, however, to distinguish between what has changed and what hasn't.
Porn's new pervasiveness and influence on the culture at large haven't necessarily introduced anything new into our sexual repertoire: humans, after all, have been having sex—weird, debased, and otherwise—for quite a while. But pervasive hard-core porn has allowed many people to flirt openly with practices that may have always been desired, but had been deeply buried under social restraint. Take anal sex: in a 1992 study that surveyed sexual behaviors, published by the University of Chicago, 20 percent of women ages 25 to 29 reported having anal sex. In a study published in October 2010 by the Center for Sexual Health Promotion at Indiana University, the instances of anal sex reported by women in the same age cohort had more than doubled, to 46 percent. The practice has even made its way into the younger female demographic: the Indiana study shows 20 percent of 18- and 19-year-olds have had anal sex at least once.
One of the Indiana study's co- authors, Debby Herbenick, believes that Internet porn now "plays a role in how many Americans perceive and become educated about sex." How this influence actually works is speculative— no one can ever really know what other people do in their bedrooms or why. Some experts postulate a sort of monkey-see, monkey-do explanation, whereby both men and women are conforming to behaviors they witness on their browser media players. But in many ways this explanation doesn't account for the subtle relationship between now-ubiquitous pornography and sexuality. To take anal sex again, porn doesn't plant that idea in men's minds; instead, porn puts the power of a mass medium behind ancient male desires. Anal sex as a run-of-the-mill practice, de rigueur pubic waxing for girls—and their mothers—and first-date doggy-style encounters (this is but a small sampling of rapidly shifting sexual mores) have been popularized and legitimized by porn. Which means that men now have a far easier time broaching subjects once considered off- putting—for instance, suburban dads can offhandedly suggest anal sex to their bethonged, waxed wives.
Men, so the conventional wisdom goes, tend to desire more than women are willing to give them sexually. The granting of sex is the most powerful weapon women possess in their struggle with men. Yet in each new sexual negotiation a woman has with a man, she not only spends down that capital, she begins at a disadvantage, because the potential losses are always greater for her. A failed or even successful single encounter can be life-altering. Whatever "social construct" you might impose upon the whole matter, nature imposes much more rigorous consequences on women than on men.
Over the years, different strategies have been offered so that women could avoid the more subjugating consequences of sex. Though methods of reversing the biological power dynamics between sexes date back to ancient Sparta, the premise had always been confined to the fringes of society until the sexual revolution of the 1960s, a period in which many feminists considered marriage the primary mechanism for women's sexual conscription. The liberation on offer was sexual freedom for women—and their partners—through open marriages and sex communes. It's worth noting that these polyamorous arrangements usually had at the center a male patriarch who reaped the perks of women's newfound freedom. This experiment was short-lived, as sexual jealousy seemed an impossible force to rationalize, and children conceived on the grounds of a canyon commune needed more stability than a group of wayward adults could provide.
But the reactionary political correctness of the 1990s put forth a proposition even more disastrous to women than free love: sexual equality. With the rise of PC culture, the notion of men and women as sexual equals has found a home in the mainstream. Two generations of women, my own included, soared into the game with the justifiable expectations of not only earning the same wage as a guy, but also inhabiting the sexual arena the way a man does.
Armed with a "Take Back the Night" pamphlet, we were led to believe that, as long as we avoided the hordes of date rapists, sex was an egalitarian endeavor. The key to sexual harmony, so the thinking went, was social conditioning. Men who sexually took advantage of women were considered the storm troopers of patriarchy, but women could teach men to adopt a different ideology, through explicit communication of boundaries —"you can touch there" or "please don't do that." Thus was the dark drama of sex replaced with a verbal contract. Once the drunken frat boys and brutes were weeded out, if we gravitated toward a kind of enlightened guy, an emotionally rewarding sex life was ours for the taking. Sex wasn't a bestial pursuit, but something elevating.
This is an intellectual swindle that leads women to misjudge male sexuality, which they do at their own emotional and physical peril. Male desire is not a malleable entity that can be constructed through politics, language, or media. Sexuality is not neutral. A warring dynamic based on power and subjugation has always existed between men and women, and the egalitarian view of sex, with its utopian pretensions, offers little insight into the typical male psyche. Internet porn, on the other hand, shows us an unvarnished (albeit partial) view of male sexuality as an often dark force streaked with aggression. The Internet has created a perfect market of buyers and sellers (with the sellers increasingly proffering their goods gratis) that provides what people—overwhelmingly males (who make up two-thirds of all porn viewers)—want to see or do.
The heated act of sex often expunges judgment, pushing the participants into territory they hadn't previously contemplated. The speed at which one transgresses, the urge to reach oblivion, the glamour of violence, the arbitrary and shifting distinction between acts repulsive and attractive—all these aspects that existed only in sex are now re-created through Internet porn. You could be poking around for some no-frills Web clips of amateur couples doing it missionary style, but easily and rapidly you slide into footage of two women simultaneously working their crotches on opposing ends of a double-sided dildo, and then all of a sudden you're at a teenage-fisting Web site. All of this happens maybe by accident—those pop-ups can be misleading—or maybe, and more likely, it happens because in that moment it's arousing, whether you like it or not. Consuming Internet porn, then, mimics many of the sensations found in sex. It's overpowering and immediate; it is the brute force of male sexuality, unmasked and untethered. Martin Amis, in his fragmented fictional meditation on male depravity, Yellow Dog, depicts the delirious and uncontrollable effects of viewing porn. Amis writes:
He slithered around in his chair and made a noise intended to drown something out—my God: pornography turned the world upside down. You gave your head away, and what your mind liked no longer mattered; now the animal parts were in the driving seat—and tall in the saddle.
Hard-core porn, which is what Internet porn largely traffics in, is undoubtedly extreme. But how is sex, as a human experience, anything less than extreme? Not the kind of sex (or lack thereof) that occurs in marriages that double as domestic gulags. Or what 30-somethings do to each other in the second year of their "serious relationship." But the sex that occurs in between relationships—or overlaps with relationships—where the buffers of intimacy or familiarity do not exist: the raw, unpracticed sort. If a woman thinks of the best sex she's had in her life, she's often thinking of this kind of sex, and while it may be the best sex in her life, it's not the sex she wants to have throughout her life—or more accurately, it's not the sex she'd have with the man with whom she'd like to spend her life. The manner in which one physically, and emotionally, contorts oneself for sex simply takes sex outside the realm of ordinary human experiences and places it in the extreme, often beyond our control. "Tamed as it may be, sexuality remains one of the demonic forces in human consciousness," Susan Sontag wrote in Styles of Radical Will. Yes, it's a natural, human function, and one from which both partners can derive enormous pleasure, but it is also one largely driven by brute male desire and therefore not at all free of violent, even cruel, urges.
At the heart of human sexuality, at least human sexuality involving men, lies what Freud identified in Totem and Taboo as "emotional ambivalence"—the simultaneous love and hate of the object of one's sexual affection. From that ambivalence springs the aggressive, hostile, and humiliating components of male sexual arousal.
Never was this made plainer to me than during a one-night stand with a man I had actually known for quite a while. A polite, educated fellow with a beautiful Lower East Side apartment invited me to a perfunctory dinner right after his long-term girlfriend had left him. We quickly progressed to his bed, and things did not go well. He couldn't stay aroused. Over the course of the tryst, I trotted out every parlor trick and sexual persona I knew. I was coquettish then submissive, vocal then silent, aggressive then downright commandeering; in a moment of exasperation, he asked if we could have anal sex. I asked why, seeing as how any straight man who has had experience with anal sex knows that it's a big production and usually has a lot of false starts and abrupt stops. He answered, almost without thought, "Because that's the only thing that will make you uncomfortable." This was, perhaps, the greatest moment of sexual honesty I've ever experienced—and without hesitation, I complied. This encounter proves an unpleasant fact that does not fit the feminist script on sexuality: pleasure and displeasure wrap around each other like two snakes.
Pornography, with its garish view of male sexual desire, bares an uncomfortable truth that the women's-liberation movement has successfully suppressed: men and women have conflicting sexual agendas.
Pornography neatly resolves the contradictions—in favor of men. They fuck with impunity. Women never dream of staying. And if, God forbid, the women get pregnant, well, they can be used in pregnant pornos and then in an episode of Exploited Moms. What a marvelous means of delving into the heads of men. And for women peeping in on the Web, an important lesson—one that can't be gleaned in a sex-ed class where condoms are placed over bananas, nor from poring over the umpteenth edition of Our Bodies, Ourselves—is that sex can be a bitter, crushing experience, no matter how much power you think you have.
One of the most punishing realities women face when they reach sexual maturity is that their maturity is (at least to many men) unsexy. Indeed, we now have an entire genre of online smut politely called "Lolita Porn." This is not actual child pornography, a genre still blessedly beyond the reach of the casual Web browser. But nor is it porn in the Barely Legal tradition of women in their early 20s, tan and taut in pigtails, playing babysitters or high-school cheerleaders. (They might toss off a "Gee, mister!" to reinforce the fantasy, but only a desperate fool would accept this as truth.) Instead, Lolita Porn features girls who are 18 or older but look like 14-year-olds. They're pale, long-limbed girls, with pears for breasts, small pink flecks for nipples (in itself a sub-genre of online porn: Tiny Titties), and a hairless, nearly invisible pubic slit.
The mass distribution of such genres of Internet porn and their hard-core depictions of sex with the steady theme of humiliation have thrown current-day feminists into a scramble. The new neo-feminists (it's difficult to keep track of whatever wave the current "movement" is riding) argue that the primary obstacle to women's gaining greater equality in the political and economic sphere is today's "hypersexuality," and specifically the spread of online porn. This is a somewhat new take on an old position. In the 1970s, second-wave feminists embraced an anti-porn militancy (a position closely identified with Andrea Dworkin). But that view was discredited by a new group of feminists who took up the mantra "Feminism means choice"—specifically, choice of lifestyle. Sex workers, strippers, corporate executives, and housewives, so the thinking went, all held the right to be liberated, "sex-positive," and even enthusiastic consumers of (pre-digital) porn.
This sex-positive stance became so widely accepted that, as Natasha Walter writes in Living Dolls: The Return of Sexism, by the 1990s, "the classic feminist critique of pornography" had "disappeared from view." That might not have been a wholly negative development, because feminism's simplistic argument that porn objectified women was, for Walter, too simplistic. But the spread of Internet porn—a far cry from the Hefner-published glossies of the mid-20th century—has reignited a 40-year debate, and the new-new feminists are horrified to have found that in some way they were, albeit temporarily, in bed with the sex industry. Now they are in lockstep retreat. And in fact they've reached a new consensus: the ubiquity of pornography has brought the sex industry out of the margins and into the mainstream, and we're all the worse off for it. Walter asserts:
In this generation a certain view of female sexuality has become celebrated throughout advertisements, music, television programmes, films and magazines. This image of female sexuality has become more than ever defined by the terms of the sex industry.
Walter is correct that beauty standards in advertising and entertainment are unattainable, but she mischaracterizes what the images coming out of the "sex industry" actually look like today—Walter and so many other women writers who didn't grow up with the Internet miss the fact that Internet porn has fundamentally changed the way sexuality is transmitted back to us. For instance, in her 2005 review of a documentary about Deep Throat (a movie that in today's world of porn might be rated PG-13), Northwestern University professor Laura Kipnis compared porn to science fiction: "Like sci-fi, porn replaces existing realities with wild alternative universes (against which to measure the lackluster, repressive world we've inherited)." But instead of a sexual ecosystem populated by an overheated species of Amazon women and ponytailed men, the Internet porn aesthetic verges on unvarnished realism.
It seems like almost every teenager in America—and hardly just the teenagers—has heard of or taken a dip into sites like RedTube and YouPorn, which alone account for roughly 2 percent of all daily Internet traffic. These are free, open, enormous sites, in which anybody can upload, distribute, and view whatever porn they please; even porn in which they star. It's amateur hour—and like all amateur hours, it's an honest, if often not-pretty, catalog of the desires and insecurities of regular folk.
And it's largely a grim parade of what women will do to satisfy men: young wives fingering themselves on the family couch, older wives offering themselves to their hubby's Army buddies, aging moms in shabby corsets shoving their sagging rear ends into the camera. When it comes to contemporary porn, you don't have to look like a porn star to be sexually desired. Indeed, porn stars no longer look like porn stars. The image of Jenna Jameson, America's most famous professional porn star (and a best-selling author)—with her comically huge breasts, overextended blond extensions, and artificially tanned skin—has been supplanted by the new face of pornography: a pale, naughty, 19-year-old with A-cups and a bad haircut, her face illuminated only by the bluish glow of her Mac.
This populist, utilitarian quality of homegrown porn is now obligingly mimicked by threatened professional porn productions: bald, one-off quality, whitewashed by unfiltered lights, sickly hues, and indifferent composition. This amateur aesthetic pervades porn where the viewer is put directly in the scene: always hard core, mostly close-ups, no plot or dialogue, just screwing. Some of the most popular sites of the past five years—the Bang Bus, Captain Stabbin, Mike's Apartment—all feature vignettes based on the same premise: the pornographer plays a pornographer and the actresses play eager actresses who, either willingly or with a bit of cajoling, have sex with the pornographer (without musical accompaniment). Seasoned porn stars, to succeed, must now play the role of amateur, aspiring porn stars.
Gail Dines, author of Pornland: How Porn Has Hijacked Our Sexuality, frets that the overwhelming exposure to emotionless, rapacious sex on the Internet will socialize men to find degradation of women sexually arousing. She writes,
Porn is actually being encoded into a boy's sexual identity so that an authentic sexuality—one that develops organically out of life experiences, one's peer group, personality traits, family and community affiliations—is replaced by a generic porn sexuality limited in creativity and lacking any sense of love, respect or connection to another human being.
First, I have yet to see a single credible study that links proliferation of pornography to an increase in abuse of women. More important, the sort of sex that Dines envisions—where respect, love, and civic connections are merged into erotically rewarding experience—is utopian (and not perhaps all that enticing). Dines ignores the fact that men behave differently than women. It wasn't just Ward Cleaver–type stuffiness that prompted generations of dads to warn their daughters not to get into cars with boys. Dads are grown men, and they know that when it comes to sex, most men will take every inch a woman yields.
If the shadowy cabal of Internet pornographers posited by Dines were not able to use 30-second clips of porn as bread crumbs to entice men away from their true sexual personas, what sort of "authentic sexuality" would males possess? Dines seems to have in mind a Rousseauistic pygmy race of sexually neutered males; perhaps many feminists (and perhaps many fathers of daughters, and perhaps many sensible and civilized people, for that matter) would applaud this emasculated masculinity as progress—but we're never going to achieve it. While sexual aggression and the desire to debase women may not be what arouse all men, they are certainly an animating force of male sexuality. They may be unattractive and even, if taken to extremes, dangerous, but they're not, perhaps alas, deviant. Leaving aside for the moment the argument that some things that might be sordid and even ugly can also be arousing and satisfying, the main problem with the new anti-porn critics is their naive assumption that if only we could blot out Internet porn, then the utopia of sexual equality would be achieved. But equality in sex can't be achieved. Internet porn exposes that reality; it may even intensify that reality; it doesn't create it.
This isn't to argue that pornography is harmless or even that it shouldn't be censored: its pervasiveness clearly exacerbates the growing moral nihilism of our culture. But removing pornography won't alter the unlovely aspects of male sexuality that porn depicts and legitimizes. The history of civilization would seem to show that there's no hope of eradicating those qualities; they can only be contained—and checked—by strenuously enforced norms. And given our à la carte morality and our aversion to cultural authority—a societal direction made plain by porn's very omnipresence—I wouldn't put much faith in enforcement.
Even the crudest of online porn captures only a slice of the less-than-uplifting aspects of the sexual experience, because porn not only eschews but actively conceals this singular truth: the most brutalizing aspects of sex are not physical. This is made plain by the great, filthy, but far from pornographic Last Tango in Paris, which Pauline Kael described as the "most powerfully erotic movie ever made." In Bernardo Bertolucci's story, Paul, played by an age-ravaged but still sexually menacing Marlon Brando, decides to rent a flat in an attempt to escape his grief over his wife's recent suicide. When Paul goes to look at an empty apartment, he meets Jeanne, a petite 20-year-old bride-to-be who is also searching for an apartment. The two have sex without even knowing each other's names, and this begins their four-day encounter.
Paul insists that the two meet only at the apartment, only have sex, and say nothing about their lives. Jeanne halfheartedly accepts (she constantly comes up against Paul's rules, begging for more details about him and offering unsolicited morsels about her life). Paul works out his grief by debasing himself and her. "He demands total subservience to his sexual wishes," Kael writes. "This enslavement is for him the sexual truth, the real thing, sex without phoniness." In one scene, Paul asks Jeanne if she would be willing to eat vomit as proof of her love for him. Adoringly, she says yes. Jeanne experiences the full brunt of Paul's sexual aggression and violence when, while she attempts to resist, Paul pulls down her jeans, pins her to the floor, and has rough anal sex with her, using butter as a lubricant.
Jeanne accepts all of Paul's manic pronouncements, sexual roughhousing, and torment, either because of her own naïveté or, perhaps, as a response to Paul's authentic desperation. When Paul's wife's body is finally ready for burial, he gives up the apartment and tells Jeanne that he wants to know her name and he is ready to love her. As the picture of Paul comes more sharply into focus, Jeanne ultimately rejects him not because of his brutishness, but because of his banality. Paul is a morose wash-up, a widower in his 40s who runs a flophouse. His excessive masculinity quickly withers when exposed to the air outside the barren flat.
What makes Last Tango so devastating and resonant is not the sex acts, for which the movie is often remembered, but rather the common but annihilating emotions that fuel them: desperation and loneliness. It's the clash between vulnerability and indifference that transpires after sex that is so savage. This is what Kael called "realism with the terror of actual experience." The most frightening truths about sex rarely exist in the physical, but instead live in the intangible yet indelible wounds created in the psyche. Go try to find that on the Internet.
When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.