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In an email I sent to my Uncle listing possible things he could get my son for Christmas (hey, he ASKED, I don't just make up lists and send them out to people), I told him: "Anything NOT Star Wars or LEGOs would be good. We are drowning in LEGOs and Santa's bringing more and if I have to hear Snags go on and on about Star Wars and Obi Wan Kenobi anymore I swear I will poke my ears out with the first thing I can get my hands on – probably a LEGO."
But that's a lie. A total bold faced lie. Because actually, at the time I wrote that email, I had already dug my ear drums out with the tines of a fork. The whole ordeal was a bit messier than I had anticipated and so I tried to staunch the flow of blood with the first thing I could get my hands on – and that WAS a bunch of LEGOs. Only LEGOs aren't cotton, so they aren't very absorbent in that impervious hard plastic surface sort of way, and so I was forced to sit there and build tiny LEGO dams while the blood poured from my empty ear sockets all over my keyboard. I shoved the little plastic LEGO dams into the holes that once held ear drums, and here I type with sticky fingers telling all the world the truth. That I am a liar and I am sick to death of hearing about Star Wars. Honestly, I only lied in the first place because I didn't want to alarm my Uncle over all the blood.
But like I said, Santa IS bringing more Star Wars LEGOs to our house this Christmas, so I fear I can't escape the coming waves of Star Ships engaged in the battles of my obsessed child's devising. I have seriously considered calling Santa and telling him "NO! Return those LEGOs to your toy storage locker that is Toys R Us, don't bring them here!", but then they were the first thing Snags asked for in his letter to Santa, and they were the first things he marked as "Top Choice" on his list, like a butcher grading cuts of meat. So I can't bring myself to do it. Plus
Santa I can't find the receipt.
So Christmas is coming and thankfully I've already completed some of my shopping. I got my parents… oh wait, they might read this so I can't say. But I got my husband… nope, better not tell you that either. Okay, so instead I'll tell you about my brother's Christmas wish-list. He didn't prioritize it so I don't know if this was his "Top Choice" or not, but one of the items on his list was the Magic Wallet. Have you heard of it? It's been around for years. I think my brother even had one once upon a time. It must have worn out. He wants a new one. But he wants the Original Magic Wallet, not the new Magic Wallet Plus. Basically the concept is you open it up, drop in a dollar bill or a receipt or something, close it up, and it "magically" moves the paper to it's proper place. Well, more or less. It's not really magic at all, having elastic bands that hook it all together not unlike a Jacob's Ladder toy. Something which, by the way, I always wanted when I was a kid. Something I still haven't figured out to this day. But anyway, the Magic Wallet… I can just picture my brother now, using the wallet as a prop for his pick-up line at a bar, saying something like "Hello beautiful! See if you can find what I have hidden in my Magic Wallet!" Word to my brother: If I DO get you the Magic Wallet for Christmas, DON'T use that line. It's awful. It's sure to get a drink thrown in your face and very possibly a kick to your nuts. So you know, you've been warned.
But Christmas! It's almost here. Only 26 or so days left and there is still so much to do! I've got gifts to wrap, bows to tie, cards to sign and mail, and decorations to dig out of the basement. The tree has been up for a week now but I've got to rearrange the ornaments. Snags hung them all at a six year old level, so the bottom third of the tree looks like it's wearing a skirt of baubles, the rest looks quite naked. Rearranging is definitely in order.
I have menus to plan and more presents to shop for. I have to buy more Scotch Tape so I can wrap the things I've bought. Snags has used all that I had in a fit of creativity. He's building some sort of display, something that combines Star Wars figurines and space crafts, LEGOs, scraps of wood from the garage, and I think, some of the figures from our Nativity Scene, all Scotch Taped together on my coffee table. Warning to those coming for Christmas: there may not be any place to set your drinks down.
Which reminds me, I have to go to the liquor store. Drinks! I am going to need them. I hear they help numb the pain. And my ears, shoved full of LEGOs as they are, they are starting to throb.


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Smaller Than Life
Jonathan Franzen's juvenile prose creates a world in which nothing important can happen.
One opens a new novel and is promptly introduced to some dull minor characters. Tiring of them, one skims ahead to meet the leads, only to realize: those minor characters are the leads. A common experience for even the occasional reader of contemporary fiction, it never fails to make the heart sink. The problem is not only one of craft or execution. Characters are now conceived as if the whole point of literature were to create plausible likenesses of the folks next door. They have their little worries, but so what? Do writers really believe that every unhappy family is special? If so, Tolstoy has a lot to answer for—including Freedom, Jonathan Franzen's latest. A suburban comedy-drama about the relationship between cookie-baking Patty, who describes herself as "relatively dumber" than her siblings; red-faced husband Walter, "whose most salient quality … was his niceness"; and Walter's womanizing college friend, Richard, who plays in an indie band called Walnut Surprise, the novel is a 576-page monument to insignificance.
Granted, nonentities are people too, and a good storyteller can interest us in just about anybody, as Madame Bovary demonstrates. But although the narrator of Freedom tells us on the first page, "There had always been something not quite right about the Berglunds," one need read only that the local school "sucked" and that Patty was "very into" her teenage son, who in turn was "fucking" the girl next door, to know that whatever is wrong with these people does not matter. The language a writer uses to create a world is that world, and Franzen's strenuously contemporary and therefore juvenile language is a world in which nothing important can happen. Madame Bovary's marriage sucked, Heathcliff was into Catherine: these words fail the context not just because they are of our own time. There is no import in things that "suck," no drama in someone's being "into" someone else. As for the F word, Anthony Burgess once criticized the notion that to use it in matter-of-fact prose is to hark back to "a golden age of Anglo-Saxon candour"; the word was taboo from the start, because it stands for brutal or at best impersonal sex. "A man can fuck a whore but, unless his wife is a whore, he cannot fuck his wife … There is no love in it." A writer like Franzen, who describes two lovers as "fucking," trivializes their relationship accordingly. The result is boredom.
Franzen does not take his story very seriously, but the irony is indiscriminate and directionless; he hints at no frame of reference from which we are to judge his prose critically. Nor are we to imagine that a fool or semiliterate is addressing us. The same narrator who gives us "sucked" and "very into" also deploys compound adjectives, bursts of journalese, and long if syntactically crude sentences. An idiosyncratic mix? Far from it. We find the same insecure style on The Daily Show and in the blogosphere; we overhear it on the subway. It is the style of all who think highly enough of their own brains to worry about being thought "elitist," not one of the gang. The reassuring vulgarity follows the flight of pseudo-eloquence as the night the day. Like the rest of these people, Franzen should relax. We don't need to find a naughty word on every page to know that he is one very regular Joe.
But if Freedom is middlebrow, it is so in the sacrosanct Don DeLillo tradition, which our critical establishment considers central to literature today. The apparent logic is that the novel can lure Americans away from their media and entertainment buffet only by becoming more "social," broader in scope, more up-to-date in focus. This may be the reason we get such boring characters. Instead of portraying an interesting individual or two, and trusting in realism to embed their story naturally in contemporary life, the Social Writer thinks of all the relevant issues he has to stuff in, then conceives a family "typical" enough to hold everything together. The more aspects of our society he can fit between the book's covers, the more ambitious he is considered to be.
Every big fat new effort to "develop" the DeLillo model is thus hailed as important even before it is read, as happened with Franzen's last novel, The Corrections (2001). No doubt the rave reviews for Freedom will evince the same reluctance to quote from the text that we saw then. Reviewers gave that book maximum points for sweep and sprawl while subtracting none for its slovenly prose, the short-windedness of each of its thousand "themes," and the failure of the main story line to generate any momentum. (These flaws, too, were in the great DeLillo tradition.) There was no overlooking a certain determination to be impressed. I especially liked how the author got a pass for the first chapter, a soporific one even by postmodern standards, because a later line seemed to imply it had been a practical joke.
Not surprisingly, Franzen pushes his luck even further in Freedom. Patty's memoirs start very early on in the book under the separate title Mistakes Were Made: The Autobiography of Patty Berglundby Patty Berglund. It gets worse. Here, referring to herself in the third person, Patty recalls her delayed reaction to having been raped.
The indignity was that Ethan had considered her such a nothing that he could just rape her and then take her home. And she was not such a nothing. She was, among other things, already, as a junior, the all-time single-season record holder for assists at Horace Greeley High School. A record she would again demolish the following year! She was also first-team All State in a state that included Brooklyn and the Bronx. And yet a golfing boy she hardly even knew had thought it was OK to rape her.
Are we to chuckle at the adult woman for writing this in seriousness, or is she mocking her younger self, the teenage rape victim? Either way, she is too stupid to merit reading about. Mistakes Were Made is of the same subtlety throughout and can thus be easily summarized. Patty has two men in her life, "the great guy she'd married and the sexy one she hadn't." In vain does she yearn for husband Walter to "just bend her over the kitchen table some night and have at her from behind." (And we wonder why young people would rather read about love in vampire fiction.) Their son, Joey, turns out "in the mold of Richard," the sexy guy, which is why Patty is so "into" the boy. Everything is described in the most hackneyed terms imaginable. When her children leave home, Patty feels "the emptiness of her nest … now that the kids had flown"; and what should we read about when Richard drops by during Walter's absence but "banging," "doing the deed," "scratching the itch."
For a while one wonders whether our memoirist, like Holden Caulfield, is relying on the buffering effect of trite language to get through a painful story. Yet only a very humdrum marital malaise comes to light. The narrator who takes over when Patty finally shuts up—almost 200 pages into the book, though she weighs in again later—writes and thinks in much the same way. The sentences run longer on average, but the clichés keep coming, as in a reference, clunkily tied in with the environmental crisis, to the "toxicity" of the Berglunds' marriage. Emphatic lines of dialogue continue to appear, chat-room-style, in capital letters sans exclamation marks: "I KNOW IT'S NEVER GOING TO HAPPEN." (I confess I have no idea what this is meant to sound like.)
Language vies with content to be as ugly as possible. Richard's love for Walter is described as follows: "These groinal heatings were no more about literal sex, no more homo, than the hard-ons he got from a long-anticipated first snort of blow." Meanwhile, the author's attempts at humor descend to the sort of puerility that Americans tolerate only when reading a so-called literary novel. A documentary about bitterns is to be called Bitternness; the pun is repeated a few times for good measure. A man with his face in a woman's private parts can "feel one of the cats clambering onto his feet, seeking attention. Pussy, pussy." The imagery ranges from merely passable to lazily half baked: "Gene … stirred the cauldrons like a Viking oarsman." No doubt the author's fans will welcome this writing because hey, it's so much like modern America itself. If only Franzen were less aware of how much badness he can get away with.
Why was Freedom written? The prologue raises expectations for a socially engaged, or at least social, narrative that are left unmet. Too much of it takes place in high school, college, or suburbia; how odd that a kind of fiction allegedly made necessary by America's unique vitality always returns to the places that change the least. Franzen clearly has little interest in the world of work. (The same applies, incidentally, to whoever edited the novel.) Of the four main characters, only Walter has a real job, about which we learn nothing until it becomes a matter of traveling around with an admiring young assistant. (American novelists never tire of the student-don romance; they just dress it up in different clothes.) Walter is constantly holding forth on issues he has researched, but not dramatically experienced. They are entertaining tirades, but this is not what fiction is for.
Franzen uses facile tricks to tart up the story as a total account of American life: the main news events of the past quarter century each get a nod in the appropriate chapter. Brands are identified whenever possible; we go from Parliament butts in the first chapter to Glad-wrapped cookies in the last. Countless pop-cultural artifacts are name-checked, in the most minimal sense of the term. When Joey and a girl fly to Argentina, Pirates of the Caribbean is playing on the seat backs in front of them. Facile, yes, but Franzen knows his market. Many people who eschew great books for the latest novels do so because they want precisely this kind of thing. (Every new book we read in our brief and busy lives means that a classic is left unread.) These readers want a world that is recognizably their own in every trivial particular, right down to Twitter, even if the book says less of real relevance to their lives than one written a century ago. The critics do their bit by acting as though name-checks constituted themes and issues. I can hear the prize laudation for Freedom now: "It is a novel about commercialism, about the war in Iraq, about the pervasiveness of Hollywood culture …"
Perhaps the only character who holds the reader's interest is Walter, if only because he is less obviously unpleasant than his wife, son, and college friend. But whenever we come close to caring about him, a silly joke comes along to set us straight. The ethical choices on his steak-house menu are so few and unappealing that after a little deliberation he says, "Fuck it … I'm going to have the rib-eye." (A fellow environmentalist cheers the selection as if welcoming a wallflower onto the dance floor.) The book pays dearly for this sitcom gag; Walter's interest in saving wild birds suddenly looks like a manifestation not of real conviction, but of the same uptight goody-goodiness that bores his wife. Even when he finally loses his temper, the book shows him no respect: the chapter in question is called "The Nice Man's Anger." Would he have turned out less of a clown had Freedom been written after the BP spill? I doubt it; Franzen must riff and smirk for our age, the Age of Unseriousness. No sooner does Walter declare his love for his assistant than we are forced to follow him to the bathroom, where, unable to pee, he wastes water in "an unnecessary flush." How tiresome all of this is; literary fiction has drawn man smaller than life for much, much longer than it ever did the opposite. Later, some gossip about another man suffices to make Walter rethink his future.
To throw away his marriage and follow Lalitha had felt irresistible until the moment he saw himself, in the person of Jessica's older colleague, as another overconsuming white American male who felt entitled to more and more and more: saw the romantic imperialism of his falling for someone fresh and Asian, having exhausted domestic supplies.
If his love is not strong enough to counter an access of political correctness, nor strong enough for him to see Lalitha as a woman first and an Asian second, why should we care about it? As for the vile phrase having exhausted domestic supplies, Walter, who has so far been faithful to his wife, has no reason to apply it to himself.
One keeps waiting for something that will make these flat characters develop in some way, and finally the Nice Man is struck by a great blow of fate. But rather than write his way through it, Franzen suspends things just before the moment of impact, then resumes Walter's story six years later—updating us with the glib aside that the event in question "had effectively ended his life." A writer's got to know his limitations, but this stratagem is clumsy enough to make one want to laugh for the first time in the book. It certainly beats the part where a wedding ring is retrieved from a bowl of feces.
I found nothing glittering in Freedom but saw at least one glimpse of the novel it might have been. The following is from early on in Walter's travels with his assistant:
At the Days Inn in Beckley, they fitted identical keycards into identical doors, fifteen feet from each other, and entered rooms whose identical profound drabness only a torrid illicit liaison could have overcome. Walter couldn't avoid thinking about how alone Lalitha was in her identical room. Part of his feeling of inferiority consisted of straightforward envy—envy of her youth; envy of her innocent idealism; envy of the simplicity of her situation, as compared to the impossibility of his—and it seemed to him that her room, though outwardly identical, was the room of fullness, the room of beautiful and allowable yearning, while his was the room of emptiness and sterile prohibition.
This is simply too repetitive to rise all that sharply out of the surrounding morass. Still, a mature thought and a fine shading of sadness are conveyed here. Before this passage, I had concluded that the style of the novel was, as the French say, the man himself; now I prefer to give Franzen the benefit of the doubt. Perhaps he can learn a lesson from Freedom: write a long book about mediocrities, and in their language to boot, and they will drag you down to their level.
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subset: commoncrawl


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Emily Pilloton interview on the Colbert ReportPosted in Comedy, News, Other Peoples' Interviews, Videos on January 19th, 2010 by Hyphen
|The Colbert Report
|Mon – Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
|Emily Pilloton
My nerd crush on Ms. Pilloton aside (smart women FTW), this is awesome.
In short, she graduated from Berkeley trained as an architect, but after working a few years in "the real world" making conventional goods, she realized she wanted to do more. At 26, she founded Project H Design, a non-profit created to put design innovation to better use. Rather than focus on making money, Project H seeks "the triple bottom line: planet, people, & profit."
As a post grad that's been disillusioned with the rat race from time to time myself, I love that she took a chance and put her ideals first. It's actually not that different from our mindset with Sound Session…well, in terms of doing work you believe in, rather than "selling out" if you well. Kudos to Emily and if you'd like to read more or become involved, check out their site.
Here's a great presentation of hers from last year that explains things a little further:
Seattle people: it looks like they have a chapter here in the 206, so if you're looking for some direction in life and have extra time on your hands, you know what to do.


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2011 JCC I Tri UNIDENTIFIED
We were unable to identify the race number for these athletes consequently they are not searchable. All photos © 2011 MultiSport Photography. All Rights Reserved. Email email@example.com for permissions or acceptable use information. Personal use on blogs, personal websites and other personal public displays requires photo credit.Read More


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Giveaway from America's Test Kitchen!
It's The Pietanic!! Your heart will go on!
Because finally!! The long anticipated pie post on America's Test Kitchen's Blog, The Feed! Is up and awesome!
You remember don't you? I, and my humble blog, won a free trial scholarship to the online cooking school. America's Test Kitchen Online Cooking School. You might recall the deal was: I would receive a scholarship if I agreed to bake apple pies utilizing their courses and blog about them for their blog called, "The Feed." COOL right? Yes! COOL!
It was so much fun for me. I learned making pie is a science and a craft. More importantly it is an art! Art is ALWAYS harder than it looks. But I swear this was pretty dang easy. (Once I relaxed and got my pie mojo!) Near, far, wherever you are– you can go and read all about my process and see all of the pies and the surprise delight that came from them!
You can make pretty pies too! As a matter of fact, I WANT you to make pies, and pasta, and eggs and meat! So much so that I am giving away (with the help of ATK Online Cooking School) to TWO lucky winners- a 60 day trial to the cooking school! Yep, you can go back to school and have total access to the course catalogue and all the lessons for 2 whole months! You know you need this! It's already back-to-school,
Memorial Day LABOR DAY* is coming, and before you know it it'll be Thanksgiving! It is TIME to get your cooking mojo flowing! It's time to get those questions answered, and take your skills to the next level- whatever that level is!
Here are the details on how to enter to win:
1. follow me on twitter AND leave your Twitter handle along with your desire to be entered to win- in the comment section here.
I will want to follow you back and put your name in the giant hat!
Click "like" on my Facebook page! Poor 'ole thing, it needs the love!
Go check out "The Feed." If you do nothing else, do this. It is so amazing! I learn so much from this blog! You'll thank me for this. I subscribe to their blog. I love it that much.
It's that easy. I will pick a name at random out of the giant hat at the next full moon! (August 31) and two lucky winners will be on their way to amazing delicious cooking!
Go on! Tell me, do you want to go back to school- right in your own kitchen? What do you want to learn more about cooking?
* thanks Doug, those end of summer vs beginning of summer holidays confuse me!
August 14, 2012 10:15 pm
Sign me up! @fulmer
August 21, 2012 12:16 pm
Funny, as I was just looking at online cooking schools like this a few weeks ago. I'm a mom of two boys (four boys and three girls if you count step kids! One step son lives with us… so we have three boys here – I'm the only girl…)
I've always loved cooking, but only recently did it really dawn on me that maybe THAT is what I SHOULD be doing. So I've been creating a lot of food lately from scratch and trying new things and trying to build up things I need in the kitchen (challenging with very limited supplies to work with).
August 21, 2012 12:17 pm
Oh crud, I forgot to leave my Twitter lol https://twitter.com/AChefWithin (also liked you on FB).


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I am delving back into the journals that were the basis for my new book, AKissB4UGo. Many pages never made it into the published book but still have lots of meaning for me. If you don't mind, I'll share them with you over the next few weeks.
Patti left behind a lot of possessions. Years later I'm still going through them. At first I was wracked with guilt at the thought of throwing away anything that she'd ever touched. I just put it back in the box to wait until my heart had hardened a little more.
Some of the things became easier to part with. Patti was a huge collector of newspaper clippings and postcards and had big piles of letters and notes and shopping lists and I went through them over time, sifting them into smaller and smaller groups and filling garbage bags with stuff that meant nothing to me anymore. But there are also many things that I found it hard to part with. Patti's apron collection is one of them. She loved aprons and pick them up and thrift stores and flea markets and had dozens more than she could ever wear. I still wear them when I do the washing up for cooking a tomato sauce but there's only so many aprons a man needs.
Of course I think about Jack when I'm going through this process. What will he want of his mother's? Will he have some future wife who will share Patti's love for these things? How awful if I've thrown away every trace of her obsessions.
I tried carefully through the things that Patty left behind and trying to be a good curator. Of course these things are just things and I don't really need to be reminded of Patti by an apron or a sale circular or even a love letter. But things also carry the traces of people and one has to handle them carefully and not be overwhelmed by the need to bulldoze the past away, as if clearing my closets of her presence will somehow eliminate the last vestiges of pain.
I don't know if all those thoughts are evident in this spread from my journal. Probably not. And it was hard to do justice to the beautiful designs of her aprons in a wearily done watercolor, so this spread, like many others, remained in my journal and didn't make it into the final version of the book.


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MONDAY, Feb. 4, 2013 (HealthDay News) -- The first generic version of the cancer drug Doxil (doxorubicin hydrochloride liposome injection) has been approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, which says the action should help relieve shortages of the brand-name medication.
Doxil is on the agency's drug shortage list. The list empowers the FDA's Office of Generic Drugs to grant priority review to generic equivalents, the agency said Monday in a news release.
Noting that generics were of the same quality and strength as the original drugs, the FDA said: "Generic manufacturing and packaging sites must pass the same quality standards as those of brand-name drugs."
Generic Doxil will be produced by Sun Pharma Global FZE in 20 milligram and 50 milligram vials.
More information
Visit the FDA to learn more.


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Absolute Continuity I
We've shown that indefinite integrals are absolutely continuous, but today we're going to revise and extend this notion. But first, to review: we've said that a set function defined on the measurable sets of a measure space is absolutely continuous if for every there is a so that implies that .
But now I want to change this definition. Given a measurable space and two signed measures and defined on we say that is absolutely continuous with respect to — and write — if for every measurable set for which . It still essentially says that is small whenever is small, but here we describe "smallness" of by itself, while we describe "smallness" of by its total variation .
This situation is apparently asymmetric, but only apparently; If and are signed measures, then the conditions
are equivalent. Indeed, if is a Hahn decomposition with respect to then whenever we have both
Thus if the first condition holds we find
and the second condition must hold as well. If the second condition holds we use the definition
to show that the third must hold. And if the third holds, then we use the inequality
to show that the first must hold.
Now, just because smallness in can be equivalently expressed in terms of its total variation does not mean that smallness in can be equivalently expressed in terms of the signed measure itself. Indeed, consider the following two functions on the unit interval with Lebesgue measure :
and define to be the indefinite integral of . We can tell that the total variation is the Lebegue measure itself, since . Thus if then we can easily calculate
and so . However, it is not true that for every measurable with . Indeed, , and yet we calculate
By the way: it's tempting to say that this integral is actually equal to , but remember that we only really know how to calculate integrals by taking limits of integrals of simple functions, and that's a bit more cumbersome than we really want to get into right now.
One first quick result about absolute continuity: if and are any two measures, then . Indeed, if then by the positivity of measures we must have both and , the latter of which shows the absolute continuity we're after.
8 Comments »
[…] Continuity II Now that we've redefined absolute continuity, we should tie it back to the original one. That definition makes precise the […]
Pingback by Absolute Continuity II « The Unapologetic Mathematician | July 2, 2010 |
[…] Another relation between signed measures besides absolute continuity — indeed, in a sense the opposite of absolute continuity — is singularity. We say that […]
Pingback by Singularity « The Unapologetic Mathematician | July 5, 2010 |
[…] Before the main business, a preliminary lemma: if and are totally finite measures so that is absolutely continuous with respect to , and is not identically zero, then there is a positive number and a measurable […]
Pingback by The Radon-Nikodym Theorem (Statement) « The Unapologetic Mathematician | July 6, 2010 |
[…] to the general case, we know that the absolute continuity is equivalent to the conjunction of and , and so we can reduce to the case where is a finite measure, not just a […]
Pingback by The Radon-Nikodym Theorem (Proof) « The Unapologetic Mathematician | July 7, 2010 |
[…] , while on . For the first case, let be a set for which . Since , we must have , and so . Then by absolute continuity, we conclude that , and thus on . The proof that on is […]
Pingback by The Radon-Nikodym Theorem for Signed Measures « The Unapologetic Mathematician | July 8, 2010 |
[…] As we've said before, singularity and absolute continuity are diametrically opposed. And so it's not entirely surprising that if we have two totally […]
Pingback by Lebesgue Decomposition « The Unapologetic Mathematician | July 14, 2010 |
[…] from a measure space to a totally -finite measure space so that the pushed-forward measure is absolutely continuous with respect to . Then we can select a non-negative measurable […]
Pingback by Pulling Back and Pushing Forward Structure « The Unapologetic Mathematician | August 2, 2010 |
[…] If is the metric space associated to a measure space , and if is a finite signed measure that is absolutely continuous with respect to . Then defines a continuous function on […]
Pingback by Associated Metric Spaces and Absolutely Continuous Measures I « The Unapologetic Mathematician | August 16, 2010 |


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Smed: ProSiebenSat.1 Forced Migration is Dead — Euro SOE Players Can Stick With SOE
Written by Feldon on Tuesday, October 16, 2012 at 10:27 am
Well, this should change the tone and tenor of the ProSiebenSat.1 Panel at SOE Live a bit.
From SOE President John Smedley's twitter:
[I] wanted to thank our players for continuing feedback. We've been listening along with our European partners at Prosieben.
We've found a way to let existing players of our current games that are migrating over to Prosieben (EQ, EQ II, Planetside 2) keep their SOE accounts and stay with SOE. Down the road we may offer an option to move over to Prosieben.
Just to be clear after these games launch on Prosieben's service new accounts will be created on their sites. However all US and EU players can still play together no matter which service they are on.
I want to be clear that Prosieben will have better European CS and payment options IMO. That's why we went with them in the first place. Also Prosieben has done a great job of listening and is working on changing some of their CS policies. More to come on that soon.
Just going back and forth with our partners at Prosieben. I can confirm that we WILL offer the ability to migrate to Prosieben. No word on timeframe just yet but shouldn't take too long.
[I] want to make sure I'm crystal clear – after we launch Planetside 2 – new EU accounts can only be created on Prosieben.
This has subsequently been posted on the EQ2 Forums.
via The EQ2 Wire — EverQuest II News & Commentary.
Huzzah!!!! Fantastic News!!!!!


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Call us +49 7141 247-0
Portable one thread chain stitch bag closing machine with direct drive by fan-cooled electric motor. Combined upper and lower feed for greater power grips both sides of the bag, even on difficult materials. Motor housing and handle made of fiber-glass reinforced break-resistant polyamide. Sealed, dust proof and permanently lubricated motor ball bearings. Power cable 5 m long.


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Craghoppers Kids Nosilife Emerson Shirt
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- Weight: 120g
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Press Releases
Fortinet Further Invests in the Middle East region
Dubai, UAE, April 6, 2015 – Fortinet® (NASDAQ: FTNT), a global leader in high-performance cyber security solutions - today announced that it has moved to a new and larger office and at the same time opened a unique Technical Assistance Center in Dubai, UAE. These changes aim to more effectively address the requirements of Fortinet's customers across Middle East and reflect the company's strong growth and commitment to the region.
Building on the success of its global support centers, Fortinet has identified Dubai as a strategic location for delivering technical services for its full suite of network security solutions. The center will be staffed with engineers providing the comprehensive range of FortiCare™ Services from technical support, premium and focused security services as well as Professional Services.
"Fortinet is growing exponentially and we continue to invest in high-growth territories such as the Middle East in order to meet the rising demand from our customers and partners" said Yann Pradelle, Vice President EMEA South at Fortinet. "Fortinet is the first security vendor across the region to have a dedicated and senior technical support team on-the-ground to provide high quality services to our customers."
"Some security vendors do not pay enough attention to local support," said Rudiger Lenz, Vice President International Support & Service at Fortinet. "Conversely, Fortinet is assuming that responsibility on a local level which is a very positive development. This clearly demonstrates the significance, priority and importance to Fortinet of corporate security and customer satisfaction in the region. The opening of the Dubai Support Center is a strong commitment to our Middle East customers."
The new and sprawling office is located at the Arjan Rotana Office towers in Dubai Media City accommodating a significant increase of the company's headcounts across Middle East.
About Fortinet
Fortinet (NASDAQ: FTNT) protects the most valuable assets of some of the largest enterprise, service provider and government organizations across the globe. The company's fast, secure and global cyber security solutions provide broad, high-performance protection against dynamic security threats while simplifying the IT infrastructure. They are strengthened by the industry's highest level of threat research, intelligence and analytics. Unlike pure-play network security providers, Fortinet can solve organizations' most important security challenges, whether in networked, application or mobile environments - be it virtualized/cloud or physical. More than 210,000 customers worldwide, including some of the largest and most complex organizations, trust Fortinet to protect their brands. Learn more at www.fortinet.com , the Fortinet blog or FortiGuard Labs.
Copyright © 2015 Fortinet, Inc. All rights reserved. The symbols ® and ™ denote respectively federally registered trademarks and unregistered trademarks of Fortinet, Inc., its subsidiaries and affiliates. Fortinet's trademarks include, but are not limited to, the following: Fortinet, FortiGate, FortiGuard, FortiManager, FortiMail, FortiClient, FortiCare, FortiAnalyzer, FortiReporter, FortiOS, FortiASIC, FortiWiFi, FortiSwitch, FortiVoIP, FortiBIOS, FortiLog, FortiResponse, FortiCarrier, FortiScan, FortiAP, FortiDB, FortiVoice and FortiWeb. Other trademarks belong to their respective owners. Fortinet has not independently verified statements or certifications herein attributed to third parties and Fortinet does not independently endorse such statements. Notwithstanding anything to the contrary herein, nothing herein constitutes a warranty, guarantee, binding specification or other binding commitment by Fortinet, and performance and other specification information herein may be unique to certain environments. This news release contains forward - looking statements that involve uncertainties and assumptions, such as statements regarding product releases. Changes of circumstances, product release delays, or other risks as stated in our filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, located at www.sec.gov , may cause results to differ materially from those expressed or implied in this press release. If the uncertainties materialize or the assumptions prove incorrect, results may differ materially from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements and assumptions. All statements other than statements of historical fact are statements that could be deemed forward-looking statements. Fortinet assumes no obligation to update any forward-looking statements, and expressly disclaims any obligation to update these forward-looking statements.


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Police: Shooter at Oregon school had assault rifle
TROUTDALE, Ore. (AP) — A 15-year-old gunman at an Oregon high school had an assault rifle, handgun and several magazines of ammunition hidden in a guitar case and duffel bag when he rode a school bus to the campus, police said Wednesday.
The attacker, identified as Jared Michael Padgett, a freshman at Reynolds High School in Troutdale, entered a boys locker room on Tuesday at the gymnasium, where he "murdered a fellow student," police Chief Scott Anderson said.
He also wounded a teacher, who managed to make his way to an office and alert officials. Anderson said the action by teacher Todd Rispler and responding officers likely saved numerous lives.
The shooter later encountered officers in a hallway. After a brief exchange of gunfire, he fled into a restroom and was later found dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound, police said.
Anderson said no link has been found between the shooter and the student who was killed. No motive was released.
"The shooter obtained the weapons from his family home," Anderson said. "The weapons had been secured, but he defeated the security measures."
Police say the shooting occurred in a gym detached from the main school building, with 14-year-old Emilio Hoffman killed in the boys' locker room.
In the aftermath, the governor called the violence senseless, the Troutdale mayor praised the police response, and the school district superintendent said she had once hoped she could get through her career without a school shooting.
Hoffman was the only teenage boy in his house, said Savannah Venegas, who dated him a year ago, "so (his mother) was very protective of him."
"He was such a good kid, a quiet kid," Venegas said. "He didn't stir up trouble. Just a down-to-earth guy."
Perhaps no school district better reflects the changing face of Oregon than the one in Troutdale. This was not a shooting at a school in the posh suburbs or the inner city. Reynolds High School is harder to categorize.
The school draws from a diverse group, including far-east residents of Portland and agricultural families from the Columbia Gorge.
"This is a tragedy that affects our whole community," Anderson said. "This is not supposed to happen in any school, or to any child."


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Women who experience a drop in their sex drive after taking antidepressants might be helped by testosterone therapy, a new study from Australia suggests.
In the study, women on antidepressants who wore a patch that delivered the hormone testosterone daily reported having more sexual experiences they called "satisfying," compared with women who wore a placebo patch.
By the end of the three-month study, those who wore the testosterone patch had about two additional satisfying sexual experiences per month, compared to their typical number. In contrast, those who wore the placebo patch had about the same number of satisfying sexual experiences at the beginning and end of the study. No adverse side effects related to the male hormone were seen. [51 Sultry Facts About Sex]
Decreased sexual desire is a known side effect of antidepressants, including selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) and serotonin-norepinephrine reuptake inhibitors (SNRIs), and low libido may become a problem for those who need to take the drugs over the long term, the researchers said. The 44 women in the study, who were ages 35 to 55, all felt that their libido had dropped since starting antidepressants.
The study "provides the first evidence that [testosterone-patch] therapy may be a treatment option for women with SSRI/SNRI-emergent loss of libido who need to remain on their antidepressant therapy," the researchers wrote in a study published Jan. 16 in The Journal of Sexual Medicine.
The results are "very exciting," said Dr. Lynne Shuster, an internal medicine physician and women's health specialist at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., who was not involved with the study. "This is a very common problem for which we don't have good treatments," Shuster said. Sexual side effects from antidepressants can lead to discontinuation of medication or reduced quality of life, Shuster said.
Women in the study who wore the testosterone patch did not have an increase in scores on a test chosen by the researchers to detect overall changes in sexual function. But the reason there was no change in this score could be because this test is not a good indicator of the changes in sexual function brought on by testosterone, Shuster said.
Previous studies in women with low sexual desire have found that low doses of testosterone, similar to the dose used in the current study, are safe and do not cause serious side effects, Shuster said.
However, the drug has a "narrow therapeutic window, meaning if you use any more than the right amount for an individual patient, there may be risks," Shuster said. That's why the use of the hormone should be monitored closely by a health care provider, Shuster said.
In women, doses of testosterone that are too high can lead to the development of male characteristics, such as a growth of facial hair and a deepening of the voice.
A testosterone patch called Intrinsa (made by Procter & Gamble), which is intended to treat female sexual dysfunction, is approved for use in other countries, but not in the United States. More long-term studies (conducted over multiple years) are likely needed before the drug could be approved in this country, Shuster said.
There has also been concern that if the drug is approved, it would be used off-label by women who would best be treated with a different approach, Shuster said. (Off-label use is when a drug is legally prescribed for a condition that it is not specifically approved to treat). But off-label use is a risk with any drug, and Shuster said such concerns are "not a reason to withhold approval for a drug."
Follow Rachael Rettner @RachaelRettner. Follow LiveScience @livescience, Facebook &Google+. Original article on LiveScience.


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Today's News: Our Take - Who Is Jon Stewart's Worst Guest of All Time?
It's safe to say Jon Stewart isn't a member of the Hugh Grant fan club. The Daily Show host recently told Stephen Colbert that Grant is his least favorite guest of all time.
Photos: Everybody's posing nude! Check out Rihanna and other stars who've bared all
"And we've had dictators on the show," Stewart pointed out, as he was being interviewed by Colbert at a fundraiser in New Jersey for the Montclair Film Festival, according to Third Beat.
According to Stewart, when Grant came on the show in 2009 to promote the film Did You Hear About the Morgans?, he complained that he had other places to be. "He's giving everyone s--- the whole time, and he's a big pain in the a--," Stewart said, according to Third Beat, adding that he would never have the British actor back on the show.
RIP Jelena and TomKat! Check out the most shocking celebrity splits
Grant also reportedly said that the film clip that was aired during his segment was "terrible."
Stewart's response? "Well, then make a better f------ movie."
Are you surprised? And what other celebrities do you know of who have a reputation for being somewhat salty?
View original Who Is Jon Stewart's Worst Guest of All Time? at TVGuide.com
Other Links From TVGuide.com


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Hubble finds hundreds of young galaxies in the early universe
The discovery is scientifically invaluable for understanding the origin of galaxies, considering that just a decade ago early galaxy formation was largely uncharted territory. Astronomers had not seen even one galaxy that existed when the Universe was a billion years old, so finding 500 in a Hubble survey is a significant leap forward for cosmologists.
The galaxies unveiled by Hubble are smaller than today's giant galaxies and very bluish in colour, indicating they are ablaze with star birth. The images appear red because of the galaxies' tremendous distance from Earth. The blue light from their young stars took nearly 13 billion years to arrive at Earth. During the journey, the blue light was shifted to red light due to the expansion of space.
"Finding so many of these dwarf galaxies, but so few bright ones, is evidence for galaxies building up from small pieces - merging together as predicted by the hierarchical theory of galaxy formation," said astronomer Rychard Bouwens of the University of California, Santa Cruz, USA who led the Hubble study.
Bouwens and his team spied these galaxies in an analysis of the Hubble Ultra Deep Field (HUDF), completed in 2004, and the Great Observatories Origins Deep Survey (GOODS), made in 2003. The results were presented on August 17 at the 2006 General Assembly of the International Astronomical Union, and will be published in the November 20 issue of the Astrophysical Journal.
The findings also show that these dwarf galaxies were producing stars at a furious rate, about ten times faster than is happening now in nearby galaxies. Astronomers have long debated whether the hottest stars in early star-forming galaxies, such as those in this study, may have provided enough radiation to reheat the cold hydrogen gas that existed between galaxies in the early Universe. The gas had been cooling since the Big Bang.
"Seeing all of these starburst galaxies provides evidence that there were enough galaxies 1 billion years after the Big Bang to finish reheating the Universe," explained team member Garth Illingworth of the University of California, Santa Cruz. "It highlights a period of fundamental change in the Universe, and we are seeing the galaxy population that brought about that change."
In terms of human lifetimes, cosmic events happen very slowly. The evolution of galaxies and stars, for example, occurs over billions of years. Astronomers, therefore, rarely witness dramatic, relatively brief transitions that changed the Universe. One such event was the Universe is "reheating." The reheating, driven by the galaxies ultraviolet starlight, transformed the gas between galaxies from a cold, dark hydrogen soup to a hot, transparent plasma over only a few hundred million years. With Hubble's help, astronomers are now beginning to see the kinds of galaxies that brought about the reheating.
Just a few years ago, astronomers did not have the technology to hunt for faraway galaxies in large numbers. The installation of the Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) aboard the Hubble Space Telescope in 2002 allowed astronomers to probe some of the deepest recesses of our Universe. Astronomers used the ACS to observe distant galaxies in the HUDF and GOODS public surveys.
Another major step in the exploration of the Universe's earliest years will occur if Hubble undergoes its next upgrade with the Wide Field Planetary Camera 3 (WFC3). The WFC3's infrared sensitivity will allow it to detect galaxies that are so far away their starlight has been stretched to infrared wavelengths by the expanding Universe.
The galaxies uncovered so far promise that many more galaxies at even greater distances are awaiting discovery by the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), scheduled to launch in 2013. Co-author Marijn Franx, member of the ESA JWST NIRSPEC science team, explains: "The JWST will be able to see even further back into the early Universe, and glimpse the first objects that formed. ESA's NIRSPEC instrument, can even measure the exact distances of these objects."
Source: ESA/Hubble Information Centre


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So in 2006 I was probably one of the first people to get a Baby Firefly tattoo. I remember sharing it with Sheri Moon Zombie on Myspace and she was in awe that someone would get her movie character as a tattoo and she featured it on her page. She even eventually featured it on the Total Skull website when it launched as well. Then before you knew it House of 1000 Corpses and Devil's Rejects tattoos were everywhere.
The thing about my tattoo was it wasn't suppose to be a portrait version of her. It was suppose to be an representation of the character but in a traditional pin up girl style and pose. My tattoo artist at the time came up with the drawing and so it began. It didn't really turn out as traditional as I had wanted it to but it worked. The downfall is that over the years the tattoo didn't stick well and some of the features even bled out. I take overly good care of my ink with sunblock and such so it was just time and possibly just the way the ink was originally done.
So it's 10 years later and I have been putting off getting something done with this tattoo. I went to Dave Togtman at Black Devil Tattoo who happens to be a long time friend of my husband and opened his own shop last year (we actually had Frankenhearse on display at their opening party). My goal was to see if we could transform what I had into a neo traditional style tattoo and hopefully magically bring it back to life some how. The reason I thought neo traditional would work is because it can incorporate the traditional old school colors and pin up style my tattoo already had but could also have cartoonish like qualities if needed and thick lines that could hopefully fix the bleed out.
I have to say I am really happy with what he has done so far! He started working on it yesterday. His goal being lets get her cleaned up first and then go from there to add to it etc. As you will see from the collage below (and mind you this is a large tattoo on my leg so perspective is a little off on each photo) it goes from 2006 when the tattoo was first done, to the 2016 photo I sent to Dave of it sadly needing to be fixed and then the new neo traditional style work he did last night.
He wants to see how it heals and then we are going to do another session that will incorporate background that will make it look even more neo traditional and other elements I want to add to it. One of them he actually already designed for me and showed me last night. Needless to say I am stoked to get it added! I will wait until he does it to share what it is. Now to take care of this swollen leg and prepare for the kankle that comes with it ha ha.
Stay Spooky!
LDG Nicole


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Examine A Hand, Foreshadow A Future
Back to the subject at hand.
To those who are relatively new to this blog, one of the most popular…uh…tolerated series of posts has been my series on the physical exam. If you haven't done so already, you may want to go back and read the posts to get in the proper mindset (or destroy enough brain cells).
Astute readers will note that doctors are not the only professionals to examine the hand.
Long before we knew anything about carpal tunnel syndrome or the thenar eminence, we had Madam Linda and her cohorts looking at the hand for signs of what the future will bring for the individual that happens to be connected to the hand in question. Just as stars and planets can have a peculiar interest as to whether a person will run into money, the lines on a person's hand can foreshadow a person's future. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Musings of a Distractible Mind*


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Information Date
Presented ToTHE COMMITTEE ON EDUCATION AND LABOR U.S.HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
Speaker(s)David Michaels
Chairman Miller, Ranking Member Kline, and Members of the Committee, thank you for the opportunity today to discuss the Miner Safety and Health Act of 2010, which would bring needed reforms to our nation's workplace health and safety laws. Every day in this country, 14 workers are killed on the job. Every day we encounter employers who put profits above the safety of their workers, children who have lost parents, or parents who have lost children from workplace injuries. Workers are fired for voicing safety and health concerns, companies subject workers to known hazards while the courts spend years deciding contested citations, and our nation's workforce protection agencies are plagued with outdated laws, tools, and penalties that make it difficult to deter safety and health violations.
Until 1970, there was no national guarantee that workers throughout America would be protected from workplace hazards. In that year the Congress enacted a powerful and far-reaching law-the Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970 (OSH Act), which created the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) and provided workers with the rights they needed to protect their safety and health on the job.
But today, 40 years after the Act was passed, American workers continue to face unacceptable hazards on the job. And while these hazards and working conditions have changed significantly, the law has not been substantially modified in those 40 years.
During the seven months I have been the Assistant Secretary of OSHA, explosions at the Kleen Energy power plant in Connecticut, the Tesoro refinery in Washington State, the Upper Big Branch mine in West Virginia, and on the Deepwater Horizon offshore oil drilling platform in the Gulf of Mexico have killed 54 workers. We add their names to a long list of recent disasters, like the explosions at the BP refinery in Texas, Sago and Darby mines in West Virginia and Kentucky, and the Imperial Sugar plant in Georgia that killed dozens of workers and injured hundreds more. But these are only the tragedies that make national headlines. What is not publicized are the more than 5,000 other workers killed on the job in America each year, the more than 4 million who are injured, and the thousands more who will become ill or die in later years from present day occupational exposures. Every day in this country we have a Sago mine disaster, every two days an Upper Big Branch, and every month the loss of a fully loaded Boeing 747. These tragedies happen in every corner of the country, usually one at a time, far from the evening news and the morning headlines.
Secretary Solis' vision for the Department of Labor is "Good Jobs for Everyone." Good jobs are safe jobs and we must do more to make our nation's workplaces safer. OSHA has already taken significant steps toward this goal. In April, the Labor Department released its Spring regulatory agenda which includes a new enforcement strategy - Plan/Prevent/Protect - an effort designed to expand and strengthen worker protections through a new OSHA standard that would require not just the best employers, but every employer to implement an Injury and Illness Prevention Program tailored to the actual hazards in that employer's workplace. Instead of waiting for an OSHA inspection or a workplace accident to address workplace hazards, employers would be required to create a plan for identifying and remediating hazards, and then to implement this plan.
Essentially, through this common sense rule, also known as "Find and Fix," we will be asking employers to find the safety and health hazards present in their facilities that might injure or kill workers and then fix those hazards. Workers, those who are most directly at risk, would participate in developing and implementing these workplace safety plans and evaluating their effectiveness in achieving compliance.
While we believe this enforcement strategy will go a long way toward eliminating the "catch me if you can" mindset prevalent in corporate America, the workplaces of 2010 are not those of 1970 and the OSH Act, which has remained stagnant for 40 years, must be brought into the 21st century to ensure OSHA has the tools and authority to prevent safety and health violations.
I therefore greatly appreciate the work of this Committee in proposing legislation that would significantly increase OSHA's ability to help protect American workers. I want to congratulate you, Mr. Chairman, Congresswoman Woolsey and other cosponsors of the Miner Safety and Health Act for recognizing not only that the nation's 350,000 miners desperately need better protections to prevent any more Sago or Upper Big Branch disasters, but that this nation's 135 million workers in general industry who are covered by OSHA also need better, more up-to-date protections. Clearly, whether a worker leaves home in the morning on his way to a mine or on her way to a refinery or construction site, every worker needs and deserves equally effective protections.
Title VII of the Miner Safety and Health Act provides critical amendments to the OSH Act that would increase OSHA's civil and criminal penalties, enhance whistleblower protections and victims' rights, and give OSHA the authority to require abatement of serious hazards even if and while the employer contests citations issued for them. These provisions, strongly supported by the Labor Department and endorsed by the Obama Administration, would enable OSHA to more effectively accomplish its mission to "assure safe and healthful working conditions for working men and women."
Because OSHA can visit only a limited number of workplaces each year, we need a stronger OSH Act to leverage our resources to encourage compliance by employers. We need to make employers who ignore real hazards to their workers' safety and health think again. Federal OSHA and state plans combined have just over 2,200 inspectors, which translates to about one compliance officer for every 60,000 workers. OSHA needs more modern tools to ensure that employers are safeguarding the safety and health in our country's almost 9 million workplaces.
Today, my testimony will focus on the Title VII provisions of the Miner Safety and Health Act, which address significant weaknesses in current OSHA law, and how this legislation would address those problems by bringing OSHA into the 21st century.
Safe jobs exist only when employers have adequate incentives to comply with OSHA's requirements. Those incentives are affected, in turn, by both the magnitude and the likelihood of penalties. Swift, certain and meaningful penalties provide an important incentive to "do the right thing." However, OSHA's current penalties are not large enough to provide adequate incentives, especially for large employers. Currently, serious violations - those that pose a substantial probability of death or serious physical harm to workers - are subject to a maximum civil penalty of only $7,000. Let me emphasize that - a violation that causes a "substantial probability of death - or serious physical harm" brings a maximum penalty of only $7,000. Willful and repeated violations carry a maximum penalty of only $70,000.
Congress has increased the OSH Act's monetary penalties only once in 40 years despite inflation during that period. Unscrupulous employers often consider it more cost effective to pay the minimal OSHA penalty and continue to operate an unsafe workplace than to correct the underlying health and safety problem. The current penalties do not provide an adequate deterrent. This is apparent when OSHA penalties are compared with penalties that other agencies are allowed to assess.
For example, in 2001 a tank full of sulfuric acid exploded at an oil refinery in Delaware, killing Jeff Davis, a worker at the refinery. His body literally dissolved in the acid. The OSHA penalty was only $175,000. Yet, in the same incident, thousands of dead fish and crabs were discovered, allowing EPA to assess a $10 million penalty for violating the Clean Water Act. How do we explain to Jeff Davis' wife Mary, and their five children, that the penalty for killing fish and crabs is so much higher than the penalty for killing their husband and father?
Other examples abound. The Department of Agriculture is authorized to impose a fine of up to $140,000 on milk processors for willful violations of the Fluid Milk Promotion Act, which include refusal to pay fees and assessments to help advertise and research fluid milk products. The Federal Communications Commission can fine a TV or radio station up to $325,000 when a performer curses on air. The Environmental Protection Agency can impose a penalty of $270,000 for violations of the Clean Air Act and a penalty of $1 million for attempting to tamper with a public water system. Yet, the maximum civil penalty OSHA may impose when a hard-working man or woman is killed on the job - even when the death is caused by a willful violation of an OSHA requirement - is $70,000.
The Miner Safety and Health Act makes much needed increases in both civil and criminal penalties for every type of violation of the OSH Act and would increase penalties for willful or repeat violations that involve a fatality to as much as $250,000. These increases are necessary to create at least the same deterrent that Congress originally intended when it passed the OSH Act. Simply put, OSHA penalties must be increased to provide a real disincentive for employers not to accept worker injuries and deaths as a cost of doing business.
Unlike most other Federal enforcement laws, the OSH Act has been exempt from the Federal Civil Penalties Inflation Adjustment Act, so there have not even been increases in OSHA penalties for inflation. This has reduced the real dollar value of OSHA penalties by close to 40%. In order to ensure that the effect of the newly increased penalties does not degrade in the same way, the Miner Safety and Health Act also provides for inflation adjustments for civil penalties based on increases or decreases in the Consumer Price Index (CPI). Criminal penalties in the OSH Act are also inadequate for deterring criminal wrongdoing. Under the OSH Act, criminal penalties are limited to those cases where a willful violation of an OSHA standard results in the death of a worker and to cases of false statements or misrepresentations. The maximum period of incarceration upon conviction for a violation that costs a worker's life is six months in jail, making these willful crimes a misdemeanor.
The criminal penalty provisions of the OSH Act have not been updated since the law was enacted and are weaker than virtually every other safety and health or environmental law. The Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act all provide for criminal prosecution for knowing violations of the law, and for knowing endangerment that places a person in imminent danger of death or serious bodily harm, with penalties of up to 15 years in jail. There is no prerequisite in these laws for a death or serious injury to occur. Other federal laws provide for a 20-year maximum jail sentence for dealing with counterfeit obligations or money, or mail fraud; and for a life sentence for operating certain types of criminal financial enterprises. It defies logic that serious violations of the OSH Act that result in death or serious bodily injury are treated as lesser crimes than insider trading, tax crimes, customs violations and anti-trust violations.
It is clear that nothing focuses attention like the possibility of going to prison. Unscrupulous employers who knowingly refuse to comply with safety and health standards as an economic calculus, and cause the death or serious injury of a worker, will think again if there is a chance that they will be incarcerated for ignoring their responsibilities.
The Miner Safety and Health Act would amend the criminal provisions of the OSH Act, as it would also amend the Federal Mine Safety and Health Act, to change the burden of proof from "willfully" to "knowingly." Specifically, Section 706 states that any employer who "knowingly" violates any standard, rule, or order and that violation caused or contributed to the death of any employee is subject to a fine and not more than 10 years in prison. Most federal environmental crimes and most federal regulatory crime use "knowingly," rather than "willfully." This would ease the burden on prosecutors by harmonizing these worker safety provisions with similar (or comparable or analogous) crimes.
In the 1980s, we saw in Texas and California that aggressive criminal law enforcement procedures improved occupational safety and health. In Texas, the number of trenching fatalities dropped dramatically when one county adopted a well-publicized criminal prosecution effort. Los Angeles County California also mounted an effective criminal prosecution program during those years. In addition, OSHA continues to work with New York State's prosecutors on similar prosecutions, even as recently as the Deutsche Bank case. The Committee has wisely included a provision stating that nothing in the Act shall preclude a state or local law enforcement agency from conducting criminal prosecutions in accordance with its own laws.
Good jobs are also jobs where workers' voices are an essential part of the conversation about creating safe workplaces. As my colleague Assistant Secretary Joe Main has testified, this Committee heard powerful testimony from the mining community at its field hearing in Beckley, West Virginia about how important it is for miners to be able to come forward and report dangerous conditions in the mine before tragedy strikes. It is equally important that workers in other dangerous industries, like oil refineries, chemical plants, and construction, feel that same security in coming forward.
The OSH Act was one of the first safety and health laws to contain a provision - 11(c) - for protecting employees from discrimination and retaliation when they report safety and health hazards or exercise other rights under the OSH Act. Since OSHA cannot be at every workplace at all times, we rely heavily on workers to act as OSHA's "eyes and ears" in identifying hazards at their workplaces. This protection is fundamental to OSHA's ability to safeguard the workforce. If employees fear that they will lose their jobs or otherwise be retaliated against for actively participating in safety and health activities, they are not likely to do so.
OSHA's 11(c) provision is now 40 years old and is one of the weakest whistleblower provisions in any federal law. Last April you heard from a worker whose discrimination claim was upheld by OSHA, but because of weaknesses in the law, the case was never carried forward to litigation. At that hearing, Deputy Assistant Secretary Jordan Barab testified that he was outraged that in the year 2010, workers in this country still fear being fired or disciplined for exercising their rights.
The Miner Safety and Health Act strengthens whistleblower protections for workers in both mining and general industries. It makes explicit that a worker may not be retaliated against for reporting injuries, illnesses or unsafe conditions to employers or to a safety and health committee, or for refusing to perform a task that the worker reasonably believes could result in serious injury or illness to the worker or to other employees. Additionally, the Act increases the existing 30-day deadline for filing an 11(c) complaint to 180 days, bringing 11(c) more in line with most of the other whistleblower statutes enforced by OSHA. Over the years many complainants who might otherwise have had a strong case of retaliation have been denied protection simply because they did not file within the 30-day deadline.
The Miner Safety and Health Act's adoption of the "contributing factor" test for determining when illegal retaliation has occurred is also a significant improvement in 11(c). The Act would employ this same test for whistleblower complaints in the mining industry as well, making both 11(c) and the Federal Mine Safety and Health Act consistent with other whistleblower statutes enacted since 1989, when the "contributing factor" scheme was introduced. This would enhance the protections afforded to America's workers and improve workplace safety and health.
The private right to enforce an order is another key element of whistleblower protections in the Miner Safety and Health Act, and has been included in most other whistleblower statutes enforced by OSHA. It is critically important that if an employer fails to comply with an order providing relief, either DOL or the complainant be able to file a civil action for enforcement in a U.S. District Court.
The Miner Safety and Health Act also allows complainants or employers to move their cases to the next stage in the administrative or judicial process if the reviewing entities do not make prompt decisions or rulings. For example, the Act would allow complainants to "kick out" to a hearing before an Administrative Law Judge (ALJ) if the Secretary has not issued a decision within 120 days from the case filing, and to district court if an ALJ or the ARB has not issued a decision within their 90-day time limits.
These legislative changes in the whistleblower provisions are a long-overdue response to deficiencies that have become apparent over the past four decades. In addition, the Miner Safety and Health Act amends section 17(j) of the OSH Act to include an employer's history of violations of section 11(c) as a consideration in assessing civil penalties. This is also a long overdue change that underscores the importance of preventing the chilling effect of retaliation on workers.
The Miner Safety and Health Act also includes a section that would expand the rights of workers and victims' families. No one is affected more by a workplace tragedy than workers and their families, so we fully recognize and embrace their desire to be involved in the remedial process. Family members also provide useful information to OSHA inspectors about the culture and environment of a workplace and the events leading up to an incident that results in serious injury or death. The moving testimony of the families of the Upper Big Branch miners before this Committee in May and Jodi Thomas's testimony on the Kleen Energy explosion last month demonstrate how much family members have to offer MSHA and OSHA.
Although it is OSHA's policy to talk to families during the investigation process and inform them about our citation procedures and settlements, we have found that some of these policies are not always applied consistently. The Miner Safety and Health Act would help us in this area by placing into law, for the first time, the right of a victim (injured employee or family member) to meet with OSHA, to receive copies of the citation at no cost, to be informed of any notice of contest, and to appear and make a statement during settlement negotiations before an agreement is made to withdraw or modify a citation.
The Act also requires the Secretary to designate at least one employee at each OSHA area office to serve as a family liaison, similar to the program already in existence at MSHA. The OSHA family liaisons would keep victims informed of the status of investigations, enforcement actions, and settlement negotiations, and assist victims in asserting their rights. As we have seen at MSHA, the family liaisons have effectively enhanced victims' rights and involvement in the enforcement process. The last thing we want is to repeat situations when family members, like Miss Tonya Ford who testified before this Committee in April, find out about the tragic circumstances of their loved one's death from the media and not from OSHA. In addition to the helpful fixes in the Act, OSHA is also working administratively to incorporate suggestions we have received from victims on how to improve our enforcement process and better involve victims and their families.
One of the most significant changes that the Miner Safety and Health Act makes to the OSH Act is the provision that requires abatement of serious, willful, and repeat hazards during the contest period. Currently, if an employer contests an OSHA citation, that employer is not obligated to correct the hazard during the administrative contest period leaving workers exposed to serious or deadly hazards for months or years after the hazards have been identified.
The lack of any requirement for employers to abate hazards during the contest period also seriously undermines the effectiveness of OSHA's already low penalties. Largely because OSHA is pressured to negotiate away penalties in order to avoid employer contests and ensure that hazards are quickly fixed, the average current OSHA penalty is only around $1,000. The median initial penalty proposed for all investigations conducted in FY2007 of cases where a worker was killed was just $5,900. Clearly, OSHA can never put a price on a worker's life and that is not the purpose of penalties - even in fatality cases. OSHA must, however, be empowered to send a stronger message in cases where a life is needlessly lost than the message that a $5,900 penalty sends. By giving OSHA the authority to require abatement during contest, we not only ensure that workers are protected immediately but also can hold employers accountable for keeping a safe and healthful workplace. We must not forget that the stronger the message OSHA sends, the better the deterrence and more lives are saved.
The Miner Safety and Health Act would enable OSHA to issue failure to abate notices to a workplace with a citation under contest, which would carry a penalty of up to $7,000 for each day the hazard goes uncorrected. This provision would greatly strengthen the right of workers in general industry to be protected from the most egregious workplace hazards.
OSHA believes this protection is critical. Too often hazards remain uncorrected because of lengthy contest proceedings-periods that can last a decade or more. A recent OSHA analysis found that between FY 1999 and FY 2009, there were 33 contested cases that had a subsequent fatality at the same site prior to the issuance of a final order.
This is not the first time that this issue has been before Congress. During hearings on comprehensive OSHA reform in the 102nd and 103rd Congresses, numerous examples were presented of employees being hurt or killed while an inspection was under contest. While those opposing this provision argued that employers would needlessly spend large sums on abatement for a citation that is later overturned, business representatives testified that even when there is a contest most employers abate hazards during the review process.
Additionally, the State of Oregon, which operates its own safety and health program, requires abatement during contest for serious violations. This provision was included in Oregon's original statute and has not been revised since 1977. Although attorneys have objected in State legislative hearings on due process grounds, there have been no court challenges of this provision.
It is also important to note that the Miner Safety and Health Act guards the rights of employers by allowing an appeal to the Occupational Safety and Health Review Commission (OSHRC) regarding the requirement to abate during contest.
MSHA has long had a similar provision under its current law. It is now time that we protect general industry workers from known hazards during contest, that are just as deadly, as we do for miners.
Based on the long experience with this provision under the Mine Act, the GAO recommended that Congress require protection of workers during contests. Similarly, various environmental statutes also require that violations be corrected when they are identified. In weighing the balance between employee protection and employer contest rights, it seems clear that employee safety should take precedence.
* * * *
Mr. Chairman, an essential element of achieving Secretary Solis's goal of good jobs for everyone is to change the culture of safety in the American workplace. Under both the OSH Act and the Mine Act, employers are legally and morally responsible for the safety and health of their workers. The important reforms in the Miner Safety and Health Act go far in encouraging employers to accept this responsibility and giving OSHA and MSHA the tools we need to deal with employers who refuse.
In the months I have been at OSHA, I have spoken with children, spouses and parents of workers who have been killed on the job. They do not care about the specifics of the legislative process or the details of how one law compares with another. The only thing they want; the only thing they ask you to do is pass laws that contain the best possible protections, that prevent any other workers - whether mine workers, refinery workers, construction workers, or hospital workers - from losing their lives, from leaving their loved ones behind. We know we can provide these workers with better protections. We know we can prevent many of these deaths, injuries and illnesses. In a civilized society, this level of death and injury on the job is simply too high a price to pay, especially when we have it within our means to prevent them.
We applaud the important work this Committee has done in drafting the Miner Safety and Health Act, and we look forward to working with you on this legislation as it advances through the legislative process. Thank you again for the opportunity to testify today. I am happy to answer your questions.


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Mark L. Hopkins: The State of the Union
Here we are in 2018, a full year after Donald Trump became our new president, and the world hasn't come to an end, yet.
Those who predicted gloom and doom have been proven to be half right. We have had plenty of gloom. The doom, well, as Mark Twain predicted, "The reports of my (our) demise were greatly exaggerated."
So, what is good and what is not so good. Let's take a look at the state of the union. Well, at least, let's take a look from one person's perspective.
On the bright side … the stock market is at an all-time high at 26,000+ and still going up. That is a 30 percent increase over the past year and more than 120 percent in a decade. Big investors are making money hand over fist.
Gas prices are slightly lower over the past year and hover nationally at around $2.54 a gallon. That is more than a 25 percent reduction over a decade ago and has held steady now for more than 18 months. That computes to about $500 in savings for the average motorist over a 12-month period.
Unemployment is at the historically low rate of 4.2 percent. Economist tell us that 5 percent is full employment. A portion of our workforce is constantly unemployed because of technological advancements in the marketplace. Some are what we term "hard core," unemployed but most cycle back into the workforce with additional training.
From the not so good perspective we have a more disquieting history in the recent past.
Illegal immigration continues to be a major national issue. We are not alone in having that problem to solve. Most of Europe is facing the same dilemma. The DACA vote looms and 800,000 lives hang in the balance.
We are still at war in the Mid East and it seems to be heating up again with a recent surge of troops. It is a quagmire and just as we seem to have extricated ourselves from that mess, we get pulled back in again. Can we never anticipate "Peace on earth, good will toward men?"
Our president has some "wins" and some "losses" during his first year in office, not dissimilar to most of his predecessors. The thing that is very different is his constant popularity ratings which hover between 30 and 40 percent, well below presidents all the way back to Abraham Lincoln's time. Those low ratings do not bode well for future successes in Congress nor Republican success in the 2018 elections.
Perhaps the most disappointing thing is the constant attack on the news media from the president. New words and phrases such as, "fake news," "alternate facts," and, "the enemy," have entered our vocabulary. His most recent speech delivered in Europe at the World Economic Forum contained these lines, "How nasty, how mean, how vicious, and how false the news can be." Expecting some support from other heads of state he, instead, got hisses and boos.
President Trump hasn't yet realized that the job of the media is not to support the administration. Instead, it is to provide information and to hold power accountable. In short, the media, at its core, is a counter-balance to political leadership. The E.W. Scripps News Media Company's motto is, "Give light, and the people will find their own way." News media people are devoted to that philosophy.
President Trump has proven to be the P.T. Barnum of politics. Folks, that isn't all bad. There is no doubt that, like the circus that traveled the country for a century and a half, he can gather a crowd and mystify the gathering. No one has done it better in recent years. Our democratic approach to governance gives him three more years to make good things happen for the country using his unique approach. "Hope does spring eternal."
— Dr. Mark L. Hopkins writes for More Content Now and the Anderson Independent-Mail in South Carolina. He is past president of colleges and universities in four states. Books by Hopkins currently available on Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble include "Journey to Gettysburg" and "The Wounds of War," both Civil War-era novels, and "The World As It Was When Jesus Came." Contact him at email@example.com.


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Trench art 'forged in fire, blood and destruction'
Considering his military background, it is no surprise Peter Harvell prefers collecting art made from artillery shells and bayonets to paintings of pastel pansies or Impressionist haystacks.
Framingham's director of Veterans Services, a retired U.S. Army lieutenant colonel, has acquired an extensive collection of "trench art" consisting of war munitions and material fashioned into art by combatants from the Civil War to the ongoing war against terror.
At a packed presentation Friday at the Callahan Senior Center, Harvell showed and explained the history of his art from World War I German "Frankenstein" helmets to chocolate tins, from Japanese fishing buoys to a badge from the Tailhook Association featuring Bart Simpson.
Citing research by author Jane A. Kimball, he said trench art generally shares several fundamental characteristics. They are:
- Souvenirs collected by soldiers and others during war and modified to serve as a remembrance.
- Souvenirs made by combatants during war.
- Souvenirs made for sale by soldiers, civilians or prisoners.
- Mementos made by convalescing soldiers.
- Souvenirs made for tourists.
- Post-war souvenirs manufactured commercially in trench art style.
For Harvell, "trench art (is) art forged in fire, blood and destruction to honor the courage, duty and sacrifice of those who would possess it."
Growing up in Lexington, a 12-year-old Harvell began collecting military artifacts that would come to be known as trench art after his grandfather gave him a piece of an historic elm tree, cut down because it was dying, under which George Washington took command of the Continental Army on July 3, 1775.
Harvell attended Boston College as part of the ROTC program and majored in history before going on active duty in 1974.
For an hour, he explained the origins and evolution of trench art, and showed 70 audience members remarkably crafted, exotic and poignant artifacts, such as a crucifix forged from bayonets, "bead snakes" made by Turkish prisoners to sell to their guards and rare first-hand accounts written by the first Underwater Demolition Team (UDT) frogmen who went ashore in Japan at the end of World War II.
"Trench art is universal," said Harvell, who served from 1974 to 1997 in the U.S. Special Forces, also known as the Green Berets. "I like this stuff because it talks to me."
Harvell's art also spoke to several veterans in the audience.
Attending with his wife, Thelma, World War II veteran Warren Buzzell described the objects on display as "real works of art."
"I enjoyed the whole show," said the Framingham resident who served in northern Italy with the U.S. Medical Corps. "That's the first time I ever saw anything like that in person."
Buzzell, 81, said he was amazed to see the snakes made from beads by Turkish prisoners of war that were sold to their British guards.
Buzzell enlisted in the Army as a teenager. After WWII, he studied art on the GI Bill and worked in the Dennison Company's art department until retiring in 1990.
"The thing that really struck me was the crucifix made out of bayonets," he said. "My God, was I surprised by the quality of the stuff!"
Displaying that piece, Harvell told the audience, "You can imagine how conflicted the person who made this must have been to make a religious object from a bayonet."
For this show, audience member Herbert Jordan of Framingham loaned Harvell a small but intriguing war artifact passed on to him from his wife's uncle who had served in Germany.
A U.S. Navy quartermaster stationed in Shanghai, China, after WWII, the 80-year-old Framingham resident said his in-law had given him a German mark note autographed by popular entertainers Jack Benny and Ingrid Bergman following a USO show.
His wife, Marjorie Jordan, while working as historian of the First Baptist Church, preserved a 1945 newsletter listing 211 Framingham residents, including his four cousins, serving in the military in 1945.
"I really enjoyed (Harvell's) show. I'd never thought so many of the things from the war would now be considered a form of trench art," said the retired house painter.
Unknown artisans had fashioned several of the most striking objects on display from military objects into something entirely different.
Harvell differentiated between the hundreds of military patches and badges he owns and genuine "real trench art" made from scrap material by people caught up in the conflict.
For example, he showed model ammunition trains that had been made from German 88-millimeter shells. And he said his most unique piece was a clock constructed from an 18-inch segment of a large artillery shell fired from a cannon fixed atop a railroad car.
Harvell pointed out some political and military leaders gave out their own trench art for self-serving reasons. For example, he said, German Crown Prince Wilhelm distributed pipes decorated with his picture at Christmas.
Harvell spends his spare time searching for trench art at flea markets and antique shops. He said the apogee for trench art was World War I, because long stalemates between offensives gave troops the time to transform debris into art.
During WWII, less trench art was produced, he said, because frequent scrap drives for brass and steel deprived military artists of their chief material and "more fluid" campaigns provided less time for creative leisure.
Although owning scores of war-related objects, Harvell cited two pieces as having special personal meaning for him.
The first was a diving knife carried by Sudbury resident Don Pierce, who served with a UDT unit that took part in the atomic tests at the Bikini Atoll after WWII.
Belonging to Harvell, the second is the figure of a firefighter holding a U.S. flag atop two pieces of concrete from the World Trade Center.
"Many people will look at it and not 'get' it," said Harvell. "But it is my daily reminder that the global war on terror is real and that our troops need all the support they can get to win it."
The MetroWest Daily News


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Innovative low-cost carrier Flydubai to launch flights to Maldives from January 2013
Maldives Promotion House – Flydubai, Dubai's innovative low-cost airline, has announced flights to Malé, the capital of the Maldives.
Commencing on 19 January 2013, flights will operate five times a week between Dubai's Terminal 2 and the Maldives' Ibrahim Nasir International Airport in Malé.
Bringing Flydubai's presence in the Indian Subcontinent to nine points across six countries, the new route will allow travellers from across the region to enjoy affordable fares to one of the world's most renowned leisure destinations.
"We are very excited about adding Malé to our destination network," said Flydubai's CEO, Ghaith Al Ghaith.
"As the first low-cost carrier from the UAE to fly to the Maldives, we are making this island paradise even more accessible to travellers across our network. Flydubai offers a low-cost model with innovation and excellent service. This proposition has proved very popular with our passengers and will undoubtedly be a draw for those looking to experience one of the world's top holiday spots at an affordable price."
Voted the number one island destination in the Indian Ocean by Condé Nast Traveller readers, the Maldives has advanced its tourism credentials by promoting its rich culture, vast array of luxury resort experiences, exotic culinary experiences and adventure sports ranging from paragliding to diving. The country has also remained committed to protecting its diverse ecology and champions environmentally-friendly activities. The result has been a consistent growth in visitor numbers over the years, with the Maldives welcoming almost a million tourists in 2011 – a leap of 17.6% over 2010.
The country has proved particularly popular amongst travellers from Russia, CIS and GCC, with figures revealing a 15.7% increase in tourist arrivals in the first quarter of this year compared to January to March 2011.
The report also highlighted a 77.8% increase in passengers from the Middle East over the same period with the growth linked to the opening of a number of Middle East-based hotel chains, such as Jumeirah Group's Vittaveli Maldives which opened in December 2011. Flydubai flies to 16 points in the CIS and CEE, and more than 20 points in the Middle East.
"We anticipate a strong demand for flights from the GCC, in particular Kuwait, as well as markets such as Russia, CIS and Central & Eastern Europe. Thanks to our strong presence in both these regions, passengers will be able to fly to the Maldives via our Dubai hub," said Ghaith Al Ghaith.
"This will be our first launch in 2013 and we look forward to welcoming passengers from across our network to this wonderful country."
The Maldives is widely regarded as one of the world's top holiday spots. It comprises of 1,190 coral islands, formed around 26 natural ring-like atolls and spread over 90,000 square kilometres. With a maximum natural ground level of only 2.4 metres, it is also the lowest country in the world, making it a water-lover's paradise.
The Maldives will be the latest addition to Flydubai's growing network of more than 50 destinations in 32 countries, spanning the GCC, Middle East, North Africa, Indian Subcontinent, Asia and Central & Eastern Europe.
The representative for FlyDubai as the GSA distributor in the Maldives is Inner Maldives Holidays.


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It might be very calming and invigorating to flee occupied life and stressful schedules by moving for that hills. Just before taking off from the every day regimen, it is essential to put together and look at what products are important for a safe and comfy amount of time in the outdoors. For mother nature is actually a formidable force and we must clothe and prepare ourselves for long hikes and hill trekking.
Very first let's take into account clothing. Here throughout the uk, our company is renowned for taking pleasure in several seasons in a day. It may begin a definite blue sky and hot sun-drenched day time and soon come to be overcast, windy and damp. Hailstones in July usually are not an uncommon occurrence. Light in weight water-resistant and windproof jackets and pants can be simply folded to a little sizing and transported along with other walking jeans and jackets can be shower area evidence.
Neck area and lower body gaiters also will not consume much room and can supply additional safety in climates which you could count on far more persistent rainfall. Fleece jackets are perfect for warmness and have a covering to guard from damp, windy and moist issue. Also, they are light to carry. Obviously secure strolling boots that fit properly are crucial as are some couples of outside strolling socks.
A good quality and light-weight rucksack can be a another will need to have listed. It is crucial that it fits your back and shock absorbing shoulder joint straps can certainly make the trek much easier when you are aiming to protect a lot of miles or walk for a few days. Some rucksacks also provide buckle bands that fit around your waistline to help distribute the weight and prevent any back pain problems spoiling your exciting.
Other basic safety things can include a compass, a go torch plus a durable water package. A Swiss army knife may come in beneficial and a plastic-type travelling bag to your map can help to save a great deal of difficulty and strife in drenched problems. And of course cell phones fully charged may well be a life saver – when there is reception in remote control areas.
The best advice will be to be also loaded as possible. Appearance for the best match of outdoor garments for you like childrens jogging footwear and females water-resistant coats and trousers. And look the elements forecasts – an ice pack can nonetheless be located in some better locations in spring and summer. Also check with community individuals for suggestions and information, probably at your accommodation or perhaps in a local retail outlet or pub.
Inspired by: ezinearticles


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Chambliss: Obama to get 'his way' on fiscal cliff
Sen. Saxby Chambliss predicted Sunday that the nation would avoid the so-called fiscal cliff with President Obama prevailing over House Republicans.
"Here's what I think is going to happen if I had to guess right now: I think the president's probably going to get his way," said the Georgia Republican senator.
Obama and U.S. House Speaker John Boehner are haggling over whether to allow an automatic increase in income taxes for people earning more than $250,000. Obama favors the tax, while Boehner doesn't.
Chambliss said, based on his experience in the House and Senate, he believes a deal will be struck that avoids the fiscal cliff at the last moment. But negotiations in Washington usually don't gel, he said, until a deadline approaches such as the coming Christmas vacation.
The senator offered his forecast to members of the state General Assembly meeting at the University of Georgia for issue briefings ahead of their own session that starts Jan. 14. The state lawmakers had just gotten a sober assessment of Georgia's own financial situation during closed-door presentations by their leaders.
Since much of what the state spends comes from federal programs, the Georgians were interested to hear whether Chambliss would be bringing good news. Many of those programs would be cut automatically Jan. 1, along with hikes in a range of federal taxes, unless Congress comes up with alternative ways to reduce the gap in what Washington receives and what it spends known as the federal deficit.
The accumulation of each annual deficit is the country's outstanding debt, which totals nearly $17 trillion.
Chambliss is a leader in the Gang of Six, a bipartisan group of senators who crafted proposals for deficit reduction. He said Boehner's negotiating stance draws heavily from work done by the Gang of Six.
When the senator listed the gang's three goals, the state legislators applauded at the first one, cutting federal spending. However, the largely conservative crowd didn't make a peep when he mentioned the other two, reforming entitlements like Medicare and raising federal revenue.
Chambliss has drawn vocal criticism from conservatives for publicly stating that he was no longer bound by a pledge he signed as a candidate 20 years ago not to raise taxes. He and the gang are calling for the elimination of most tax credits and deductions, but keeping the home mortgage and charity deductions.
"When I said that I had a problem with the pledge, it had nothing to do with me wanting to raise taxes, but it had everything to do with the fact that I know we've got to begin paying down that (federal debt)," he said. "I'm not going to have some lobbyist in Washington tell me 'here's the way you're going to do it.' "
The state lawmakers will hear from a range of experts over the next two days about issues coming before the General Assembly, from education to crime. Gov. Nathan Deal addresses the group Tuesday and is expected to offer at least some hints about his own financial blueprint for the state.