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An old master print is a work of art produced by a printing process within the Western tradition. The term remains current in the art trade, and there is no easy alternative in English to distinguish the works of "fine art" produced in printmaking from the vast range of decorative, utilitarian and popular prints that grew rapidly alongside the artistic print from the 15th century onwards. Fifteenth-century prints are sufficiently rare that they are classed as old master prints even if they are of crude or merely workmanlike artistic quality. A date of about 1830 is usually taken as marking the end of the period whose prints are covered by this term.
The main techniques used, in order of their introduction, are woodcut, engraving, etching, mezzotint and aquatint, although there are others. Different techniques are often combined in a single print. With rare exceptions printed on textiles, such as silk, or on vellum, old master prints are printed on paper. This article is concerned with the artistic, historical and social aspects of the subject; the article on printmaking summarizes the techniques used in making old master prints, from a modern perspective.
Many great European artists, such as Albrecht Dürer, Rembrandt, and Francisco Goya, were dedicated printmakers. In their own day, their international reputations largely came from their prints, which were spread far more widely than their paintings. Influences between artists were also mainly transmitted beyond a single city by prints (and sometimes drawings), for the same reason. Prints therefore are frequently brought up in detailed analyses of individual paintings in art history. Today, thanks to colour photo reproductions, and public galleries, their paintings are much better known, whilst their prints are only rarely exhibited, for conservation reasons. But some museum print rooms allow visitors to see their collection, sometimes only by appointment, and large museums now present great numbers of prints online in very high-resolution enlargeable images.
Woodcut before Albrecht DürerEdit
The oldest technique is woodcut, or woodblock printing, which was invented as a method for printing on cloth in China. This had reached Europe via the Islamic world before 1300, as a method of printing patterns on textiles. Paper arrived in Europe, also from China via Islamic Spain, slightly later, and was being manufactured in Italy by the end of the thirteenth century, and in Burgundy and Germany by the end of the fourteenth.[1] Religious images and playing cards are documented as being produced on paper, probably printed, by a German in Bologna in 1395.[2] However, the most impressive printed European images to survive from before 1400 are printed on cloth, for use as hangings on walls or furniture, including altars and lecterns. Some were used as a pattern to embroider over. Some religious images were used as bandages, to speed healing.[3]
The earliest print images are mostly of a high artistic standard, and were clearly designed by artists with a background in painting (on walls, panels or manuscripts). Whether these artists cut the blocks themselves, or only inked the design on the block for another to carve, is not known. During the fifteenth century the number of prints produced greatly increased as paper became freely available and cheaper, and the average artistic level fell, so that by the second half of the century the typical woodcut is a relatively crude image. The great majority of surviving 15th-century prints are religious, although these were probably the ones more likely to survive. Their makers were sometimes called "Jesus maker" or "saint-maker" in documents. As with manuscript books, monastic institutions sometimes produced, and often sold, prints. No artists can be identified with specific woodcuts until towards the end of the century.[4]
The little evidence we have suggests that woodcut prints became relatively common and cheap during the fifteenth century, and were affordable by skilled workers in towns. For example, what may be the earliest surviving Italian print, the "Madonna of the Fire", was hanging by a nail to a wall in a small school in Forlì in 1428. The school caught fire, and the crowd who gathered to watch saw the print carried up into the air by the fire, before falling down into the crowd. This was regarded as a miraculous escape and the print was carried to Forlì Cathedral, where it remains, since 1636 in a special chapel, displayed once a year. Like the majority of prints before approximately 1460, only a single impression (the term used for a copy of an old master print; "copy" is used for a print copying another print) of this print has survived.[5]
Woodcut blocks are printed with light pressure, and are capable of printing several thousand impressions, and even at this period some prints may well have been produced in that quantity. Many prints were hand-coloured, mostly in watercolour; in fact the hand-colouring of prints continued for many centuries, though dealers have removed it from many surviving examples. Italy, Germany, France and the Netherlands were the main areas of production; England does not seem to have produced any prints until about 1480. However prints are highly portable, and were transported across Europe. A Venetian document of 1441 already complains about cheap imports of playing cards damaging the local industry.[6]
Block-books were a very popular form of (short) book, where a page with both pictures and text was cut as a single woodcut. They were much cheaper than manuscript books, and were mostly produced in the Netherlands; the Art of Dying (Ars moriendi) was the most famous; thirteen different sets of blocks are known.[7] As a relief technique (see printmaking) woodcut can be printed easily together with movable type, and after this invention arrived in Europe about 1450 printers quickly came to include woodcuts in their books. Some book owners also pasted prints into prayer books in particular.[8] Playing cards were another notable use of prints, and French versions are the basis of the traditional sets still in use today.
By the last quarter of the century there was a large demand for woodcuts for book-illustrations, and in both Germany and Italy standards at the top end of the market improved considerably. Nuremberg was the largest centre of German publishing, and Michael Wolgemut, the master of the largest workshop there worked on many projects, including the gigantic Nuremberg Chronicle.[9] Albrecht Dürer was apprenticed to Wolgemut during the early stages of the project, and was the godson of Anton Koberger, its printer and publisher. Dürer's career was to take the art of the woodcut to its highest development.[10]
German engraving before DürerEdit
Engraving on metal was part of the goldsmith's craft throughout the Medieval period, and the idea of printing engraved designs onto paper probably began as a method for them to record the designs on pieces they had sold. Some artists trained as painters became involved from about 1450–1460, although many engravers continued to come from a goldsmithing background. From the start, engraving was in the hands of the luxury tradesmen, unlike woodcut, where at least the cutting of the block was associated with the lower-status trades of carpentry, and perhaps sculptural wood-carving. Engravings were also important from very early on as models for other artists, especially painters and sculptors, and many works survive, especially from smaller cities, which take their compositions directly from prints. Serving as a pattern for artists may have been a primary purpose for the creation of many prints, especially the numerous series of apostle figures.
The surviving engravings, though the majority are religious, show a greater proportion of secular images than other types of art from the period, including woodcut. This is certainly partly the result of the relative survival rates—although wealthy fifteenth-century houses certainly contained secular images on walls (inside and outside), and cloth hangings, these types of image have survived in tiny numbers. The Church was much better at retaining its images. Engravings were relatively expensive and sold to an urban middle-class that had become increasingly affluent in the belt of cities that stretched from the Netherlands down the Rhine to Southern Germany, Switzerland and Northern Italy. Engraving was also used for the same types of images as woodcuts, notably devotional images and playing cards, but many seem to have been collected for keeping out of sight in an album or book, to judge by the excellent state of preservation of many pieces of paper over five hundred years old.[11]
Again unlike woodcut, identifiable artists are found from the start. The German, or possibly German-Swiss, Master of the Playing Cards was active by at least the 1440s; he was clearly a trained painter.[12] The Master E. S. was a prolific engraver, from a goldsmithing background, active from about 1450–1467, and the first to sign his prints with a monogram in the plate. He made significant technical developments, which allowed more impressions to be taken from each plate. Many of his faces have a rather pudding-like appearance, which reduces the impact of what are otherwise fine works. Much of his work still has great charm, and the secular and comic subjects he engraved are almost never found in the surviving painting of the period. Like the Otto prints in Italy, much of his work was probably intended to appeal to women.[13]
The first major artist to engrave was Martin Schongauer (c. 1450–1491), who worked in southern Germany and was also a well-known painter. His father and brother were goldsmiths, so he may well have had experience with the burin from an early age. His 116 engravings have a clear authority and beauty and became well known in Italy as well as northern Europe, as well as much copied by other engravers. He also further developed engraving technique, in particular refining cross-hatching to depict volume and shade in a purely linear medium.[14]
The other notable artist of this period is known as the Housebook Master. He was a highly talented German artist who is also known from drawings, especially the Housebook album from which he takes his name. His prints were made exclusively in drypoint, scratching his lines on the plate to leave a much shallower line than an engraver's burin would produce; he may have invented this technique. Consequently, only a few impressions could be produced from each plate—perhaps about twenty—although some plates were reworked to prolong their life. Despite this limitation, his prints were clearly widely circulated, as many copies of them exist by other printmakers. This is highly typical of admired prints in all media until at least 1520; there was no enforceable concept of anything like copyright. Many of the Housebook Master's print compositions are only known from copies, as none of the presumed originals have survived — a very high proportion of his original prints are only known from a single impression. The largest collection of his prints is at Amsterdam; these were probably kept as a collection, perhaps by the artist himself, from around the time of their creation.[15]
Israhel van Meckenam was an engraver from the borders of Germany and the Netherlands, who probably trained with Master ES, and ran the most productive workshop for engravings of the century between about 1465 and 1503. He produced over 600 plates, most copies of other prints, and was more sophisticated in self-presentation, signing later prints with his name and town, and producing the first print self-portrait of himself and his wife. Some plates seem to have been reworked more than once by his workshop, or produced in more than one version, and many impressions have survived, so his ability to distribute and sell his prints was evidently sophisticated. His own compositions are often very lively, and take a great interest in the secular life of his day.[16]
The earliest Italian engravingsEdit
Printmaking in woodcut and engraving both appeared in Northern Italy within a few decades of their invention north of the Alps, and had similar uses and characters, though within significantly different artistic styles, and with from the start a much greater proportion of secular subjects. The earliest known Italian woodcut has been mentioned above. Engraving probably came first to Florence in the 1440s; Vasari typically claimed that his fellow-Florentine, the goldsmith and nielloist Maso Finiguerra (1426–64) invented the technique. It is now clear this is wrong, and there are now considered to be no prints as such that can be attributed to him on anything other than a speculative basis. He may never have made any printed engravings from plates, as opposed to taking impressions from work intended to be nielloed. There are a number of complex niello religious scenes that he probably executed, and may or may not have designed, which were influential for the Florentine style in engraving. Some paper impressions and sulphur casts survive from these. These are a number of paxes in the Bargello, Florence, plus one in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York which depict scenes with large and well-organised crowds of small figures. There are also drawings in the Uffizi, Florence that may be by him.[17]
Where German engraving arrived into a still Gothic artistic world, Italian engraving caught the very early Renaissance, and from the start the prints are mostly larger, more open in atmosphere, and feature classical and exotic subjects. They are less densely worked, and usually do not use cross-hatching. From about 1460–1490 two styles developed in Florence, which remained the largest centre of Italian engraving. These are called (although the terms are less often used now) the "Fine Manner" and the "Broad Manner", referring to the typical thickness of the lines used. The leading artists in the Fine Manner are Baccio Baldini and the "Master of the Vienna Passion", and in the Broad Manner, Francesco Rosselli and Antonio del Pollaiuolo, whose only print was the Battle of the Nude Men (right), the masterpiece of 15th-century Florentine engraving.[18] This uses a new zigzag "return stroke" for modelling, which he probably invented.[19]
A chance survival is a collection of mostly rather crudely executed Florentine prints now in the British Museum, known as the Otto Prints after an earlier owner of most of them. This was probably the workshop's own reference set of prints, mostly round or oval, that were used to decorate the inside covers of boxes, primarily for female use. It has been suggested that boxes so decorated may have been given as gifts at weddings. The subject matter and execution of this group suggests they were intended to appeal to middle-class female taste; lovers and cupids abound, and an allegory shows a near-naked young man tied to a stake and being beaten by several women.[20]
The other notable early centre was Ferrara, from the 1460s, which probably produced both sets of the so-called "Mantegna Tarocchi" cards, which are not playing cards, but a sort of educational tool for young humanists with fifty cards, featuring the Planets and Spheres, Apollo and the Muses, personifications of the Seven liberal arts and the four Virtues, as well as "the Conditions of Man" from Pope to peasant.[21]
Mantegna in MantuaEdit
Andrea Mantegna who trained in Padua, and then settled in Mantua, was the most influential figure in Italian engraving of the century, although it is still debated whether he actually engraved any plates himself (a debate revived in recent years by Suzanne Boorsch). A number of engravings have long been ascribed to his school or workshop, with only seven usually given to him personally. The whole group form a coherent stylistic group and very clearly reflect his style in painting and drawing, or copy surviving works of his. They seem to date from the late 1460s onwards.[23]
The impact of DürerEdit
In the last five years of the fifteenth century, Dürer, then in his late twenties and with his own workshop in Nuremberg, began to produce woodcuts and engravings of the highest quality which spread very quickly through the artistic centres of Europe. By about 1505 most young Italian printmakers went through a phase of directly copying either whole prints or large parts of Dürer's landscape backgrounds, before going on to adapt his technical advances to their own style. Copying of prints was already a large and accepted part of the printmaking culture but no prints were copied as frequently as Dürer's.[24]
Dürer was also a painter, but few of his paintings could be seen except by those with good access to private houses in the Nuremberg area. The lesson of how he, following more spectacularly in the footsteps of Schongauer and Mantegna, was able so quickly to develop a continent-wide reputation very largely through his prints was not lost on other painters, who began to take much greater interest in printmaking.[25]
Italy 1500–1515Edit
For a brief period a number of artists who began by copying Dürer made very fine prints in a range of individual styles. They included Giulio Campagnola, who succeeded in translating the new style Giorgione and Titian had brought to Venetian painting into engraving. Marcantonio Raimondi and Agostino Veneziano both spent some years in Venice before moving to Rome, but even their early prints show classicizing tendencies as well as Northern influence.[26] The styles of the Florentine Cristofano Robetta, and Benedetto Montagna from Vicenza are still based in Italian painting of the period, and are also later influenced by Giulio Campagnola.[27]
Giovanni Battista Palumba, once known as "Master IB with the Bird" from his monogram, was the major Italian artist in woodcut in these years, as well as an engraver of charming mythological scenes, often with an erotic theme.[28]
The rise of the reproductive printEdit
Prints copying prints were already common, and many fifteenth century prints must have been copies of paintings, but not intended to be seen as such, but as images in their own right. Mantegna's workshop produced a number of engravings copying his Triumph of Caesar (now Hampton Court Palace), or drawings for it, which were perhaps the first prints intended to be understood as depicting paintings—called reproductive prints. With an increasing pace of innovation in art, and of a critical interest among a non-professional public, reliable depictions of paintings filled an obvious need. In time this demand was almost to smother the old master print.[29]
Dürer never copied any of his paintings directly into prints, although some of his portraits base a painting and a print on the same drawing, which is very similar. The next stage began when Titian in Venice, and Raphael in Rome, almost simultaneously began to collaborate with printmakers to make prints to their designs. Titian at this stage worked with Domenico Campagnola and others on woodcuts, whilst Raphael worked with Raimondi on engravings, for which many of Raphael's drawings survive.[30] Rather later, the paintings done by the School of Fontainebleau were copied in etchings, apparently in a brief organised programme including many of the painters themselves.[31]
The Italian partnerships were artistically and commercially successful, and inevitably attracted other printmakers who simply copied paintings independently to make wholly reproductive prints. Especially in Italy, these prints, of greatly varying quality, came to dominate the market and tended to push out original printmaking, which declined noticeably from about 1530–1540 in Italy. By now some publisher/dealers had become important, especially Dutch and Flemish operators like Philippe Galle and Hieronymus Cock, developing networks of distribution that were becoming international, and much work was commissioned by them. The effect of the development of the print-selling trade is a matter of scholarly controversy, but there is no question that by the mid-century the rate of original printmaking in Italy had declined considerably from that of a generation earlier, if not as precipitously as in Germany.[32]
The North after DürerEdit
Although no artist anywhere from 1500 to 1550 could ignore Dürer, several artists in his wake had no difficulty maintaining highly distinctive styles, often with little influence from him. Lucas Cranach the Elder was only a year younger than Dürer, but he was about thirty before he began to make woodcuts, in an intense Northern style reminiscent of Matthias Grünewald. He was also an early experimenter in the chiaroscuro woodcut technique. His style later softened, and took in the influence of Dürer, but he concentrated his efforts on painting, in which he became dominant in Protestant Germany, based in Saxony, handing over his very productive studio to his son at a relatively early age.[33]
Lucas van Leyden had a prodigious natural talent for engraving, and his earlier prints were highly successful, with an often earthy treatment and brilliant technique, so that he came to be seen as Dürer's main rival in the North. However, his later prints suffered from straining after an Italian grandeur, which left only the technique applied to far less dynamic compositions. Like Dürer, he had a "flirtation" with etching, but on copper rather than iron. His Dutch successors for some time continued to be heavily under the spell of Italy, which they took most of the century to digest.[34]
Albrecht Altdorfer produced some Italianate religious prints, but he is most famous for his very Northern landscapes of drooping larches and firs, which are highly innovative in painting as well as prints. He was among the most effective early users of the technique of etching, recently invented as a printmaking technique by Daniel Hopfer, an armourer from Augsburg. Neither Hopfer nor the other members of his family who continued his style were trained or natural artists, but many of their images have great charm, and their "ornament prints", made essentially as patterns for craftsmen in various fields, spread their influence widely.[35]
Hans Burgkmair from Augsburg, Nuremberg's neighbour and rival, was slightly older than Dürer, and had a parallel career in some respects, training with Martin Schongauer before apparently visiting Italy, where he formed his own synthesis of Northern and Italian styles, which he applied in painting and woodcut, mostly for books, but with many significant "single-leaf" (i.e. individual) prints. He is now generally credited with inventing the coloured chiaroscuro (coloured) woodcut.[36] Hans Baldung was Dürer's pupil, and was left in charge of the Nuremberg workshop during Dürer's second Italian trip. He had no difficulty in maintaining a highly personal style in woodcut, and produced some very powerful images.[37] Urs Graf was a Swiss mercenary and printmaker, who invented the white-line woodcut technique, in which his most distinctive prints were made.[38]
The Little MastersEdit
The Little Masters is a term for a group of several printmakers, who all produced very small finely detailed engravings for a largely bourgeois market, combining in miniature elements from Dürer and from Marcantonio Raimondi, and concentrating on secular, often mythological and erotic, rather than on religious themes. The most talented were the brothers Bartel Beham and the longer-lived Sebald Beham. Like Georg Pencz, they came from Nuremberg and were expelled by the council for atheism for a period. The other principal member of the group was Heinrich Aldegrever, a convinced Lutheran with Anabaptist leanings, who was perhaps therefore forced to spend much of his time producing ornament prints.[39]
Another convinced Protestant, Hans Holbein the Younger, spent most of his adult career in England, then and for long after too primitive as both a market and in technical assistance to support fine printmaking. Whilst the famous blockcutter Hans Lützelburger was alive, he created from Holbein's designs the famous small woodcut series of the Dance of Death. Another Holbein series, of ninety-one Old Testament scenes, in a much simpler style, was the most popular of attempts by several artists to create Protestant religious imagery. Both series were published in Lyon in France by a German publisher, having been created in Switzerland.[40]
After the deaths of this very brilliant generation, both the quality and quantity of German original printmaking suffered a strange collapse; perhaps it became impossible to sustain a convincing Northern style in the face of overwhelming Italian productions in a "commoditized" Renaissance style. The Netherlands now became more important for the production of prints, which would remain the case until the late 18th century.[41]
Mannerist printmakingEdit
Some Italian printmakers went in a very different direction to either Raimondi and his followers, or the Germans, and used the medium for experimentation and very personal work. Parmigianino produced some etchings himself, and also worked closely with Ugo da Carpi on chiaroscuro woodcuts and other prints.[42]
Giorgio Ghisi was the major printmaker of the Mantuan school, which preserved rather more individuality than Rome. Much of his work was reproductive, but his original prints are often very fine. He visited Antwerp, a reflection of the power the publishers there now had over what was now a European market for prints. A number of printmakers, mostly in etching, continued to produce excellent prints, but mostly as a sideline to either painting or reproductive printmaking. They include Battista Franco, Il Schiavone, Federico Barocci and Ventura Salimbeni, who only produced nine prints, presumably because it did not pay. Annibale Carracci and his cousin Ludovico produced a few influential etchings, while Annibale's brother Agostino engraved. Both brothers influenced Guido Reni and other Italian artists of the full Baroque period in the next century.[43]
The Italian artists known as the School of Fontainebleau were hired in the 1530s by King Francis I of France to decorate his showpiece Chateau at Fontainebleau. In the course of the long project, etchings were produced, in unknown circumstances but apparently in Fontainebleau itself and mostly in the 1540s, mostly recording wall-paintings and plasterwork in the Chateau (much now destroyed). Technically they are mostly rather poor—dry and uneven—but the best powerfully evoke the strange and sophisticated atmosphere of the time. Many of the best are by Leon Davent to designs by Primaticcio, or Antonio Fantuzzi. Several of the artists, including Davent, later went to Paris and continued to produce prints there.[44]
Previously the only consistent printmaker of stature in France had been Jean Duvet, a goldsmith whose highly personal style seems halfway between Dürer and William Blake. His plates are extremely crowded, not conventionally well-drawn, but full of intensity; the opposite of the languorous elegance of the Fontainebleau prints, which were to have the greater effect on French printmaking. His prints date from 1520 to 1555, when he was seventy, and completed his masterpiece, the twenty-three prints of the Apocalypse.[45]
The NetherlandsEdit
Cornelius Cort was an Antwerp engraver, trained in Cock's publishing house, with a controlled but vigorous style, and excellent at depicting dramatic lighting effects. He went to Italy and in 1565 was retained by Titian to produce prints of his paintings (Titian having secured his "privileges" or rights to exclusively reproduce his own works). Titian took considerable trouble to get the effect he wanted; he said that Cort could not work from the painting alone, so he produced special drawings for him to use. Eventually, the results were highly effective and successful, and after Titian's death Cort moved to Rome, where he taught a number of the most successful printmakers of the next generation, notably Hendrik Goltzius, Francesco Villamena and Agostino Carracci, the last major Italian artist to resist the spread of etching.[46]
Goltzius, arguably the last great engraver, took Cort's style to its furthest point. Because of a childhood accident, he drew with his whole arm, and his use of the swelling line, altering the profile of the burin to thicken or diminish the line as it moved, is unmatched. He was extraordinarily prolific, and the artistic, if not the technical, quality of his work is very variable, but his finest prints look forward to the energy of Rubens, and are as sensuous in their use of line as he is in paint.[47]
At the same time Pieter Brueghel the elder, another Cort-trained artist, who escaped to paint, was producing prints in a totally different style; beautifully drawn but simply engraved. He only etched one plate himself, a superb landscape, the Rabbit Hunters, but produced many drawings for the Antwerp specialists to work up, of peasant life, satires, and newsworthy events.[48]
Meanwhile, numerous other engravers in the Netherlands continued to produce vast numbers of reproductive and illustrative prints of widely varying degrees of quality and appeal—the two by no means always going together. Notable dynasties, often publishers as well as artists, include the Wierix family, the Saenredams, and Aegidius Sadeler and several of his relations. Philippe Galle founded another long-lived family business. Theodor de Bry specialised in illustrating books on new colonial areas.[49]
17th century and the age of RembrandtEdit
The 17th century saw a continuing increase in the volume of commercial and reproductive printmaking; Rubens, like Titian before him, took great pains in adapting the trained engravers in his workshop to the particular style he wanted, though several found his demands too much and left.[50] The generation after him produced a number of widely dispersed printmakers with very individual and personal styles; by now etching had become the normal medium for such artists.
Rembrandt bought a printing-press for his house in the days of his early prosperity, and continued to produce etchings (always so called collectively, although Rembrandt mixed techniques by adding engraving and drypoint to some of his etchings) until his bankruptcy, when he lost both house and press. Fortunately his prints have always been keenly collected, and what seems to be a high proportion of his intermediate states have survived, often in only one or two impressions. He was clearly very directly involved in the printing process himself, and probably selectively wiped the plate of ink himself to produce effects surface tone on many impressions. He also experimented continually with the effects of different papers. He produced prints on a wider range of subjects than his paintings, with several pure landscapes, many self-portraits that are often more extravagantly fanciful than his painted ones, some erotic (at any rate obscene) subjects, and a great number of religious prints. He became increasingly interested in strong lighting effects, and very dark backgrounds. His reputation as the greatest etcher in the history of the medium was established in his lifetime, and never questioned since. Few of his paintings left Holland whilst he lived, but his prints were circulated throughout Europe, and his wider reputation was initially based on them alone.[51]
A number of other Dutch artists of the century produced original prints of quality, mostly sticking to the same categories of genre they painted. The eccentric Hercules Seghers and Jacob van Ruisdael produced landscapes in very small quantities, Nicolaes Berchem and Karel Dujardin Italianate landscapes with animals and figures, and Adriaen van Ostade peasant scenes. None was very prolific, but the Italianate landscape was the most popular type of subject; Berchem had a greater income from his prints than his paintings.[52]
Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione grew up in Genoa and was greatly influenced by the stays there of Rubens and van Dyck when he was a young artist. His etching technique was extremely fluent, and in all mediums he often repeats the same few subjects in a large number of totally different compositions. His early prints include a number of bravura treatments of classical and pastoral themes, whilst later religious subjects predominate. He also produced a large series of small heads of exotically dressed men, which were often used by other artists. He was technically innovative, inventing the monotype and also the oil sketch intended to be a final product. He, like Rembrandt, was interested in chiaroscuro effects (contrasts of light and dark), using a number of very different approaches.[53]
Jusepe de Ribera may have learned etching in Rome, but all his fewer than thirty prints were made in Naples during the 1620s when his career as a painter seems to have been in the doldrums. When the painting commissions began to flow again, he all but abandoned printmaking. His plates were sold after his death to a Rome publisher, who made a better job of marketing them than Ribera himself. His powerful and direct style developed almost immediately, and his subjects and style remain close to those of his paintings.[54]
Jacques Bellange was a court painter in Lorraine, a world that was to vanish abruptly in the Thirty Years War shortly after his death. No surviving painting of his can be identified with confidence, and most of those sometimes attributed to him are unimpressive. His prints, mostly religious, are Baroque extravaganzas that were regarded with horror by many 19th century critics, but have come strongly back into fashion—the very different Baroque style of another Lorraine artist Georges de La Tour has enjoyed a comparable revival. He was the first Lorraine printmaker (or artist) of stature, and must have influenced the younger Jacques Callot, who remained in Lorraine but was published in Paris, where he greatly influenced French printmaking.[55]
Callot's technical innovations in improving the recipes for etching ground were crucial in allowing etching to rival the detail of engraving, and in the long term spelt the end of artistic engraving. Previously the unreliable nature of the grounds used meant that artists could not risk investing too much effort in an etched plate, as the work might be ruined by leaks in the ground. Equally, multiple stoppings-out, enabling lines etched to different depths by varying lengths of exposure to the acid, had been too risky.[56] Callot led the way in exploiting the new possibilities; most of his etchings are small but full of tiny detail, and he developed a sense of recession in landscape backgrounds in etching with multiple bitings to etch the background more lightly than the foreground. He also used a special etching needle called an échoppe to produce swelling lines like those created by the burin in an engraving, and also reinforced the etched lines with a burin after biting; which soon became common practice among etchers. Callot etched a great variety of subjects in over 1400 prints, from grotesques to his tiny but extremely powerful series Les Grandes Misères de la guerre.[57] Abraham Bosse, a Parisian illustrative etcher popularized Callot's methods in a hugely successful manual for students. His own work is successful in his declared aim of making etchings look like engravings, and is highly evocative of French life at the middle of the century.
Wenzel Hollar was a Bohemian (Czech) artist who fled his country in the Thirty Years War, settling mostly in England (he was besieged at Basing House in the English Civil War, and then followed his Royalist patron into a new exile in Antwerp, where he worked with a number of the large publishers there). He produced great numbers of etchings in a straightforward realist style, many topographical, including large aerial views, portraits, and others showing costumes, occupations and pastimes.[58] Stefano della Bella was something of an Italian counterpart to Callot, producing many very detailed small etchings, but also larger and freer works, closer to the Italian drawing tradition.[59] Anthony van Dyck produced only a large series of portrait prints of contemporary notables, the Iconographia for which he only etched a few of the heads himself, but in a brilliant style, that had great influence on 19th century etching.[60] Ludwig von Siegen was a German soldier and courtier, who invented the technique of mezzotint, which in the hands of better artists than he was to become an important, mostly reproductive, technique in the 18th century.[61]
The last third of the century produced relatively little original printmaking of great interest, although illustrative printmaking reached a high level of quality. French portrait prints, most often copied from paintings, were the finest in Europe and often extremely brilliant, with the school including both etching and engraving, often in the same work. The most important artists were Claude Mellan, an etcher from the 1630s onwards, and his contemporary Jean Morin, whose combination of engraving and etching influenced many later artists. Robert Nanteuil was official portrait engraver to Louis XIV, and produced over two hundred brilliantly engraved portraits of the court and other notable French figures.[62]
Fine art printmaking after Rembrandt's deathEdit
The extremely popular engravings of William Hogarth in England were little concerned with technical printmaking effects; in many he was producing reproductive prints of his own paintings (a surprisingly rare thing to do) that only set out to convey his crowded moral compositions as clearly as possible. It would not be possible, without knowing, to distinguish these from his original prints, which have the same aim. He priced his prints to reach a middle and even upper working-class market, and was brilliantly successful in this.[63]
Canaletto was also a highly successful painter, and though his relatively few prints are vedute, they are rather different from his painted ones, and fully aware of the possibilities of the etching medium. Piranesi was primarily a printmaker, a technical innovator who extended the life of his plates beyond what was previously possible. His Views of Rome—well over a hundred huge plates—were backed by a serious understanding of Roman and modern architecture and brilliantly exploit the drama both of the ancient ruins and Baroque Rome. Many prints of Roman views had been produced before, but Piranesi's vision has become the benchmark. Gianbattista Tiepolo, near the end of his long career produced some brilliant etchings, subjectless capricci of a landscape of classical ruins and pine trees, populated by an elegant band of beautiful young men and women, philosophers in fancy dress, soldiers and satyrs. Bad-tempered owls look down on the scenes. His son Domenico produced many more etchings in a similar style, but of much more conventional subjects, often reproducing his father's paintings.[64]
The technical means at the disposal of reproductive printmakers continued to develop, and many superb and sought-after prints were produced by the English mezzotinters (many of them in fact Irish) and by French printmakers in a variety of techniques.[65] French attempts to produce high quality colour prints were successful by the last part of the century, although the techniques were expensive. Prints could now be produced that closely resembled drawings in crayon or watercolours. Some original prints were produced in these methods, but few major artists used them.[66]
The rise of the novel led to a demand for small, highly expressive, illustrations for them. Many fine French and other artists specialised in these, but clearly standing out from the pack is the work of Daniel Chodowiecki, a German of Polish origin who produced over a thousand small etchings. Mainly illustrations for books, these are wonderfully drawn, and follow the spirit of the times, through the cult of sentiment to the revolutionary and nationalist fervour of the start of the 19th century.[67]
Goya's superb but violent aquatints often look as though they are illustrating some unwritten work of fiction, but their meaning must be elucidated from their titles, often containing several meanings, and the brief comments recorded by him about many of them. His prints show from early on the macabre world that appears only in hints in the paintings until the last years. They were nearly all published in several series, of which the most famous are: Caprichos (1799), Los desastres de la guerra (The Disasters of War from after 1810, but unpublished for fifty years after). Rather too many further editions were published after his death, when his delicate aquatint tone had been worn down, or reworked.[68]
William Blake was as technically unconventional as he was in subject-matter and everything else, pioneering a relief etching process that was later to become the dominant technique of commercial illustration for a time. Many of his prints are pages for his books, with text and image on the same plate, as in the 15th century block-books.[69] The Romantic Movement saw a revival in original printmaking in several countries, with Germany taking a large part once again; many of the Nazarene movement were printmakers.[70] In England, John Sell Cotman etched many landscapes and buildings in an effective, straightforward style. J. M. W. Turner produced several print series including one, the Liber Studiorum, which consisted of seventy-one etchings with mezzotint that were influential on landscape artists; according to Linda Hults, this series of prints amounts to "Turner's manual of landscape types, and ... a statement of his philosophy of landscape."[71] With the relatively few etchings of Delacroix the period of the old master print can be said to come to an end.[72]
Printmaking was to revive powerfully later in the 19th and 20th centuries, in a great variety of techniques. In particular the Etching Revival, lasting from about the 1850s to the 1929 Wall Street crash rejuvenated the traditional monochrome techniques, even including woodcut, while lithography gradually became the most important printmaking technique over the same period, especially as it became more effective in using several colours in the same print.[73]
Printmakers who signed their work often added inscriptions which characterised the nature of their contribution.
A list with their definitions includes:[74]
- Ad vivum indicates that a portrait was done "from life" and not after a painting, e.g., Aug. de St. Aubin al vivum delin. et sculp.
- Aq., aquaf., aquafortis denote the etcher
- D., del., delin., delineavit refer to the draughtsman
- Des., desig. refer to the designer
- Direx., Direxit. show direction or superintendence of pupil by master
- Ex., exc., excu., excud., excudit, excudebat indicate the publisher
- F., fe., ft, fec., fect, fecit, fa., fac., fact, faciebat indicate by whom the engraving was "made" or executed
- Formis, like excudit, describes the act of publication
- Imp. indicates the printer
- Inc., inci., incid., incidit, incidebat refer to him who "incised" or engraved the plate
- Inv., invenit, inventor mark the "inventor" or designer of the picture
- Lith. does not mean "lithographed by," but "printed by". Thus, Lith. de C. Motte, Lith. Lasteyrie, I. lith. de Delpech refer to lithographic printing establishments
- P., pictor, pingebat, pinx, pinxt, pinxit show who painted the picture from which the engraving was made
- S., sc., scul., sculpsit, sculpebat, sculptor appear after the engraver's name
See alsoEdit
- ^ Griffiths (1980), 16.
- ^ Field, Richard (1965). Fifteenth Century Woodcuts and Metalcuts. Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art.
- ^ Hind (1935).
- ^ Landau and Parshall, 1–6, quotes 2, 33–42. Mayor, 5–10.
- ^ Mayor, 10.
- ^ Mayor, 14–17.
- ^ Mayor, 24–27.
- ^ A number have survived pasted on the inside of the lids of boxes or chests, like this example.
- ^ Landau and Parshall, 34–42. Mayor, 32–60. Bartrum (1995), 17–19.
- ^ Bartrum, 17–63. Landau and Parshall, 167–174.
- ^ Landau and Parshall, 46–51, 64.
- ^ Shestack (1967a), numbers 1–2. Mayor, 115–117.
- ^ Shestack (1967b). Shestack (1967a), numbers 4–19. Spangeberg, 1–3. Mayor, 118–123. Landau and Parshall, 46–50.
- ^ Shestack (1967a), numbers 34–115. Landau and Parshall, 50–56. Mayor, 130–135. Spangeberg, 5–7. Bartrum, 20–21.
- ^ Filedt Kok. Mayor, 124–129.
- ^ Landau and Parshall, 56–63. Mayor, 138–140.
- ^ Levinson. Landau and Parshall, 65.
- ^ Langdale. Landau and Parshall, 65, 72–76.
- ^ Langdale.
- ^ Landau and Parshall, 89. Levinson.
- ^ Landau and Parshall, 71–72. Spangeberg, 4–5.
- ^ Levinson, no. 83.
- ^ Landau and Parshall, 65–71. Mayor, 187–197. Spangeberg, 16–17.
- ^ Bartrum (2002). Bartrum (1995), 22–63. Landau and Parshall, see index. Mayor, 258–281.
- ^ Pon. Landau and Parshall, 347–358. Bartrum (1995), 9–11.
- ^ Pon. Landau and Parshall, see index.
- ^ Levinson, 289–334, 390–414. Landau and Parshall, 65–102 (see also index). Mayor, 143–156, 173, 223, 232.
- ^ Levinson, 440–455. Landau and Parshall, 199, 102.
- ^ Pon. Landau & Parshall, chapter IV, whose emphasis is disputed by Bury, 9–12.
- ^ Pon. Landau and Parshall, 117–146.
- ^ Jacobson, parts III and IV.
- ^ Landau and Parshall develop the traditional view of decline, which Bury contests in his Introduction, pp. 9–12, and seeks to demonstrate the opposite view throughout his work.
- ^ Bartrum (1995), 166–178.
- ^ Landau and Parshall, 316–319, 332–333, 333 quoted.
- ^ Mayor, 228, 304–308, 567. Bartrum (1995), 11–12, 144, 158, 183–197. Landau and Parshall, 323–328 (Hopfers); 202–209, 337–346 (Altdorfer).
- ^ Bartrum (1995), 130–146. Landau and Parshall, see index, 179–202 on the chiaroscuro woodcut.
- ^ Bartrum (1995), 67–80.
- ^ Bartrum (1995), 212–221.
- ^ Bartrum (1995), 99–129. Mayor, 315–317. Landau and Parshall, 315–316.
- ^ Bartrum (1995), 221–237.
- ^ Bartrum (1995), 12–13.
- ^ Landau and Parshall, 146–161.
- ^ Bury. Reed and Walsh, 105–114 on Annibale and subsequent artists in etching. Mayor, 410, 516.
- ^ Jacobson, parts III and IV. Mayor, 354–357.
- ^ Marqusee. Jacobson, part II. Mayor, 358–359.
- ^ Mayor, 403–407, 410.
- ^ Mayor, 419–421. Spangeberg, 107–108.
- ^ Mayor, 422–426.
- ^ Mayor, 373–376, 408–410.
- ^ Mayor, 427–432.
- ^ White; Mayor, 472–505; Spangeberg, 164–168.
- ^ Mayor, 467–471. Spangeberg, 156–158 (Seghers), 170 (van Ostade), 177 (Berchem).
- ^ Reed and Wallace, 262–271. Mayor, 526–527.
- ^ Reed and Wallace, 279–285.
- ^ Griffiths and Hartley. Jacobson, part X. Mayor, 453–460.
- ^ Mayor, 455–460.
- ^ Hind (1923), 158–160.
- ^ Mayor, 344.
- ^ Reed and Wallace, 234–243. Mayor, 520–521, 538, 545.
- ^ Mayor, 433–435.
- ^ Griffiths (1980), 83–88. Mayor, 511–515.
- ^ Mayor, 289–290.
- ^ Mayor, 550–555.
- ^ Mayor, 576–584.
- ^ Griffiths (1996), 134–158 on English mezzotints and their collectors.
- ^ Spangeberg, 221–222. Mayor, 591–600.
- ^ Mayor, 568, 591–600.
- ^ Bareau. Mayor, 624–631.
- ^ Mayor, 608–611. Spangeberg, 262.
- ^ Griffiths and Carey.
- ^ Hults, 522.
- ^ Spangeberg, 260–261
- ^ Mayor, 660 onwards. Spangeberg, 263 onwards.
- ^ Weintenkampf, 278–279.
- Bareau, Juliet Wilson, Goya's Prints, The Tomás Harris Collection in the British Museum, 1981, British Museum Publications, ISBN 0-7141-0789-1
- Bartrum, Giulia (1995), German Renaissance Prints, 1490–1550. London: British Museum Press ISBN 0-7141-2604-7
- Bartrum, Giulia (2002), Albrecht Dürer and his Legacy. London: British Museum Press ISBN 0-7141-2633-0
- Bury, Michael; The Print in Italy, 1550–1620, 2001, British Museum Press, ISBN 0-7141-2629-2
- Filedt Kok, J.P. (ed.), Livelier than Life, The Master of the Amsterdam Cabinet, or the Housebook Master 1470–1500, Rijksmuseum/Garry Schwartz/Princeton University Press, 1985, ISBN 90-6179-060-3 / ISBN 0-691-04035-4
- Griffiths, Antony (1980), Prints and Printmaking; 2nd ed. of 1986 used, British Museum Press ISBN 0-7141-2608-X
- Griffiths, Antony and Carey, Francis; German Printmaking in the Age of Goethe, 1994, British Museum Press, ISBN 0-7141-1659-9
- Griffiths, Antony & Hartley, Craig (1997), Jacques Bellange, c. 1575–1616, Printmaker of Lorraine. London: British Museum Press ISBN 0-7141-2611-X
- Griffiths, Antony, ed. (1996), Landmarks in Print Collecting: connoisseurs and donors at the British Museum since 1753. London: British Museum Press ISBN 0-7141-2609-8
- Hind, Arthur M. (1923), A History of Engraving and Etching. Boston, Mass.: Houghton Mifflin Co. (reprinted by Dover Publications, New York, 1963 ISBN 0-486-20954-7)
- Hind, Arthur M. (1935), An Introduction to a History of Woodcut. Boston, Mass.: Houghton Mifflin Co. (reprinted by Dover Publications, New York, 1963 ISBN 0-486-20952-0)
- Hults, Linda, The Print in the Western World: An Introductory History, The University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, Wisconsin, 1996,
- Karen Jacobson, ed (often wrongly cat. as Georg Baselitz), The French Renaissance in Prints, 1994, p. 470; Grunwald Center, UCLA, ISBN 0-9628162-2-1
- Landau, David & Parshall, Peter (1996), The Renaissance Print. New Haven: Yale U. P. ISBN 0-300-06883-2
- Langdale, Shelley, Battle of the Nudes: Pollaiuolo's Renaissance Masterpiece, The Cleveland Museum of Art, 2002.
- Levinson, J. A., ed., Early Italian Engravings from the National Gallery of Art. Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art LCCN 73-79624
- Michael Marqusee, The Revelation of Saint John; Apocalypse Engravings by Jean Duvet, Paddington Press, London, 1976, ISBN 0-8467-0148-0
- Mayor, A. Hyatt, Prints and People, Princeton, NJ: Metropolitan Museum of Art/Princeton U. P. ISBN 0-691-00326-2, Prints & people: a social history of printed pictures fully online from the MMA
- Pon, Lisa, Raphael, Dürer, and Marcantonio Raimondi, Copying and the Italian Renaissance Print, 2004, Yale UP, ISBN 978-0-300-09680-4
- Reed, Sue Welsh & Wallace, Richard, eds. (1989) Italian Etchers of the Renaissance and Baroque. Boston, Mass.: Museum of Fine Arts ISBN 0-87846-306-2
- Shestack, Alan (1967a) Fifteenth-century Engravings of Northern Europe. Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art LCCN 67-29080 (Catalogue)
- Shestack, Alan (1967b), Master E.S.Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art
- Spangeberg, K. L., ed., Six Centuries of Master Prints. Cincinnati: Cincinnati Art Museum ISBN 0-931537-15-0
- Weitenkampf, Frank (1921). How to Appreciate Prints, third revised edition (at Internet Archive). New York: Charles Scribner's Sons.
- White, Christopher, The Late Etchings of Rembrandt. London: British Museum/Lund Humphries
External linksEdit
- The Printed Image in the West: History and Techniques from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY; Timeline of Art
- Large list of links to museum etc. online images of old master prints
- Washington Post review of NGA exhibition on C15 German woodcuts
- Old master prints blog


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You know, there is something almost funny about the fact that Obama insists that everyone gather together in Geneva to make nice over Ukraine, only to run across the unpleasant reality that Putin really isn't running the insurgency in Russian Ukraine.
For the past three months, this has been something of a Western fantasy – that Putin was trying to pry off sections of other countries, and this his protestation that he was responding to native unrest simply wasn't true. But Obama is learning something ugly this morning – just because a country supports an insurgency doesn't mean that the country controls it. This was a lesson painfully learned on 9/11, when it appears that our best friends in Afghanistan, the ones who were torturing the Russians, really weren't under our control. For all the somber sympathy coming out of Moscow after 9/11, the Russians thought that the United States was getting something of its comeuppance for being smacked in the butt by the folk it helped create.
Putin has actually been quite restrained in Ukraine, being careful not to be led down the garden path by indigenous forces that today don't like Ukraine but tomorrow might not like Russia. So, it turns out that contrary to Kerry's and Obama's screechy protestations to the contrary, Putin doesn't control those Russians, and the sole tool in the tool box, sanctions against Russia, now look both illegal and unwarranted. It must suck for Obama to always be wrong.

subset: commoncrawl


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Muhlenberg College Web Privacy Statement
Muhlenberg College's web sites are configured to preserve the privacy of our users. This Statement describes what information is collected, how it is collected, why it is collected, and how it might be used. The purpose of the Statement is to allow users to decide whether, and how, to make use of the College's web sites.
Some of our sites create a "cookie", a record stored on your computer's own hard disk, which makes it possible for our sites to recognize that a specific computer has made previous requests. Our cookies are used exclusively for providing services. Muhlenberg does not utilize cookies for any purpose other than providing requested services. Much of Muhlenberg's web content includes links to content on web servers belonging to third parties. Muhlenberg cannot control or make any representation regarding the use of cookies on such third party sites.
For each visitor to our web page, our web server automatically recognizes only the visitor's domain name, but not the e-mail address (where possible). We collect information on what pages are accessed, time spent on pages, what browser and operating system is used, and the website from where the access originated. This information is stored for the purpose of analyzing how visitors use our web sites. The College uses this information to improve the usefulness of our web sites.
Muhlenberg does not share or sell lists of email addresses for commercial purposes. When a user contacts Muhlenberg using Email, information included in that message may be used to respond to the message or to provide a requested service or information. The message, or information in it, may be shared with other employees of the College for the purpose of providing the requested information or service. The College does not distribute such information to persons or organizations outside Muhlenberg unless specifically required to fulfill a specific request.
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2 Bradenton cancer-treatment centers part of $125 million buyout
A pair of cancer treatment centers here have changed hands as part of a multimillion-dollar acquisition of bankrupt OnCure Holdings by Fort Myers-based Radiation Therapy Services Holdings Inc. Radiation Therapy operates as 21st Century Oncology, and will use that name for what is now the Manatee Cancer Center, which maintains two offices in Bradenton.
"Our care team is pleased to now work more closely with a larger group of medical professionals," said Dr. Tri Nguyen, who runs Manatee Cancer Center. "This means we can call upon specialized physicians from across the country for their expertise and opinions for optimal patient care."
Existing patient treatment plans will not be disrupted, according to Radiation Therapy. The deal began taking shape in June, when Radiation Therapy won key bidder status for OnCure, which is operating under federal bankruptcy laws.
Radiation Therapy agreed to pay $125 million, including $42.5 million in cash and up to $82.5 million in assumed debt. The acquisition, completed Friday, is the largest Radiation Therapy has made, involving 34 additional centers in Florida, California and Indiana. Including OnCure, Radiation operates 165 treatment centers -- including 132 in 16 U.S. states and 33 in six Latin American countries.
To complete the transaction, Radiation Therapy boosted a credit line by $50 million in August.
"The additional capital raised through this transaction enables us to complete the OnCure transaction without diminishing our financial flexibility," said Bryan J. Carey, who is Radiation Therapy's vice chairman and chief financial officer.
Radiation Therapy reported gross sales of $178.1 million in the quarter which ended June 30, resulting in pre-tax earnings of $24.8 million.
Wells Fargo was the key lender in enhancing the company's credit line.


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Recreation versus utility in urban issues
Few things devised by man really ever go away. Plenty, however, go out of use and become exotic or quaint — no longer of practical utility. But sometimes the utility of something can persist and even grow again, and yet this may be difficult to see through all the recreational use.
What the hell am I talking about? Tourist trains, for one. Trains have gone away as transportation in most of North America, but tourist trains abound. When looking up Port Stanley as a possible place to visit a few months ago, I found that there was a tourist train between Port Stanley and St. Thomas along the old London & Port Stanley line. Note that St. Thomas is pretty close to the 401 highway, while Port Stanley is much further south, on Lake Erie. I thought it would be pretty neat — drive to St. Thomas and take the train to Port Stanley and back. Unfortunately, this tourist railway deliberately prevents usefulness, since the only boarding is done at Port Stanley. (In fairness, the Waterloo Central Railway between Waterloo and St. Jacobs does allow one-way trips.)
The bicycle hasn't been a major mode of transportation in North America for the better part of a century. At the same time that driving has become the predominant way to travel, bicycling has stayed around as child's play and recreation. Go to any Wal-Mart and you will find a wide selection of mountain bikes with 20+ gears and fancy shocks. At the specialized bike shops you'll also find ultra-light road bicycles for the spandex-wearers. At neither place are you likely to find many comfortable utility bikes, with fenders, baskets, skirt guards, and lights. And neither mountain bikes nor road bikes are well-suited to being used for utility cycling. Yet when I look at what people use to get around town here in Kitchener-Waterloo, it's almost always the ubiquitous recreational bicycles.
Walking is no longer considered a serious mode of transportation. Parks, however, abound with all kinds of recreational trails; often you're supposed to drive to the park so that you can go for a stroll. These paths tend to be under the oversight of parks departments and feature signs saying they are closed at night. And being recreational trails, why would anyone want to use them in foul weather? Presumably this is why the path through Waterloo Park is not paved, despite being extensively used as transportation.
The Iron Horse Trail has its share of irony. It's a rails-to-trails on the old Grand River Railway right-of-way. Though it is paved and even plowed, it isn't lit and is "closed" at night. What used to be a passenger railroad was converted into a recreational trail, which incidentally is now used as transportation by many people.
I would suggest that the focus should be more on recreation as an adjoint to utility, not just recreation for its own sake (perhaps with utility as an afterthought). When your regular travel take you through a park, that enriches each trip — as opposed to the few times a year you might get to an out-of-the-way park. Focusing on making a recreational space useful can end up adding more to the quality of life for many more people.
Similarly, downtowns also should be about utility and not just recreation. As Jane Jacobs wrote, "You can't rely on bringing people downtown; you have to put them there." After the post-war suburban sprawl took hold, downtowns suffered. Some tried to convince people to come back through demolishing buildings and providing plentiful free parking to compete with the suburbs, to little effect. Others, like Waterloo and Kitchener, built downtown malls in the failed hopes that people would come downtown for them (instead of the suburban ones). Unless your downtown is an amazing tourist spot, it just cannot be sustained as an occasional destination. Downtowns need to be places that are used in a variety of ways on a daily basis — for utility, not just recreation.


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MAYFIELD – New York's new gun-control law, fast-tracked through the Legislature last month at the behest of Gov. Andrew Cuomo, has drawn criticism from many corners of the state.
One local gun-control opponent is doing more than complaining about the New York SAFE Act – he's sued the governor over it.
On Jan. 16, the day after the New York Secure Ammunition and Firearms Enforcement Act was put into effect, Mayfield resident Douglas Kampfer went to buy a semi-automatic rifle but was denied under the new law.
On Jan. 23, Kampfer filed a civil rights complaint in U.S. District Court in Albany against Cuomo, seeking to rid the state of the new restrictions.
"The whole idea of the Second Amendment – it was brought about in 1791 by our forefathers to make sure that each able-bodied citizen was armed and ready at a moment's notice to fight for family, liberty and this country," he said. "Well, with society the way it is nowadays and with the way other countries are and with the type of weapons that they have, the people should be ready and armed at equal capacity to fight."
Under the New York SAFE Act, New York residents are prohibited from buying assault weapons defined as semi-automatic pistols, semi-automatic rifles, semi-automatic shotguns and any automatic weapons. State residents who had owned any assault-style weapon before the passing of the bill now must register them within a year and be recertified every five years.
Other parts of the bill call for mental health professionals to report when a patient might become violent, limit magazines to seven rounds and require background checks for all gun sales and transfers outside the immediate family. The penalty for bringing a firearm into a school was increased from a misdemeanor to a felony.
Kampfer said he agrees with several parts of the law, but he claims taking away the right to own what the bill defines as "assault weapons" is wrong.
"There's a fine line between what is classified as an assault weapon and what is not," he said. "I've got an 870 Remington shotgun that I use for duck hunting. But if I put a pistol grip onto it, now it becomes an assault weapon? That doesn't make sense … Military weaponry is automatic weaponry. Semi-automatic weaponry, regardless of what features it has, is not a military weapon."
Kampfer argues that Article VI of the U.S. Constitution declares that federal laws pre-empt state laws.
"The federal government already has regulations on what kind of an assault weapon people can have. Federal law states that citizens of this country can own semi-automatic weapons," Kampfer said. "Because the federal law already states we can own semi-automatic, I believe we should be able to own semi-automatic weapons. I don't think we should be able to own automatic weapons. That's for the military. Gov. Cuomo actually violated federal law by outlawing something that federal law already guarantees."
With regard to the mental health aspect of the bill, Kampfer said he believes any potential gun owner should be evaluated by a firearms trainer.
He doesn't think Cuomo's "Mental Health Alert" proposition in the SAFE Act will do enough to prevent firearms from getting into the wrong hands. He said he doesn't want to come across as unsympathetic, either.
"I have all the sympathy in the world for the people who have suffered from mass assaults by mentally deranged people," he said. "The governor should have gone about it in a different way … Instead of outlawing the assault weapons, he should have required that anytime somebody is going to buy a weapon, before they can buy that weapon they should go through proper training of firearms, receive a certificate of completion of that training before they can even buy the weapon.
"Before you can get a pistol, you have to go to a dealer, you have to purchase the pistol," he said. "You cannot take the pistol away from the dealer. You cannot receive that pistol until after you have received your permit. The way I believe it is, you should have to go through training first, then go and take the weapon to the sheriff's department and show that you purchased the weapon, obtain the permit, then go get the weapon."
Kampfer said he is willing to take this case to the Supreme Court, if necessary, and this initial filing could be just the first step.
Other groups, including the New York Rifle & Pistol Association, the Westchester County Firearms Owners Association and the Sportsmen's Association for Firearms Education, are collectively filing separate legal action in opposition to the new law.
John Borgolini can be reached at [email protected].


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August 24th, 2013
Should Christianity be so boring?
Opinion by Jon Acuff, Special to CNN
(CNN) - No one has ever accused us Christians of being fun.
No one has ever said we are a laugh-filled group.
No atheist has ever said, "I might not love Jesus, but his followers sure know how to party!"
And yet, in my favorite story in the Bible we actually see Jesus paint the opposite picture.
If you're a Christian, you've heard the Parable of the Prodigal Son in the Gospel of Luke referenced in approximately 42 million sermons. If you've missed it though, allow me to summarize.
A young son said to his dad, who represents God, "I want my inheritance." This was the cultural equivalent of saying, "I wish you were dead!" The father gives him the money. The son immediately runs off to the Jersey shore and fist pumps the night away with 4 Loko and Skrillex. [Not a direct translation.]
After squandering all the money and awakening in a pig pen, the son devises a plan. He will come home, apologize and throw himself at the mercy of the father. His greatest hope is that the father will let him be a servant. He can't even imagine getting to keep the title "son."
He comes home expecting punishment, but instead something weird happens.
The father sees him from a distance and sprints toward him. He runs toward him and embraces him. Before the son can even get his whole apology out, the father has already started planning the last thing he expected.
A party.
Instead of punishment he gets a party.
The idea that God fixes problems with parties is crazy.
Who does that?
Life doesn't work that way. Imagine that you messed up at work. Your boss called you in and said, "Johnson you lost our biggest account! You just cost this company more than 3 million dollars. You know what that makes me want to do? Throw you a party!"
Or think about this in the context of a marriage. Have you ever had an argument with your spouse? Not a fake argument but one that lands you on the couch overnight.
You come into the kitchen and your wife is doing that "mad dishwashing" move we all do when we're upset. Just power scrubbing pots and pans with a vengeance, mumbling the entire time.
You approach her slowly and say, "Heyyyy baby, how do you feel this morning?" Without looking at you, she takes a deep breath and says, "You really hurt my feelings. Last night, you really surprised me by what you did. My mom was right about you. I'm so angry and disappointed. This whole thing makes me want to get an inflatable bounce house and throw a huge celebration in your honor!"
That would be ludicrous.
Our worst mistakes don't end in parties, but in this story in the Bible, it did.
When given the opportunity to talk to a group of people, the picture Jesus drew of his Father was of a party giver; someone who met sinners with welcome home banners.
What if Christians were like that?
What if churches became the place where failures found new beginnings?
What if we were known for our parties, not for our Pharisees?
It all feels a little crazy, but I don't think it's impossible.
Christians should offer hope in exchange for hurt, new in exchange for old, parties in exchange for pain.
Are we there yet?
Nope, we've got a long way to go. We've still got a lot of things to work through, a lot of progress we have to make.
But when you think about the prodigal son story, I hope you will remember something.
Two people moved.
One walked.
One ran.
And we prodigals are the walkers.
We still have a running God.
And he is ready to throw a party.
Jon Acuff is a keynote speaker and the author of four books including The New York Times best-seller, START. Acuff is also the author of the popular blog, Stuff Christians Like.net.
The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Jon Acuff
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About this blog
The CNN Belief Blog covers the faith angles of the day's biggest stories, from breaking news to politics to entertainment, fostering a global conversation about the role of religion and belief in readers' lives. It's edited by CNN's Daniel Burke with contributions from Eric Marrapodi and CNN's worldwide news gathering team.


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Jeremiah Wright was right after all. The Algeria jihad attack proves it.
Not long after the 9⁄11 jihad attacks, Barack Obama's mentor and friend, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, preached a sermon in which he uttered the now-notorious words: "America's chickens are coming home to roost."
Wright meant, of course, that the U.S. had brought the attack upon itself by its own acts of violence against others: "We bombed Hiroshima, we bombed Nagasaki, and we nuked far more than the thousands in New York and the Pentagon, and we never batted an eye… and now we are indignant, because the stuff we have done overseas is now brought back into our own front yards."
In a certain sense Wright was right: the U.S. did bring 9⁄11 on itself – but not in the way that he thought. The jihadists who destroyed the Twin Towers and damaged the Pentagon had not been brooding about Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and no action by the U.S. did or could have justified the mass murder those jihadists perpetrated. If it could be truly said that the U.S. brought 9⁄11 on itself in any way, it was only by failing to recognize the implications of and to confront the ideology behind the jihad attacks that immediately preceded it.
There was an abundance of indicators of what was coming. In December 1988, an Islamic jihadist murdered 259 people, including 189 Americans, by bringing down Pam Am flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland. In February 1993, Islamic jihadists murdered six people and wounded over a thousand in their first attempt to bring down the World Trade Center towers. In June 1996, Islamic jihadists murdered nineteen people and wounded 515, including 240 Americans, in a bombing at the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia. In August 1998, Islamic jihadists bombed the American embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, murdering 291, including 12 Americans, in Nairobi, and murdering ten more and wounding 77 in Dar es Salaam. In October 2000, Islamic jihadists bombed the USS Cole in port at Aden, Yemen, murdering seventeen sailors and wounding 39.
In response to all this, the U.S. lobbed a few cruise missiles into Afghanistan and took out a chemical weapons factory (or aspirin factory, depending on one's source) in Sudan, and did little more. No serious attempt was made to come to grips with the full nature and magnitude of the ideology that inspired those jihad attacks, and to work to neutralize its violent potential. And so it would have been more surprising if the 9⁄11 attacks hadn't happened than that they did.
So it is today. Barack Obama has overseen the installation of Sharia regimes in Tunisia, Libya, and Egypt. While paying lip service to the importance of distinguishing jihadists from genuine democratic forces in Syria and elsewhere, the Obama administration has offered no criteria for doing this. And now al-Qaeda jihadists in Algeria have carried out a brazen assault on BP's natural gas plant in that country, killing at least eighty-one people and demonstrating anew the falsehood of Barack Obama's recent claim that in Afghanistan "we achieved our central goal … or have come very close to achieving our central goal, which is to de-capacitate al-Qaeda, to dismantle them, to make sure that they can't attack us again."
Al-Qaeda is not "de-capacitated" or dismantled in Afghanistan or Algeria. Barack Obama's warm support for Islamic supremacist authoritarian regimes has resulted in direct aid for Islamic jihadists, as Libyan jihadists gave weapons they received from the U.S. and its allies to their brethren in Mali, who used them to establish a brutal and bloody Sharia autocracy in the northern part of the country, and have surprised the French with the tenacity and ferocity of their resistance.
Obama has made it abundantly clear that he has no objection, on human rights grounds or any others, to Sharia regimes. Consequently, Islamic supremacists worldwide are considerably emboldened, as they see that the United States will offer no significant counterweight to their advance. One of the hostages taken captive at the Algerian gas plant recounted that the kidnappers had said, "We've come in the name of Islam, to teach the Americans what Islam is." Obama has made it abundantly clear that there is no sense in which he objects to that statement; he maintains, on the contrary, that despite such statements from the jihadists themselves, their actions actually have nothing whatsoever to do with Islam. He has made this counter-factual proposition the official position of his administration.
These chickens are going to come home to roost no less unmistakably than did the chickens of America's indifference to jihad mass murder attacks before 9⁄11. Unreality can be enforced at the point of a gun or a trip to the camps, as in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, but the truth can never be wholly effaced from the human mind. Reality has a tendency to break through even the most skillful and subtle propaganda. Unfortunately, in this case reality is very likely to take the form of another catastrophic, high-casualty jihad mass murder on American soil – one that could have been prevented had Barack Obama not instead been encouraging and embracing those who share the jihadists' goal of imposing Sharia, differing from them only in methods.
The Algeria jihad attack was just the latest harbinger of the things that are inevitably to come.
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FreeBSD Manual Pages
MVS(4) FreeBSD Kernel Interfaces Manual MVS(4) NAME mvs -- Marvell Serial ATA Host Controller driver SYNOPSIS To compile this driver into the kernel, place the following lines in your kernel configuration file: device pci device scbus device mvs Alternatively, to load the driver as a module at boot time, place the following line in loader.conf(5): mvs_load="YES" The following tunables are settable from the loader(8): hint.mvs.X.msi controls Message Signaled Interrupts (MSI) usage by the specified con- troller. hint.mvs.X.ccc controls Command Completion Coalescing (CCC) usage by the specified con- troller. Non-zero value enables CCC and defines maximum time (in us), request can wait for interrupt. CCC reduces number of context switches on systems with many parallel requests, but it can decrease disk perfor- mance on some workloads due to additional command latency. hint.mvs.X.cccc defines number of completed commands for CCC, which trigger interrupt without waiting for specified coalescing timeout. hint.mvsch.X.pm_level controls SATA interface Power Management for the specified channel, al- lowing some power to be saved at the cost of additional command latency. Possible values: 0 interface Power Management is disabled (default); 1 device is allowed to initiate PM state change, host is pas- sive; 4 driver initiates PARTIAL PM state transition 1ms after port becomes idle; 5 driver initiates SLUMBER PM state transition 125ms after port becomes idle. Note that interface Power Management is not compatible with device pres- ence detection. A manual bus reset is needed on device hot-plug. hint.mvsch.X.sata_rev setting to nonzero value limits maximum SATA revision (speed). Values 1, 2 and 3 are respectively 1.5, 3 and 6Gbps. DESCRIPTION This driver provides the CAM(4) subsystem with native access to the SATA ports of several generations (Gen-I/II/IIe) of Marvell SATA controllers. Each SATA port found is represented to CAM as a separate bus with one target, or, if HBA supports Port Multipliers (Gen-II/IIe), 16 targets. Most of the bus-management details are handled by the SATA-specific transport of CAM. Connected ATA disks are handled by the ATA protocol disk peripheral driver ada(4). ATAPI devices are handled by the SCSI protocol peripheral drivers cd(4), da(4), sa(4), etc. Driver features include support for Serial ATA and ATAPI devices, Port Multipliers (including FIS-based switching, when supported), hardware command queues (up to 31 command per port), Native Command Queuing, SATA interface Power Management, device hot-plug and Message Signaled Inter- rupts. HARDWARE The mvs driver supports the following controllers: Gen-I (SATA 1.5Gbps): o 88SX5040 o 88SX5041 o 88SX5080 o 88SX5081 Gen-II (SATA 3Gbps, NCQ, PMP): o 88SX6040 o 88SX6041 (including Adaptec 1420SA) o 88SX6080 o 88SX6081 Gen-IIe (SATA 3Gbps, NCQ, PMP with FBS): o 88SX6042 o 88SX7042 (including Adaptec 1430SA) o 88F5182 SoC o 88F6281 SoC o MV78100 SoC Note, that this hardware supports command queueing and FIS-based switch- ing only for ATA DMA commands. ATAPI and non-DMA ATA commands executed one by one for each port. SEE ALSO ada(4), ata(4), cam(4), cd(4), da(4), sa(4) HISTORY The mvs driver first appeared in FreeBSD 8.1. AUTHORS Alexander Motin <firstname.lastname@example.com> FreeBSD 13.0 March 23, 2015 FreeBSD 13.0
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The McDavid Adults' Deluxe Calf Support offers excellent support against calf strains, shin splints and varicose veins. This contoured, flexible support features a thermal, 100% latex-free neoprene sleeve with nylon facings on both sides to offer warmth, compression and support. The heavy-duty nylon outer lining provides strength and durability. Fits right or left calf.


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VA Regional Office in Milwaukee closes Tuesday due to shutdown
Wisconsin American Legion presses lawmakers for solution
The Veterans Administration Regional Office in Milwaukee closed to the public Tuesday as a result of the federal government shutdown.
A "substantial portion" of the staff was notified they are not to report to work, according to a press release from David Kurtz, department adjutant of the Wisconsin American Legion.
According to Kurtz, VA benefit payments for October may not be paid, and the appeals process for claims will be suspended.
"As thousands of our veterans live solely on their VA benefit payment, especially VA pensions, we are possibly looking at a jump in homeless veterans, not to mention a potential rise in suicides," said Ken Rynes, state commander of the American Legion of Wisconsin.
"This may seem alarmist, but having dealt with a great number of veterans dealing with financial hardship, the American Legion has more than a little insight on the frailty of their situations," Rynes said.
VIDEO: Government shutdown affects thousands of VA employees
Rynes called on elected representatives to work together to reach a solution to the shutdown that will protect the country's veterans.
"Veterans should not have to suffer over Washington D.C.'s inability to do its job," he said.
James Fialkowski with the American Legion worried that if the shutdown drags on, veterans will not see a pension check for the month of October.
"I've got thousands of veterans who live off, solely off, of the payment from the VA -- their compensation checks, their pension checks, especially pension. They're the most needy veterans out there," he said.
"If you don't have a little nest egg to hold you through times like this, the veteran is in real trouble," veteran Ronald Ruffin said.
The VA Medical Center in Milwaukee is open.


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The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the Singapore government have agreed to set up a global centre to help developing countries strengthen their public services. The Global Centre for Public Service Excellence will be based in Singapore by the end of 2012.
UNDP administrator Helen Clark said the new centre would be a leading research hub, drawing information from think-tanks, universities and on-going policy practice in Singapore and other countries.
The initiative was announced at the World Cities Summit in Singapore on 2 July.
The provision of clean water and sanitation in developing countries were mentioned as two critical focus areas.
Helen Clark said:
"Unfortunately sanitation has had a very low priority in so many places and it's appalling to think that a significant proportion of human kind still faces open defecation and no access to a proper toilet at all.
"Singapore has so much to share of its own experience since independence of strong non-corrupt effective governance and so we are partnering to put in place here a centre which will be able to do research on this, bring people together, have convening power and really promote best practice in governance."
Related organisations and programmes:
- IRC – Water Services that Last
- Municipal Service Project (MSP)
- Public Services International Research Unit (PSIRU)
- Public Utility Research Center (PURC) at the University of Florida
Source: Wayne Chan, Channel News Asia, 02 Jul 2012 ; UNDP, 02 Jul 2012


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SAN FRANCISCO – A federal appeals court put same-sex weddings in California on hold indefinitely Monday while it considers the constitutionality of the state's gay marriage ban.
The decision, issued by a three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, trumped a lower court judge's order that would have allowed county clerks to begin issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples on Wednesday.
Lawyers for the two gay couples that challenged the ban said Monday they would not appeal the panel's decision on the stay to the U.S. Supreme Court. They said they were satisfied the appeals court had agreed to expedite its consideration of the Proposition 8 case by scheduling oral arguments for the week of Dec. 6.
"We are very gratified that the 9th Circuit has recognized the importance and the pressing nature of this case by issuing this extremely expedited briefing schedule," said Ted Boutrous, a member of the plaintiffs' legal team. "Proposition 8 harms gay and lesbian citizens every day it remains on the books."
Attorneys for sponsors of the voter-approved measure applauded the decision. In seeking the emergency stay, they had argued that sanctioning same-sex unions while the case was on appeal would create legal chaos if the ban is eventually upheld.
"I think the basic notion that this case is not final until it's gone through the complete appellate process really prevailed," said Douglas Napier, a lawyer with the Alliance Defense Fund, a Christian legal firm.
"Rather than have this kind of pingpong effect of having the decision overturned, appealed and then overturned again, it's better to have this kind of decision," he said.
Under the timetable laid out Monday, it was doubtful a decision would come down from the 9th Circuit before next year.
A different three-judge panel than the one that issued Monday's decision will be assigned to decide the constitutional question that many believe will eventually end up before the Supreme Court and further delay a final outcome.
County clerks throughout the state had been preparing to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples for the first time since Proposition 8 passed in November 2008. The measure amended the California Constitution to overrule a state Supreme Court ruling that legalized same-sex unions earlier that year.
"I'm sad, but I'm also glad that I didn't pay the $100 to reserve an appointment at the clerk's office," said Thea Lavin, 31, of San Francisco, who had planned to wed her partner, Jess Gabbert, 30, if the stay were denied. "This has happened so many times before where we take two steps forward, one step back."
Chief U.S. District Court Judge Vaughn Walker had ordered state officials to stop enforcing Proposition 8 beginning late Wednesday afternoon after ruling Aug. 4 that the ban violated the equal protection and due process rights of gays and lesbians guaranteed under the U.S. Constitution.
The ban's backers appealed that ruling and also asked the 9th Circuit to block same-sex weddings in the meantime. They claimed in papers filed with the 9th Circuit that gay marriages would harm the state's interest in promoting responsible procreation through heterosexual marriage.
Lawyers for two same-sex couples had joined with California Attorney General Jerry Brown in urging the appeals court to allow the weddings this week, arguing that keeping the ban in place any longer would harm the civil rights of gays and lesbians.
In a two-page order granting the stay, the appeals court panel did not indicate why it was keeping Proposition 8 in effect until it could consider the appeal of Walker's verdict.
But it ordered Proposition 8 sponsors to address in their opening brief due Sept. 17 whether they even have the legal right to try to have the trial judge's ruling overturned. Both California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and state Attorney General Jerry Brown, the original defendants in the case, have said they support same-sex marriage and refused to defend Proposition 8 in court.
Walker presided over a 13-day trial earlier this year that was the first in federal court to examine if states can prohibit gays from getting married without violating the constitutional guarantee of equality.
Currently, same-sex couples can legally wed only in Massachusetts, Iowa, Connecticut, Vermont, New Hampshire and Washington, D.C.


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Editor's Note: Dan Riffle is a former assistant prosecutor and the director of federal policies at the Marijuana Policy Project, the primary financial backer of the 2012 campaign to regulate marijuana in Colorado.
Story highlights
Dan Riffle: The war against marijuana has not worked, just like alcohol prohibition
Riffle: Marijuana is far safer than alcohol; there are many alcohol-induced deaths
He says we can take pot away from criminals and let licensed businesses handle it
Riffle: Regulating marijuana would make America a safer and healthier nation
Anti-marijuana crusaders like Kevin Sabet, while well-intentioned, are promoting policies that lead to more violence and disease in our society. In his recent CNN.com op-ed, Sabet argues we should keep marijuana illegal. But as long as marijuana remains illegal, profits from sales go to criminals and drug cartels, and adults will continue to be punished for using a substance less harmful than currently legal drugs.
Confused? Let's back up. For more than 80 years, our government has spent tens of billions of taxpayer dollars fighting a war against marijuana. We arrest three-quarters of a million adults every year, 87% for simple possession rather than production or sales of marijuana. Courtrooms turn into assembly lines churning out probationers – mostly minorities – with convictions that will make it virtually impossible to find employment.
The result? Marijuana is universally available, used by almost half of Americans at some point in their lives, and we've enriched murderous drug cartels fueling violence in Mexico that has claimed more than 60,000 lives.
Of course, we've been down this road before. During alcohol prohibition in the 1930s, federal agents raided speakeasies and busted barrels of illegally produced and imported booze. Meanwhile, bootleggers made money hand over fist, empowering criminals like Al Capone to turn Chicago into an urban war zone. And much like with marijuana today, even under alcohol prohibition most Americans who wanted a drink had no problem finding one.
Today, marijuana prohibition has proven itself just as disastrous a public policy failure as alcohol prohibition before it. Yet despite all the obvious similarities between the two, there's one key difference: Marijuana is dramatically safer than alcohol.
According to the Centers for Disease Control, excessive alcohol use is the third leading lifestyle-related cause of death. In a typical year, there are roughly 25,000 alcohol-induced deaths in the United States, most from long-term consequences like liver disease and some from acute alcohol poisoning brought on by binge drinking.
Marijuana, on the other hand, does not cause overdose deaths and comes with far fewer long-term health consequences. A 2009 Canadian study determined the annual health-related costs associated with alcohol are more than eight times greater per user than with marijuana. And, according to the Institute of Medicine, people who use marijuana are far less likely to become dependent than those who drink alcohol.
Even if you don't drink, alcohol can kill you. Federal agencies report that 40% of violent crimes in the U.S. are linked to alcohol use, whereas those same agencies report that marijuana users usually do not commit violent crimes. Alcohol plays a role in a third of all emergency room visits. As a prosecuting attorney, I often had police confess to me how much they loathed arresting drunks, given how often the situation escalated to violence. I never fielded similar complaints about marijuana consumers.
The irony is that these perverse policies are cheered on by organizations with names like "Save Our Society" that seem to believe chaos will somehow ensue if adults are no longer punished for using marijuana. The reality is that by punishing adults who would rather use marijuana, we're encouraging them to instead use alcohol – a more dangerous and harmful, but legal, drug. Public policy should be geared toward reducing violence and disease, not maximizing them.
There is a better way. Polling shows a majority of Americans want marijuana taxed and regulated. A growing number of states are bucking our federal government's policy of absolute marijuana prohibition, and the Department of Justice recently signaled it will not challenge state laws that regulate the cultivation and sale of marijuana.
By doing so, we can take marijuana away from criminals and cartels and put it in the hands of licensed businesses. Obviously, those businesses should be subject to sensible rules ranging from where and when they can operate and who is able to invest in them, to restrictions on advertising.
Don't believe it could work? In 2009, Colorado's medical marijuana industry exploded, prompting the state to put in place the kinds of regulations I've just outlined. According to CDC data on youth drug use, from 2009 to 2011 – a time when youth marijuana use increased nationally – the percentage of Colorado teens using marijuana dropped more than any other state in the country and is now below the national average.
Marijuana is safer than alcohol; let's treat it that way. Adults who would prefer to use marijuana instead of alcohol should be free to do so. Just as significant, the law enforcement resources spent making those three-quarters of a million arrests could instead be devoted to preventing and solving real crimes.
In other words, regulating marijuana would make America a safer, healthier nation.
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The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Dan Riffle.


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After years of hoping, praying, cajoling, and begging for a follow-up, Blizzard has finally announced Diablo III, and fans all over the world cheered before getting down to business - complaining. A petition has gone up at whiner headquarters PetitionOnline, with over 2,000 fans signing on to complain about the game's art direction. Petitioners feel that the graphics we've seen so far depict a world that is far too bright and cartoony for their liking, citing World of Warcraft as one of the influences ruining their dark and macabre series. Where is the light radius? Why are those shoulder pads so huge? Here's an example of something they are complaining about.
Outside scenarios with vivid colors, beautiful forests with colorful vegetation, shinny and beautiful waterfalls where even rainbows take place.
They hate rainbows! They can't draw gothic fan art with rainbows in it!
*sigh* It just goes to show you that no matter how hard you try there's just no pleasing some people.
Renewed artistic direction for Diablo 3 [PetetionOnline.com via WorthPlaying]