text: Can anyone help me with setting up an SSL certificate for a site on ISPconfig 3? I have web site that was running perfectly fine on a separate custom debian system (not ISPconfig), with an SSL cert. And we moved this site to a new ISPconfig3 server. In the ISPconfig3 interface I pasted the SSL cert into the "SSL Certificate" field on the SSL tab of Web Domain. And ticked the box for SSL. However site does not work. Firefox reports error: SSL received a record that exceeded the maximum permissible length. (Error code: ssl_error_rx_record_too_long) I cannot find anything in ispconfig logs. When I view the apache config file (e.g. /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/abc.domain.com) I cannot see any reference of SSL. On our previous custom server, we had these entries: SSLEngine On SSLCertificateFile /etc/apache2/ssl/abc.domain.com.crt SSLCertificateKeyFile /etc/apache2/ssl/abc.domain.com.key The SSL tab in ISPconfig has 3 fields: - SSL Request - SSL Certificate - SSL Bundle Which one does the SSL key file go in? Which one does the SSL CSR file go in? And does the SSL cert (*.crt) go in the SSL Certificate box? Thanks in advance.


text: Über uns Unternehmensgeschichte Kontakt News und Events Berater Nachrichten und Veranstaltungen AktuellesPressemitteilungenVeranstaltungen All topics All topicsKrankenversicherungMitarbeiternebenleistungen & InvestitionenRisikomanagement & FinanzverwaltungVersicherung & Risikomanagement Germany Go to:BrazilWorldwideUnited StatesUnited KingdomAustraliaSwitzerlandGermanySpainFranceIrelandIndiaItalyJapanKoreaNetherlandsPolandRomaniaIndonesiaBelgiumSingaporeSouth AfricaUAE Vorherig 1 von 1 Weiter 1-13 von 13 13. August 2018 — Captive.com Milliman named actuarial firm winner by this year's U.S. Captive Review AwardsThese awards recognize captive insurance products and services providers offering high levels of excellence over the past year. 05. Januar 2016 — Milliman Milliman CEO Steve White comments on changing market for actuarial consultingA commitment to independence sets the firm apart in a changing marketplace. 22. Dezember 2015 — Insurance Journal Milliman report on Europe, Japan, Asia insurers sees increased embedded valuePhilip Simpson and Paul Sinnott discuss recently released embedded value reports on Europe and Asia. 14. Dezember 2015 — Actuarial Post MG-ALFA wins 2015 Actuarial Software of the Year AwardActuarial Post names MG-ALFA best actuarial software for 2015. 05. August 2015 — Der Aktuar Solvency II – ORSA: Angemessenheit der Standardformel in der Lebensversicherung – Eine Case StudyArtikel in 'Der Aktuar' (Juni-Ausgabe) von Dr. Matthias Meng und Marco Ehlscheid (als Einzelheft oder über Abonnement erhältlich). 19. Dezember 2014 — Reuters Amazon's cloud business a harder sell in post-Snowden eraAmazon faces many challenges as it works to expand its cloud computing business, known as Amazon Web Services (AWS). 11. November 2014 — Wired The biggest risk facing insurers today? Old-guard ITThe insurance industry has long lagged behind in IT adoption, even though insurers' computing demands are on the rise. This Wired article profiles Milliman's efforts to reverse the trend with its innovative systems transformation project for the U.K.'s Phoenix Group. 15. April 2013 — InfoWorld How to become an accidental cloud service providerAdoption of Windows Azure public cloud helped MG-ALFA transform the actuarial workflow of its customers. 05. März 2013 — Insurance & Technology Conning/Milliman partnership boosts economic capital modelingLinking Milliman's MG-ALFA system with Conning's GEMS Economic Scenario Generator will respond to regulators' and raters increasing demand for stochastic modeling capabilities and foster a holistic approach to risk management. 13. Dezember 2012 — Actuarial Post MG-ALFA wins 2012 Actuarial Software of the Year awardMilliman's financial modeling and actuarial projection system for insurance companies was voted to be the top actuarial software. 17. August 2012 — Microsoft Building on Windows AzureMilliman's MG-ALFA cloud application is using Windows Azure to run high performance computing scenarios on upwards of 10,000 cores concurrently. The application enables insurance industry companies to process complex algorithms in a much more efficient manner than using traditional on-premises hardware and software. 25. November 2010 — InsuranceERM Phoenix revolutionizes its actuarial systems and processesThe U.K.'s Phoenix Group has selected Milliman to help it replace its legacy systems with a single actuarial modeling system. The upgrade will include Milliman's MG-ALFA® actuarial projection system and Daily Solvency Monitoring System (DSM). The project, slated for completion in 2013, will help Phoenix keep pace with the requirements of Solvency II and will also streamline the firm's technology into an automated, web-based system that makes use of cloud computing. Note: One-time free registration is required to view this article. 03. September 2010 — InsuranceERM Milliman to transform Phoenix Group's actuarial systemsIn what is likely to be one of the largest actuarial system implementation projects ever undertaken, U.K.-based Phoenix Group has selected Milliman to provide its actuarial systems transformation project. The project is scheduled to be completed at the end of 2012, in time for Solvency II implementation. According to Nick Dumbreck, leader of Milliman's U.K. Life practice, the combination of Milliman consulting expertise, the MG-ALFA actuarial projection system, and the Daily Solvency Monitoring System will provide Phoenix with a solution for gaining Solvency II internal model approval, monitoring and managing risks on a daily basis, and driving internal operational efficiency savings. Vorherig 1 von 1 Weiter

subset: commoncrawl


text:
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text:
No Verdict In Children Slain Trial
Prosecutors Intend To Retry Case
No verdict.
The all-black Baltimore jury of eight women and four men has reached its 11th day of deliberation in the trial of Policarpio Espinoza, 23, and his nephew, Adan Canela, 18, but they could not reach a verdict.
WBAL-TV 11 News I-Team reporter David Collins reported at 11:15 a.m. Tuesday that Judge Thomas Ward declared a mistrial as the result of a hung jury.
Canela and Espinoza were charged with first-degree murders of 9-year-old Ricardo Espinoza Jr. and his sister, 8-year-old Lucero Espinoza and their 10-year-old male cousin, Alexis Espejo Quezada, in their apartment. They also faced conspiracy charges and would have faced life imprisonment if convicted.
Last week, the jury indicated the possibility of it not reaching a verdict. The judge, in response, sent the jury home for the weekend and ordered deliberations to continue this week. On Monday, the jury indicated that some members held out hope for a unanimous verdict.
Collins said the jury ultimately sent the judge 72 questions, which frustrated some jurors.
"I was disappointed that they didnt reach a verdict, but I understand," the judge said. "They were hung, and they were hung right from day one."
Prosecutor Sharon Holback said the state intends to try this case again.
"On behalf of the children who suffered and died, we're going to get some rest, then we're going to try (the defendants) again because the children in this community deserve a justice and closure in this case," Holback said.
Collins said Espinoza and Canela will remain charged with first-degree murder and will remain in jail until a new trial date is set. Also, the federal government continues to hold a retainer on both defendants due to their illegal immigrant status.
Collins reported that after five weeks of testimony, the jury was evenly split and one member said there was no smoking gun in the case. Some jurors spoke to what they called a lack of a solid motive.
"That was a big mystery, not having a motive and (the defendants) being family and all," said Mike Johnson, a juror. "I think that was a tragedy, I think that was a travesty, I think that was hideous. That was the worst thing that you could do to anyone, but you can't just pin that on to somebody just because of what happened."
"We believe that all the evidence did not come in that should've come in, we had some things missing even from some of the things we had," said a woman who identified herself as Juror No. 6.
During closing arguments, Collins reported that the prosecution never really presented a clear-cut motive. Prosecutors suggested that the three children were slain because of a "family secret" and that relatives were too scared to reveal what they actually knew.
Prosecutors suggested the murders could be tied to an illegal immigration ring debt or a love interest between the family patriarch and one of the mothers of the slain children.
Some jurors felt questions about the extended family went unanswered.
"I'd like to know more about (family patriarch) Victor Espinoza. There was some mention of smuggling of (immigrants at) some price, and we wanted to look into him as well," said a man who identified himself only as Juror No. 3.
Espinoza's defense attorney, Tim Dixon, said the trial was fair.
"I think the jurors listened to the evidence. We trusted them all along, and if the state decides to retry it, we'll trust the jurors again," Dixon said. "This is the kind of case, when you take the emotions out of it, there just isn't a lot of evidence there."
Defense attorney Nick Panteleakis cited the following reasons for the result: "No motive, lack of DNA, lack of physical evidence."
Collins reported that the defense also attacked the administration of Baltimore Mayor Martin O'Malley, accusing it of withholding citizen donations to the victims' families. The mayor's office responded, saying it turned the donations over to charities, which in turn, wrote a check to the families on April 13.
The defendants' family and friends had no comment as they left the courtroom. A family spokesman told the media the relatives were confident that, despite the lengthy deliberations, they defendants would come out not guilty.


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Re: How are you marketing your community?jsummers Jan 6, 2011 10:52 AM (in response to daniel.marotta)
that sounds about right. We are doing all of that today.
Re: How are you marketing your community?daniel.marotta Jan 6, 2011 11:01 AM (in response to jsummers)
John (and others), do you run email campaigns to your customers to create awareness? To drive registration or specific actions on community? Direct them to a specific post or series of content?
I try to avoid email myself and only piggy-back on my fellow marketers' campaigns to minimize the amount of times we message our customers.
Re: How are you marketing your community?cmcguinness Jan 6, 2011 11:05 AM (in response to daniel.marotta)
We asked Jive to customize an area in the top of the community email digest so that we could put marketing messages there. That way, members get an upt-to-date note from us whenever they get the digest, but they have full control over the digest frequency.
This is a feature I'd like to see integrated into Jive, complete with a begin/end date for the message!
Re: How are you marketing your community?daniel.marotta Jan 6, 2011 11:14 AM (in response to cmcguinness)
I very much like the idea of being able to create messaging on the fly like that. One drawback, the recipient would need to be a member of the community already.
How do you reach prospective members?
Re: How are you marketing your community?Emilie Jan 27, 2012 7:40 AM (in response to daniel.marotta)
Hi Dan - I found this thread thanks to your recent response to my question. What is your relationship with Database Marketing?
So - if we're talking about increasing awareness of the community and we're considering email - I'd suggest you work with your database marketing team.
We sometimes work together to promote specific community groups based on the customer profiles they are contacting. Granted, the email is not exclusively marketing the community - rather it's marketing a specific vertical or campaign - so I have to convince them to squeeze in a call-out to a specific community group that fits the context of the message. But in the end, it's a win-win for both business units. They can promote more specific, relevant discussions and content, and I get a bit more traffic driven to the community.
It's just another tactic we have on our list.
Re: How are you marketing your community?daniel.marotta Jan 27, 2012 8:00 AM (in response to Emilie)
I'm always internally selling community to my marketing colleagues to have community included as part of their campaigns. Its a much softer avenue than straight promoting the community. Community should always be considered as part of the marketing mix.
Re: How are you marketing your community?brutis Apr 5, 2012 3:46 AM (in response to cmcguinness)
I'm a Department of Defense Program manager, we're trying to drive DoD Scientists, Engineers and warfighters to use our version of Jive. To date we are running 5.0.1 on the secret net, with as many bells and whistles as allowed by our security. However, usage is dismal at best. We've not done a good job marketing, The digest idea intrigues us. Is it a rolling marquee? How is the information provided? Did Jive give you any feedback pertaining to actually deploying the tool/feature for the rest of us?
Re: How are you marketing your community?bjewell Jan 6, 2011 12:03 PM (in response to daniel.marotta)
Dan, are prospective members the largest portion of your target audience for your external community?
Re: How are you marketing your community?daniel.marotta Jan 6, 2011 12:21 PM (in response to bjewell)
I'm not sure I fully understand the question. Do you mean prospective customers?
In general, anyone that is in our industry that is not yet a member of our community, is how I'm defining a prospective member.
Re: How are you marketing your community?bjewell Jan 6, 2011 12:47 PM (in response to daniel.marotta)1 person found this helpful
My mistake, yes, I meant prospective customers. I asked before I responded because our target audience is current clients. All of our methods are tied to existing processes and publications that our clients use:
- links from the corporate web site and online store
- references in presentations to specific communities
- references in email templates (emails sent from our help desk application or from the support team, client newsletters, etc.)
- elevator and table signs in our buildings that clients visit
- our training materials and software documentation live in or are tangential to our community so users have to visit it to get those resources
- messages that play during hold music
Re: How are you marketing your community?daniel.marotta Jan 6, 2011 1:33 PM (in response to bjewell)
That's a great list. I especially like the elevator signs, table tents and hold music.
Re: How are you marketing your community?laurakelso Jan 6, 2011 1:08 PM (in response to daniel.marotta)
Dan, we're a fledgling community, preparing for a hard (broad) launch in February, but here are a few of the marketing ideas we plan to execute on:
- email to our current customer base of vacation home owners
- community ads on our websites
- community messaging in our purchase confirmation emails
- community messaging in our inquiry emails (emails sent to vacation home owners from travelers interested in renting)
- dashboard interstitials (pop ads that direct prospective customers to community to help them get "real answers to real questions")
- showcasing community at live owner seminars and our company's Annual Summit
- mentioning our new community on similar sites such as the Yahoo boards and LayMyHat.com
I hope this helps...
Re: How are you marketing your community?daniel.marotta Jan 6, 2011 1:37 PM (in response to laurakelso)
This does help. It looks like you do a lot with email.
I forgot to mention that we do have a community booth at our annual customer conference as well.
Thanks everyone!
Re: How are you marketing your community?kpratico Mar 1, 2012 1:46 PM (in response to daniel.marotta)
Our community is focused on existing clients. We of the most recent marketing initiatives we implemented is replacing our monthly newsletter with a monthly community update. It's literally an email with links to some of the hot topics, blogs, announcements, and events in the community. The benefit is that we're driving clients directly to the community, rather than sending an email newsletter that they may or may not read. Also, it has really helped increase our monthly new user registrations.
Re: How are you marketing your community?bartlick Dec 6, 2012 6:06 AM (in response to kpratico)
We are a new Jive customer and will start to build a new customer community next week... Glad to hear that replacing a newsletter has seemed to work for you. That's one of the plans on our end.
Re: How are you marketing your community?Kate_Mahoney Apr 4, 2012 2:01 PM (in response to daniel.marotta)
Have you tried joining other Communities or LinkedIn groups and adding to their discussions?
Re: How are you marketing your community?daniel.marotta Apr 4, 2012 2:15 PM (in response to Kate_Mahoney)
We do participate in other communities and social networks to build trust with customers outside of our owned platforms. We approach this as soft sells and win new memberships via those trusted relationships. We would never outwardly promote and solicit in those communities and social networks to win new memberships.
Re: How are you marketing your community?rmkingsland Mar 25, 2014 8:22 AM (in response to daniel.marotta)
I've been talking to product marketing and trying to work with them to get some word out. other than that it has been pretty organic and by talking about it at our events.
Re: How are you marketing your community?markgibson Apr 8, 2014 7:33 AM (in response to daniel.marotta)
Where and how are you marketing your community?
Here are a few things we've tried:
- web banners on our corporate site
- within our corporate newsletter
- web banners on 3rd party sites
- 3rd party newsletters
- rely on organic search engine traffic
What successful marketing campaigns have you run to promote awareness?
What were the more successful tries?
We've used in varying degrees of success:
Communications on intranet main page (a what's new/ the latest), slow build up, then ramp up near the time of deployment
Street Events
How to snippets
What's new, what you can do with x and y.
Currently around 70% take up by users.


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Mutual Authentication with CLIENT-CERT, Tomcat 6, and HttpClient
M is for Mutual Authentication:
How "it must be simple" turned into "god that was annoying".
I spent most of today wrestling with getting a JEE webapp running in Tomcat 6 to enforce mutual authentication by using the rarely used CLIENT-CERT authentication. If you love spending your days translating poor error messages and frustrations into Google queries as much as I do, read on for some notes I took along the way. If not, check out this amazing chart over at XKCD.
The mission: lock down a particular action on our web application so that only a single other system could authenticate and invoke it. Also provide an example client application which can access the webapp.
Back story: I have worked with certificates and various forms of authentication before, but never this combination. We want a small subset of the application to only be accessed via SSL with both server and client providing trusted certificates for mutual authentication. The portion of the application will only be accessed by a single other system inside the company intranet.
How it went down: The following are the basic steps to get everything setup in Tomcat 6 and a fairly standard JEE webapp.
- First we need to know who we are, who they are, and make sure we ONLY trust them and no one else
- To do this we need a certificate to identify ourselves. Java's provided keytool.exe provides an easy way to create a self signed certificate within a keystore. Keytool can also help us export our public certificate out of our keystore. This should also be done for the client.
- Next import the public certificates into a new truststore for the opposite system (A only trusts B and B only trusts A). Keytool to the rescue again.
- Note: Java keystore files and certs of in a different format than the PKCS12 files that can be created by OpenSSL
- Next configure a Tomcat to support SSL communication
- Add a new connector to thees server.xml configuration specifying HTTPS, the SSL protocol, where the webapp's keystore and truststores are, etc
- <Connector className="org.apache.coyote.tomcat4.CoyoteConnector"
port="8443″ enableLookups="true"
acceptCount="100″ connectionTimeout="20000″
useURIValidationHack="false" disableUploadTimeout="true"
scheme="https" secure="true" SSLEnabled="true"
keystoreFile="ourApp.keystore" keystorePass="changeit"
truststoreFile="ourApp.truststore" truststorePass="changeit"
clientAuth="false" sslProtocol="TLS"
- Note: clientAuth can have 3 values
- True – all connections through this connector require client authentication
- Want – the web app will ask for authentication but not require it
- False – connections do not require client authentication UNLESS the web app specifies it is required via a security constraint with CLIENT-CERT chosen (this is the one we want)
- Configure a new user with the required security role in the tomcat-users.xml if the in-memory realm is used
- <role rolename="secureconn"/>
- <user username="CN=TheirApp, OU=Unknown, O=Unknown, L=Unknown, ST=Unknown, C=Unknown" password="null" roles="secureconn"/>
- Configure out web.xml to use a CLIENT-CERT authentication constraint for our action
- <security-constraint>
<web-resource-name>Demo App</web-resource-name>
<realm-name>Demo App</realm-name>
- <security-constraint>
- Create a client to hit the application
- Here we used the Apache Commons HttpClient (3.x b/c of client restrictions)
- Several pages talk about various ways to add security protocols to HttpClient code but the examples are left lacking and most point to the AuthSSLProtocolSocketFactory class which for some reason is not present int he 3.x binaries but IS present in the 3.x SRC bundles.
- ** I will include some sample code tomorrow ….
- Test things using Firefo
- You can add a personal certificate to identify yourself through Firefox's preferences -> Advanced -> Exncryption
- Firefox uses PKCS12 certificates which can be created easily from scratch through a few OpenSSL commands or from an existing keystore certificate through one hairy keytool command
- ** I will include the commands and a couple links tomorrow …..
Hopefully these notes will help someone in the future with getting things setup correctly. When I started this morning I couldn't find an end to end example to build on.
Edit: Huge thanks to Matt Todd for helping me with this. You can check out his blog at: http://emergentdevelopment.blogspot.com/ .


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Yay... Hit 10,000 miles on my bike today. And got a flat tire AND yet another broken rear axle. I need to be gentler with stuff I ride... The next thing I break might be painful and not so easily repaired or replaced...
Eh, I have been riding my bike to work since 2008. I bike 20 miles per day.Never had any problem, save for breaking lots of rear axles, several punctured tires, one fall once a few years ago and breaking the frame of my old bike in half after it reached 12,000 miles in.
whores need to learn to keep their legs closed.
So to simplify, at a page a day it would take me 210 years to complete the whole story.
Of eating ass? You're not missing much
I hope this means that you'll go into scriptwriting and write the next Repo Man script (Repo Gal does not count and should be destroyed).It does seem sad, but you gotta do what you gotta do sometimes. I respect that you're putting your family first. Now to get off my ass and read the comic from beginning to end.
...Are you Kentaro Miura?
Luis Alejandro said, August 19, 2015, 03:01:11 AMOf eating ass? You're not missing muchYou sure know a lot about this, eh?


text: Egyptian Dreams - Ancient Egyptian Discussion Board :: View topic - The Anatomical Record : The Anatomy of the Mummy - Ancient Egypt - Egyptology Forum Click on the logo to visit the shop Egyptian DreamsAncient Egypt Discussion Board FAQ Search Memberlist Usergroups Register Profile Log in to check your private messages Log in The Anatomical Record : The Anatomy of the Mummy Egyptian Dreams Forum Index -> Books View previous topic :: View next topic Author Message LutzPharaohJoined: 02 Sep 2007Posts: 4154Location: Berlin, Germany Posted: Tue Jun 30, 2015 8:09 am Post subject: The Anatomical Record : The Anatomy of the Mummy Online for free ... "The Anatomical Record - Special Issue : The Anatomy of the Mummy" (Volume 298, Issue 6. - June 2015) ... also with some very interesting articles related to Ancient Egyptian mummys / mummyfication. Greetings, Lutz._________________Ägyptologie Forum (German) Back to top Display posts from previous: All Posts1 Day7 Days2 Weeks1 Month3 Months6 Months1 Year Oldest FirstNewest First Egyptian Dreams Forum Index -> Books All times are GMT Page 1 of 1 Jump to: Select a forum Forum Information----------------AnnouncementsForum Help New Members----------------Say Hello Ancient Egypt----------------Mythology and ReligionPharaohs and QueensArt and LiteratureSphinxPyramids, Tombs, & MonumentsMummificationEvidence from AmarnaPre-dynastic EgyptNubiaBooksTravelHomework HelpMiscellaneous Off Topic----------------General Discussion You cannot post new topics in this forumYou cannot reply to topics in this forumYou cannot edit your posts in this forumYou cannot delete your posts in this forumYou cannot vote in polls in this forum Powered by phpBB © 2001, 2005 phpBB Group


text:
Zoning Board hearings
Pittsburgh's Zoning Board of Adjustment has scheduled the following public hearing of interest to South Pittsburgh residents in the first floor hearing room of the John P. Robin Civic Building, 200 Ross Street, Downtown.
Zone case 187/13 on Thursday, Sept. 5 at 9:30 a.m. is the appeal of Pittsburgh Rugby Association II LLC, owner and applicant for 40 S. 22nd Street in the 16th Ward (Zoning District R1A-VH).
Applicant requests existing restaurant expansion: 21' x 16' two-story addition at rear of existing structure.
Special Exception: 921.02.A.1; Expansion of a nonconforming use is a Special Exception.
Variances: 921.02.A.1.(a)(i): Limit of Expansion 15%; 50% requested. 903.03.E.2: Minimum 3' interior side setback required and 0' proposed; Minimum 5' exterior side setback required and 0' proposed; Minimum 15' rear side setback required and 0' proposed.
Notes: Certificate of Occupancy 69537, dated 6/7/1997, permitted occupancy "Existing two-story structure for bar/restaurant with one dwelling unit above and outdoor seating in rear of building and 6'6" high stockade fence. Maximum of 45 occupants inside; 30 outside."
Zone case 197/13 on Thursday, Sept. 5 at 10:10 a.m. is the appeal of Mark and Mary Beth Wrigley, owners and applicants for 133 S. 20th Street in the 17th Ward (Zoning District R1A-VH).
Applicant requests use of existing 2½-story structure as two-family dwelling.
Special Exception: 921.02.A.4: Change from one nonconforming use to another is a Special Exception.
Notes: Certificate of Occupancy 64859, dated 4/27/1993, permitted occupancy "Use of first floor as a dental office with one dwellin unit above to remain." Certificate of Occupancy dated 2/6/2001, permitted occupancy "2½ story structure with dentist office on first and second floor."
Zone case 196/13 on Thursday, Sept. 12 at 10:00 a.m. is the appeal of Karen Lucca, owner and applicant for 264 Plymouth Street in the 19th Ward (Zoning District R1D-M).
Applicant requests use of structure as two-family dwelling with existing two-car parking area at rear.
Variances: 911.04: Use is not permitted in R1D zoning district; 903.03.C.2: For parking area: Minimum 5' interior side setback required and 0' requested.
Zone case 214/13 on Thursday, Sept. 12 at 10:20 a.m. is the appeal of James R. Smith, owner and applicant for 208 Reifert Street in the 30th Ward (Zoning District R1D-H).
Applicant requests use of existing structure as two-family dwelling.
Variances: 911.02: Use of two-family dwelling units is not permitted in R1D zoning district. 914.02.A: One additional parking space required; no parking spaces requested.
Notes: Certificate of Occupancy 15232, dated 6/19/1961, permitted occupancy "One family dwelling."
For more information on the City of Pittsburgh Zoning Board of Adjustment, go to: http://www.city.pittsburgh.pa.us/cp/html/zoning_board_of_adjustment.html.


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Art Walks
September 25 @ 10:30 am - 11:15 am
An event every week that begins at 10:30 am on Friday, repeating indefinitely
The Mission Art Walk is a docent guided tour highlighting the art collection of rare paintings related to Mission's history within the Serra Chapel, the Spanish Colonial Room and the Mission Treasures Exhibit. Experience Spanish Colonial and Plein Air paintings as well as learn about Mission San Juan Capistrano's goal and efforts in the conservation of its collection.
For groups of 15 people or more, please call Group Bookings at (949) 234-1306 to schedule in advance. Pricing is $8 per adult.


text:
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New Yorker
Join Date: Sep 2001
Location: Virginia
Posts: 2,857
Local Time: 08:56 PM
Bluegrass, Wal-Mart and Jesus (an interview I loved)
Sojourners associate editor Rose Marie Berger and photographer Ryan Beiler spent a Sunday afternoon in February with Wendell Berry at his farm in Henry County, Kentucky. Berry is the author of more than forty books of fiction, poetry, and essays, including The Unsettling of America, What are People For?, Life is Beautiful, Citizenship Papers, and The Art of the Commonplace. He has farmed in a traditional manner for nearly forty years. Berry spoke with Sojourners about religious practice, Bluegrass country, defending against Wal-Mart, usury, and Jesus. - The Editors__________________
ROSE MARIE BERGER: Tell me about this land, about this bioregion, about the history of your farm.
WENDELL BERRY: We're on the west side of the Kentucky River, in the Kentucky River Valley. Some people call this the Outer Bluegrass; there are other names for it. We have limestone soils. An old ocean or sea laid down these layers of limestone. There are lots of trees here. There are white, chinquapin, red, black, and shumard oaks. Those are the principle ones. And we have two or three kinds of ash, maples, several varieties of hickory, black walnut, sycamore, black locust, honey locust, cedar, basswood, red elm, slippery elm. We used to have chestnuts once. Tanya and I have 125 acres altogether, 75 here and about 50 on Cane Run.
This place where we're sitting today, is the old property known as Lane's Landing. Twelve acres, more or less, the deed says. Tanya and I bought it in 1964 and moved in the next year. So we've been here thirty-nine years.
My mother was raised in Port Royal. And her father's land borders this. My father was born and grew up on a farm just the other side of Lacie. My brother lives there now.
This is tobacco country. We've lost two-thirds of the allotment in the last few years, courtesy of the global economy. Not the anti-smoking people. This is traditionally a mixed farming country. Tobacco was the staple crop, but we also grew corn and small grains. The small grains were grown as cover crops on the tobacco and corn ground.
The farms were around a hundred acres when I was a boy, on the average; they're about 150 on the average now. But the farming that was done here when I first knew it, in the 1940s and '50s, at its best, was very good farming. In addition to the crops I named, we raised cattle, sheep and hogs, sometimes all three on the same farm. And every farm had a kitchen garden, a flock of chickens, meat hogs, and at least enough cows to supply the household with milk.
BERGER: You really had a working, home economy. How does the local tobacco economics fit with the global economics? How has that shift from local to global been experienced here?
BERRY: Tobacco acreages have declined here because the companies can fill their needs more cheaply elsewhere. The other products we grow are thrown into the world market to compete as best they can. With the help of subsidies, of course. In Kentucky we have always raised for export. One of this state's problems is that it hasn't added value to its agricultural products. I would say we are adding less now than ever. Louisville used to have two or three packing plants, for instance, and a stockyard. But no more. Most of the things that are produced in this state are shipped out, to have the value added elsewhere.
When you take away the subsistence economy, then your farm population is seriously exposed to the vagaries of the larger economy. As it used to be, the subsistence economy carried people through the hard times, and what you might call the housewife's economy of cream and eggs often held these farms and their families together. The wives would go to town with eggs and cream once a week, buy groceries with the proceeds, and sometimes come home with money. Or they'd sell a few old hens, that sort of thing. So that's the first lesson to learn about agriculture, as far as I'm concerned: It needs a sound subsistence basis. People need to feed themselves, next they need to feed their own communities. That's what we're working for now. We want to develop a local food economy that local producers will supply and that the local consumers will support. It's ridiculous that we should be importing food into this state while our farmers are suffering.
BERGER: What are the models that are being used here in Kentucky to resist the economic pressure from the larger market?
BERRY: Community-supported agriculture, farmer's markets, direct marketing of meat, that sort of thing. There's an effort under way to develop a retail market for local produce. But this is hard to bring about.
The local landscape used to contribute food to Louisville. There was a significant amount of truck farming going in those days. That's gone. The stockyard's gone, the packinghouses are gone. So there's Louisville economically and culturally isolated from its rich agricultural landscape. Which is ridiculous.
BERGER: It's almost a process of reweaving the city life with its agricultural counterpart - its breadbasket.
BERRY: That's right - building commercial linkages between the city and its local countryside. And there are good reasons to do that. You've got the prospect, to begin with, of better, fresher food. You've got the possibility that consumers could influence production.
You have the possibility that urban consumers, by fulfilling their responsibility to local producers, can make secure their local food supply in the face of various threats. The paramount one, now on everybody's mind, is terrorism, but there are also the threats of epidemic and disease. In other words, the influence of local consumers could work, not only to maintain farming in the local landscape, but also to diversify it. And American agriculture is badly in need of diversity. Another threat to the present food system of course is the likelihood that petroleum is not going to get any cheaper.
BERGER: That happened in Venezuela a few years ago. They had an oil producer's strike and people lost their gasoline supply. As a result they couldn't truck food anywhere. Whole communities were starving because they couldn't get access to food in stores, and they didn't have any capacity to feed themselves.
BERRY: What could be more terrible? There are lots of bad things that can happen to a food economy that's both extensive and centralized. There's no substitute for petroleum. And from what I read, the curve of discovery and production of petroleum is about to decline. To have a growth economy based on a declining fuel supply is bound to be stressful.
BERGER: In Life is a Miracle, you talk about cloning and genetic engineering. Genetically modified organisms are being promoted by agribusiness as "a way to feed the poor people of the world." What kind of ethical values should we be operating under when we think about cloning, GMO, and genetic engineering?
BERRY: The first ethical requirement is a decent suspicion of the claims of people who have something to sell. I'm not reading anything that suggests that genetic engineering is increasing production. Some recent things I've read suggest that productivity of Round-up ready soybeans is less than that of other varieties.
I think that the real reason for genetic engineering is to put absolute control of the food system into corporate hands. They don't want anybody - farmer or urban consumer or anybody else - to have anything whatsoever that they don't buy from a corporation at the corporation's price. In other words, economic totalitarianism is the goal. And I don't think the difference between political totalitarianism and economic totalitarianism is worth lingering over. If you're not economically free, if you don't have economic choices, you're not free.
BERGER: Your collection of essays, Citizenship Papers, has been published recently and you wrote an amazing set of articles for Orion about the national security agenda. As I read through sections of the Patriot Act, I was reminded of an old poem of yours titled "Do Not Be Ashamed." It says, "Though you have done nothing shameful,/ they will want you to be ashamed./ They will want you to kneel and weep/ and say you should have been like them."
BERRY: Well it's sort of normal to wish that things like that would not be applicable any longer and it's discouraging to see that they stay current. You wish that a book like The Unsettling of America would become obsolete, but it's more relevant now than it ever was. I don't think that national security can be achieved the way we're trying to achieve it. I don't think that being the strongest country in the world can necessarily make us the most secure country. And the fact remains that we're destroying our country ourselves.
It's easy to get the idea that we're stationing troops all over the world to protect our right to destroy our own country. I think that if you were seriously interested in security, you would make the country secure in its regions. You'd make it possible for the people to eat with far less public transportation. To do that you'd have to think in a different way. And we've got to face the likelihood that the people in charge are simply not capable of thinking that way. They've never thought in that way. Their doctrine is maximum force relentlessly applied. That's the doctrine of war. But it's also the doctrine of industrial agriculture. It's the way the industrial system works.
Look at the way we mine coal, for instance. Look at the way we're logging the forests. These are not sustainable procedures. They're not even conservative procedures. Wes Jackson has started calling this the "Prodigal Era." By that he means the era in which we're going to use up most of the topsoil and most of the fossil fuels.
BERGER: It seems like it always comes back eventually to the individual's choice. Does one choose to live in an economy of grace, based on generosity, or in an economy of scarcity based on acquisition?
BERRY: You have to realize that people are working very hard to remove that choice, to make it impossible to make such a choice. And they can do that simply by putting the land entirely under corporate control. It can happen. We're pretty well advanced into a corporate or capitalist totalitarianism. And it's a very strange thing to see happen, because we were lately so much afraid of communist totalitarianism. You can remove that choice we were talking about simply by making it impossible for small economic enterprises to survive.
You can use Wal-Mart as a weapon, for instance, to destroy the economic centers of small towns and small cities.
BERGER: The method of disarming such a weapon is carving out a local economy, a local space, and defending it?
BERRY: You've got to defend it; you've got to defend it economically. You've got to have some kind of fidelity between consumers and producers. The great corporations can use volume discounts to make it impossible for anybody else to be in business. And they are doing that.
BERGER: And you have that partnership of slightly increased unemployment - no benefits, poor wages - so it's a push and a pull. People are pushed into the arms of Wal-Mart and Wal-Mart is pulling them with cheap products produced in labor conditions that are exploitative.
BERRY: Healthcare and health insurance are so expensive that almost nobody can afford them. Most people can't.
BERGER: How do you see that playing out in terms of the rural poverty here?
BERRY: Rural poverty happens because people aren't being paid to take adequate care of their places. There's lots of work to do here. And you can't afford to pay anybody to do it! If you depress the price of the products of the place below a certain level, people can't afford to maintain it. And that's the rural dilemma we're in now. But you've got to see the connection between the poverty of the people and the impoverishment of the place. If you buy the products, and you don't give an adequate payment in money, then that means that the producer doesn't give adequate care.
The worst example of rural poverty we have right here is that of migrant farm workers. Well, they're "temporary workers," is the way to put that. They have no permanent jobs, so they have no equity in the places where they work. They're not shareholders, let alone entrepreneurs. They're not small farmers, they're not market gardeners, they're just temporary - uprooted, isolated, easily exploitable people.
BERGER: One ends up lacking affection. The migrant workers perhaps don't have a particular affection for the place other than just the work and the money, and the place and the people and economy never develops an investment in them because they're on their way out.
BERRY: That's right. Because they're temporary and replaceable. They're more readily replaceable than the slaves were. Also in Kentucky some corporations, Fruit of the Loom, for instance, have just left for places that are more exploitable than Kentucky. And then we have, west of here, the hog and chicken factories. That's another story of corporate abuse of places and people.
BERGER: This organic mechanism of resistance is trying to establish a community/regional area and beginning to develop alternative models of connection between the producer and the consumer, and begin to create some trading zones that are micro-trading zones.
BERRY: Yes. You can hope only to take it back a little at a time. There is no master plan. And I would be very suspicious of a master plan if I knew of one. It's got to happen a little at a time. You've got to confront the very difficult economic problem of making a local supply and a local demand come into existence simultaneously. I don't know that that's ever been done before in the way we will have to do it. And nobody knows how well it's going to succeed. But there are hopeful signs. It would be no trouble to take you and show you things that are working, but there are not enough of them yet.
BERGER: I want to ask you also about Harlan and Anna Hubbard, about the influence they've had on your life. And also the tension between the nomadic, pilgrim experiment that they launched off into versus rootedness, staying in one place, making a deep commitment to a particular area.
BERRY: Well, Harlan and Anna Hubbard were a married couple who began their life together by building a shanty boat and making a sort of epic drift down the rivers from Brent, Kentucky, above Cincinnati, to New Orleans and then on out into the bayous. In the early fifties, that journey having completed itself, they returned to Kentucky and bought a remote property, known as Payne Hollow, on the Ohio River in Trimble County. They built a house there and remained there, living mostly from their land and the river until they died.
They were musicians; they played duets every day of their life together. They played Mozart, Brahms, and Bach, those people. Harlan made prints, drawings, oils, and watercolors. And he was a writer. He published in his lifetime two wonderful books, one called Shantyboat that was an account of their trip down the rivers, and another called Payne Hollow, which is a distillation of their life at Payne Hollow. Their life was exemplary in a lot of ways. They did little harm. They lived abundantly, by their own efforts, and with a very small expenditure of money. In their frugal life they experienced much joy and made much beauty. They were teachers to a lot of people, and I'm one of them.
BERGER: How did you come to meet them, originally?
BERRY: By accident. A friend and I were on a canoe trip. We stopped there to see if we could get some drinkable water. We had replenished our water supply with the city water of Madison, Indiana, and we were finding it hard to swallow.
BERGER: I've gone back and looked again at some of the ways that Harlan engaged his spirituality or religion, his reading of the Bible, and how at one point I think he said something about how he experiences the Bible not as revelation but as confirmation, and that he comes to these lessons in his life, and is sometimes surprised that the Bible also has come to those lessons. And I find that sort of engagement with Christianity very appealing in the sense that it feels very authentic, and lets the faith be a humanizing faith.
BERRY: I think Harlan was a man with a very strong religious impulse, or religious nature. But I don't think the formal religions, the churches of this area, had much to offer him. It's hard to nail Harlan's religion down very firmly. I did the best I could in a chapter of my little book about Harlan and his work.
Thinking about Harlan as a religious man is quite different from thinking about, say, Thomas Merton as a religious man, because there's not a body of doctrine that Harlan subscribed to. He didn't endorse any creed. He was a man at large with his faculties and his gifts and his inspiration, his great relish of life and of his world, which he said was "heaven." You look to see what Harlan painted when he was "painting heaven" and you see landscapes of northern Kentucky and Payne Hollow.
BERGER: What was your connection with Thomas Merton, the Trappist monk who lived here in Kentucky?
BERRY: My connection with him was the photographer Ralph Eugene Meatyard, who has grown steadily in reputation since he died. Thomas Merton was interested in photography, and I guess that led him to Gene, who was no more conventionally religious than Harlan Hubbard. Gene was a wizard. He had an incredible gift of seeing and of picture-making. But let's don't say "incredible." It was perfectly credible when you saw what he could do. He had a very great gift. Merton could see that, and he made a friend of Gene. Gene and his wife Madelyn took Tanya and me down there twice.
Merton was a man who understood how to be a companion. He had a lot of humor, and I think he knew something about how to be happy or how to enjoy happiness when he had it. I liked him tremendously. He had a very lively countenance; a very bright, curious, amused eye.
When we went down there the first time, he just dropped it out casually, and I think with great secret amusement, that he was thinking about joining an Indian tribe. I think Merton was a profound Christian. Some people seem to think that when he went East he was abandoning his faith or his vocation. I don't think he was at all. His talks to religious groups in Alaska (Thomas Merton in Alaska) on that last trip were wonderful.
BERGER: He just seemed to be moving deeper and deeper, which in some ways made it easier to connect across a variety of spiritual expressions.
BERRY: He had, I think, a very fortunate impulse to reach out to other religions. And we need to pay attention to that, because there are people now who would carry us right into a religious war. That's a big problem, I think.
BERGER: The end of Christendom.
BERRY: Well, Christendom is all right, but it doesn't have to exclude everybody else. It doesn't have to go to war against them. And it doesn't have to be so stupid as to condemn other faiths that it doesn't know anything about.
BERGER: One of the lines in Life is a Miracle says, "It's impossible to prefigure the salvation of the world in the same language by which the world has been dismembered and defaced." It's a brilliant line!
BERRY: You've got to reach towards a better language, and you're not going to make it up from scratch; you've got to reach back into the tradition. Western tradition is not as impoverished as a lot of people would like to think, but you'd have to go back before the industrial revolution; you may have to go back farther than that. Of course, the Bible has a perfectly adequate language, but it's suffered a lot of thoughtless wear.
BERGER: Some of the work being done, more by poets rather than theologians, in reclaiming the roots of biblical language - digging in for what almost intuitively or artistically makes sense rather than the science of translation - seems to bring life back.
BERRY: If you're a writer and you are at all inclined to speak as a Christian in some way, you realize very quickly that the conventional language is pretty much useless. It takes a long time to get past that, or it has taken me a long time. People in conventional Christianity have spoken lightly and sometimes frivolously of God for a long time. It's a word that needs to be used sparingly, in my opinion.
Any religion has to have a practice. When you let it go so far from practice that it just becomes a matter of talk something bad happens. If you don't have an economic practice, you don't have a practice. Christians conventionally think they've done enough when they've gone to the store and shopped. But that isn't an economic life. It isn't an economic practice. If you take seriously those passages in the scripture that say that we live by God's spirit and his breath, that we live, move, and have our being in God, the implications for the present economy are just devastating. Those passages call for an entirely generous and careful economic life.
BERGER: There are a number of explorations and economic models in the scriptures, in terms of the Sabbath economics, jubilee economics, but there's not enough experimenting among Christians or people of faith with alternative models of economics.
BERRY: There's a fairly explicit attempt back there in the early books of the Old Testament to see that property doesn't accumulate into too few hands. There's a real attempt at economic democracy. The idea of the Jubilee year is a deliberate affront to what we now call capitalism. There's a lot that's been said, not just in the Bible, but in the biblical tradition in literature, on the subject of usury. Dante was pretty explicit about it. It would put you in hell because it implied, among other things, a contempt for nature. It's an attempt to go around the natural world and human work and make money grow out of itself. It's an attempt to make value grow in the abstract, without work, without a real product. As lots of people have said, this goes against the real economy of the world. Ezra Pound has a great canto on usury, two of them as a matter of fact. "With usura hath no man a house of good stone." Nobody can have good things when you let money become its own value.
BERGER: As the epigraph to Citizenship Papers you quote 2 Peter 2:3, "And through covetousness shall they with feigned words make merchandise of you." I don't know that I have ever heard that phrase in this context. Suddenly it becomes revolutionary.
BERRY: Yes. The gospels, and sometimes the epistles, are pretty revolutionary. They propose a revolution of about 180 degrees.
One of the popular versions of the Bible has in the back an index of great stories and great chapters, and not one of them from the gospels.
But Christ was quite explicit, for instance, about his pacifism. You can't be more explicit than "Love your enemies." He did run those people out of the temple, but he didn't kill them.
People are always talking about the first church. The real first church was that gaggle of people who followed Jesus around. We don't know anything about them. But he apparently didn't ask them what creed they subscribed to, or what their sexual preference was, or any of that. He fed them. He healed them. He forgave them. He is clear about sin, but he was also for forgiveness.
BERGER: Well there's so much in that way of engaging people - and the sin and forgiveness model's a good one - that is all about promoting life and opening up possibilities for life. It's never about shutting life down, closing people off, stopping them in their tracks. It's about opening up possibilities for people.
BERRY: That's right. That's right. A completely decent and authentic way of putting it, I think.
BERGER: Of all your writing, Life is a Miracle is the one that I think is the most brilliant because it calls into question the entire myth of progress.
BERRY: You know, it helps an old man to hear that!
BERGER: There are not enough people who are asking questions about the post-Enlightenment era, and the myth of progress and where it's taking us. Even our contemporary Christian mindset is just built on this myth that the world just keeps getting better and that the past was worse than the present.
BERRY: It gets taken for granted, that's why it's so easy to attack. People are handing out this stuff without thinking about it.
BERGER: How is that myth of progress operating on us as people, and what are the reasons for calling it into question, or subverting it?
BERRY: Well, that's two questions, isn't it? How does it operate on us? It substitutes this infinite advance toward better and better life in the material sense for the old pilgrimage, which you make by effort and grace, to become a better person. And I guess that's the reason you need to subvert it if you can. It takes people's minds off the important things. It becomes, at it's worst, a kind of determinism: All we have to do is just passively go along and things will get better and better, and we'll be happier and happier. That's why we need honest accounting.
I think all the time about the medical industry's emphasis on longevity. It's a substitution of quantity for any idea of completeness or wholeness or any sense of real fulfillment or real worth, so that you prolong life past the time where it's worth living, and then you brag about it. Without any acknowledgment of the possibility that somebody's life might become a burden, or that some things are worse than death.
BERGER: Death becomes simply an inconvenience to be shuddered away.
BERRY: As if it might not at some point be a great relief. As if it might not be a blessed deliverance.
All the questions about progress reduce to the question of what your measures are. And what is the measure of progress? It is possible to measure the progress of the last two or three hundred years in soil erosion. We can measure it in the rate of species extinction. We can measure it in pollution, in the toxicity of the world. Those things, like power and speed, are perfectly measurable.
But we need also to raise the questions that are not quantitative. How happy are people? What do we make of all this complaining? How healthy are people? How are love and beauty faring? What do we make of all this doctoring and medication that's going on all the time at such a great expense? That's not to deny that this so-called progress has given us things that are worth having. A hot bath every night is a good thing. I affirm that it is good, and wish to record my gratitude. There are other good things, but real harms also have been done.
BETH NEWBERRY: How does your identity as a writer connect to a region, a place, and a land?
BERRY: Well, I was born here, not in this house, but in this county. I grew up in these little towns, and in the countryside, on the farms. All my early memories are here. All the voices that surrounded me from the time I became able to hear were from here. Tanya and I came back here in 1964 and have lived here for 39 years, raised our children here. How could you draw a line separating this place and my identity? If you've known these places from your early youth, that means that you have a chance to know them in a way that other people never will.
I think often of the importance of a language spoken by people who are really local, who really know where they are and have lived there a long time; that language has a particularity about it that no language of bureaucracy or government or the university can ever have. It has a designating power that's utterly precise. Knowing the landscape in common and knowing it intimately, minutely, that has to be the basis of a language. That's where it starts, and you can raise it up from there, in successive levels of abstraction. But if you lose that power to particularize and designate precisely, in some sense you don't have a language anymore. So having a common tongue can mean that at one level you have the dictionary in common, you have the English vocabulary. But to have a common tongue in the sense that you can speak in detail, knowledgably and responsibly, about a well-known place, a well-known ecosystem and a well-known human community, is quite another thing.
BERGER: Is there a tension between self-sufficient communities and balkanism? Is there a danger of isolation in developing sustainable communities? If a community withdraws into itself so much, or becomes removed from a larger system of relationship, is there a danger of setting up enemy tensions between communities? Prejudice?
BERRY: I'll honor the question if you will acknowledge that this can happen in cities as well as in the country. People are always saying that these terrible things happen in little towns and rural communities, but of course they happen in cities just as readily, and for the same reasons. I suppose the direct way to deal with this is to point out that no community is or ever can be entirely self-sufficient. It's dependent on other communities, not only for supplies, but also for conversation and goodwill.
We're a pretty bad species in a lot of ways and in other ways a pretty good one. We can become a warrior civilization and live by piracy; on the other hand, we're capable of lovingkindness, of genuine affection, of generosity, of friendship, of peaceability, of forgiveness and gratitude. It's a question of where you want to put your influence, how you want to apply the little means that you have. It's too easy to say that country people are provincial and prejudiced, as if the worst things that humans are capable of hadn't also risen up in cosmopolitan, highly sophisticated, urban civilizations. That's just a passing of blame. If you can blame it all on people out in the provinces then you don't have to worry about what's going on in your urban neighborhood or in your urban soul.
One of the oldest human artifacts is the trade route. People were trading in obsidian and other rare things long before history. So we know there's going to be trade, we know that you can't isolate a culture and keep it going without cultural interchange. You can't live without influence, you can't live without change, you can't live without trade.
The serious question is whether you're going to become a warrior community and live by piracy, by taking what you need from other people. I think the only antidote to that is imagination. You have to develop your imagination to the point that permits sympathy to happen. You have to be able to imagine lives that are not yours or the lives of your loved ones or the lives of your neighbors. You have to have at least enough imagination to understand that if you want the benefits of compassion, you must be compassionate. If you want forgiveness you must be forgiving. It's a difficult business, being human.
Rose Marie Berger is an associate editor of Sojourners.
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Great interview. I saw Berry read a few years ago.__________________
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Thanks for posting this, Sherry. I'm a big fan of both Berry and the Sojourners people.
Especially loved this part:
That's a sobering point about the big-picture effects of usury and its implications for the mushrooming rich-poor gap illustrated by people being "pushed into the arms" of Wal-Mart etc. Some will say Well better this than welfare, it does provide a paycheck and affordable basic needs, at least; but that too easily overlooks the larger questions of how we got here in the first place and whether we are doing right by just passively accepting it as a fait accompli.
Though I will say, having grown up poor, sometimes I do look around the homes of people who proclaim themselves "reliant" on Wal-Mart and think, With that home entertainment system? With that mountain of toys and gadgets for your kids and this boatload of crappy superfluous particle-board furniture you've bought? We never had any of that stuff when I grew up, and my parents would never have put acquiring it before making sure we had the best education and insurance coverage they could afford. Or forked over for such crappy workmanship when they could've made do with one or two pieces that would actually *last* awhile. So it does cut a bit both ways, and the almighty consumerist imperative does factor into there too.
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Thanks for posting this!
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I think lawyers could effectively get around the requirements of Jubilee with some clever drafting....
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Doug not sure at all what you're getting at, if anything (perhaps it was just a clever comment?). Care to clarify?
No comment on any of the substantial points the interview made?
Dread and Joy you're welcome
I think his emphasis on local empowerment is wise, and I think we'd be wise to heed his call for "new thinking", creativity and imagination. That takes risk, however. I wonder it is possible in a democracy. Or it is only possible in a democracy? Hmmm....
On another note, I was interested by his connection to God through the land he worked. As an urban Army-brat, that's not a concept I can relate to at ALL. Yet it resonates with me anyway. Any one have any thoughts?
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I grew up poor as well and my parents, like yours, also put education and health above everything else. They also taught me about quality over quantity and I still live that way today. If my sisters and I needed new shoes, they didn't just buy some cheap crap; they thought feet were important! We didn't have coca cola, junk food, cheap clothes and a pile of dumb toys; we had well water, homemade oatmeal cookies, good shoes and a couple of toys each. My sister started sewing as a child (she designs cashmere sweaters today) and she designed and made most of our clothes so we didn't appear to be nearly as poor as we were. I guess not every poor family is lucky enough to have a budding young designer in the family, though, but the point is that my family was very creative with what little we had.
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joyfulgirl, homemade oatmeal cookies ... A similar golden rule my mother taught us was if you can afford it, just get it (don't cut corners).__________________
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ATHENS, Greece (AP) — State TV channels in Greece remained off-air Tuesday as the political storm over the future of public broadcaster ERT raged on, despite a court ruling that the prime minister's decision to pull the plug was wrong.
The threat of a snap general election was averted late Monday after a meeting between Conservative Prime Minister Antonis Samaras and his center-left coalition partners, who strongly oppose his June 11 decision to close ERT and fire its staff of nearly 2,700.
The three-party talks came as Greece's high court ruled the government should not have switched off the public TV signal, despite conceding that it had the right to restructure the broadcaster.
Samaras had indicated he wants a leaner and more efficient replacement by late August. But he offered coalition partners to start programming sooner under a transition broadcaster, and the three leaders agreed to continue negotiations. They will meet again Wednesday.
Samaras is under pressure from Greece's international bailout lenders to continue with austerity reforms in return for continued payouts from their 240 billion euro ($320 billion) rescue program.
Late Tuesday, Samaras met with senior creditor representatives who are in Athens for a new inspection of the country's efforts to right its recession-crippled economy and to narrow budget deficits.
Finance Minister Yiannis Stournaras said after the talks that "significant progress" has been made, but provided no further details.
Though an imminent election over ERT's closure appears to have been averted, analyst George Tzogopoulos said the ongoing political crisis was making the government coalition look weak.
"The signal that is now sent to our partners in Europe and the markets is that this coalition is not stable any longer," said Tzogopoulos, a senior researcher at the Hellenic Foundation for European and Foreign Policy.
Fired ERT workers have continued live broadcasts streamed online and satellite, helped by the Geneva, Switzerland-based European Broadcasting Union, which represents the continent's public broadcasters.
On Tuesday, the EBU urged the government to restore ERT's signal immediately, citing the court ruling. Samaras has also faced criticism from international human rights groups and the powerful Greek Orthodox Church.
And in Brussels, EU Commission spokesman Olivier Bailly said the commission expects the Greek authorities to "respect" legal decisions.
Shares on the Athens Stock Exchange closed 1.16 percent higher Tuesday, as investors breathed a sigh of relief that an election has been seemingly averted.


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iPhone buyers who finance full-priced smartphones are more likely to open their wallets and pick the flagship -- and most expensive -- iPhone 5S than U.S. consumers sticking with the subsidized-purchase model, analysts said today.
In the July 2013-March 2014 timespan, the iPhone 5S was selected by 73% of those who financed the purchase, said Consumer Intelligence Research Partners (CIRP), a Chicago-based firm, citing a survey of 1,500 American consumers. Meanwhile, about 58% of those who bought a subsidized Apple smartphone went with the 5S.
In the U.S., all four major carriers -- AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile and Verizon -- offer installment plans that require the consumer to pay a monthly fee for a phone, which is priced at its full, or unlocked price. Rather than pay $199 for a 16GB iPhone 5S at the time they sign a two-year contract, consumers can instead pay about $27 each month -- the carriers don't add interest charges -- to account for the iPhone 5S's $650 full price. The latter group does not have to sign a long-term contract, and can generally upgrade to a new phone in just over a year.
The skew towards the upper-end iPhone by consumers opting for installment caught CIRP analysts by surprise. But they said it made sense.
"When customers are paying the full price of their new phone, the common prediction was that they would gravitate toward less-expensive models," said Josh Lowitz, co-founder of CIRP, in a note to clients. "The carriers' decision to offer interest-free 24-month financing seems to have more than counteracted that pressure. When confronted with a payment difference of less than $10 per month, iPhone buyers have chosen to buy the higher price, premium phones."
Buyers comparing the price of a subsidized iPhone 5S against that of an iPhone 4S face a difference of $199, as the latter is free with a two-year commitment. But when paid in installments, the monthly difference at Sprint is just $8.34 (over 24 months), at AT&T $10 (over 20 months).
It's perception and psychology, the same that softens sticker shock at the car dealership and leads buyers to opt for higher-end vehicles when they lease.
"A decision whether to buy a subsidized iPhone 4S, 5C, or 5S means a big difference in spending, $100, $200, or more -- or immediately spending double or more," Lowitz said. "In contrast, unsubsidized phone prices tend to differ by about 20%, and when they are broken into 24 payments, they are truly marginal."
Installment plans boosted sales of the iPhone 5S and depressed those of the iPhone 4S, the 2011 model that Apple uses as its entry-level phone. Of those who financed an iPhone, only about 4% selected the 4S, compared to about 18% of those who bought a subsidized iPhone.
For the iPhone 5C, the new, lower-cost model Apple introduced last year, about the same percentage picked it who took the installment path as chose the subsidized price.
Apple is expected to roll out one or more new iPhones this fall, most likely with larger screens.
Gregg Keizer covers Microsoft, security issues, Apple, Web browsers and general technology breaking news for Computerworld. Follow Gregg on Twitter at @gkeizer, on Google+ or subscribe to Gregg's RSS feed. His email address is email@example.com.
See more by Gregg Keizer on Computerworld.com.
Read more about smartphones in Computerworld's Smartphones Topic Center.


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REAL NAME: Terry Gene Bollea
BORN: August 11, 1953 in Augusta, Georgia
6'4", 290 pounds
ALIASES/ NICKNAMES: Terry Boulder, Sterling Golden, Hulk Hogan, the Hulkster, Hollywood Hulk Hogan, Mr. America
If there is ever an argument over who is the biggest name in the history of pro wrestling, consideration must be given to Hulk Hogan, who was at the forefront of the great rise in wrestling popularity in the mid-1980s. Although Hulk Hogan may not have "made wrestling", it can certainly be argued that he helped to make wrestling what it is today.
Initially wanting to be a musician, Hogan decided (while working as a bank teller) that there was money to be made in the wrestling business after being spotted by the Brisco Brothers. Trained by Hiro Matsuda, Hogan debuted in Florida in 1978 and wrestled under a mask as the Super Destroyer before later being dubbed Terry Boulder.
It would be, however, under the guise of Sterling Golden that, after wrestling in Georgia, he would defeat Dick Slater for the NWA Southeastern title in Knoxville Tennessee on December 1st, 1979.
After losing the title on Christmas Day to Bob Armstrong, Golden would depart from the area and head to the WWWF under the management of "Classy" Freddie Blassie, targeting Bob Backlund and Andre the Giant. Andre and Hogan would meet in several high-profile bouts on August 9th, 1980 on the undercard to the Bruno Sammartino/Larry Zbyszko cage match at Shea Stadium.
For the first (but not the last) time in Hogan's career, Hollywood would come calling, and he found himself cast as "Thunderlips", a champion wrestler, in Rocky III. The move to Hollywood, however, cost him his job in the WWWF...at least for now, as Vince McMahon Sr. fired him.
When Hogan returned to the ring in 1981, it would not be in the WWWF but for Verne Gagne's American Wrestling Association. Although initially a heel, as he had been in the WWWF, Hogan quickly became a face and was lined up for title matches against Nick Bockwinkle, who was managed by frequent Hogan foe, Bobby "the Brain" Heenan. Although Hogan was so over that his being cheated out of a title win nearly sparked riots (such as the aftermath of a NO-DQ win on April 24th, 1983), Gagne never consented to put the AWA World title on this rising superstar.
Hogan would still win titles, but in Japan where on June 2nd, 1983, he defeated Antonio Inoki to become the very first IWGP Champion. It was in Japan that Hogan told Gagne that he was leaving the AWA to return to the WWWF (or the WWF as it was known by then).
Introduced to the WWF fans as Bob Backlund's tag team partner during a match against the Samoans, Hogan quickly replaced Backlund in the hunt to dethrone new WWF Champion the Iron Sheik. On January 23rd, 1984, it took Hogan a little over five minutes to defeat the Sheik in Madison Square Gardens to win the WWF Championship.
With Hogan in place as the new WWF Champion and the phenomenon of Hulkamania running wild, WWF promoter Vince McMahon set into motion a series of events that would take Hogan and the WWF to the forefront of mainstream pop culture. Teaming Hogan up with A-Team star Mr. T, Hogan would headline the very first Wrestlemania against "Rowdy" Roddy Piper and Paul Orndorff in an event that included such celebrities as Liberace, Billy Martin and Cyndi Lauper, among others.
In the build-up to Wrestlemania, Hogan would make the talk show circuit, appearing with Mr. T on Saturday Night Live as well as the Richard Belzer Show. Belzer would suffer injuries when Hogan demonstrated a front facelock. Belzer passed out and then, when Hogan released the hold, fell to the ground, hitting his head on a table on the way down.
Hogan's feud with Piper would continue for months to come, including a World title match at the Wrestling Classic, the WWF's first pay-per-view. Hogan would also face Big John Studd, Greg Valentine and Don Muraco. Meanwhile, Hulkamania began to grow even larger. Hogan was the focus of a cartoon show, entitled Hulk Hogan's Rock and Wrestling, appeared on the A-Team and became the first pro wrestler to grace the cover of Sports Illustrated.
It was a title defense against Muraco during the taping of Saturday Night's Main Event that Hogan was attacked by King Kong Bundy. The story was that Bundy injured Hogan's ribs, putting him at a disadvantage for the ensuing cage match at Wrestlemania II. Hogan would still climb out of the cage and retain the title against Bundy.
Following Wrestlemania II, Hogan began teaming with Paul Orndorff. But following a televised match against Bundy and Studd, Orndorff attacked Hogan, and the pair battled for the rest of the year, including a bout at Toronto's CNE Stadium in front of more than 60 000 people.
As 1987 began, Hogan found himself challenged by another former friend, Andre the Giant, who had taken Bobby Heenan as his manager and demanded a title shot. Andre would get his shot against Hogan at Wrestlemania III, at the Pontiac Silverdome. In front of an announced crowd of 93,173, Hogan bodyslammed and pinned Andre. But Hogan wasn't rid of Andre yet as the pair captained opposing teams at the first Survivor Series in November, 1987.
Hogan's first World title reign would finally come to an end on national television, as NBC broadcast "The Main Event" in prime time in February, 1988. Andre, now managed by Ted Dibiase, would pin Hogan, thanks to a crooked referee. The title was declared vacant when Andre tried to sell the title to Dibiase, and he and Hogan met yet again, battling to a draw in the second round of the WWE title tournament at Wrestlemania IV.
Hogan would depart wrestling to film No Holds Barred during the summer of 1988, returning to team with Randy Savage at Summerslam 88 against Andre and Dibiase. Hogan and Savage would also team at the 1988 Survivor Series. However, over the next few months, the team of Hogan and Savage would begin to disintegrate. After Hogan accidentally eliminated Savage at the 1989 Royal Rumble, tempers flared, and when Hogan left Savage during a tag match during the Main Event in February to attend to an injured Elizabeth, the Mega Powers exploded, leading to a World title match between Hogan and Savage at Wrestlemania V.
Hogan defeated Savage to regain the Championship but would have to continue to battle Savage for months. With the release of No Holds Barred in the summer of 1989, Savage would gain an ally in Zeus (Tiny Lister's character). Zeus and Savage would team to take on Hogan and his partner Brutus "the Barber" Beefcake at Summerslam 89 as well as in a cage match at No Holds Barred: the Match, the Movie pay-per-view that aired in December 1989.
Hogan came out victorious at the 1990 Royal Rumble but in doing so helped to eliminate the Ultimate Warrior whose popularity was beginning to rival Hogan's. After several altercations, the two met at Wrestlemania VI, from Toronto's Skydome. The Warrior defeated Hogan to become champion. A few weeks later, Hogan was seemingly injured at the hands of Earthquake and was gone for the summer of 1990, returning to defeat the Earthquake at SummerSlam 90.
For the rest of 1990 and into 1991, Hogan was aligned with the Ultimate Warrior although most expected Wrestlemania VII to be a rematch between the two. That changed when the Warrior dropped the title to Sgt. Slaughter at the 1991 Royal Rumble and Hogan was named the Number One contender. Hogan met and defeated Slaughter at Wrestlemania VII.
Hogan's third reign as WWE Champion lasted until the Survivor Series when the Undertaker defeated him, thanks to the interference of Ric Flair. The subsequent rematch (at This Tuesday In Texas) caused the title to be held up, and decided by the 1992 Royal Rumble. Hogan lasted until the very end, only to be eliminated by his supposed friend, Sid Justice. Hogan and Justice battled at Wrestlemania VIII, with talk that Hogan would retire after the match.
At approximately the same time that Hogan was disappearing from the WWE scene, the steroid scandal was beginning. Many wrestlers, including Superstar Billy Graham and David Schultz, claimed that Hogan had taken steroids, something Hogan denied during an appearance on the Arsenio Hall show.
Hogan would return to the WWE in early 1993 to aid his friend Brutus Beefcake in getting revenge against Money Inc. (Irwin R. Schyster and Ted Dibiase), challenging them to a tag team title match at Wrestlemania IX. Hogan showed up to the event with a black eye. The WWE explained it away that by saying Money Inc had attacked him during a workout but rumours persisted that Randy Savage punched him over suspicions over Hogan's relationship with Elizabeth.
Although Hogan and Beefcake would lose by disqualification to IRS and Dibiase, Hogan's night was not through. After Yokozuna defeated Bret Hart for the WWE Championship, Hogan rushed to ringside and accepted a challenge from Mr. Fuji for the title. Fuji's attempt to throw salt in the eyes of Hogan backfired, as the salt hit Yokozuna, allowing Hogan to gain the pinfall and another WWE title.
Rather than drop the belt to Bret Hart, Hogan's reign came to an end with a loss to Yokozuna at King of the Ring two months later. By then, Hogan was more interested, it seemed, in his new television show Thunder in Paradise.
Hogan went to Japan for a while, defeating Tatsumi Fujinami at the Eggdome in Tokyo to start off 1994. Hogan would return to the national spotlight by testifying on behalf of the federal government in the steroid scandal. Hogan would admit to using steroids but said that he had done so on his own accord, helping to clear Vince McMahon.
In June 1994, Hogan would sign with Ted Turner's WCW and in his first match in WCW at Bash at the Beach in July, with Shaquille O'Neal in his corner, would defeat Ric Flair to win the WCW World Championship. Flair and Hogan would meet again, in a steel cage match with Hogan "retiring" Flair at Halloween Havoc. Hogan would then feud with Kevin Sullivan's Dungeon of Doom and face his former friend Brutus Beefcake at Starrcade 94.
1995 saw Hogan feud with Vader, a reinstated Ric Flair and the Giant (later known as the Big Show) and main evented the very first broadcast of Monday Nitro, on September 4th, 1995, when he defeated Big Bubba Rogers. At Halloween Havoc, Hogan lost via disqualification to the Giant. However, due to Hogan's then-manager Jimmy Hart signing a contract that allowed the World title to change hands on a DQ, the Giant left as the World Champion. The World title was later held up, but interference from the Giant left Hogan out in the cold again, as Randy Savage filled won the World War III battle royale to fill the vacancy.
With the arrival of the Outsiders (Scott Hall and Kevin Nash) in the spring of 1996, Hogan was strangely absent from WCW. During a six-man tag team match that pitted Hall and Nash and a mystery partner against Randy Savage, Sting and Lex Luger at Bash at the Beach, Hogan came to ringside and many believed it was to take the place of the injured Luger. A leg drop to Savage ended that speculation. After the match, Hogan announced the formation of the New World Order or NWO.
On August 10, 1996, the New World Order struck gold as Hollywood Hulk Hogan (as he was now being billed) defeated the Giant in Sturgis, SD, to regain the WCW World Championship as part of the Road Wild pay-per-view. With the World title around his waist, Hogan and the rest of his NWO cohorts would take the battle to every other member of the WCW roster, including Ric Flair, Randy Savage, Lex Luger, the Giant and even "Rowdy" Roddy Piper, who battled and defeated Hogan in a non-title cage match at Starrcade '96.
After teasing that Sting had joined the NWO in late 1996, Hogan had to keep looking over his shoulder as 1997 progressed. Meanwhile, he would team with basketball superstar Dennis Rodman to take on Lex Luger and the Giant at 1997's Bash at the Beach. Luger would also temporarily derail Hogan's run as champion, defeating him on Nitro in August. Five days later, however, Hogan would walk out of Road Wild as champion, much as he had a year previous.
As the year came to a close, however, the issue with Sting came to a head and finally, at Starrcade '97, Hogan and Sting met in what should have been a stellar blow-off to the feud that was over a year in the making instead was mired in controversy. The pinfall Hogan made on Sting was little out of the ordinary, hardly the result most fans were looking for, and then WCW newcomer, Bret Hart (a referee for the Eric Bischoff-Larry Zbyszko match) rushed to the ring, restarted the match and eventually counted the pinfall on Sting.
Hogan's attempt to regain the title from Sting ended in failure at Uncensored in 1998. Instead, Hogan would defeat former NWO member, Randy Savage, to regain the title on Nitro on April 20, 1998. After losing the belt to the up-and-coming Goldberg, Hogan switched his focus to feuding with Diamond Dallas Page. Hogan would reteam with Dennis Rodman to defeat Page and basketball star Karl Malone at Bash at the Beach, but, teaming with NWO head Eric Bischoff, would lose to Page and talk show host Jay Leno.
Just when Hogan thought it was safe, however, came the return of the Warrior. Warrior began to play mind games with Hogan, kidnapping "the Disciple" (formerly Brutus Beefcake) and forming OWN (One Warrior Nation). Hogan finally met and (with the help of nephew Horace Hogan) defeated the Warrior at Halloween Havoc to avenge his Wrestlemania VI loss.
On Thanksgiving Day, 1998, Hogan appeared on Jay Leno to announce his retirement from pro wrestling to make a run at the White House in 2002. Rumours also abounded that Hogan was on the verge of creating his own wrestling organization. But the retirement would last just over a month and end at the first Nitro in 1999 when Hogan would regain the WCW World title from Kevin Nash after the infamous "finger poke of doom".
With Hogan back as champion, his first major challenge was from Ric Flair, who had become the "president" of WCW. The two met at SuperBrawl and then at Uncensored, with Flair defeating Hogan in a "first blood" match, although referee Charles Robinson allowed the match to be decided by a submission via Flair's figure four leglock.
It would be another figure four leglock, this one from Diamond Dallas Page at Spring Stampede, that would provide the cover story for Hogan's departure from wrestling in the spring and summer of 1999 while he had knee surgery and worked his way back into shape. Hogan returned in July and quickly defeated Randy Savage for the WCW World title with the help of Kevin Nash.
But it would be Nash who would challenge Hogan for the title, resulting in a "Loser Leaves Town World Title Match" at Road Wild. Hogan won and retained the title and also returned to the red and yellow colours of Hulkamania. In a reversal of events from three years before, Hogan had to convince Sting that he had not returned to the NWO but Sting turned on Hogan during their World title match at Fall Brawl, winning the title.
Hogan's battle against Team Package (Lex Luger and Ric Flair) raged as 2000 began but came to an abrupt halt with the "reset" of WCW in April 2000. Hogan, a part of the Millionaire's Club, battled Billy Kidman, who was aided by Eric Bischoff. Hogan, however, got wins over Kidman at Slamboree and Bash at the Beach 2000, the latter of which earned him a title shot atthe Great American Bash.
At Bash at the Beach, WCW Champion Jeff Jarrett laid down for Hogan, who simply had to put his foot on Jarrett to win. But Hogan, upset at this turn of events, walked out on WCW, with booker Vince Russo cutting what is believed to be a "shoot" promo, condemning Hogan and giving the title back to Jarrett. Hogan would later file a lawsuit against Russo over the match and the promo.
Hogan spent most of 2001 on the sidelines, getting involved with Acclaim's Legends of Wrestling video game to become their spokesperson. His most high-profile in-ring activity was to defeat Curt Hennig at the XWF TV tapings in Orlando, Florida in November 2001.
With Randy Orton becoming infatuated with daughter Brooke and challenging Hogan and later attacking him, the Hulkster would return for "One More Match", again at SummerSlam. And again, Hogan came out victorious!
Few expect Hogan not to return again for "one more match", but even when Hogan does finally hung up his boots, he has long ago established himself as one of the legends in the world of professional wrestling. Critics may question his in-ring ability or criticize his penchant for using his "creative control" but no one can deny that Hogan's charismatic persona has taken him a long way.
-- compiled by John Milner


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But I doubt it.
I've actually been reading Framed almost since the beginning, but I stopped like a year and a half ago. I re-read the archives over the course of Christmas break, and remembered how great this strip is, probably my favorite ever, but I do have a few questions.
1. How long will this current schedule of updates last? The schedule has been really junky as of late, and it seems as though things may have actually settled down.
2. Why is there no Keenspot message board? I think that if there were a few keenspot plugs and such this board might start moving again.
3. Will the great escape ever be re-archived? I realize that this probably will never happen, but I find it incredibly sad that one of the greatest undertakings in the history of comics should be lost entirely. Maybe if we contacted all of the artists involved or known people from their fanbases?
Yeah, this will probably never even get read, but here's hoping. 8)


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Important Note from West Coast Paintball Players League:Team Captains - The divisions are limited and therefore the first registered teams to pay get's to play. All players are required to pay the registration fee (exceptions are Staff and Media ONLY). Please note that everyone added to a roster MUST have a passport / driver's license style headshot (photo) uploaded to their APPA accounts prior to the event. During check-in at the event, a valid ID is required in order to participate. We reserve the right to refuse service to anyone. Unauthorized distribution of soliciting material during the event is prohibited by the promoter and/or field owner which will result in the immediate removal of the individual(s) from the premises.
Note: Only PAID teams can view player contact information.
Tip: Players log in with their player ID number and password. Administrators log in with their administrator account name and password. New players should use the menu items above. New leagues should contact PBLI at email@example.com
Please enter your log-in information:


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LITTLE ROCK — The state Supreme Court on Thursday upheld a circuit judge's decision to grant class-action status to a lawsuit alleging that online travel companies are not paying their fair share of taxes to cities and counties.
LITTLE ROCK — The state Supreme Court on Thursday upheld a circuit judge's decision to grant class-action status to a lawsuit alleging that online travel companies are not paying their fair share of taxes to cities and counties.
The high court issued the ruling in a lawsuit filed by the Pine Bluff Advertising and Promotion Commission and the city of North Little Rock on behalf of all similarly situated commissions, cities and counties.
The suit alleges that Hotels.com, Expedia, Orbitz, Travelocity and other similar companies typically acquire rooms from hotels at discounted rates, then charge higher rates to customer who book rooms through the companies' websites and collect taxes from the customers based on those higher rates. The companies then pay cities and counties taxes based on the lower, discounted rates and pocket the difference in violation of Arkansas law, the plaintiffs claim.
In oral arguments before the Supreme Court last week, an attorney for the companies argued that the plaintiffs should have been required to exhaust every administrative remedy before taking the companies to court and that every A&P commission, city and county with a complaint should make its case separately.
Arkansas' highest court rejected the argument in a unanimous decision Thursday.
"This court requires exhaustion of administrative remedies before resorting to an action for declaratory judgment," Justice Paul Danielson wrote in the opinion. "In this case, however, it is evident that there was no adequate administrative remedy available."
The companies argued that under the Arkansas Tax Procedure Act, tax complaints must be made to the state Department of Finance and Administration.
The court said Thursday the act "provides a remedy solely to a taxpayer" and not to an A&P commission, city or county.
The companies also argued that many differences exist between hotel-tax ordinances across the state, so different entities would have different claims and therefore class-action status is not appropriate.
The Supreme Court said that while individual ordinances may vary, they all are derived from the same state laws allowing the levying of hotel taxes. The question of whether the companies' practices are subject to those laws is "an overarching issue," the court said.
"As we have said time and time again, the mere fact that individual issues or defenses may be raised regarding the recovery of individual class members cannot defeat class certification where there are common questions that must be resolved for call class members," Danielson wrote in the opinion.


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Train Le Havre → Lyon
Duration 4h36 - From €64
- Arrival station : Lyon part dieu (5, Place Charles Béraudier 69003 Lyon)
Lyon perrache (14, cours de Verdun 69286 Lyon cedex 02)
Le Havre, a nice northern French city which name means "the haven"… Le Havre is located in North Western France, between the English Channel and the Seine river estuary. In the region of Normandy, which was an inspiration for many impressionist artists. Learn more about Le Havre
Lyon, the culinary capital of France
Lyon, the capital of French gastronomy Proud of its history – Lyon was once the capital of the Gauls – the city offers an original trip back in time and through cultures. Gastronomy, culture, fêtes, nature, silk, light... you name it! Lyon has it! Besides being known for its culinary and architectural heritage, Lyon is also renowned for its effervescent cultural scene. The most appealing event of the city is the Festival of Lights, which takes place during four nights in December. Learn more about Lyon
Book your journey from Le Havre to Lyon From €64 €98
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Today was our first real day in Malta. I was so excited to be here that I couldn't sleep and found myself lying awake at 5 am.
I met up with Erin and all the paleontologists (David Temple, Dr. Robert Bakker, Tim Quarls, Mark Thompson, Sue Frary, and Kathy Zoehlfeld) at the early hour of 6:30 for breakfast, and then we headed on over to the dig site. It's about thirty minutes away from Malta, and is the location where the dinosaurs Leonardo, Peanut, and Roberta were found.
Mark and Tim led the way across the ranch, our three cars kicking up dust as we traversed thousands of acres of farmland. We wove up hills and down ravines, slowly following a narrow path that was often blocked by cows. After spending another half hour crossing the ranch, we finally arrived at our first destination, a dig site called 442. We loaded our pockets with water and sunscreen and walked the rest of the way.
Mark and Steven check out the
We had been hiking for about ten minutes when Mark stopped me and pointed out a dinosaur bone to me. It was small and laying at the base of a hill. To be honest, it looked a little bit like a rock to me. It was a small fragment, no bigger then half my pinky. The bone had been weathered, and what was left was mostly bone marrow. Mark pointed out several more near by fragments, so I could get an idea of what I was looking for.
Then the group split up to start searching the nearby area. I started by scrambling up the narrow ledges to the top of a hill. I searched for nearly a half hour without finding anything of value. However, at the top of one hill, just below a jutting rock, I found a fragment that I thought might be bone. It was small, about the length of my thumb but a little skinnier. It looked a little like petrified wood.
I saw several of these pieces lying around, so I mentally noted the spot and went back to find David. He told me that I had found a piece of a dinosaur rib! I excitedly went to go show Mark, who was gathering everyone else in order to move to another site. However, I showed him my rib and told him that there were several more pieces at the site. He followed me back to the location, and began to look around.
He immediately noticed the ribs lying on the ground, and found several other bone fragments near by. He then found something really exciting. Jutting out from the rock was a gigantic dinosaur shoulder blade! He also showed me a few other bones visible in the rock as well as a few tendons. He called over the other paleontologists and we began a more extensive search, finding several pieces of bone fragments scattered down the side of the hill.
Bakker then told me to clear my head, and think of two syllables, and informed me that that would become the name of the site. I had no time to think, but the first name that popped into my head was Marco. I was thinking of the explorer Marco Polo.
I have named a dig site. I have found pieces to a dinosaur, a baby duckbill dinosaur to be precise. And tomorrow, the rest of the team and I will return to the dig site to dig up the rock that the shoulder blade was in and see if we can find more of Marco.
(Just a note: We got lots of great photos today, but due to technical difficulties,
we'll have to upload them in the morning. Be sure to check back – it is amazingly beautiful here. UPDATE: Here are a few more photos)
Some of the first bone fragments
Steven and Bakker examine the Marco Site


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We are pleased to announce that we are assisting Virginia Industries for the Blind (VIB) with their strategic planning effort.
VIB is is a division of the Virginia Department for the Blind and Vision Impaired (DBVI), and provides employment opportuniities for Virginians who are blind or visually impaired in two manufacturing plants, eleven base supply stores, and six service locations. They have diverse contracts with federal agencies through the AbilityOne Program (e.g., contract management and closeout services for the U. S. Army), contracts through State Agency agreements such as the Virginia Court Debt Collection Office, the Department of Motor Vehicles, and the Virginia Employment Commission, and manufacture items as diverse as mattresses for the U. S. Navy and state colleges and universities and reflective vests for the Virginia Department of Trnsportation.
Given the improvements in assistive technology and more ambitious expectations of young people who are blind and people who lose their sight after gaining work experience, VIB is exploring ways to attract workers who are looking for more than traditional product manufacturing. In fact, some of VIB's experienced contract closeout employees have already been hired by the government, which is quite a successful outcome for those people.
We look forward to helping VIB plan the modernization of its business to meet the evolving needs of people who are blind or vision impaired.


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Impact of Voter Photo ID on SVRS
Impact of Voter Photo ID on SVRS from Wis. Govt. Accountability Board on Vimeo.
To download this video for later viewing, go to the Vimeo website and use the Download button.
Webinar Downloading Instructions
1. Click the link above, which will take you to the Vimeo website.
2. Click the 'Download' button that appears below the video.
3. Choose the "SD.MP4" file option and right-click on that link.
4. Another little menu will pop up. If you're a Windows user, choose 'Save as' or 'Save target as'. Save the file to your desktop or somewhere else on your computer where you store saved files. (If you're a Mac user, hold down the Control key and click the link, then choose 'Save link as' or 'Download linked file'.)