text:
(Non) Credo
I do not believe that the point of history is to seek the 'truth', at least as usually conceived. Nor do I think that historical research is capable of recovering such a thing even if it were its purpose. As I have said repeatedly on this blog, the purpose of history (as opposed to chronicling and antiquarianism) goes far beyond the establishment of things that did or did not happen (politically useful though those limited objectives might sometimes be), which nevertheless remain the (not always easily-established) base upon which the practice of History itself takes place. As I think I have said before, the base of much physics is mathematics, but that does not mean that theoretical physics reduces to maths.
The 1990s saw a number of debates about the nature of Truth, sometimes referred to collectively as 'The Truth Wars'. One of the less intellectually-improving skirmishes around the edge of this cultural moment concerned 'postmodern history', specifically the publication of Re-Thinking History by Keith Jenkins, and various responses to it. This book occasioned a flurry of books by Jenkins and his acolytes (most notably Jenkins' side-kick Alun Munslow, who must rank as the most un-self-conscious sycophant in the recent, or possibly the entire, history of the discipline) and a journal of Re-Thinking History.
One of the reasons why this book continues to have its doleful influence is that most of the responses to it were very weak, especially Richard Evans' In Defence of History. Evans sought to defend history from an 'onslaught' of postmodernist critiques, although it is very strongly suggested by the book's argument and footnotes that Evans had read, first-hand, hardly any at all of the works of hardly any at all (beyond some Foucault) of the philosophers whom he bracketed as being at the root of this onslaught, much less understood them. Indeed, there are some reasons to suppose he had not read some of the 'postmodern' critical articles that he did cite (at least in their entirety). You might ponder that that was a pretty serious (and ironic) flaw in a book trumpeting the virtues of empirical research amongst the documents, but there we are.
Be all that as it may, one argument (amongst other ad hominem critiques) was to attack Jenkins for not being 'a proper historian'. There are, to be sure, points where some better-founded knowledge – not necessarily first-hand experience – of how historians go about their research would have saved Jenkins from some misunderstandings. But whether or not Jenkins is an historian, a 'working historian', a 'proper historian' or whatever, misses the point. Do you need to be a painter to theorise about aesthetics? Do you need to be a practising scientist to think about the philosophy of science? If the issue is epistemology, the status of historians' truth-claims, of course you don't need to be someone who actually researches and publishes about the past. Jenkins took his stand as a philosopher of history, not as an historian.
Another response to Jenkins was the glib one often thrown at 'postmodernists', that goes: 'aha: you say that all arguments are positioned and their authority only relative, so your argument must be, too!' To which I assume that Jenkins would reply 'Erm, well, yes. That is kind of the point.' [Although it would be somewhat undermined by his later claims to have 'won' the debate.] The argument that there is no single objective truth is not some version of the Cretan (or Epimenides'] Paradox which is rendered false by being true or vice versa: e.g. 'all statements are lies'.
Critiques which started (or derived authority) from the position of being 'a working historian', saying – in effect – that is not how we do it would find it difficult to really land an effective blow as, rightly or wrongly, they could themselves be dismissed as positioned, self-interested defences of the status quo.
Thus attacks on the book from without – that is to say critiques of the degree of fit between its arguments and the external object of the practice of history – tended to be deflected and were indecisive. We can more effectively critique it from within, by studying its own arguments. Such a critique will reveal that it is a patchwork of straw men, category errors, muddle and self-contradictions that actually collapses from the inside. Furthermore, its author seems not even to have understood the ideas of the authorities he uses as the basis of his argument. In short, the weaknesses of Re-Thinking History lie not in its author not being 'a proper (or 'working') historian' or in it, as a book, supposedly not being good history but in the fact that it is a shockingly bad piece of philosophy. And I say that – let's be clear – without (unlike Jenkins) claiming to be any sort of trained or qualified philosopher.
There are valid points of critique within the book. Historians are very often un-self-conscious about what they do. And it is true that a lot of history goes on being entirely unreflexive about what it does or why. I would say (I've said it before) that the discipline is complacent, and that it has no clear idea of what it is there for. Books published in 2009 still claim that history is about a verifiable search for truth, and so on. These are all areas where History does need to be called out. In this sense Re-Thinking History and the similarly weak books that poured forth in its wake have had a negative effect. It remains on many historiography courses (like ours) but I suspect as a kind of straw man, almost as a false-flag operation by traditionalist positivist empiricists. It is so bad that Evans (vel sim) can be deployed as riding to the rescue of beleaguered Klio with all his easy humour, bonhomie and good old common sense and all can go on as before. Phew! Hurrah! Re-Thinking History can be deployed as a smoke-screen to mask rather better work (often pre-dating its publication) with better and more germane critiques of the discipline. So here is my critique, from a position of someone who has tried to write self-reflexive history for over twenty years and who does believe that (more or less) plausible, (more or less) patchy and (always) incomplete re-descriptions of the past (as it impinged upon the people who produced its traces) are possible but who also thinks that that is not ultimately the purpose of history, who doesn't think that 'truth' is (or can be) attainable and who believes that history, narratives and so on are present constructions which are not imposed by the past as it was lived.[1] In other words, if anyone ought to have been at least vaguely sympathetic to Jenkins, it was me, but I'm not.
So the point in this piece is to provide a brief (roughly a page and a half) but fair summary of the text, which will save students having to read it, and a detailed critique that will provide them with the arguments they need to dismantle it on its own terms. But, that critique is not one which will let traditional positive empiricism or current complacent historical practice off the hook. If that looks like a rather naughty way of undermining everyone's seminars on 'postmodern history',[2] that is because it is. If we drop Re-thinking History and the drivel it inspired from our historiography courses we can forget the whole sorry episode (or at least look back with embarrassment, roll our eyes and ask 'wtf?') and clear the way for some more rigorous questioning of, and self-reflexivity about, the practice of history. Students: read, use freely, and share widely!
The argument
First of all, though, a basic summary of the argument. Within the constraints of space, I will strive to make this a fair account.
In Chapter 1 (What History Is: pp.6-32), J argues that History is not in itself The Past. As a result, it cannot provide an objective account or recreation of the Past. History is and can only be a discourse. The historian's view is conditioned by his/her time, social background, institutional position. History is about stories, but the past comes down to us as stories (p.11) so there is no way of breaking out of a linguistic 'bind'. Language always supports multiple readings. It is always the historian's personal construct and the choices of topic, the kinds of evidence or the weight assigned to different pieces of evidence is governed by this. History is given shape by the historian. So history is something that is made at particular points in time and space and 'imprisoned' by that fact, rather than something that is, and is reachable, 'out there'. Consequently, all histories are logically equivalent and one cannot be chosen over another on the grounds of 'correspondence' with the objective truth of history. 'Everything is relative (historicist)' (p.30). The only way one history gains ground over another is through the operation of power. Some discourses are dominant, others subordinate. The truth claims of academic history stem only from universities' position as the guardians of ideological control. Consensus only occurs, says J, where dominant voices silence the others (p.23). All accounts are relative and problematic (p.30). J argues that this is empowering: history can be whatever you want. But also, not being able to judge between histories on account of 'correspondence' is not entirely disabling: to understand different histories you have to analyse the power relations in which they are enmeshed. You should ask not 'what history is' but 'who history is for'.
Chapter 2 (On Some Questions and Some Answers: pp.33-69)
In this chapter J discusses a number of key issues in historical research, beginning with 'truth' (pp.34-39). In this section he argues essentially that the desire for truth is a sort of basic psychological need and that we fear being cut off from this. Using a discussion by Foucault of a passage from Borges about a Chinese encyclopaedia with strange categories,[3] he suggests that we abandon what we think of as objective categories and embrace uncertainty. The connection between word and world is arbitrary he claims, using various thinkers including Derrida. Truths are just 'useful fictions' (p.39).
Moving onto the issue of facts (pp.40-44), J says that Historians are concerned with more than discrete facts. They combine them into arguments and think that the resultant arguments/interpretations are true. This is because they think that facts render arguments true/accurate. He cites an article by Skidelsky claiming that interpretation only exists peripherally around a core of accepted factual knowledge. J then points out that the ideas of 'centres' (like that factual core) cannot be seen as other than contingent, placed on a sliding spectrum. J moves on to some fairly unremarkable comments on 'bias' (pp.44-47), concluding that because they see their centre position as objective, empiricists see bias as something only affecting others, although they cannot be unbiased themselves.
On that basis J moves on to spend ten pages (pp.47-57) on empathy, in which he decries the attempt to try and think yourself into a past world in order to understand and explain. Philosophers like Wittgenstein have discussed the problem of 'other minds' and how difficult it is to know how someone else feels, so how much more difficult must this be with other periods and places? People in the past were different from us (p.56). J argues that the attempt to think yourself into the past is an attempt to colonise the past with modern bourgeois, liberal, capitalist attitudes. So, as with the attempt to portray an objective empiricist view as a neutral centre, this would seem to argue that empathy is an attempt to show certain modes of thought as transcendent and normal [at least that is how I understand the argument to go].
The discussion of sources (pp.57-53) develops the main thrust of the argument to claim that evidence is only used to support arguments, and so is not itself free from the discourse. The past happened and it leaves traces which exist whether we look at/for them or not, but these traces only become evidence when used in a positioned way to support an argument. Citing Roland Barthes (pp.60-61), J states that what history is inevitably only a copy, in discourse, of something that exists in the 'Real' but which cannot be captured independently of discourse.
The section on causation essentially repeats the point made already that issues like causation etc. cannot be a fact, or 'true', and argues that one interpretation only wins out over another because of strategies of discourse of which academic historians are the guardians. In the conclusion to the chapter (pp.66-69), J says he thinks that relativism and scepticism are a basis for social toleration, using a lengthy quote from Hayden White to support the point.
Chapter 3: (Doing History in a post-modern world: pp.70-84)
This chapter begins with J's definition of post-modernism. All the old gods, the old certainties, have turned out to have feet of clay, to be temporary fictions. He moves on to give a lengthy (pp.72-75) [historical] account of how this happened. The 'dominant underlying presuppositions of 'our times'' are provided by scepticism, he says, and bolsters this with a discussion of Richard Rorty's pragmatism. The bonus, in J's view, is that there are now myriad forms of history to be used or abused and only some ill-defined figures [presumably academics in old universities: it's not clear] control the bounds of what is 'proper history'. Some 'brilliant histories' are marginalised because they are unpalatable to these people (p.79). But new histories can still be found, that have been hidden away. Our approach must be to deconstruct and historicise historical accounts. 'Always historicise', urges J (p.82). So the purpose of history is to help us 'understand the world we live in and the forms of history that have both helped to produce it and which it has produced' (p.83).
A Critique
Let us assume, on the basis of its essential thesis, that the book's claim to be taken seriously stands or falls on the basis of the coherence of its argument. Critique based upon its degree of 'fit' with an external reality ('how the practice of history is') can be shrugged off according to the book's points about either the 'situated-ness' of the critique or the vested power-interests of the critic (or MRDA[4]: '[you] would [say that] wouldn't [you]'). The 'correctness' or otherwise of the use of authorities is a similarly insecure point from which to critique the book, given the argument made (rightly or wrongly) about the infinite readings of text. Any such criticisms have to be secondary.
A: Straw Men?
In some ways this is a minor point but it is worth asking yourself, as reader, how convinced you are about the reality of the ostensible target of Re-Thinking History. How many actual historians are cited? And how recent are they? E.H. Carr and Geoffrey Elton are frequently cited: their books on what history is/was were twenty-four to twenty-seven years old when Re-Thinking History was published. Arthur Marwick's was twenty-one and Thompson's The Poverty of Theory a mere whipper-snapper of a book at only thirteen years old. A trawl through the footnotes provides very few traces of any engagement with (then) recent thinking by historians (say, less than ten years old in 1991). Is J setting up a straw man to knock the stuffing out of just for his own self-aggrandizement as, one might suspect, might be the book's own question turned on itself? The point is that the book does not make the case very convincingly that it is engaging with a current topic/debate.[5] Maybe it does; maybe it doesn't. The text itself leaves you with room for serious doubt.
B: Category errors
The next heading under which I want to group my critical points concerns areas where it is simply not clear what J is actually talking about, as the target of his critique seems to slide about between analytically different things, suggesting, at best, some pretty muddled thinking.
J is frequently unclear when it comes to discussing the related network of concepts, truth/fact/interpretation. See pp.14-15, where J slides from a discussion of events to one of hypotheses and interpretation. At the top of p.14 he argues that a historical account cannot be checked against the past but only against other accounts. And yet later (p.40) he is happy enough that events – 'discrete facts' (how discrete if, as p.14, already enmeshed in discourse as 'accounts'?) – exist. Later still (p.60) he says that traces of the past exist whether or not we look at them (and so are, equally, fundamentally independent of modern constructs). Thus Jenkins is happy to accept the independent existence of traces of the past and the possibility of establishing 'discrete facts' (which surely would be the basis of even the most traditional historical research), yet he seems to want us to believe that we cannot check a historian's account against anything other than other historians' accounts (p.14).[6] He does this essentially by a sleight of hand that puts interpretation and hypothesis in a supposedly-claimed category of fact/truth. Of course, interpretation, hypothesis and causation cannot lie in the realms of fact or of truth/falsehood. But interpretation and hypothesis can be judged (not as true/false but as more or less plausible) according to their degree of fit with J's own categories of 'discrete fact' and 'trace'. This is a more serious flaw than simply setting up a straw man. All this relates to what 'truth' it might be that J is discussing. Is it a 'true picture', i.e. this did or did not happen to these/those people in this/that order? Or is it some sort of more transcendent order of truth?
Here, J is not alone as this is a problem that bedevils discussions of historical truth. It is this muddle that allows people to argue that so-called postmodernism in history permits, in and of itself, holocaust denial. No philosopher of whom I am aware, amongst those grouped (usually wrongly) under the heading of postmodernist – and especially not Derrida – would deny that the holocaust happened, or that it and its details are empirically true and indeed verifiable via the sorts of procedures used by, e.g., Deborah Lipstadt or Richard Evans. But equally no historian would argue that there is a single true story of the holocaust. And what is the truth of the holocaust beyond that (or beyond the obvious point that it was a very Bad Thing)? That is the level of truth that most of those philosophers are dealing with if and when they say that truth is unreachable.
Essentially J's argument is based upon his own assumption that interpretations can - ideally - be true. His argument for the 'logical' (rarely has the word logical been used so frequently and with so little irony) relativism of history (contra, e.g. Geoffrey Elton) is essentially that 'true' explanations of the past cannot be reached. Put another way, History = X; therefore, if X is impossible, History is also impossible. But, if you don't agree that History is X in the first place (because, say, you never thought that history was about [or capable of] establishing true/false distinctions in interpretation/hypothesis/causation), then the question of the possibility/impossibility of History remains open. Ultimately, J's argument is only possible because he has accepted (and shares) Elton's ideal of what history is; they just differ on whether that ideal is attainable (though see below). He bolsters his argument only with a quote by Robert Skidelsky in a piece in the TES, which raises a series of further questions. Essentially, what J comes close (on p.13) to realising but ultimately fails to grasp is that what he sees as history's impossibility is its very condition of possibility in the first place.
A similar and related problem arises in J's discussion of the concepts evidence/source/trace. Exactly what is he talking about when he discusses the material with which historians work? Early in the book, he says that the evidence for the past comes always-already in the form of stories. But is that always the case? He says that the past leaves traces (as we have seen) which can be left undiscovered. If that is so, how (at least on the first occasion it is encountered and used) can such a trace come ready-made in a story? The trace/evidence distinction (between traces of the past and evidence used in support of an argument) is well made but is only, to all intents and purposes, a slight reworking of Carr's fact/evidence distinction from 1964. But note how the subject of the discussion slides about between the categories of trace and evidence. Sometimes, in other words, he is treating 'traces' as 'evidence' and vice versa.
C: Confusion
What kind of history?
Ask yourself what sort of history J thinks he is talking about in his critique. Does he know? I do not mean the difference between a right-wing imperialist, a socialist, a feminist or a postcolonial history of the same events (say the Great Bengal Famine of the 1940s), but the different thematic varieties of history. It seems to me from the text that J is envisaging narrative political history alone as constituting the 'history' that he is putatively re-thinking. But how would the same critiques apply to other types of history (intellectual history, say, or the history of mentalities, both of which relate to my meta-critique, E, below)?
Discourse, Power and Relativism
J seems to me to be pretty crucially muddled about discourse and the operation of power. For now we must leave aside the issue of whether that is how things work in practice (for what it's worth, I think J's view is so unidimensional as to be little more than caricature, but we can bracket that). How well does the concept work within his argument? I am not sure. J seems to want to believe that you can have any history you like (p.13) and that any historian's historical work represents, and is dependent upon, personal constructs (pp.14-15). All historical accounts are 'imprisoned in time and space' (p.19). But he simultaneously wants history to be locked into a constructed discourse (p.11). It is the discourse, formed over time, that makes you, qua historian, see and read the traces of the past in a specific way. Discourses are always on the move (ibid). But in that case it is pretty unclear what concept of discourse J is using (from the text it appears to be Foucault's but we have to bracket whether or not that concept seems properly to be employed). How does discourse structure history (and how is history a discourse) if history can be so individual that anyone can make of it what they want? This would seem to make history not a discourse – a historically-contingent episteme, imprisoning the values and terms of discussion – so much as a discussion, structured around and between kaleidoscopic arrangements of situational, contingent, political alliances of particular individuals, each with their own separately-, individually-produced ideas of history. In that sort of formulation the ideas of discourse and 'discursive formation' are pretty much evacuated of any analytical value. What sort of analytically-meaningful discourse, in any case, (you might ask) is so fragile that one professor (J) can come along and say "hey, everyone, do your own thing! Break out of the discourse!"...?
[You might also wonder how this essentially free market consumer-choice model of what history can be – or the 'liberation' he sees as being represented by free market choice of histories – fits with J's posturing about being on the Left and his critique of empathy on the basis that it supposedly normalises free market liberal capitalist thinking, but I digress.]
Related to this is J's muddled thinking about the operation of power within historical debate. Generally, J sees this as the guardians of the dominant discourse (whatever that may be: see above), who he appears to think (pp.65-66) are 'university historians' (all of whom, for some reason, appear amazingly to have agreed on what history is and how it is to be done/used, even though it can be anything,[7] so that one quote from Skidelsky suffices to illustrate what university historians all think). These people keep unpalatable or unconventional histories/historians in their place (p.23; p.79). J, however, thinks that his relativism (which he bases on his claim that there are no value-free facts in history, which he later contradicts, as above) is 'politically enabling' as it allows millions of different histories to flourish, breaking out of the confines of this elitist domination. This is where he can indeed be attacked for enabling far right-wing, pro-Nazi, holocaust-denying history. For how, within his model, does one tackle such history if all histories are equally 'positioned' and 'logically' epistemologically equal? The only way within his argument (and this is where things get ironic) would be on the basis of de facto power-operations, where the guardians of the discourse, the professors (the Richard Evanses and Deborah Lipstadts) stamp down on the Nazis, not on the basis of greater and more sophisticated fit between interpretation and the traces of the past but by sole virtue of their greater academic/cultural capital.[8] If J supports the political Left then he would have to welcome such an operation of power, which his whole book is supposed to be criticising and trying to counter…. The problem is that J's type of relativism is in fact entirely politically disabling. It provides no basis at all on which to challenge dominant views.
D: Self-Contradiction
There are some serious points at which J contradicts himself. One is in his discussion of empathy. As noted J wants to suggest that other minds cannot be entered into. To be crude, the other minds argument in philosophy asks questions like 'how do you know that the colour I call 'red' is the same as the colour you perceive as red? Or, 'if I stick my hand in some boiling water and scream, how do you know that I am feeling what you would think was pain?' 'If I see a crocodile and run away screaming, is it because I am experiencing what you would call fear?' And so on. [It is an essentially unsurmountable issue that the whole 'History of the Emotions' fad conveniently agrees to ignore.] What J seems not to realise, though, is that you can't somehow ring-fence that problem. Once you have let it out of the bag, you have no more logical basis for stating that past minds were different from 'ours' than for saying that they were just like ours and are entirely reachable on the basis of the statements they left behind. If you think past minds and ideas can't be grasped then you simply can't know whether they were the same or different and so the argument that they can be grasped proceeds on the same basis as the belief that they can't, in other words on the basis of faith alone. What's more, the fact that Wittgenstein and co said you could not be sure that you know, is not a basis for saying (as does J) that you can't know.
More to the point, once one gets to pp.52-53, we find J citing Collingwood and Steiner to support an argument that past cultures were different. But on what basis can such a judgement be made (and its truth-claim be accepted), other than on the basis of the standard historical mode of enquiry and a degree of argument-source/trace fit that J is allegedly re-thinking? On p.54, furthermore, J cites J.S. Mill and his idea of freedom. Here, then, J feels sufficiently confident of having been able to get into Mill's mind, via his texts, as to be able to redescribe what Mill thought about freedom, in spite of his belief ('I think', p.56) that past people were 'very different from us in the meanings they gave their world' (p.56). At what point, one might ask J, does he think the past inhabited by 'past people' begins… Before John Stuart Mill, evidently. To restate my point, if you think that you can use Mill's writings to redescribe his views of the world that impinged upon him, and identify differences from modern ideas, then you can logically do the same to find areas of similarity.
This applies to J's general appeals to authority. Throughout the book he appeals to other commentators on modern academic practice, sometimes historical, more often not, as furnishing a basis and support for his critique. But here, quite apart from asking what authority these thinkers can carry according to the terms of his argument and thus why we have to take their views seriously (are they somehow less 'positioned' and imprisoned in language/discourse than historians?), we can also ask how he can tell from their writings that what they are talking about is what he understands them to be talking about. This is where the 'other minds' problematic won't go back into the bottle once you have let it out. What basis does J have for understanding and agreeing with their account of the world other than a kind of recognition and empathy? Why is Terry Eagleton's mind more accessible to others, via his texts, than, say, a Roman centurion's? If the answer is that Eagleton and J inhabit the same general cultural milieu or (in Foucauldian terms) episteme then where does that cultural milieu begin and end? And how can one know other than via an essentially historical enquiry?
[This, incidentally, is where it becomes more than a tad sticky to use Foucault, whose work (whatever you think of it) essentially took the form of historical enquiry predicated on the ability to be able to describe past modes of thought, ideas, techniques of the self, and so on, and changes therein, as a basis for an argument rejecting the possibility of doing any of those things.]
E: The meta-critique: historicising history
And so we arrive at the most significant problem that besets Re-thinking History and which, more than anything else, tears it apart from within. As we have seen, J's key argument is that all historical works are ideologically situated (fair enough). They cannot be judged better or worse according to their fit with an external past reality (we have seen there are problems within his argument there but let us continue) so we can only arrive at the ultimate goal of the book – to understand the world through the histories it has produced – via the analysis of the power-relations involved in the production of different histories, at their various ideological[9] or discursive situations. All being products of a time and place, his injunction, as we have seen, is 'always historicise' (p.82). And there: boom! The whole argument of the book implodes. For how does one go about historicising a text and its author, if not by precisely the sort of historical methodology he wants to reject? How does one situate a book's author other than by finding out about him/her from the evidence of her/his texts or from other sources of information (the epistemological status of which is exactly the same as that of historical sources)? How does one situate a historical author within a socio-economic structure other than through a fundamentally historical process of enquiry, by analysing sources of information and putting them together to make up some sort of general picture? Is this any more possible for modern writers than for people writing in the tenth century? Probably, but only because we have more data and the gaps in the picture or the story might be smaller or less problematic, but does anyone want to suggest that the picture thus presented of current society and power-structures is going to be any less problematic, any less 'situated', any less the product of our discursive formation than the picture we might put together of twelfth-century society, or than the pictures of their world put together by twelfth-century people? Can my picture of the world in 2016 and how and why it works the way it does, and thus my argument about where Historian X's writing 'is coming from' and why (my historicising of Historian X), be judged better or worse than anyone else's on anything other than a degree of fit with the evidence produced by or about the world and Historian X? If it can't, then basically I cannot analyse the power structures or discourse producing/produced by Historian X and his/her works? And if I cannot do that (as logically J's argument suggests I can't) then I cannot obey his injunction always to historicise. Or, alternatively, if I can do that, then there is no logical reason why I cannot do the same (albeit, to various degrees, to patchier effect) with, say Matthew Paris, or Herodotus, or Gregory of Tours, or Jules Michelet, or Edward Gibbon, or the person who wrote an early Frankish charter or a diarist during the Hamburg cholera outbreak. Note though, that I have not taken J's injunction to historicise him; I have simply analysed the coherence of his text, not least because, as I said at the start, attempts to historicise him have ironically been rejected as the simple products of the critics' positioning (which again turns the book's argument inside-out, if you accept its claim that we can meaningfully evaluate historians' accounts, and understand the world, on the basis of historicising their authors). Further, if one accepts that historians are imprisoned in language then historicising implies a world outside language (yet a third self-contradiction inherent in the injunction).
If the argument on pp.1-82 (leaving aside the earlier reference to historicising on p.30) is correct, historicising is impossible and the injunction on p.82 is entirely fatuous and, if the instruction to 'always historicise' is to be taken seriously, then the book's entire argument up to p.82 is pointless. So we must conclude that Re-thinking History is, after all, a Cretan Paradox, and on a grand scale. If we could be sure that it was deliberate it would be a literary achievement worthy of considerable respect and/or a hoax which worked better than J could have ever have imagined. Too well, perhaps, as J has been compelled to maintain the pretence, keep playing the role, for the subsequent quarter-century.
My conclusion[10], then, is that this is a book which is entirely incoherent and self-contradictory. The proposal it makes for dealing with the problems of historical accounts flatly (and completely) contradicts its own analysis of those problems. You have to ask why a book this bad (as noted, to the extent of being a 90-page paradox) not only gets a place on reading lists (outside a course on 'how not to argue'), let alone should still be in print in revised editions, having even generated its own literature. Ironically, the most convincing argument in support of J's claim for the theoretical/philosophical impoverishment of the historical discipline is the fact that his book was not trashed decisively as soon as it came out.
[1] In other words, we can produce all kinds of stories about the past that are entirely consistent with its traces and which fairly re-describe a past as experienced by actual people – and that matters – but those stories not only do not equal an object history (or The Past) and they were almost certainly not experienced as those stories at the time. The stories, the linkages of events, the causation and the interpretations are ours, imprisoned in language, sometimes (perhaps usually) unconsciously. Thus no one single story or account is or can be imposed by the past itself. Which is 'the true story'? Provided they fit the available traces of the past, all of them. Or none.
[2] Theorists in other humanities have tended to look a bit askance at references to 'postmodern' historians, as postmodernism is a moment, not a movement, and most of the philosophers claimed to underpin it where quite clear about not being postmodernists (e.g. 'a term I am on record … as disapproving for both philosophical and sociological reasons' – Simon Critchley, Very Little … Almost Nothing, p.xxvii). In a sense it is about as meaningful as calling Descartes a 'Seventeenth-Centuryist' philosopher. Mostly 'postmodernist' is, in Critchley's term, a traditionalist's bogeyman (I have been accused of it often enough even though I reject the category), an empty catch-all for 'things I don't want to have to think about'.
[3] Entertainingly (or ironically), J seems not to realise that the work by Borges cited by Foucault was a work of fiction.
[4] Mandy Rice Davies Applies. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandy_Rice-Davies#.22He_would.2C_wouldn.27t_he.3F.22
[5] The defence, I assume, would be that the fact that the book caused a furore amongst historians proves that it was dealing with a hot topic. Maybe so. But if I wrote a book which tore into archaeology on the basis of archaeological thinking and practice from the 'sixties or 'seventies, arguing that one ought to be entirely skeptical of anything that archaeologists said, or their ability to say 'reliable' things about the past, and that any reading of archaeology was 'logically' as good as any other, and this books sold thousands of copies and made a big splash, I think it would be fairly safe to assume that it too would cause a furore. It's the first (f)law of citation indices: if you want to get lots of citations write something terrible. In any case, this critique takes the text entirely on its own terms and for the most part eschews external referents.
[6] Ask yourself on what basis J claims to be able to judge the alleged brilliance of the 'brilliant' works of history supposedly silenced by the dominant discourse. A distinction between an object past and historians' writings is also implied in the phrase 'the past can sustain countless narratives' (p.22).
[7] Anyone who has ever attended a university history departmental meeting will be especially interested by the idea that academic historians can agree on any important (or even unimportant) topic with anything like unanimity, but I digress again.
[8] In any case, the really tricky issue for non-relativist, politically-engaged historians to confront is not what one does with holocaust-deniers, which easy enough, so much as how one deals, within historical practice, with holocaust-approvers.
[9] I'm not, incidentally, always clear from the text on how J understands ideology (according to Terry Eagleton seems to the only answer it provides), but there we are.
[10] I had initially thought of discussing a range of other problems, external to the text itself, such as whether the ideas of Foucault, Derrida etc. are being used in any way 'canonically' or, if they are, whether they support the argument being made, or are consistent with each other, or whether the analysis of historical discourse and its university-based 'guardians' stacks up, and so on, but in the end it seemed unnecessary. Suffice it to say that they are there.


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This is a very easy route through beautiful forest. Meet at the Heart Lake parking lot.
Directions to Heart Lake parking lot:
From Commercial Ave, head west on 32nd St. Turn left on H Ave. H Ave eventually turns into Heart Lake Rd. Continue south on Heart Lake Rd approximately 1 mile. The Heart Lake parking lot will be on your right. Park near the trailhead kiosk.


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Posted: Aug 29 2007, 12:00am CDT | by Shane McGlaun , Updated: Aug 10 2010, 9:14am CDT , in Peripheral
This story may contain affiliate links.
Features & Specifications
If you have never heard of Skooba Design, you may have heard of RoadWired, which was the same company until a recent name change. The same bag designs are available from Skooba Designs that RoadWired carried. The Skooba Skin we are taking a look at here is the 1415 medium sized version designed to fit most 15" laptops. If you have smaller ultra-portable you can get a Skooba Micro sized for 10" to 12" notebooks. There is also small size for larger framed 10" to 12" notebooks, and a large size for 16" to 17" notebooks.
Unlike some of the other laptop bags I have looked at in the last few months, the Skooba Skin 1415 is a minimalist design that has not one single pocket for anything other than your notebook. There is no room for extra batteries, wires, AC adapters or anything. The bag has foam padding on the bottom and sides to protect your notebook. The Skooba Skin 1415 measures 14.25" L x 10.5" H x 1.75" W.
There are several color options available for the Skooba Skin 1415 including silver with orange lining, black ballistic with blue lining, blue ultra suede with blue lining, red/black rip stop with gray lining, olive ballistic with red lining, brown corduroy with teal lining, pink vinyl with black lining, and the unfinished canvas with red lining I am reviewing here.
Skooba Design recommends markers, paints, airbrush, glues, anything intended for fabric for customizing the canvas bag. You can't use heat because it might melt the foam lining of the bag, so no iron on transfers.
Using the Skooba Skin
The Skooba Skin 1415 is well built from heavy-duty materials that should last a long time. The interior of my review bag has good visibility thanks to the red color. Some of the other bag colors may have less visibility inside because of the dark colors used.
The Skooba Skin 1415 has two methods of use, a pair of built-in handles can be used to carry the sleeve, or one of the handles can be folded inside the bag and the other Velcro's to the outside of the bag making a simple sleeve to slip inside another bag or backpack for laptop protection. To my eyes the curve and design of the bag is a bit feminine when the handles are used, so if you are a manly man you might want to consider that before you buy.
The Skooba Skin 1415 was slightly too small for my Acer TravelMate 4404 WLMi 15.4" notebook. I could get it inside the bag, but the outer flap wouldn't close correctly. Like I said before this is the minimalist laptop bag, once the computer is inside there is no room for anything else. This bag is ideal for those only wanting to travel with their notebook or for someone using a larger backpack that wants extra protection for their notebook.
If all you want is protection for you notebook and you don't need no stinking accessories, the Skooba Skin 1415 is for you. It is also a great way to add protection for your notebook inside a suitcase or larger backpack. If you need to take a few other items with you and you only want one bag, you will want to buy something larger than the Skooba Skin 1415
This story may contain affiliate links.
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Shane McGlaun
Tech and Car expert Shane McGlaun (Google) reports about what's new in these two sectors. His extensive experience in testing cars, computer hardware and consumer electronics enable him to effectively qualify new products and trends. If you want us review your product, please contact Shane.
Shane can be contacted directly at firstname.lastname@example.com.
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Published: 3:04:16 am, 11/20/2019


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Thomas Gaynor, Organ Recital, Wednesday 13th May, 7.30pm at St Matthew's Church
Thomas works very hard to raise funds for his continued study at Eastman School of Music. The doctorate studies in Organ Performance will take another 3 or 4 years.
Please come along to support him and be entertained!+
"Thomas Gaynor is a New Zealand-born organist currently pursuing his DMA degree under David Higgs at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York. He is recently the winner of the Sydney International Organ Competition and the Fort Wayne National Organ Playing Competition, Indiana, as well as second prize winner of the Miami International Organ Competition. Thomas is currently Assistant Director of Music at Christ Episcopal Church in Pittsford, New York."


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Pat Jackson Inc./Tri-City
In Memory of Eugene "Gene" Dube
7-31-1948 to 4-24-2007
AUGUSTA -- Eugene "Gene" Louis Dube, 58, of Burns Road died Tuesday, April 24, 2007, surrounded by his family, at MaineGeneral Medical Center, Thayer Unit in Waterville, after a courageous battle with cancer.
He was born in Augusta on July 31, 1948, a son of the late Louis J. and Lillian (Kallock) Dube.
Mr. Dube was a graduate of Cony High School, class of 1967.
From 1967 to 1969, he was a member of the Army and served in the Vietnam War.
Gene was the owner and president of Pat Jackson Inc./Tri City Septic Services, in which he had great pride and passion. With Gene's ingenuity, he was the first to build a private waste-water treatment plant in the state of Maine. With the environment in mind, he started recycling septage by composting. He was involved with the state of Maine in educating septic inspectors for certification.
Whether you were the state of Maine, city sewer treatment plants from all over the State, a student in a septic class on design that needed to be taught for the Department of Human Services, a big box store, a farmer, someone at a school or a homeowner at midnight anywhere in the state of Maine, but, most of all, someone who needed Gene's help anytime from any walk of life, if you could hear, "Hello, this is Gene," you knew things would only get better.
Gene was a member of the Maine Masonic Temple Lodge 25, Maine Association of Waste Haulers, Maine Association of Site Evaluators, Veterans of Foreign Wars Post 887 and the National Association of Wastewater Transporters.
Gene was a big-hearted man who would drop what he was doing to help anyone who needed a hand. He trusted everyone and could always see the best in them.
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SGE Game Engine - News: SGE 0.24 Released
[Submit News]
[33 news in archive]
SGE 0.24 Released
Item posted by Julie Marchant <onpon4> on Fri 11 Mar 2016 11:09:14 AM UTC.
This should be the big one. Support for tiles finally exists now, and all the useful features I could think of have been added. This should hopefully be the last beta release. With two finished games and one almost finished game, I'm ready and eager to release version 1.0 of the SGE.
This is a last call for new features before that happens. I want the SGE Game Engine to be the best it can be. So if you are interested in using the SGE, but something is holding you back, or if there's just a feature you think would be particularly useful, please let me know. The easiest way to do so is to submit it as a bug (with the item group specified as "feature request").
The major changes to the SGE between versions 0.23 and 0.24 are:
- Added sge.gfx.TileGrid, which is an alternative to Sprite that can be used in some situations (but not all). Tile grids are composed of several distinct tiles organized in a grid. This is much more efficient both in RAM use and in speed than making a very large sprite, and much faster than having hundreds of distinct objects.
- Added get_pixel and get_pixels methods to sge.gfx.Sprite, which return the colors of individual pixels.
- Added sge.gfx.Sprite.scale. This function is different from changing the width and height attributes because it doesn't actually change the size of the sprite; it only scales the image within the existing bounding box. So for example, scaling an image up will result in the edges being cut off if they were non-transparent, and scaling down will result in transparency being added to pad out the image.
- Added sge.gfx.Sprite.resize_canvas. This is just an easy way to change the size of the sprite without scaling. It's designed to compliment and be used with the new scale method.
- Added sge.gfx.Sprite.from_tween. This creates a "tween" animation, using scaling, rotation, and color blending.
- Added sge.gfx.Sprite.extend, which is a quick and easy way to make a sprite have a certain number of (empty) frames.
- Renamed sge.snd.Sound.stop_all to sge.snd.stop_all.
- In fullscreen mode, sge.game.scale is now used to determine the resolution to use, if specified.
- It is now possible to mirror, flip, and rotate specific frames rather than the entire sprite.
- sge.gfx.Sprite.transparent can now be set to a color, which forces colorkey transparency to be used (with that color being the colorkey).
- Some bugs in the Pygame SGE have been fixed.
No messages in SGE 0.24 Released


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0 Murphanater Veteran Wednesday 24/04/2013, 02:47
I just got the new fang ld card, and I wanted to try to make a ELO deck with it. I wanted to use Jungo, but of course with most of the great 5*s being banned this week I had to try something new. Let me know what you think, and if if you have any suggestions feel free to offer them. I would be open to switching the jungo half deck to another clan in order to make it better.
Thanks guys!
WMDuessel Guru Wednesday 24/04/2013, 03:40
Adler... Meh. Your FPC half is good, but Jungo honestly shouldn't be used without Ongh. Do you have the Mokranus combo? Pair them up with Mokra, Jautya, Uranus, Aleister. Or you can try an AS half with something like Harrow Ld, Marina, Saki, Jessie. Lots of options for Watu as well, with Daddy Jones, Eddy, Fanny, Gabrielle.
Good luck!
UM_AaaBattery Moderator URBAN MADNESS Wednesday 24/04/2013, 12:19
Nice deck. I would personally change Moegura to Benicio for the protection.
0 Murphanater Veteran Wednesday 24/04/2013, 19:22
Thanks guys for the responses.. I have played a decent amount with this deck and alder is actually surprising decent even though alot of people say he is. I decided to switch moegura to benicio and it seems to be working out well. I like not having to worry about the confidence for his ability.
Again thanks guys for your responses.
UM_AaaBattery Moderator URBAN MADNESS Thursday 25/04/2013, 10:37
Thats ok, Im glad I could help.


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U Shaped Office Desk for Small Office
U shaped office desk – Many workers began to consider some of the benefits of working at home and many companies are now allowing their employees to telecommute. Every day more and more people are choosing to start their own home based business to avoid the dreaded 9-5 working days. No matter why you do it, if you choose to work at home, you have to build a home office space for yourself. Your first purchase should be a proper desk.
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Go ahead and admit it.
When you first heard Tennessee had hired Cuonzo Martin, you probably had the same reaction you did when you learned Derek Dooley was hired by UT.
"Are you serious?"
"That's the best we can do?"
Yet exactly a year after losing to Michigan State in the Elite Eight by one point — March 28, 2010 — the Volunteers introduced a coach who had yet to even coach in an NCAA Tournament game.
But like Dooley, who had a career record of 16-20 in three seasons at Louisiana Tech before coming to Knoxville, the wins and losses don't reveal the whole story.
Instead, fans should look beyond Martin's 61-41 record in three seasons at Missouri State.
"Cuonzo is known as a great recruiter, a solid floor coach, person of great integrity, a great father, a great husband and now, he is known as the head coach of the University of Tennessee," men's athletics director Mike Hamilton said Monday at Martin's introductory press conference.
Martin's job at UT will be tough enough, especially if Tobias Harris and/or Scotty Hopson leave early for the NBA.
He's replacing a legend.
Bruce Pearl made Tennessee basketball what every Vol fan dreamed of it being.
And more importantly, Pearl won over the fan base.
Whoever UT hired was going to be given the task of replicating Pearl's success on the court.
Martin now has that job.
"For me, I embrace the success, because it's a program," he said. "I think you want to embrace it, and it helps you when you recruit when somebody has success. I mean, somebody has to follow (Pearl).
"If you don't want to follow him, you're afraid of competition, you're afraid of being successful. For me, I didn't really think about it like that. I thought it was a great opportunity to be a part of a great program."
He may not paint his chest for a Lady Vols home game or even wear an orange blazer against Kentucky and Vanderbilt — he said that decision was up to his wife.
But Martin needs the Tennessee fan base to support him.
He's not Bruce Pearl.
He's Cuonzo Martin.
The 39-year-old up-and-coming coach spent eight seasons as an assistant coach at his alma mater, Purdue, under Gene Keady and Matt Painter before three seasons with the Bears of the Missouri Valley Conference.
He's a former NBA player, a cancer survivor and he was raised in East St. Louis, Ill.
Given his background, coaching basketball at Tennessee will be relatively easy.
And Vol fans shouldn't make his job any harder than it should be by comparing him to his predecessor in any area besides what happens on the court.
And even then, Hamilton believes Martin will succeed.
"Cuonzo will win at University of Tennessee," he said.
— Matt Dixon is a senior in journalism and electronic media. He can be reached at email@example.com and followed on Twitter at @MattDixon3.


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FREDERICKSBURG, Va. – At the 2018 Capital Athletic Conference Swimming Championships, the Salisbury University men's swimming team had four members named All-CAC performers for their efforts at St. Mary's College of Maryland from February 22-25.
Sophomore Josh Brown made a huge splash at this year's championships, earning three individual first-team All CAC nods.
On Friday, Brown set both new school and conference records when he finished in first-place in the 50-yard freestyle, posting a time of 21.01 seconds. He followed it up by breaking school records on Saturday in the 100-yard butterfly, with a time of 50.87 seconds, and on Sunday in the 100-yard individual medley, with a time of 52.33 seconds.
Junior Richard Baker earned an individual second-team All-CAC honor for his second-place finish on Sunday in the 100-yard freestyle event, posting a time of 47.24 seconds.
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To view the men's All-CAC teams in their entirety, click here


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Five questions: Cincinnati Reds
How much better will the fielding be?
Last season, the Reds had the worst fielding in the National League. They were last in the league in DER (0.674), last in the league in THT's plus/minus team fielding plays (-53 plays), and were last in the league in bUZR (-45 runs).
This season looks to be better. Two of the worst defensive players on the team departed last season in Ken Griffey Jr. (-11 runs with the Reds, according to bUZR) and Adam Dunn (-18 runs). And assuming Alex Gonzalez is healthy and competent, Jeff Keppinger (-15 runs) looks to get far less time at shortstop this season, where he has been playing out of position since 2007. Those three players alone, even in part time play, were the difference between an average-fielding team and a horrible fielding team. And all things being equal, replacing those performances with average fielding could net the Reds another four wins.
Finding average fielders to insert into a lineup is no easy task, however, if they're going to hit at all. What can we reasonably expect from the Reds in 2009? We can get some idea of this using CHONE's defensive projections and some best guesses on playing time (some details on what I did are found at the end of the article). Ultimately, I came up with an overall projected team defense of approximately nine runs below average. Maybe they won't be a plus defensive team—at least not with Edwin Encarnacion and Jonny Gomes figuring to get a fair bit of playing time—but they can still be expected to post roughly a three-win improvement over last season.
How bad will the offense be?
Departing with the defensive liabilities of Dunn and Griffey was a substantial amount of offense. So are the defensive gains negated by the loss of offense?
No hitter on this team figures to be as productive as Dunn will be in 2009. Dunn's an excellent, if often miscast hitter, and the Reds don't have anyone who is likely to approach what he can provide with the bat this season. But the surprising thing is that even despite not having Dunn around, the Reds' offense might actually be improved in 2009.
How? It's addition by subtraction, mostly.
The Reds gave 20 percent of their plate appearances in 2008 to the trio of Paul Bako (.217/.299/.328), Corey Patterson (.205/.238/.344) and Keppinger (.266/.310/.346). All hit below "replacement level" (not accounting for position), to the tune of 25-30 runs. The first two are no longer with the team, and Keppinger should receive less playing time this year while also showing a bit of a rebound at the plate. If those performances are replaced on this year's team with even replacement-level hitting, the Reds stand to gain two to three wins.
To get a more objective estimate of the 2009 Reds offense, I looked again to CHONE projections and my best guesses on playing time (again, see methods at end). This is admittedly very prone to error, especially among the principal bench players, as it's very hard to predict how playing time will shake out over a 162-game season. But I think what I've done is pretty reasonable, and different scenarios among bit players usually make very little difference to teams' offensive projections.
Overall, after working through the projections and forcing the plate appearances to match last years' Reds, my estimate for 2009 Reds offense was…. 25 runs above average. If the NL average is 734 runs scored per team, as it was last year, that would put the Reds at 759 runs scored. That would have ranked sixth in the league in 2008. And this is from a team that scored just 704 runs last year with a partial season of Adam Dunn. Granted, if you adjust for park effects, you should cull 15 or so runs off of this total. But even so, most of us think of the Reds as a below-average hitting team these days. These data indicate that this isn't the case.
It took me a while to buy into this. But I've repeated this several times using several different approaches, and my estimates are always within 20 or so runs of this total (and often are above the number I'm reporting), which has to be within our margin of error here. What's driving it? Strong performances by Joey Votto, Jay Bruce, Encarnacion, Brandon Phillips, and new addition Gomes (I'm giving him 327 PAs as part of the left field squad, and his CHONE projection is very strong).
Perhaps most importantly, we get only a handful of sub-replacement level hitting performances. Yes, some of the these guys will miss low on their projections. But others might overperform, and CHONE's been as good a projection system as there is, historically.
What about the rotation?
The Reds have quietly assembled what could potentially be one of the deepest rotations in the league. They have six starters with a good shot to be at least respectable, and at least one in Edinson Volquez who has a chance to be brilliant. The competition for the fifth spot is as tight as it gets between once uber-prospect Homer Bailey and the more experienced hitting curiosity Micah Owings, but regardless of what happens by Opening Day I expect both pitchers to get a good chunk of starts this season.
To project rotation performance, I took CHONE projections for the top four starters as-is: Volquez, Aaron Harang, Bronson Arroyo and Johnny Cueto. That took care of 116 games. The remaining games started were then filled by the next guys in line, and I allocated 20 starts to Owings, 20 to Bailey, and two each to Matt Maloney, Ramon Ramirez and Daryl Thompson.
Altogether, these starters account for 162 games started, 939 innings pitched, and a … 4.15 ERA. Last year, Reds starters accounted for 917 innings pitched and a 4.97 ERA, so this is a massive projected improvement. The worst CHONE projection among these pitchers is Bailey with a 4.61 ERA, but to be honest the projections for the six primary starters look pretty reasonable to my fan's eye. (Owings is the only one that looks overly optimistic to me.)
Altogether, this group of starters is projected to allow 468 runs in 939 innings, which is much better than average.
What about the bullpen?
The bullpen also looks pretty solid, as it was last year. Francisco Cordero may be overpaid, but he's a good anchor to a pen that also features a couple of good young arms in Bill Bray and Jared Burton, as well as "veteran presence" players David Weathers and Arthur Rhodes. Bray and Burton should be the better pitchers of those four, but will likely have to defer to the old guys until or unless they flame out. Even so, this is a good core of relievers, with other guys like Mike Lincoln and Nick Masset who should be decent middle relief contributors.
To continue the projection work from the prior sections, I sequentially added CHONE projections of relievers in order of my perception of the likeliness that they'll get a shot at contributing this season. I needed 503 innings, and I had to add 10 relievers into the mix to get them, all but the last contributing between 30 and 70 innings. Altogether, CHONE projects those relievers to have a 3.99 ERA (last year, the Reds' pen sported a sparkly 3.81 ERA), allowing 241 runs in 503 innings. Essentially, that's holding steady on what was already a good bullpen last season.
That makes the overall pitching look pretty good: 1,442 innings, allowing 709 runs (~25-35 runs less than an average staff in the NL), which works out to ~4.4 runs per game. That's shaving just shy of 100 runs off of last year's total, and would have been good for fifth in the league last season. Most of that's the starting pitching, but I'd wager that 20-30 runs of it is due to improved fielding. (Rally reports that these projections already take into account something about team fielding, so I won't adjust further).
So just how good are the Reds going to be this year?
When Rally published his NL Central projections last month, he had the Reds one game over .500. The Hardball Times Preview's projections had them one game under .500. The consensus is that the defense (pitching and fielding) looks very promising, while the offense is probably a bit below average.
With the estimates I came up with here of 759 runs scored and 709 runs allowed, and plugging them into the pythagoran formula, I'm getting an overall expected winning percentage of .534. That would make them 86-75, and surprise contenders in the NL Central.
My guess is that I'm still missing high for some reason, and probably on offense. Maybe I still need to include still more PAs by reserves or something. But the real point of all of this is that this new model of a Reds team—one supposedly built more on pitching and fielding than offense—might surprise some people this year. They're younger, faster and better in the field than they have been in a long while. They have a good-looking young pitching staff with genuine talent. The offense might also turn out to be at least average in its run output, provided it can avoid black holes in the lineup. All of this means that the Reds are likely to be at least a .500 ballclub, and if things go their way they could find themselves in the hunt this September.
We haven't seen that kind of thing in Cincinnati in a very long time, so here's hoping.
Some additional details on methodology
To do playing time projections with position players, I took all starters and used every PA that CHONE projects. I then divided up other plate appearances among reserves. For catchers, I have Ryan Hanigan getting roughly twice as much playing time as Wilkin Castillo, but I'm expecting that Castillo will get some PAs. Infielder reserve PAs were split among Keppinger, Danny Richar, Adam Rosales and Paul Janish, with a double share going to Keppinger given his status.
Outfielders were handled a bit differently, given the chance for a three-way "platoon" among Chris Dickerson, Gomes and Jerry Hairston. I split the starting LF job evenly between them. I then split the remaining reserve PA's between the three left fielders plus Norris Hopper. This gave Dickerson, Gomes and Hairston about 75 percent of their projected CHONE PAs, while Hopper got just 37 percent of his.
To estimate the impact of pitchers on offense, I used 2008 league-wide pitcher hitting performance and pro-rated it down to the 326 PAs I needed to complete the Reds' offense after the position players were accounted for. No effort was made to account for the Micah Owings factor. Overall, not counting the generic "pitcher" I added, 17 players were given projected playing time, all of which received at least 90 PAs. Last year, 25 players served as non-pitchers for the Reds (including Owings), but only 16 got to the 90-PA mark.
Fielding was based on CHONE defensive projections, pro-rated to playing time. To deal with position inequities, I based each players' fielding ratings on the position assigned in CHONE, but then used position adjustments to get them all on the same playing field. This way, for example, if Keppinger plays lots of shortstop (+7.5 runs/season bonus) instead of third base (+2.5 runs/season bonus) where he should be, his overall fielding rating will be only marginally affected even though he'll compare badly to other shortstops.
Reds hitter run production was estimated using Tom Tango's linear weights. I ran a check with base runs on overall team hitting statistics and didn't find much of a difference between base runs and what the linear weights project, meaning that there aren't extreme enough OBP vs. ISO issues to cause linear weights to be a poor predictor of team-level offense. Pitcher run allowed estimates are straight from CHONE, pro-rated by innings.


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LACC must handle financial crimes-Chairman Verdier
MONROVIA-The Liberia Anti-Corruption Commission, LACC wants Finance Development Planning Ministry turn over evidences and suspects involved in the U$82,000 case to the Commission for investigation.
LACC Executive Chairman, Jerome Verdier, said the anti-graft institution is clothed with the authority to investigate financial crimes in the country.
He said: "Investigating financial crime is out of the domain of Finance Ministry, and the Ministry must not determine what happens to the suspects involved."
He made the comments on Friday, February 10, 2917 when he spoke to ELBC on the Super Morning Show.
Cllr. Verdier, however, praised the Ministry's efforts to recover the missing funds from government's coffers, but insisted that it is the LACC legal right to take appropriate actions in such matters.
He maintained that he wants to take full charge of the investigation process and subsequently forward the suspects to the Justice Ministry if they are found guilty.


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My friend Caleb gave me a wonderful gift when he was visiting us. On Friday evening, we were sitting on the front lawn watching the littles run and scooter around the neighborhood while we talked. Ellie kept trying to ride in the street, was told no, and when she did not get her way, exposed her defiant side to her new friend. As I sat down after dealing with her, Caleb quietly declared, "Stubborn. I wonder where she gets it?" as he looked me directly in the eye with a mocking grin on his face. I shared that I was a completely compliant child, and then wondered out loud if I could currently be defined as "stubborn." I have always confessed that I am controlling, but stubborn? And that is where our conversation ended, because we were interrupted for the 47th time that evening.
But I thought about his comment all weekend ... "I wonder where she gets it?" What made him say that? Where did he see me in Ellie? And why was it so obvious to him?
So, on Sunday, while we were sitting in church waiting for the service to begin, I asked him. And how he answered took me by surprise. "Michelle, you are a woman of determination and perseverance. Both of these traits are the result of sanctified stubbornness."
Sanctified stubbornness. Hmm. I have never heard such a phrase and I was not sure I understood him. But since he is a scientist, and ridiculously intelligent, I knew he would clarify it for me at once. And he did. "Stubbornness is a result of the flesh wanting its own way and refusing to take anything less than what it wants, when it wants it. But when we let the Holy Spirit take control, stubbornness yields itself to change - and it becomes determination and perseverance. You still want something, but you are willing to see it through the lens of biblical thinking rather than selfishness.
Remember when you told me about your boundaries as a mother, not allowing others to influence your children in certain areas regardless of what they think of you as a result? That is determination - you are going to have it your way. But the desire and "why" behind it are motivated by Scripture and a desire to obey."
Remember when you told me about your boundaries as a mother, not allowing others to influence your children in certain areas regardless of what they think of you as a result? That is determination - you are going to have it your way. But the desire and "why" behind it are motivated by Scripture and a desire to obey."
I sat there staring at him for several seconds and then - heartily agreed. It was encouraging to take a look backwards and see that one of my greatest weaknesses is slowly being turned into something GOOD.
The reason I say he gave me a gift is because I felt like he shed light on an area that I have never been able to fully dissect and reassemble to any satisfaction. And now - I get it! But the Lord was not finished. He kept me thinking about it, and then - pushed me into Scripture to support it.
So, I began a somewhat exhaustive search on the three words: stubborn, determined, and persevere. And I must say, I was pleasantly surprised to see how neatly the dictionary definitions fit with Scripture, and - horrified to see how unattractive the character quality of stubbornness really is.
-unreasonably or perversely unyielding
-suggestive or typical of a strong stubborn nature
-performed or carried on in an unyielding, obstinate or persistent manner
-difficult to manage, handle, or treat
adamant, bullheaded, hardheaded, headstrong, immovable, implacable, inconvincible, inflexible, opinionated, self-willed, stiff-necked, obstinate, unbending, uncompromising, unrelenting, unyielding, willful (aren't these adjectives horrible? who would ever want to be described by any of them?)
"But my people did not listen to My voice; Israel would not submit to Me. So I gave them over to their stubborn hearts, to follow their own counsels." Psalm 81:11,12
Yet they did not obey or incline their ear, but everyone walked in the stubbornness of his evil heart. Therefore I brought upon them all the words of this covenant, which I commanded them to do, but they did not." Jeremiah 11:8
"But they would not listen, but were stubborn, as their fathers had been, who did not believe in the Lord their God." II Kings 17:4
"But they did not obey or incline their ear, but walked in their own counsels and the stubbornness of their evil hearts, and went backward and not forward." Jeremiah 7:24
-having reached a decision : firmly resolved
Synonyms of Determined
bent (on or upon), bound, decisive, firm, intent, purposeful, resolute, resolved, set, single-minded
Don't you feel better already? While still powerful descriptions, these words create an image of strength rather than selfishness.
"Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight, and sin which clings so closely, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us," Hebrews 12:1
"Not that I have already obtained this or am already perfect, but I press on to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own. Brothers, I do not consider that I have made it my own. But one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus." Philippians 2:12-14
"But I am not ashamed, for I know whom I have believed, and I am convinced that He is able to guard until that Day what has been entrusted to me." I Timothy 1:12
"But the Lord God helps me; therefore I have not been disgraced; therefore I have set my face like a flint, and I know that I shall not be put to shame." Isaiah 50:7
-to persist in a state, enterprise, or undertaking in spite of counterinfluences, opposition, or discouragement
Synonyms for Perseverecarry on, persist
"And let us not grow weary of doing good, for in due season we will reap, if we do not give up." Galatians 6:9
"Consider it pure joy, my brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith produces perseverance. Let perseverance finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything." James 1:2-4
"Let us hold fast the confession of our hope without wavering, for He who promised is faithful." Hebrews 10:23
"So then, brothers, stand firm and hold to the traditions that you were taught by us, either by our spoken word or by our letter. Now may our Lord Jesus Christ Himself, and God our Father, who loved us and gave us eternal comfort and good hope through grace, comfort your hearts and establish them in every good work and word." II Thessalonians 2:15-17
"Be watchful, stand firm in the faith, act like men, be strong." I Corinthians 16:13
"Therefore, my beloved brothers, be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, knowing that in the Lord your labor is not in vain." I Corinthians 15:58
Isn't this GREAT? Do you see what I see?
We are born into sin. Our flesh seeks its own way from the moment we take our first breath, and it is not until we accept the gift of forgiveness and salvation from God that we are able to FIGHT the flesh and walk in the Spirit. Friends - it is a choice. Every day we must choose whether we will live out our selfish wants and desires, or die to self and let the Holy Spirit take over and lead us on the path of righteousness ... in the pursuit of holiness.
the flesh dies
the Spirit dwells
sanctification is seen and lived out
-to set apart to a sacred purpose or religious use
-to free from sin
-to impart or impute sacredness
-to make productive of holiness or piety
Synonyms of Sanctify
cleanse, purge, purify
"Therefore, if anyone cleanses himself from what is dishonorable, he will be a vessel for honorable use, set apart as holy, useful to the master of the house, ready for every good work." II Timothy 2:21
"Now may the God of peace Himself sanctify you completely, and may your whole spirit and soul and body be kept blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ." I Thessalonians 5:23
"I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself for me." Galatians 2:20


text: I received a free wig from the Cancer Society (machine made). Not satisfied, I found Studio International and had a private consultation with them. They were so kind and patient, and I could feel a HUGE difference between hand tied wigs and machine made wigs. I wish I had known about them sooner! I ended up buying two wigs and couldn't be happier. I wish all the local oncology departments would educate their patients about the difference between machine made and hand tied wigs!


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We are the Faculty of Medicine & Dentistry at the University of Alberta, one of the world's elite academic health sciences centres, where top students are taught by award-winning educators and mentored by renowned scientists in a dynamic learning environment.
We conduct our teaching, research and patient care in accordance with the highest international standards. We work with our partners in education, research and health care for the greater good of the local, regional and global community.
Outstanding areas of medical research at the University of Alberta include diabetes, obesity, virology, heart disease, motor control and rehabilitation, protein structure and function, and transplantation.
Emergency Medicine Research Director
Visiting Professor of Health Economics, University of Leeds
Principle Investigator PACEOMICS (www.paceomics.org)
Principle Investigator Precision Medicine Policy Network (http://precisionmedicinepolicynetwork.org/)


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Thanks to Bin Wen from Shanghai we are now able to provide a translation of our handout to Chinese speaking visitors.
22 July 2015
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When did you last visit this museum? For 45 years, this was a traditionally static local history museum. Now the place is being transformed to become a true community ecomuseum. Rediscover the house and the collection and wander through the gardens. You will be pleasantly surprised.


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Gregg DEal, on Dakota Access Pipeline
a Native American Artist
Gregg Deal discusses the history and treatment of Native Americans in our country. He discusses how Native Americans may possibly be disproportionately affected by Climate Change. He shares his feelings about how the idea of rational political discussions have disappeared from our nation.
a mother, a scientist
Rebecca Safran is an accomplished scientist as well a mother and mentor. Her perspective allows her to give unique opinions on the way that science is communicated, and why it is important to listen to each other. She speaks about how her children have changed the timeline in which she views the world, and have driven her to create the best future possible for them.
Marc Doherty, backcountry skier
Marc has noticed the changes that are happening in the mountains of Colorado, through his skiing. The seasons are shorter, there is more dust and less snow. He discusses how this affects agriculture, and local industries, including the ski industry. As we suffer from drier seasons, ski resorts are relying more and more on snow-making which is a very energy intensive process. Marc talks about what he thinks the best solution to these problems are.
john and judy miller talk climate change
Ellen Miller's Parents
ellen goins, the ski industry
Ellen Goins tells us about her parents' cross country ski area, and how it has changed over the decades. She has lived in red river her whole life, and speaks to the the hardships and benefits of the small town community. Her knowledge of the mountains give her a unique insight into how the changing climate may be affecting her business, and her town.
Each of these videos features a climate scientist. They answer questions about how they think they could be doing better and why their information isn't resonating with the public.
They each discuss why they are passionate about their work, and who they are outside of their job. They want you to know that, even though they work in a controversial field, they still take off their lab coats at the end of the day and go home to their kids.
bruce vaughn, climate scientist
this ranch has been passed down by the women of this family, for generations.
Carol talks about her favorite memories as a child, and how she feels that things are changing in the world of ranching
an island diver
Bert is a native to Caye Caulker, Belize. He owns a dive shop and speaks to why his country and his island mean so much to him, as well as his profession. He discusses the threat to their reef, the threat that tourism poses, and how he can't image a life without his island. Bert believes that the solution to a sustainable future for their island lies in education of younger generations.
california surfer, nikki harth
Nikki was born and raised in the small surfing town of Encinitas, California. His whole life has been shaped by the beach from childhood, to surfing, to opening a surf hotel with his brother. He has surfed all over the world and seen how things are changing. He speaks on the changing water temperatures, storms, and erosion. He is worried that Climate Change will have an impact on his traditions, memories, and new business.


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Stars including Ross Kemp, Eddie Izzard and John Barrowman have lent their support to the Let's Stay Together campaign.
Other familiar faces urging Scots to reject independence include Baroness Doreen Lawrence, One Foot In The Grave actor Richard Wilson and soap star Michelle Collins.
Campaign organisers believe that the views of people in England, Wales and Northern Ireland have largely gone unheard in the debate and the video will "show Scotland that we do care".
Spokesman Andrew McGuinness said: "For everyone in the rest of the UK, just as for Scotland, the result of the referendum will have a fundamental impact on our identity, our culture and our future.
"It is for the people of Scotland to decide, but we want them to know the true feelings of the vast majority of their fellow citizens of the United Kingdom who want us to stay together."
The video has been been released following the launch of another online film made by Yes Scotland, which features the likes of actors Brian Cox and Martin Compston, comedienne Elaine C Smith and Deacon Blue's Ricky Ross.
Souce: PA


text: Last month, we told you about the return of 17-piece disco-funk collective Escort and their thunderous new single "Barbarians." We wanted more. We got more. Brazilian electronic rock group CSS dialed back the original track's disco element, adding tribal, polyrhythmic drums and knob-twiddling electronics recalling warped radio frequencies. Different, but still highly danceable.


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6240 Box Springs Blvd Suite C
Riverside, CA 92507
Scotty's Auto Repair located in Riverside, CA, 92507, has expert technicians who have years
of experience working on Mitsubishi vehicles. Our technicians are ready to handle
whatever service or maintenance problem that crops up in your Mitsubishi vehicle.
Our staff understands what it takes for your Mitsubishi to perform at an optimal
level and what the brand represents.
Mitsubishi is a Japanese automaker that offers vehicles ranging from compact cars to large SUVs and crossovers. The brand combines affordability and performance into a stylish package. Mitsubishi is budget conscious, but offers a level of design and amenities that many automakers cannot offer at the price Mitsubishi does.
There will come a time when your Mitsubishi vehicle, old or new, will need to have maintenance or service repairs completed. There will always be general maintenance, such as oil changes, that will need to be completed. Additionally, you could see problems with the transmission, engine or interior quality over the life of the vehicle, depending on the model and year of the vehicle.
Mitsubishi Vehicles Fixed At Affordable Prices
Scotty's Auto Repair has a staff that is ready and waiting to fix your Mitsubishi vehicle and get you and your car back on the road as quickly and conveniently as possible. Scotty's Auto Repair prides itself on offering affordable and efficient repairs. We are waiting to service all your Mitsubishi needs so please give us a call at 951-697-7708. You can also stop by our service center and visit our knowledgeable service technicians. Our friendly staff is waiting to help you with any of your Mitsubishi needs.
The Best Auto Repair Shop in Riverside and Moreno Valley for over 20 years. The are Knowledgeable about all our cars. I highly recommend them for Smog's and all repairs. Awesome Shop, give them a call!
My family never trusted anybody but my father to work on all of our vehicles, when he passed away three years ago we were all desperate to find someone that we could trust to work on our vehicles. When we found Scotty's and saw the way that he and his wife ran the business we knew the entire family would stick with Scotty's because of their sincere honesty, their affordability and their family oriented way of running the business. I highly recommend Scotty's!
Scotty's Auto Repair is amazing! I wouldn't take my care anywhere else. The owners and staff are all incredible people!
Scott and his team are among the best mechanics in the area...and even more important, they have integrity! They stand behind their work and will do whatever is necessary to make it right! I have absolute confidence in the work they do!
I brought my 2007 4Runner in for a smog check. As always I was provided excellent service. Scott had me out in less than 45 minutes and that included a courtesy check of the entire vehicle. Always a great experience at Scotty's.
Scotty's has time and again demonstrated incomparable service. Our latest experience involved a last minute smog test for a private vehicle sale. With one phone call, Caren was able to brief me on all of the requirements and immediately get me in to have the car smog tested. Scotty's literally saved the day. Thank you for being such a great business to deal with. It's truly a pleasure!
An online search yielded multiple glowing reviews for Scotty's Auto Repair, and we are happy to report that our experience was a positive and anxiety-relieving process. Samantha (aka "Sam") was patient and informative during our phone discussions regarding our options. Manager Kelly gave us sage advice regarding the engine replacement and delivered a smoothly running vehicle--at a fair price--on the day promised.
As usual, Scotty's delivered! Quick and complete. Total came in slightly under what was originally quoted. It is very hard to find an honest mechanic, but Scotty's fits the bill.
Great customer service...car needed some work done to pass smog, Scotty's fixed the problem...car passed. Thank you!
This is an honest, family owned and operated business. We have been going here for years, and we trust Scotty's completely!
I discovered "Scotty's" several years ago and have been a loyal customer since. Scott is the ONLY mechanic I allow to work on my vehicles because he's professional, knowledgeable, thorough, and respects fine automobiles. In fact, he treats my Lexus better than the Riverside Lexus dealer! The front-desk gal, Caren, knows more about vehicles than a lot of mechanics and I absolutely trust her to give me honest and accurate advice. Do yourself and your vehicle a favor and hook up with Scotty, Caren, and Sam for service, value, and courtesy.
Brought my civic in for an electrical issue. Turned out to be very minor. They completely reasonable in fee. They had it done quick, and I was on my way. Also, they are super nice.
My service van was overheating and I had product that needed to be delivered. This place was the closest in Maps, so I stopped here. The staff here is so friendly, and the mechanics fixed my issue and got me back on the road in no time. Highly recommended!
Scotty's Auto Repair was truly a find. They worked to determine the problem with my vehicle and then worked to find the best parts to fix it. We did not end up having the repairs done since we opted for a new vehicle. Scotty's will be my go to place for any repairs that I may need in the future. Sam and Raven will work with you to get you the best work and price for that work.
Scotty's is great! Very Honest and every time I take my Saturn Vue there I know I won't get ripped off. I won't go anywhere else for auto repair. Give them a try, you won't be disappointed!


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Rope Range
Twine Range
Cord Range
Lines Range
No.7 Everlasto cotton tubular banding cord - 500g spool.
Ideal for use as piping for clothing trim, cushions, curtains, pelmets and general upholstery. Also great for use in general crafting applications.
Approximate runnage - 180m per kilo.
Thickness - 5.5mm (approx).
A quality Everlasto product made in the UK by James Lever of Bolton.


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"Standing there an hour alone I dreamt that Greece might once be free."
– Lord Byron
The people of Greece, along with their beautiful scenery and pleasantly temperate climate, enjoy one more distinction: each year in March, they mark a unique dual holiday that is celebrated by both the deeply religious and the happily patriotic.
Orthodox Christians observe the Annunciation, one of the great feasts of the Orthodox Church, when an angel appeared to the Virgin Mary and shared the news that she would be the mother of the Son of God. Also on this day, in 1821, Greece declared its independence after emerging victorious after a long and bloody revolution that freed them from 400 years of Turkish rule.
So, it's a good time to learn about Greek cuisine!
Greece's cuisine, in the true Mediterranean tradition, is notable for its use of fresh and healthy ingredients, including olives and olive oil, yogurt, wheat and barley, zucchini, eggplant, okra and a variety of other vegetables, fruits such as oranges and lemons, feta cheese, wine, and herbs. Honey, fruits, and nuts are often included in desserts, and pita bread is a staple.
As far as the calendar goes, this special holiday always falls in the middle of Lent, so the usual meats (lamb, pork, and poultry) are discouraged. However, fish is acceptable, and fortunately, there are a wide variety of other options on the menu and there is no limit or stipulation regarding alcohol.
This week, as you peruse the restaurant menu while sipping a nice glass of ouzo (anise-flavored liqueur) or retsina (rosé or white wine flavored with pine resin), you are likely to notice a ritual universal to Greek eateries in America (but, interestingly, not in Greece): servers lighting sizzling platters of cheese on fire while diners respond with a hearty "Opa!" This is saganaki – a tasty appetizer composed of, well, cheese (a firm variety that holds up in the heat, such as kasseri, graviera, kefalograviera, halloumi, or kefalotyri), that is marinated in brandy or ouzo, rolled in flour, pan-seared in olive oil, and set aflame in spectacular fashion and quickly doused with the juice from a freshly squeezed lemon. (Needless to say, don't try this at home without a fire extinguisher handy, and far away from your smoke detector.) This is served with fresh pita bread, as is another dish that is ubiquitous in other places, but not in Greece:
- Gyros – this popular sandwich, familiar to anyone who frequents a neighborhood grill, is composed of strips of roasted lamb, seasoned with such spices as rosemary, marjoram, garlic, kosher salt, and pepper, garnished with onions. It is topped with tzatziki sauce – a mixture of yogurt, spices, and finely chopped cucumber and mint leaves – on grilled pita bread.
- A couple of popular Greek dishes will remind you of Italian lasagna: Moussaka, which involves ground beef or lamb simmered in a tomato sauce, layered with eggplant and potato slices and a creamy white béchamel sauce (a roux of flour, butter, and milk), and baked. Pastitsio is similar in composition, but swap the eggplant and potato for a tube-shaped macaroni.
Also popular:
Souvlaki – essentially, shish-kebob; small pieces of meat and vegetables grilled on a skewer. These are often served wrapped in pita bread with tzatziki sauce.
- Spanakopita – spinach and cheese pie, with a phyllo (or filo) dough crust. The Greek translation of the name means "leaf" and it contains very little fat (being flour-based), in contrast to its close cousin French puff pastry, which is made with lots of butter. So, feel free to indulge.
- Baklava – the Greek dessert, is actually present in numerous incarnations in other cultures (and spelled differently), first surfacing in English in the mid-1600s. That phyllo dough you used for spanakopita is the main ingredient here as well…in this instance, though, it's layered with chopped nuts and honey syrup flavored with cinnamon or orange.
There are many wonderful Greek eateries in the Chicago area, and not just in Greektown (Greek Islands and Santorini). Check Please! reviewers have also touted Athenian Room in Lincoln Park; Central Gyros on the near West side; Mythos Greek Taverna in Lincoln Square; Taxim in Wicker Park; Psistaria in Lincolnwood; and Log Cabin Steakhouse in Galena.
So get your Greek on and try one of these great places, or one of the many others in the Chicago area, and celebrate Greek independence. Opa!