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More than a quarter-century after completing his term of office, James Earl Carter is still to be found in the thick of debates about national policies on a range of issues: nuclear arms, Iraq, North Korea, and, especially, the conflict between Israel and the Arabs. A steady stream of books and articles continues to issue forth from his pen, and he travels the world on self-selected diplomatic missions. No other former President has chosen to play a similar role. But then, Carter's whole political career has been out of the ordinary. In order to understand the man today, it is necessary to see him in the light of his past.
In 1976, when Carter tossed his hat into the ring for the presidential nomination, the Democratic party was still deeply riven by the long, bitter debate over the war in Vietnam. Carter's response was to soar above these divisions, downplaying both ideology and issues. Instead, he put himself forward as a man of piety and character who would restore a high tone to government in the aftermath of Watergate and related scandals. Before the rise of politically-oriented televangelists, Jimmy Carter made his personal experience as a "born again" Christian into a key tenet of his platform. "I can give you a government that's honest and that's filled with love, competence, and compassion," he pledged.
When the scramble for the Democratic nomination began, Carter was widely seen as a long shot. But by the time the primary season was half over, he had left the other, better-known Democratic contenders in the dust. That he was able to compete with them at all—that is, to raise money and enlist volunteers—owed to the national exposure he had received for his inaugural address as governor of Georgia in 1971. At that time, with much of the South still clinging to Jim Crow and resisting the nation's new civil-rights laws, Carter had boldly declared that "the time for segregation is over."
Yet the path that led him to that dramatic moment was a tortuous one, known to few outside of Georgia, and it shed light on the man who five years later would be promising voters across the country: "I will never lie to you."
Carter ran for governor of Georgia against Carl Sanders, who had served in the post previously, earning a reputation as one of the early "Southern moderates." (Georgia law prohibited serving two terms consecutively.) In the campaign, Carter presented himself as, in his words, "a local Georgia conservative Democrat . . . basically a redneck." This formulation was calculated to convey a message about his stand on racial issues: a message of resistance to racial integration, if not of out-and-out racism. He reinforced the same message by making a campaign stop at a whites-only private school, and by promising to invite Alabama Governor George Wallace, the champion of segregation, to address the state legislature.
Topping it off was Carter's reaction when, as a result of the Democratic gubernatorial primary, Lester Maddox emerged as his running mate. Maddox, a restaurateur and Sanders's successor as governor, had gained notoriety by distributing to the customers of his whites-only establishment ax handles with which to batter any blacks who might seek to be served there. Carter took the pairing in stride, characterizing Maddox as "the essence of the Democratic party."
But no sooner had he won office than he executed his remarkable shift on race, a move that landed him on the cover of Time as the apotheosis of the "new South" and made him a nationally recognized figure. The cause of this about-face is still a matter of conjecture. Since he was barred from running for re-election, it is possible that he was already weighing a presidential run and thinking in terms of a national audience. Or he may have long harbored liberal views that he had deliberately concealed. In any event, one of his associates later explained that it was Carter's way to "run conservative and govern liberal." He was soon to put that formula to use again.
In pursuing his party's 1976 presidential nomination, Carter not only kept his ideological profile low, he also made it blurry. On Vietnam, for instance: as governor, he had had no need to say much about the war, but what he did say seemed none too dovish, especially his ardent defense of Lieutenant William Calley, a Georgian convicted of the slaughter of Vietnamese civilians at My Lai. In the 1976 primary campaign, Carter distanced himself from the passel of doves—Congressman Morris Udall, Senator Frank Church, former New York Mayor John Lindsay, among others—competing for the mantle of George McGovern, leader of the antiwar Democrats. Instead, he stressed his background as a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy and, because he had served on a nuclear submarine, as a disciple of Admiral Hyman Rickover, the "father of the nuclear navy."
At the same time, though, he took pains to position himself somewhat to the dovish side of Senator Henry "Scoop" Jackson, the hero of the Democratic hawks. In particular, he denounced the Jackson-Vanik amendment that linked trade privileges for the Soviet Union to freedom of emigration. In a 1975 speech blaming Jackson for a Soviet crackdown against emigration, Carter sounded a theme that echoes in some of his pronouncements to this day:
I think that the so-called "Jackson Amendment" was ill-advised. . . . Russia is a proud nation, like we are, and if Russian Communist leaders had passed a resolution saying that they were not going to do this or that if we didn't do something domestically, we would have reacted adversely to it.
As this episode suggests, Carter was also initially cold to the subject of human rights. His 1975 book, Why Not the Best?, issued as a launching pad for his presidential campaign, makes no mention of it. Nor did he utter a word about human rights during the 1976 primaries. It was only in the course of hammering out the Democratic party's platform that his interest was kindled. By that time, with the nomination in hand, Carter's overriding goal was to unite his fissiparous party for the general election. With the Jacksonites animated against Communist regimes and the McGovernites against rightist ones, a possible common ground emerged. As Carter's chief speech writer, Patrick Anderson, explained, human rights "was seen politically as a no-lose issue. Liberals liked human rights because it involved political freedom and getting liberals out of jail in dictatorships, and conservatives liked it because it involved criticisms of Russia."
Not only was the subject a common denominator among Democrats, it helped Carter to put his Republican opponent, incumbent President Gerald Ford, on the defensive about the "realist" policies of his administration and especially of his Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger. As the New Yorker's Elizabeth Drew reported: "Human rights was an issue with which you could bracket Kissinger and Ford on both sides. . . . [I]t was a beautiful campaign issue, an issue on which there was a real degree of public opinion hostile to the administration."
On Kissinger's advice, Ford had refused to receive the novelist Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the most famous Soviet dissident, upon his expulsion from the Soviet Union. In an ironic reprise of his gubernatorial campaign promise to invite George Wallace to speak to the Georgia legislature, Carter now announced that he would invite the Russian writer to the White House. He also caught Ford in a fatal gaffe when, in their televised debate on foreign policy, the incumbent declared that "there is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe." Ford probably meant that he would not recognize Soviet domination there, but whatever he had in mind, he sounded hopelessly naive, and Carter pounced. The effect was that by election day, Carter was positioned as tougher on Communism than Ford.
But just as he had once reversed himself dramatically on the subject of race, so now, upon his election as President, Carter began at once to lay the groundwork for foreign policies that were the opposite of those he had led the voters to believe he intended to pursue. This was made manifest even before his inauguration as he went about staffing his administration. George McGovern was quoted as saying that most of Carter's State Department appointees were "quite close to those I would have made myself." Meanwhile, Carter excluded the Scoop Jackson wing of the party almost entirely from his administration. His surprising tilt away from anti-Communism was made explicit in his first major foreign-policy address when he proclaimed: "we are now free of th[e] inordinate fear of Communism. . . . We've fought fire with fire, never thinking that fire is better quenched with water."
It did not take long for Carter to discover that he was in a quandary. The idea of quenching fire with water expressed his most cherished goal, namely, achieving reconciliation with states with which America had been at odds and thus laying to rest the legacy of Vietnam, perhaps even ushering in an era of peace on earth. However, the Communist and other radical leaders with whom he was hoping to find comity happened to represent most of the world's most implacably oppressive regimes. This contradiction was never resolved, imparting an uneven and sometimes hypocritical quality to the human-rights advocacy with which Carter became identified.
The effect was exacerbated by one of Carter's personality tics, strange in a man who boasted so often of his honesty: a compulsion to engage in flattery. At times, this could manifest itself toward a rightist ally like the Shah of Iran. Just months before the outbreak of the revolution that culminated in his toppling, Carter declared in a toast that Iran was an "island of stability" thanks to the "love which your people give you." But the impulse expressed itself most strongly toward leftist strongmen. Carter hailed Yugoslav dictator Josip Tito as "a man who believes in human rights" and as a "great and courageous leader" who "has led his people and protected their freedom almost for the last forty years." Visiting Poland, then ruled by the Stalinist hack Edward Gierek, he offered a toast to its "enlightened leaders" and declared that "our concept of human rights is preserved in Poland . . . much better than other European nations with which I am familiar." He outdid himself in receiving Romania's iron-fisted ruler, Nicolae Ceausescu, enthusing:
Our goals are the same, to have a just system of economics and politics, to let the people of the world share in growth, in peace, in personal freedom, and in the benefits to be derived from the proper utilization of natural resources. We believe in enhancing human rights. We believe that we should enhance, as independent nations, the freedom of our own people.
Carter's weakness for dictators and his courtship of America's enemies not only clouded his human-rights policy, it also contributed to a flaccid approach to security issues, thus adding momentum to America's strategic decline following defeat in Vietnam. In several corners of Africa, Asia, and the Western hemisphere, Communist or other radical regimes took power, spearheaded by revolutions in Iran and Nicaragua.
Finally, when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979, Carter seemed to acknowledge his error. If he himself had once flattered Communist dictators, and if Cyrus Vance, his Secretary of State, had asserted that Soviet and American leaders "have similar dreams and aspirations about the most fundamental issues," now Carter struck a contrary note. The invasion, he said, "made a more dramatic change in my own opinion of what the Soviets' ultimate goals are than anything they've done in the previous time I've been in office."
But these second thoughts came too late to assuage American voters, and in 1980 they turned Carter out in favor of Ronald Reagan. The margin of loss was one of the widest of any incumbent President in our history.1
Few men who are called to politics suffer defeat gladly, and Carter was certainly not one of the exceptions. The last election he had lost was his first run for governor of Georgia, and it deeply shook him; as he would later relate, it was in the course of struggling to right his mood afterward that he experienced the epiphany of being born again. The loss this time was even more devastating. In 1966 he had been a forty-one-year-old politician who knew he could try again. But now he had already reached the pinnacle, only to be found wanting. The political process offered little prospect of redemption.
Nonetheless, he has striven for it mightily ever since. The effort began in the early years of his post-presidency with highly publicized activity aimed at reestablishing his credentials as a man of piety. Enrolling as a volunteer with the group Habitat for Humanity, he posed for news photos hammering nails into the timbers of homes being built for the needy. Political coloration seeped into this mission only when it took him to Communist-ruled Nicaragua, where he posed with the Sandinista dictator Daniel Ortega.
Carter was not content, however, with doing good works. In 1982 he oversaw the founding of the Carter Center at Emory University, which he still heads with the assistance of his wife Rosalynn. Although it employs some academics, the center is devoted not to scholarship but to activism. Its declared purpose is "to prevent and resolve conflicts, enhance freedom and democracy, and improve health." It provides the institutional support necessary for Carter to carve out a permanent albeit unofficial role for himself in the conduct of U.S. foreign policy.
Some of the center's activity has been non-controversial—like its missions, usually led by Carter in person, to monitor elections in countries where democracy is not yet firm. But other aspects—notably, Carter's frequent pronouncements on issues of the day and his free-lance diplomacy—have had a much sharper edge. He has injected himself into several foreign crises, sometimes with the grudging acquiescence of existing U.S. administrations but sometimes in open defiance of them.
One remarkable instance grew out of Carter's strong opposition to the use of force to reverse the Iraqi occupation of Kuwait in 1990. Not satisfied with issuing a torrent of statements and articles, he dispatched a letter to the heads of state of members of the United Nations Security Council and several other governments urging them to oppose the American request for UN authorization of military action. In this letter, writes Carter's admiring biographer Douglas Brinkley, he
urged these influential world leaders to abandon U.S. leadership and instead give "unequivocal support to an Arab League effort, without any restraints on their agenda." If this were allowed to occur, Carter believed, an Arab solution would not only force Iraq to leave Kuwait but at long last also force Israel to withdraw from the occupied territories.
The U.S. government under President George H.W. Bush learned of Carter's missive only from Prime Minister Brian Mulroney of Canada. Brent Scowcroft, Bush's National Security Adviser, called it "unbelievable" that Carter would "ask . . . the other members of the Council to vote against his own country. . . . [I]f there was ever a violation of the Logan Act prohibiting diplomacy by private citizens, this was it." Later, Carter justified his action by noting that he had sent the letter to President Bush, too—as if this disposed of Scowcroft's point. And even that was only a half-truth. As Brinkley reports, the copy to Bush was dated a day after the letter was sent to the others.
Despite Carter's appeal, the Security Council voted 12-2 to authorize military action, with only Cuba and Yemen taking Carter's side. But this was not the end of the ex-President's efforts. Just days before the announced deadline for Iraq to withdrawal from Kuwait, Carter wrote to the rulers of America's three most important Arab allies in the crisis—Egypt, Syria, and Saudi Arabia—imploring them to break with Washington: "I urge you to call publicly for a delay in the use of force while Arab leaders seek a peaceful solution to the crisis. You may have to forgo approval from the White House, but you will find the French, Soviets, and others fully supportive." This time, he did not share a copy of his appeal with his own government even after the fact.
Why, one may ask, was Carter so adamant on the point of "an Arab solution"? After all, the so-called "Carter doctrine," which he had laid down in his 1980 State of the Union address in the wake of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, explicitly threatened war in circumstances similar to those created by Saddam's naked aggression in the Persian Gulf. What, then, led him to take a different tack in this instance? Brinkley's gloss supplies a possible answer. It appears that Carter saw the fruits of Saddam's aggression as providing valuable leverage against Israel that he did not want to see squandered. Why he might have been thinking in such terms is a subject to which we shall return.
In addition to his efforts as a letter-writer, Carter, much like Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton, has materialized at the scenes of various crises over the years in the hope of making a difference—usually to little effect. His arrival in Yugoslavia during the Bosnia war in the mid-1990's is memorable mostly for the praise he garnered from president Slobodan Milosevic, who hailed him as "the first American" in a while to have "understood the situation in our country," as well as for Carter's erroneous forecast that "the prospect for ending the crisis through [U.S.] military means" was "almost hopeless." (A NATO bombing campaign some months later brought it to an abrupt halt.) A similar appearance in Haiti was notable for his approval of the human-rights record of the military strongman Raoul Cedras, reminiscent of his encomiums to Tito, Gierek, and Ceausescu.
In North Korea, however, Carter's on-the-scene intervention had real consequences that reverberate still. A new book by Marion Creekmore, Jr., a former diplomat who served as Carter's adjutant on this mission, gives us the full story "from Carter's viewpoint."2 Gushing admiration, Creekmore tells us that Carter, "though pilloried by the hawks and hard-liners as idealistic, naive, gullible, put his historical reputation on the line" to prevent war "regardless of the potential cost to him," and that in Pyongyang he managed to "cut the deal that 'experts' said could not be cut." The book is glossed with an introduction by Carter himself, patently unembarrassed by such fawning praise.
Let me set the background. After years of work on nuclear construction, North Korea had signed the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) in 1985. It had then proceeded to bob and weave around the NPT's disclosure-and-inspection obligations.3 In the face of pressure from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Pyongyang declared in 1993 that it was withdrawing from the treaty and rebuffed various inducements offered by the Clinton administration to reconsider. The matter came to a boil when the North Koreans announced they were removing fuel rods from their nuclear reactor at Yongbyon. This would make possible the extraction of plutonium from which bombs could be made, and would also prevent testing by the IAEA to see if some had been extracted earlier. When the IAEA referred the matter to the UN Security Council, Pyongyang announced that it would view any UN sanctions as acts of war.
Enter Jimmy Carter. He had received numerous invitations from Kim Il Sung to visit North Korea. Kim, who had been hand-picked by Stalin as the leader of the Korean Communists, ruled his country more tyrannically than any other dictator alive. But Carter was in his good graces: as President, he had tried to withdraw unilaterally the U.S. forces that protected South Korea from a second invasion from the North, and was prevented from doing so only by adverse opinion at home.
Successive U.S. administrations had discouraged Carter from accepting Kim's invitations. But now that the situation was heating up, he decided on his own, writes Creekmore, that "if Washington objected, he would go anyway and involve himself directly in a major international dispute." Officials working for President Clinton were not happy about this, but since they "knew that they could not stop Carter's travel . . . they sought to frame for him a useful and confined position as a message-carrier and fact-finder."
Carter sidestepped these limits. Convinced that the roots of the crisis lay in the "incredible lack of communication and understanding" between Washington and Pyongyang, he felt he could solve the crisis on the basis of his superior understanding of his hosts. The "experts" may have believed that North Korea was building nuclear weapons in order to enhance its military power, but Carter was sure it was looking only for bargaining chips. According to Creekmore, he "believed that Kim Il Sung wanted security and trade for his country and a denuclearized Korean peninsula," and that as a mediator he was uniquely positioned to work out a fair bargain. As Carter himself explains in his introduction:
In addition to showing respect for adversaries, a mediator or a negotiator must also try to understand their frames of reference, their motivations, and the pressures on them. This is very difficult for Americans, who take the economic, military, and cultural preeminence of our nation for granted and rarely consider it necessary to understand or accommodate contrary views from other people.
Accommodating contrary views was not Carter's problem, at least when it came to the North Koreans. The real obstacle, as he saw it, was President Clinton's strong declaratory stance against North Korean nuclear weapons, which he believed was counterproductive. Still worse was the stance of IAEA chief Hans Blix, who was insisting on upholding the rules of the NPT and on getting Pyongyang to account for plutonium it might have already recovered. To overcome these irritants, which only played into the hands of "hard-liners" in North Korea, Carter determined "to build a personal relationship involving trust" with Kim Il Sung.
This he did by telling Kim it was "tragic" that the IAEA had "brought to the UN Security Council a report saying that North Korea has violated its agreements." Then he added, in a direct attack on U.S. policy, "I think this sanctions effort is a serious mistake." Having thus built trust, he went on to assure Kim that "The U.S. desires to live in peace and harmony with North Korea. We don't believe our different government systems should be an obstacle to full cooperation and friendship."
For Carter, indeed, there appears to have been a solid basis for such friendship. Far from being the hive of fear and deprivation that other visitors had described—and from which masses had fled illegally into China at great peril—North Korea was just like home. He found the shops in Pyongyang to be similar to the "Wal-Mart in Americus, Georgia," and the neon lights of the capital reminded him of Times Square. Not only were the people "friendly and open," but the regime reflected their popular will, which he discovered to be "homogeneous."
That is precisely why, he later explained in a press conference, he was so opposed to sanctions. For the North Korean people would look upon them as a
personal insult to their so-called Great Leader, branding him as a liar and a criminal. This is something . . . which it would be impossible for them to accept. I thought this before I went to North Korea and that's why I went. Now after observing their psyche and their societal structure and the reverence with which they look upon their leader, I'm even more convinced.
In short order, Carter and Kim struck a deal. North Korea would be given two light-water nuclear reactors in exchange for its graphite reactor, the former being somewhat less easy than the latter to use for making weapons. In return for a U.S. commitment to enter into talks over a North Korean wish list, Pyongyang would verifiably freeze its activity with the fuel rods. Whatever weapons material the North Koreans had earlier extracted (enough for one or two bombs, in most estimates) would in effect be forgotten about.
Carter intended all of the specifics of this trade-off to be ironed out by diplomats, but he hastened to announce the agreement itself in front of news cameras even before reporting it to Washington. Thereby, he exulted afterward to Creekmore, he had driven a stake through the heart of U.S. policy: "When the cameras shut down, Carter was all smiles. . . . 'That killed the sanctions resolution,' he said."
Feeling at once boxed in and relieved, the Clinton administration proceeded to formalize Carter's deal in the so-called Agreed Framework. Carter hailed this as a great triumph, calling his own accomplishment a "miracle."
Indeed, the Agreed Framework did keep the Yongbyon reactor harmless for the next eight years, as Creekmore and Carter have repeatedly emphasized. In exchange, North Korea received a great part of its fuel as a gift from the United States, Japan, and South Korea. And yet, despite the "trust" established by Carter, North Korea, while leaving its plutonium reactor under international observation, proceeded to develop a separate, clandestine nuclear-weapons program at Kumchangri based on highly enriched uranium. Nobody knows when work on the facility began, but U.S. intelligence seems to have become aware of it in 1996.
In 2002, Bush administration officials confronted North Korean representatives over this blatant cheating. They acknowledged the truth of it, although in a tone not of apology but of anger. Renouncing its obligations under the Agreed Framework, the regime promptly began to reprocess the Yongbyon fuel rods for more weapons material, and declared threateningly that it possessed some other, "more powerful" secret programs.
Carter's own initial reaction to this 2002 blow-up was to blame the U.S. and North Korea equally for failing to honor the Agreed Framework. But neither he nor Creekmore can explain what exactly the U.S. failed to do. The reason for this is self-evident: even if the U.S. did commit some bagatelle of noncompliance, it could not possibly be considered equivalent to North Korea's developing an entire secret nuclear-weapons program (and perhaps multiple ones) negating the very purpose of the agreement.
Then, last year, North Korea tested a nuclear bomb. Pyongyang had always insisted, including in its talks with Carter, that it sought nuclear energy only for the purpose of generating electricity. Now it changed its tune, asserting that it was entitled to new deference as a member of the "nuclear club." And Carter, too, changed his tune. No longer blaming both sides impartially, he now put the blame squarely on the U.S. and specifically on President Bush. "Beginning in 2002," he wrote in an essay for the New York Times,
the United States branded North Korea as part of an axis of evil, threatened military action, ended the shipments of fuel oil and the construction of nuclear power plants, and refused to consider further bilateral talks. In their discussions with me at this time, North Korean spokesmen seemed convinced that the American positions posed a serious danger to their country and to its political regime.
He did not mention North Korea's secret nuclear program, to which each of the American actions he decried was in whole or part a response.
America's options in dealing with Pyongyang's nuclear ambitions were never attractive, but they are worse now than they were before Carter's self-aggrandizing intervention. In 1994, a military strike against North Korean nuclear facilities would have been perilous, but it was an important option to have available and may have been our best choice, as some senior military and diplomatic figures argued at the time. Today, a strike against a nuclear-armed North Korea would be infinitely more perilous. In short, America is in more difficult straits and the world is more dangerous as a direct result of Carter's actions.
Unrepentant, Carter has lately turned his focus anew to the Arab-Israel conflict. Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid 4 is his second book on the subject, a reprise in shriller terms of the themes sounded in his earlier The Blood of Abraham (1985). Carter's interest in the conflict is in one sense natural: the agreement he mediated between Israel and Egypt at Camp David in 1978 stands as one of the few solid achievements of his presidency. Yet the intensity of his rhetoric suggests that his absorption with this issue derives from something deeper than the pleasure of returning to the scene of past triumphs.5
For someone who once played and still fancies himself in the role of mediator, Carter's visceral attitudes to the two sides are strikingly disparate. He finds something to like in every Arab leader he meets. In light of Camp David, his fondness for Sadat is easy to understand. But he also seems to have felt warmly toward Syria's dictator Hafez al-Assad, who in the late 1970's led the recriminations against Sadat for allegedly betraying the Arab cause in making peace with Israel. Upon meeting Assad in 1978, Carter noted in his diary that "[t]here was a lot of good humor between us, and I found him to be constructive in attitude."
The Palestine Liberation Organization also tried to scuttle the Camp David agreement, but this hardly seems to have diminished Carter's affection for Yasir Arafat. In the new book, Carter writes blandly that "When I met with Yasir Arafat in 1990, he stated, 'The PLO has never advocated the annihilation of Israel. The Zionists started the "drive the Jews into the sea" slogan and attributed it to the PLO.'" This fabrication Carter quotes without comment, leaving the reader to take it at face value. In fact, of course, the covenant of the PLO states that the
partition of Palestine, which took place in 1947, and the establishment of Israel are fundamentally invalid. . . . The Palestinian Arab people . . . reject all alternatives to the total liberation of Palestine.
There is no doubt that Carter is familiar with this, because (as we learn from Brinkley) in a private meeting he lobbied Arafat unsuccessfully to amend it. On that meeting, Carter is mum here.
Besides giving a pass to Arafat's mendacities, Carter also assisted him more actively by, in Brinkley's words, seeking to "reshap[e] how Yasir Arafat was understood in the United States, not as a terrorist but as a peacemaker." Toward that end, Carter volunteered as a ghostwriter, "draft[ing] on his home computer the strategy and wording for a generic speech Arafat was to deliver soon for Western ears." In 1990, when Arafat's support for Saddam Hussein's occupation of Kuwait led to a devastating loss of funding for the PLO, Carter appealed to Saudi Arabia to turn the spigot back on. As Brinkley summarizes the ex-President's feelings for the PLO chieftain, this was a "fondness . . . that transcended politics, based on their emotional connection and the shared belief that they were both ordained to be peacemakers by God."
No such emotional connection, certainly, characterizes Carter's feelings about most Israeli leaders he has met—including Golda Meir, Menachem Begin, Yitzhak Shamir, Ehud Barak, Ariel Sharon, and Ehud Olmert. Universally, they seem rather to evoke his dislike, and Israel as a whole seems to have the same effect on him. In his new book he complains about the country's secularism, noting that the Bibles handed to recruits at the completion of military training are "one of the few indications of a religious commitment that I observed." But he has no use for religious Israelis, either, complaining that "very conservative religious parties [are] granted almost exclusive control over all forms of worship."6 One cannot help comparing this with Carter's praise of the Saudi royal family for "preserving the proper degree of religious commitment" in their country—a country where Christian Bibles are sometimes confiscated at the border and Jews were long barred altogether.
Whether Carter's liking for Arabs and dislike for Israelis is cause or effect, an overwhelming bias resonates on almost every page of his new book. Thus, he repeatedly denounces Israel for violating Palestinian human rights—a denunciation that sits oddly not only with his fatuous approval of such world-class human-rights abusers as Ceausescu, Kim, and Milosevic, but also with his delicately constrained comments on the human-rights practices of the Saudi rulers, who in his unctuous words "offset their absolute authority with a remarkable closeness to their subjects."
And what about the human rights of the Palestinians at the hands of their own leaders? According to Freedom House, the degree of freedom enjoyed in parts of the West Bank and Gaza administered by the Palestinian Authority has scarcely exceeded that in the parts administered by Israel. But Carter has remained silent about the abuse of Palestinians by Arafat and his successors.
To make Israel the culprit of his historical narrative, Carter is compelled to turn many things upside down. In the 1970's, he writes, "rejection of Israel was shared by the leaders of all Arab nations, following four wars in the previous 25 years." This sentence gives the impression that the "four wars" somehow caused Arab rejectionism, when the inverse is true: rejection of Israel was the reason for the wars. In another inversion, he claims that Israeli plans to divert water from the Jordan and the Sea of Galilee were what prompted the founding of the PLO in 1964. In fact, when the Arab states turned down a U.S. plan for the distribution of water because it would allow "the Zionists to consolidate their existence," Israel secured American approval to divert a smaller amount on its own, to which the Arabs retaliated by diverting water upstream of Israel and by forming the PLO as an anti-Israel guerrilla movement to continue the war of annihilation by other means.
In still another passage Carter writes: "One of the vulnerabilities of Israel and a potential cause of violence is the holding of prisoners," thus making it out that Israel's imprisonment of terrorists causes violence when it is terrorist violence that causes imprisonment. In a like vein, he asserts that "Palestinian leaders unequivocally accepted" the Bush administration's "road map" while "Israel has officially rejected its key provisions with unacceptable caveats and prerequisites." The reason Israel announced caveats is that it took the document seriously. The Palestinians may have accepted the road map rhetorically, but they have not fulfilled, and have declared they will not fulfill, its cornerstone requirement—namely, that "Palestinians declare an unequivocal end to violence and terrorism and undertake visible efforts on the ground to arrest, disrupt, and restrain individuals and groups conducting and planning violent attacks on Israelis anywhere."
Of this, Carter breathes not a word. Instead, over and over again he denies, omits, obscures, justifies, or defines away Arab terrorism against Israel. In one place, for example, erasing the distinction between victims who are deliberately targeted and those who are harmed accidentally, he asserts that "the killing of noncombatants in Israel, Palestine, and Lebanon by bombs, missile attacks, assassinations, or other acts of violence cannot be condoned." Eliding yet another distinction, he uses the euphemism "dissidents" for terrorists. In another place, he claims absurdly that "As a people, [Palestinians] were branded by Israeli officials as terrorists, and even minor expressions of displeasure brought the most severe punishment." As for what the PLO was doing all those years when Israel was falsely "branding" the Palestinians as terrorists, it seems that after 1969, when he became chairman of the PLO, "Arafat turned much of his attention to raising funds for the care and support of the refugees."
It is not only Arafat whose pacifism Carter credits. Now that the PLO has been upstaged by Hamas, he finds peaceful intentions in that quarter, too—even in the face of Hamas denials that it adheres to any such view. Reporting credulously that "Hamas would modify its rejection of Israel if there is a negotiated agreement that Palestinians can approve," he has urged Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas to forge a coalition government with this terrorist organization that is sworn to Israel's destruction.
Hamas, Carter writes, has "meticulously observed a cease-fire commitment," and "since August of 2004 [it] has not committed a single act of terrorism that cost an Israeli life." How Carter purports to know this, no one can say, since throughout the book he provides neither footnotes nor citations. As it happens, Hamas announces its operations on its websites and elsewhere. In the time frame Carter specifies, Hamas claimed responsibility for fifteen terror attacks that killed 26 Israelis: two young children and eleven other civilians, and thirteen soldiers. Two of the soldiers were killed in the course of the kidnapping of a third, Gilad Shalit, in an incident that Carter himself refers to (naturally faulting Israel).
Finally, while minimizing any Arab wish or intent to destroy Israel, Carter professes himself uncertain about the intentions of the other side. In The Blood of Abraham he wrote:
Without ever abandoning their most ambitious goals of a uniquely Jewish nation, with boundaries similar to those in the time of King David and surrounded by acquiescent and peaceful neighbors, the Jews have been willing to pursue them in incremental steps, even compromising for a while when necessary.
Although he does not repeat this assertion in the new book, he has never retracted or revised it. In his view, the underlying source of the conflict is "Israel's continued control and colonization of Palestinian land." Thus he concludes:
The bottom line is this: peace will come to Israel and the Middle East only when the Israeli government is willing to comply with international law, with the Roadmap for Peace, with official American policy, with the wishes of a majority of its own citizens—and honor its own previous commitments—by accepting its legal borders.
As for the "general Arab community and all significant Palestinian groups," they too need to make it clear that they "will end the suicide bombings and other acts of terrorism"—but only "when international laws and the ultimate goals of the Roadmap for Peace are accepted by Israel." In other words, it is all right for terrorism against Israel to continue. Until when? Well, since Carter dismisses Israel's repeated declarations that it accepts both international law and the road map, this formulation can only mean that the terror should continue until Israel bows to the interpretations and conditions set by the Arabs.
When it comes to Israel, it would take a book to catalogue all of Carter's false or wildly misleading statements on matters historical, political, military, and diplomatic. Kenneth Stein, a Middle East expert at the Carter Center who had helped write The Blood of Abraham, resigned to protest the latest book. "It is replete with factual errors, copied materials not cited, superficialities, glaring omissions, and simply invented segments," Stein wrote. "Aside from the one-sided nature of the book . . . there are recollections cited from meetings where I was the third person in the room, and my notes of those meetings show little similarity to points claimed in the book."
What is to explain Carter's passion against Israel? This question is not easy to answer. A recent article in the online journal FrontPage enumerated some of the millions of dollars that the Carter Center receives from Saudi Arabia and other oil-rich Arab states, but it is hard to know whether this is inducement or merely a benefit of Carter's position. It is also true that opposition to Israel fits seamlessly into the ex-President's leftist/third-worldist outlook in general. But this too does not explain the blind intensity of his obsession.
Something of the old-fashioned pre-Vatican II Christian animus toward Jews may be at work in Carter. In The Blood of Abraham, he claimed pointedly that Jews regard themselves as a chosen "race." (In fact the biblical idea of a "chosen people" is not racial: anyone may join this "race" by conversion.) A similar spirit creeps into several passages of his recent book. In one place he writes of a visit "with some of the few surviving Samaritans, who complained to us that their holy sites and culture were not being respected by Israeli authorities—the same complaint heard by Jesus and his disciples almost 2,000 years earlier." In another he says of Israel's anti-terrorist barrier (which he refers to variously as the "segregation barrier" and the "imprisonment wall"): "The wall ravages many places along its devious route that are important to Christians. In addition to enclosing Bethlehem in one of its most notable intrusions, an especially heartbreaking division is on the southern slope of the Mount of Olives, a favorite place for Jesus and his disciples." In still another, he claims that Jewish discrimination has caused "a surprising exodus of Christians from the Holy Land." (A more powerful cause is persecution of Christians by Muslims; but Carter says nothing, for example, of the YMCA in the West Bank town of Qalqilya that was ordered closed by Hamas officials and then burned to the ground.)
Sounding a more contemporary note of Jew-bashing, Carter echoes newly revived speculations about a conspiracy among American advocates of Israel's cause. "Because of powerful political, economic, and religious forces in the United States," he writes, "Israeli government decisions are rarely questioned or condemned, [and] voices from Jerusalem dominate in our media." Who might those "powerful . . . religious forces" be? The Christian Right supports Israel, but no one has ever accused it of dominating the media. Carter can only mean the Jews.
In a speech at a book event in November, Carter dwelled at length on the so-called Geneva Accord, an unofficial 2003 proposal for an Israeli-Palestinian settlement in which he was involved. Then he added: "Never, in this country, do you hear any of these issues proposed publicly by an elected member of the House or the Senate or in the White House or NBC or ABC or CBS, New York Times, Washington Post, LA Times. Never." His point was that the "media" suppress views like his own. In truth, when the accord was announced, a New York Times editorial hailed it as "truly momentous," and the other papers mentioned by Carter also praised it in editorials and gave it ample coverage in news and feature stories. But he will not see what he will not see.
As Carter's latest book and speeches have begun to evoke criticism from Jewish groups and others, he has taken on a new role: that of the martyr. After declining to debate Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz at Brandeis University, he took umbrage when the university, for its part, declined his request that it hire a private plane to bring him to speak alone. The incident led him to declare in the press: "My most troubling experience has been the rejection of my offers to speak, for free, about the book on university campuses with high Jewish enrollment." In sum, Carter, who seems to think of himself as a latter-day prince of peace, and who has performed "miracles" in North Korea and elsewhere, is now being persecuted for his goodness by the Jews.
Ever since his presidency, there has been a wide gap between Carter's estimation of himself and the esteem in which other Americans hold him. This has manifestly embittered him. For all his talk of "love," the driving motives behind his post-presidential ventures seem, in fact, to be bitterness together with narcissism (as it happens, two prime ingredients of a martyr complex). But he has worked hard to earn the reputation he enjoys. In contravention of the elementary responsibilities of loyalty for one in his position, he has denigrated American policies and leaders in his public and private discussions in foreign lands. He has undertaken personal diplomacy to thwart the policies of the men elected to succeed him. And in doing so he has, at least in the case of North Korea, actively damaged our security.
At home, Carter's criticisms of the policies of his successors are offered up with reckless abandon. For example, when the Patriot Act and related measures curtailed the rights of defendants accused of terrorism, Carter editorialized that "in many nations, defenders of human rights were the first to feel the consequences." The charge was simply a concoction, and not a single example was offered to substantiate it. In this manner, Carter has made himself a willing hook on which foreigners can hang their anti-American feelings. When he was given the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002, the chairman of the committee allowed that the award "should be interpreted as a criticism of the line that the current administration has taken. It's a kick in the leg to all who follow the same line as the United States."
Carter's special rancor toward Israel remains to some degree mysterious, as such sentiments often are, but it is likely we have not heard the last of it. As the protests and criticisms of him continue, he may well sink deeper into his sense of angry martyrdom, following the path recently trod by academics like John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, who fancy themselves victims of the very Jewish conspiracies they set out to expose. It is sad that a President whose cardinal accomplishment was a peace accord between Israel and one of its neighbors should have devolved into such a seething enemy of Israel. It will be sadder still if this same man, whose other achievement was to elevate the cause of human rights, ends his career by helping to make anti-Semitism acceptable once again in American discourse.
There is little doubt, in sum, that the electorate was right in 1980 when it judged Carter to have been among our worst Presidents. It is even more certain that history will judge him to have been our very worst ex-President.
1 In percentage terms, the degree of Carter's rebuff was exceeded only by Herbert Hoover's loss to Franklin Roosevelt in 1932 at the depths of the Great Depression; William Taft's loss to Woodrow Wilson in 1912 (when Theodore Roosevelt split the Republican vote); and John Quincy Adams's loss to Andrew Jackson in 1828
2 A Moment of Crisis: Jimmy Carter, the Power of a Peacemaker, and North Korea's Nuclear Ambitions
3 For some of the details, see my article Facing Up to North Korea in COMMENTARY, March 2003.
4 Simon & Schuster, 288 pp., $27.00.
5 Success at Camp David imbued Carter with supreme confidence
in his own abilities as a mediator, but once Egypt's President Anwar
Sadat had taken his remarkable peace journey to Israel in 1977, the rest was a matter of resolving details. This is a far cry from situations like Bosnia or Korea, where the goals of the parties remained fundamentally antagonistic. Ironically, Carter, fixated on multilateral initiatives in the Middle East, had at first responded coolly to Sadat's gesture.
6 This is nonsense. Religious authorities maintain control over various public and legal functions, such as Sabbath operations of government services or marriage and conversion, not over "worship"; and the authority of Christian and Muslim clergy is recognized as applying to members of those faiths.


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BMC Atrium CMDB 9.x: Advanced Training
Note: This course was formerly titled, BMC Atrium CMDB 9.1: For Consumers, Configuration Managers, and Administrators
The BMC Atrium CMDB 9.x: Advanced Training course teaches students about what makes a Configuration Management Database (CMDB) useful to the business, how to configure the CMDB, and how to perform routine administrative and maintenance tasks.
This five-day course is designed for Configuration Managers and CMDB Administrators, with the first day focused on learning how the CMDB is used by key IT Service Management functions, such as Asset, Incident, and Change Management. During the next three days, students will learn how to configure their environment to meet the requirements of CMDB consumers in the business. The final day covers routine administration and maintenance of the CMDB.
Included in this course is the examination for BMC Accredited Administrator: BMC Atrium CMDB 9.1.
Note: Interested only in learning about the fundamentals of the CMDB? The first day of content focusing on how CMDB is used by different IT Service Management functions is available separately in the BMC Atrium CMDB 9.x: Fundamentals (ASP) course.
Major release:
BMC Helix CMDB 9.x
Good for:
Administrators, Configuration Managers
Course Delivery:
Instructor Led | 40.00 hours
Course Modules
Introducing CMDB
- Defining Consumers
- Success metrics
BMC Atrium Console
- Use the CMDB Dashboard
- Find CIs
- Build queries
- Filter views
- Create and Modify CIs
Asset Management Console
- Searching for CIs
- Preference Settings
- Filters
- People Relationships
Relating CIs in Incident and Change
- Service CIs and the Incident form
- Relating CIs to Incidents and Changes
- Impact Analysis
Configuration Management
- Purpose of CMDB
- Define data requirements
Common Data Model
- Class Structure (Inheritance, Superclass, and Subclass)
- CMDB and AST forms
- Using Class Manager
- Mapping CIs to Classes
- Adding Classes and Attributes
Importing Data
- Datasets
- ADDM-CMDB synchronization
- Atrium Integrator
- Best practices for loading data
- Importing CIs
- Creating relationships between people and Cis
Normalizing Data
- Populating the Product Catalog
- Normalizing SCCM data
- Normalizing Impact data
Reconciling Data
- Standard Reconciliation
- Copy, Compare, Delete and Purge
- Performance tuning
Federating Data
- Launch Federation
- Retrieval Federation
Service Modeling
- Importing Service Models with AI
- Using the Atrium Service Catalog
- Validate a change with a Service Model
- Simulate Impact Models
Managing Permission
- Purpose of CMDB
- Define data requirements
- Migrating AI jobs
- Export and import normalization settings
- Backing up the CMDB
Post Installation Configuration
- Service Context
- Centralized Configuration
- Troubleshooting
Accreditation is available upon successful completion of this course.

subset: commoncrawl


text:
I have been using VSCO Film for about a year now, and I am still just as excited about it as I was when I first started using it. Visual Supply recently released VSCO Film 02 which offers an updated list of film emulations to Film 01 as well as some improved options in the toolkit. When I was using VSCO Film 01, I mostly used Kodak Portra 400, but in VSCO Film 02, Fuji Superia 800 – is my new go to. VSCO Film 02 also comes with several new film options for B&W images. I still like Kodak TRI-X 400 – for B&W, but the new Fuji Neopan 1600 and Ilford Delta emulations in Film 02 are just as good depending on the image you are working with. I use VSCO Film 02 for all of my personal and family pictures as well as all of the behind the scenes images from our photo shoots and productions for work. There is not really a whole lot more I feel the need to say about it. We are talking about visual style, so you either like how it looks or you don't. It's just a matter of preference, but for me personally, I am a big fan. Below are some of my images edited with VSCO Film 02. Check it out or buy it for yourself here. You won't be disappointed.
Here is the review I did on VSCO Film 01 earlier this year.


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If you're using WordPress as your favorite open source blogging platform, chances are pretty high you've already heard about the recent security flaw found in the TimThumb plugin fow WP. If you haven't - you should, cause it's pretty severe. Here is more info on that:
The security flaw isn't a core WordPress vulnerability, so you won't be vulnerable for just using WordPress. However, the bad news is that a pretty big number of themes out there use the TimThumb plugin in order to operate correctly and therefore TimThumb is included in a lot of WordPress plugins and themes, both free and paid. The result is that there is a good chance you might have the vulnerable TimThumb installed and running on your WordPress even if you don't really know about it or you don't care.
The flaw itself is rather stupid - the TimThumb plugin allows uploading files from a list of so called "trusted domains". Among those domains are "flickr.com", "picasa.com", "blogger.com", etc - all of which you might find useful in case you keep your image gallery there and would like to get an image transferred to your blog at a glance. However, the check is flawed because you can bypass it by using a domain like blogger.com.hacker.com. This domain passes the check but belongs to hacker.com, making the script exploitable. Hackers have already been exploiting this vulnerability in the wild and many many bloggers suffered from it already.
In case you are a WordPress user and have TimThumb installed or even worse - you've already been hacked, you might wonder what to do to get things resolved? Well, the good news is there's already a fix for the plugin available here:
Along with the good and the bad news in this situation, there's also a great news for you in case your WordPress is hosted at SiteGround -- it should be secured without you doing anything! As always we've been trying to take care of our fellow customers without boring them with unnecessary details and overcomplicated technical stuff. After all you've entrusted us with your website and its security is our primary goal. So here's what we did - the day after the exploit went live, which if my memory serves me well, was about a month or so ago - we checked how many people are using the TimThumb plugin. The number was devastating - around 15,000 WP instances had it installed and around 350 of those were already compromised. Obviously upgrading 15,000 WP instances was not an option - it's a huge number and given the fact there were so many different versions of TimThumb and we needed to ask for customers' consent prior to upgrading his/her website, it was simply impossible to accomplish. At least not in the short term. So, we decided to find an intelligent and efficient way to deal with the vulnerability before a much larger number of customers were affected. Well, most hosts wouldn't even bother suggesting a fix as they would define the problem as "beyond the scope of the technical support", but we try to do it differently and make sure we spare troubles and work to our customers where possible.
And then in just a few hours, one of our System Engineers found the solution, elegant, simple and fast - the TimThumb plugin uses a folder called tmp/cache to store uploaded files. What we did is suspend execution of files from that folder in all WordPress instances. In simple words - if you upload an image - it will work, but if you upload a script (e.g. badass hack script) it won't. And that magically solved it all with no hassle whatsoever for our customers. We then modified our Apache security module (mod_security) by adding some rules that will prevent execution of the hack, so our customers could be protected by two layers, instead of just one. And then notified the unlucky 350 hacked guys what they should do to get things resolved - namely get rid of the hack and upgrade plugin version. We also offered the service of cleaning the hack and upgrading the plugin to be performed by the Super Heroes @ SiteGround Support Team for the people that felt uncertain how to do it for themselves.
So the answer to the question: "Has your WordPress site been hacked recently?" will disturbingly often be YES in the general case and will most probably be NO if you use SiteGround WordPress hosting.
The SiteGround Mastermind


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Six graduate students and assistant professor Dietmar Offenhuber have created an urban light installation as part of the Northeastern University's masters programme in information design and visualisation.
Luminous 14:
Discussing with light
Six graduate students and assistant professor Dietmar Offenhuber have created an urban light installation as part of the Northeastern University's masters programme in information design and visualisation.
Students on the course "Information design for dynamic media and light" at Northeastern University designed an information display that went on their building in the heart of Boston. It told viewers about the mood on campus during finals week, transforming the data collected from participants about the campus mood into pixels of light on the physical installation, which was also designed by the students.
The students created a website interface optimised for mobile phones and coded a custom software interface for a programmable LED lighting infrastructure. They used Processing, a programming language created to enable designers and artists to develop custom code. The students' software "We wanted to use a display medium that blends with the architecture, rather than attaches to it," said assistant professor Dietmar Offenhuber. The class was keen to create a design that faced out toward the heart of campus, revealing hidden knowledge and intriguing passersby.
Once the software and display were created, the students promoted their project to gather the data. Taken online, through a mobile app, or with wireless buttons in front of Ryder Hall, the poll asked community members if they felt anxious, relieved, determined, excited, or exhausted. Once a vote was tallied, several LED nodes lit up on the installation. The more votes each emotion received, the larger each color-coded light cluster became.
The installation, named dot.vote, was made possible by the collaboration of students, instructors, and partnering companies. Philips Color Kinetics provided the LED fixtures, iColor Flex SLX, for the display, adding to the existing partnership between Northeastern and Philips Color Kinetics. This relationship stems from Northeastern's co-op programme, in which students work full-time for six-month cycles at the Philips Color Kinetics headquarters in Burlington, MA as part of their education.
The Processing language which the students used to create the custom software for the façade was developed specially for creative practitioners. The software is integrated with an Ethernet-based Philips Color Kinetics control system consisting of a Light System Engine and three 90 sPDS-480ca power and data supplies. Each port on the power and data supplies powers one chain of 50 LED pixels. Some 18 iColor Flex SLX chains were also used.


text:
In order to have a healthy sex life, it is very important to realise the mistakes that you commit in the bedroom and all the issues your partner is facing which are driving him/her away from sex.
While you are in a full swing to have sex tonight, it might leave you pondering over the fact that your partner turned you down. The reasons behind having a low sex drive can be many and gender specific.
Men can have totally different reasons to stay away from sex when compared to women. Here are few reasons behind your partner's low sexual desires.
Image courtesy: www.sexualwellnessmatters.com
Watching adult films is no more restricted to men. Now, even women take equal interest in watching such content. Many psychologists and sex therapists have claimed that watching adult movies can rekindle the lost charm in sex life but at the same time there are many studies which say that addiction to it can destroy your interest in your partner.
Some experts have also said that once a person becomes addicted to adult movies, he/she starts relying more on them than his/her spouse for satisfaction.
Image courtesy: Getty Images
It is your job to know what state of mind your partner is going through before you approach him/her for sex. There are possibilities that your partner is upset over something or is going through depression. In such cases, it is very obvious for your partner to turn down sex.
Image courtesy: Getty Images
If your partner is spending more time masturbating, it becomes quite obvious that he/she would not be interested in getting intimate with you. Masturbating can undoubtedly give a better level of sexual stimulation. Therefore, it becomes natural for your partner to opt for pleasing him/herself than to have sex with you.
Image courtesy: Getty Images
Excessive coughing and sneezing can hinder your sex life. If your partner is having a prolonged allergy, he/she is bound to have a low sex drive. The reason behind this is quite simple as a person having a running nose and watery eyes will be irritable enough to turn down your sex proposal.
Image courtesy: Getty Images
For all the women who keep wondering why their man is are no more interested in having sex, his low testosterone level will come to you as a surprise. As a matter of fact, the symptoms of having a low testosterone level were right there before you but you kept ignoring them. Low energy, bad mood, exhaustion etc. all can be symptoms of a decreased testosterone level.
Image courtesy: fitness.mercola.com
Men who have problems with erection or ejaculate soon, often withdraw themselves from having sex. Most men treat it as their responsibility to satisfy their woman and in cases where they ejaculate soon it makes them feel less of a man. These problems can make them feel less manly and they might prefer staying away from their partners.
Image courtesy: Getty Images
Men are imaginative whereas women demand a proof. There are chances that you might be taking it too fast and your woman wants it slow and more affectionate. It is very necessary sometimes to caress a woman's erogenous areas in order to arouse her. Lack of foreplay can also lead driving her away from you.
Image courtesy: Getty Images
Although being insecure about one's body is not gender specific yet this issue is more prevalent amongst female. According to studies, if anyone of the partners is encountering this issue, the couple's sex life can witness adverse effects.
Image courtesy: Getty Images
After child birth, the estrogen level in a female's body drops by a significant level. This leads to a lower sex drive in women. Especially women who breastfeed, a low desire to have sex can be seen.
Image courtesy: Getty Images
If your partner is experiencing some highs and lows in his/her career it is pretty obvious to for that person to have low sexual desire. Especially in men, being the bread-earner of the house a troubled career can kill the mood for having sex.
A healthy sex life leads to a happier life and a satisfied person therefore it becomes very essential to overcome all shortcomings which can hinder your sex life.
Image courtesy: Getty Images
All possible measures have been taken to ensure accuracy, reliability, timeliness and authenticity of the information; however Onlymyhealth.com does not take any liability for the same. Using any information provided by the website is solely at the viewers' discretion. In case of any medical exigencies/ persistent health issues, we advise you to seek a qualified medical practitioner before putting to use any advice/tips given by our team or any third party in form of answers/comments on the above mentioned website.


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text:
Camp near Saltillo, Miss
Sunday evening
June 8, 1862"
My Dearest Maggie)))) We left Baldwin yesterday
evening and arrived here about noon today."
We are encamped in an old orchard close
to a neat little farm house on the main road.
I am inclined to think we shall not remain
for any length of time; not longer than [is]
necessary for the main body of the army to
take position farther back and to remove
Company stores. Of course this is only sur-
mise, but from appearances it looks probable.
We are about ten or twelve miles South of
Baldwin and in a very pretty country.
The water is better than we have had
since we left Corinth. We get it from
a spring about a quarter of a mile from
Camp in a beautiful little valley _ it gushes
out from the feet of a bluff in a stream
as thick as my wrist _ it is quite a romantic


text:
I did terribly today. I ate chocolate and peanuts that I shouldn't have and now I feel gross. And then to top it off, I ate roast, potatoes, corn and gravy for supper. I feel even worse!
Not every day is like this, of course. I actually lost a few pounds last week, which is a good thing! But ugh!
I feel like something has changed mentally. I don't have that drive like I used to have. I want to be thin, but I don't really believe I'll ever get there and so I self sabotage myself over and over again.
Maybe I don't want it bad enough. Whatever it is, I HATE IT. I must change.
I can keep saying this over and over and over, but at least I haven't given up. I'm still trying. I suppose this "healthy" thing is a lifelong commitment and I will have bad days along with the good. That makes me feel a little better. Like less of a failure.
Tomorrow, Jess and I are starting our summer challenge together, so that will be inspiration to get it together…AGAIN. And another girl has joined the competition so the stakes are higher. This time we're counting "healthy checks" similar to WW. We are focusing on habits and healthy choices, not just weight loss.
I'm sorry I'm not very inspirational these days…this has definitely been a rough patch in my journey.


text:
Extra work pays off: Working as an extra on 'Chicago Fire'
By Patricia
Urbonas Clark
Send a link to a friend
[February 13, 2013]
CHICAGO -- When you work on the
set of a $5 million-per-episode network drama, you expect the best.
NBCs "Chicago Fire" does not disappoint. With five-star food,
state-of-the-art equipment, television icons walking freely among
you, a new extra can quickly become star-struck.
As a central Illinois grandmother turned film and television
actress, I was no less like a kid on her first trip to Walt Disney
World -- I stood with my mouth gaping at the wonder of it all. But
then, the professional inside of me showed up, put on her big-girl
panties, and prepared for a full day of work ahead.
When you are
"chosen" to work as an extra on the set of "Chicago Fire," or any
other film set, there are certain expectations. Understatement:
No pictures. It doesn't matter if every passer-by on the
neighboring streets of the North Side has their smartphone
plastering Jesse Spencer's sweet mug all over Facebook; you will
never work this show again if you take pictures. Got it. Sigh.
No approaching the talent. That means Severide is off-limits,
ladies. You can watch him from a reasonable distance on set, but do
not initiate contact. Trust me, swarms of security will show you the
nearest exit to Neverworkinthistownagainville.
When given direction, take it. No clever ad-libs to show off
your incredible acting skills that clearly put you in the running
for a steamy scene with Dawson, boys. You can fake a heart attack on
set, but neither Monica Raymond nor Laura Sherman will be delivering
CPR. The most you will get is your lifeless body being hauled off
set by the guy who moves the craft cart. Grab a handful of
macadamias for me while you are there.
Prepare to wait. You will do a lot of standing around on-set
while other portions of the scene are being shot. You have one
specific job: Stand here. Move there. Look worried.
Look relieved. Point and nonverbally refer to the crisis that is
being filmed. Interact in character with the other minions who are
making $75 per day alongside you. You are a star.
[to top of second column]
Don't ham for the cam. You are not a star. You
are a set piece. Like that tree, that truck parked on the street,
that fire hydrant -- all important, but otherwise should remain
unnoticed. Your job is to blend and set the stage, not call to Chief
Boden, "I got this, Wally!" and be a one-man rescue machine. This is
not call of duty. You are not a hero, unless Michael
Brandt says you are. You will get no extra lives at the end of this
That being said, enjoy yourself. Behave, but take in the
moment, albeit a 10-hour, repetitive one. This is cool. You
are among some television greats -- cast, production and crew. And
if you learn how to network, you just might get to work alongside
them. Wait -- you are working alongside them, even in
a minor role. This is cool.
Be in awe. You will learn the inside scoop on where the crew
gets all this equipment, makes a neighborhood brownstone look
ablaze, creates smoke that won't blacken your lungs, turns a 200-man
set into an authentic crisis that you once, as a viewer, believed to
be real.
Feast. When set breaks, you eat. In a common place. Where
everyone sits together and enjoys five-star food. Where a birthday
cake surprises Charlie Barnett. Where everyone sings and raises their
glasses. And everyone is welcome to a piece.
[By PATRICIA URBONAS CLARK]
Fan page:
IMDb page with acting reel:
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text:
Think Conan O'Brien left his Yamaha-engined Ford Taurus back in New York when he moved out to LA to take the reins at the Tonight Show? Think again. Last night saw Conan's first Tonight Show as well as the return of his green SHO!
Overall, in addition to the FoMoCo love, the show was pretty heavy on the auto humor. Want to see all of it? We're assuming it'll be up on Hulu at some point. The cold open's already there. (Hat tip to @IisChrisMiller, @joshVC!)


text:
I haven't had much time for sewing or for cooking elaborate meals in the last 11 weeks. Not much time for finishing unpainted walls or for weeding the forest of weeds that is our garden. But over these cool winter days, we have had time for listening and reading and these are some of the things we have been turning our attention too;
This is a hilarious musical by Sandra Boynton, the children's author, with lots of famous actors singing funny and very catchy tunes. This was a gift for Minnie and Louis from a lovely friend who lives in Philadelphia, without any chickens.
We read this every day, without fail. A great book as the reader chooses their own adventure.
An old school friend wrote this and we are all very proud of her! Honey has a second novel out (Good Daughter) and I understand that a film is in the works.
We all love it when this comes in the mail. Hours spent planning meals and talking about food. Minnie hardley eats (well she eats but precious little variety in her diet of hummus and pasta and cherry tomatoes) but she loves 'reading' the recipes.
I love this album but wish they had bleeped the rude words out of Little Lion Man so Minnie would have learned a more appropriate version...
We also love this one on a lazy Sunday morning, when I am still in my pj's until mid morning and my hair is very unkempt.
Of course I had to post at least one photo of my babies, here with their Poppy and Gaddy on my father's birthday. Happy Birthday Daddy/Poppy!


text:
In large projects, such as books, keeping parts of your document in several .tex files makes the task of correcting errors and making further changes easier. It's simpler to locate a specific word or element in a short file. For this purpose this article explains how to manage big projects.
Below is an example of a book whose sections and user-defined commands are stored in separate files.
\documentclass[a4paper,11pt]{book} \usepackage{import} \usepackage{example} \usepackage{makeidx} \makeindex \begin{document} \frontmatter \import{./}{title.tex} \clearpage \thispagestyle{empty} \tableofcontents \mainmatter \chapter{First chapter} \import{sections/}{section1-1.tex} \import{sections/}{section1-2.tex} \chapter{Additional chapter} \import{sections/}{section2-1.tex} \chapter{Last chapter} \import{sections/}{section3-1.tex} \backmatter \import{./}{bibliography.tex} \end{document}
As you see, the example is a book with three chapters and several sections in a neat main file that pulls external files to generate the final document. The command
\frontmatter in the book document class is used for the first pages of the document, the page numbering style is set to Roman numerals by this command; the command
\mainmatter resets the page numbering and changes the style to Arabic,
\backmatter disables the chapter numbering (suitable for the bibliography and appendices).
In the subsequent sections each part will be more clearly explained.
Open an example of the import package in Overleaf
If the preamble of your document has many user-defined commands or term definitions for the glossary, you can put it in a separate file. The right way is to create a custom package, which is a file with the .sty extension. Let's see an example:
\ProvidesPackage{example} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage[latin1]{inputenc} \usepackage[spanish, english]{babel} \usepackage{graphicx} \usepackage{blindtext} \usepackage{textcomp} \usepackage{pgfplots} \pgfplotsset{width=10cm,compat=1.9} %Header styles \usepackage{fancyhdr} \setlength{\headheight}{15pt} \pagestyle{fancy} \renewcommand{\chaptermark}[1]{\markboth{#1}{}} \renewcommand{\sectionmark}[1]{\markright{#1}{}} \fancyhf{} \fancyhead[LE,RO]{\thepage} \fancyhead[RE]{\textbf{\textit{\nouppercase{\leftmark}}}} \fancyhead[LO]{\textbf{\textit{\nouppercase{\rightmark}}}} \fancypagestyle{plain}{ % \fancyhf{} % remove everything \renewcommand{\headrulewidth}{0pt} % remove lines as well \renewcommand{\footrulewidth}{0pt}} %makes available the commands \proof, \qedsymbol and \theoremstyle \usepackage{amsthm} %Ruler \newcommand{\HRule}{\rule{\linewidth}{0.5mm}} %Lemma definition and lemma counter \newtheorem{lemma}{Lemma}[section] %Definition counter \theoremstyle{definition} \newtheorem{definition}{Definition}[section] %Corolary counter \newtheorem{corolary}{Corolary}[section] %Commands for naturals, integers, topology, hull, Ball, Disc, Dimension, boundary and a few more \newcommand{\E}{{\mathcal{E}}} \newcommand{\F}{{\mathcal{F}}} ... %Example environment \theoremstyle{remark} \newtheorem{examle}{Example} %Example counter \newcommand{\reiniciar}{\setcounter{example}{0}}
All the commands in this file could have been put in the preamble, but the main file would have become confusing because of this large amount of code, and to locate the actual body of the document in such large file would be a cumbersome task.
This file could also be put in a normal .tex file and imported with the command
import (see the next section), but a .sty file prevents possible errors if the file is accidentally imported more than once.
Notice that the first line of the example is
this means that we have to import this package as example in the main file, i.e. with the command
as shown in the introduction.
Note: A .sty file is far more flexible, it can be used to define your own macros and optional parameters can be passed, see Writing your own package.
Open an example of the import package in Overleaf
The standard tools to insert a LaTeX file into another are
\input and
\include (see below), but these are prone to errors if nested file importing is needed. For this reason the recommended option is the package import.
\chapter{First chapter} \import{sections/}{section1-1.tex} \import{sections/}{section1-2.tex}
First, add this line to the preamble of your document:
Then use
\import{ }{ }. The first parameter inside braces is the directory where the file is located, it can be relative to the current working directory or absolute. The second parameter is the name of the file to be imported
There is also available the command
\subimport that has the same syntax, but if used in one of the files that are imported in the main file, the path will be relative to that sub-file. For instance, below is the contents of the file "section1-1.tex" that was imported in the previous example:
\section{First section} Below is a simple 3d plot \begin{figure}[h] \centering \subimport{img/}{plot1.tex} \caption{Caption} \label{fig:my_label} \end{figure} [...]
As you see, this file imports a pgf plot file called "plot1.tex" that creates a 3d plot. This file is imported by
\import were used instead, the path img/ would be relative to the main file, instead of the folder "sections" where "section1-1.tex" is saved.
Open an example of the import package in Overleaf
Short description of the commands input and include.
input command
Use this command in the document body to insert the contents of another file named
filename.tex. LaTeX won't start a new page before processing the material in
input allows you to nest
input commands, in files that are already being inputted by the root file.
include command
Use this command in the document body to insert the contents of another file named
LaTeX will start a new page before processing the material input from
Make sure not to include the extension
.tex in the filename, as this will stop the file from being input (the extension can optionally be included with
input and
import). It is not possible to nest
include commands. Each file that gets
\included has its own .aux file storing information of created labels and contents for the table of contents, list of figures, etc. You can use
\includeonly with a comma separated list of file names (make sure that there are no leading or trailing spaces). If you do this LaTeX will only process the files contained in that list. This can be used to enhance compilation speed if you're only working on a small part of a bigger document. Page numbers and cross references will however still work, as the .aux files of left out files will still be processed.
Open an example of the import package in Overleaf
For more information see:
import package documentation


text:
A man can simply learn how to be a good boyfriend. All it takes is a slight small piece of perform and strength of mind to do it. Willingness is the type for any man to study how to be a good boyfriend. Unluckily not all men are willing to learn and do what it takes to be a good boyfriend.
To be a good boyfriend, you have to build good relationship skills. You have to be willing to make sacrifices for the woman that you are with and you have to be truthful. Your main concern should be making your girlfriend happy.
Learning How to be a Good Boyfriend
Learning how to be a good boyfriend has a lot of compensation not now for women but also for men.
A man that makes an attempt to learn how to be a good boyfriend can look onward to a improved and stronger relationship with their partner.
A grateful girlfriend will nearly all probable shower her man with additional love and affection than before. In addition, there will almost certainly be less irritating that will certainly be a welcome interval for any man.
If a man motionless experiences the same kind of treatment still following learning how to be a good boyfriend then there is amazing wrong. It would be a nice idea to charge the relationship at this point. May be the man is not to responsibility.
Keep in mind that there are some women in the world that cannot be content if not they are disapproving of something. At this point, a man might want to think if the relations is still worth following or if it would be time to move on and almost certainly find someone who would appreciate them better.
Guide on How to be a Good Boyfriend
A good boyfriend knows: How to stay his girlfriend happy. pleasing a woman is a inclusive plan. A good way to do so is to make her feel special by complimenting her on how well she looks.
Women do their best to look pretty: Women do their most excellent to look attractive for their man and a little flattering comment goes a long way to show her that her efforts are valued. It is also a good idea for a man to assess his own substantial appearance. As a woman takes the time to look nice for her man therefore a man should also look good for his woman.
Show respect: To show respect for her and her family is a mannerism of a good boyfriend that each man should take on. A polite man is polite and good to his girlfriend's family. Women are particularly thankful of a man that accepts and loves her family. Communication is an important fraction of every relationship.
There are no difficult and fast rules on how to be a good boyfriend. And learning how to be a good boyfriend is not easy. The eagerness to learn must be near. It is also vital to be at ease oneself when undertaking such an education. Being true to oneself is a vital part of the learning process.


text:
Locum tenens opportunity in Arkansas for a board certified interventional cardiologist. 24-hour call coverage needed in September. Responsibilities will include STEMI call, stress tests, and inpatient consults.
Dates Needed: September
Hours Per Day: 24
Provider Availability: 24-Hour Call
Assignment Type: Inpatient
Assignment Duration: Locums
Facility Type: Hospital
Call Required: Yes
Board Certification Required: Yes
Government: No
Reference ID: ORD-057390-MD-AR
Job Posting ID: 979876
Brianna Foley


text:
Mar 23,2007
Lake Billy Chinook is home to some of best bull trout fishing in the west
by Scott Staats
Sometimes it seems like the fish you lose are more memorable than the ones you catch. Such was the case on one of my first outings at Lake Billy Chinook several years ago. On the fifth cast toward shore, a big bull trout hit the Rapala and the fight began.
John Garrison with his 14-pound bull trout from Lake Billy Chinook – photo courtesy of Garrison's Guide Service After several minutes of playing the fish (or more correctly, the fish playing me), it got to within 10 feet of the boat and appeared well over 24 inches, the minimum length for keeping bull trout. Then, just as quickly as it had begun, it was over.
John Garrison with his 14-pound bull trout from Lake Billy Chinook – photo courtesy of Garrison's Guide Service
Somehow, the fish either managed to free itself of the lure or I managed to free the lure from the fish. I learned that if you give these bulls just a little slack, they're gone.
On another outing, I could see a few big bull trout prowling the shoreline. As soon as my Rapala hit the surface, one of the fish struck. After a few seconds of splashing and thrashing, the elusive fish let go. How a fish can spit out a lure with several large treble hooks attached is beyond me. I have since hooked and actually landed a fish over 24 inches.
Anglers anxiously await the March bull trout opener in the Metolius Arm of Lake Billy Chinook. Many head out after trophy fish up to 20 pounds, while others enjoy the kokanee fishing and the spectacular scenery.
According to John Garrison, owner of Garrison's Guide Service in Sunriver, the best fishing for bull trout is from mid-March to April 30 in the Metolius Arm. After that the bite slows down and the presence of jet skis and waterskiers picks up.
Garrison prefers trolling more in March for bulls and casting lures more in April. He suggests trolling Rapalas and other deep diving lures close to shore in about 20 to 30 feet of water.
"Sometimes it takes a while to locate the fish," he said, "so you have to be patient." On his best day out on the lake last year, his clients caught seven bull trout, four being over 24 inches. The biggest caught from his boats last year measured 12 pounds. In 1998, Garrison caught a 31-inch, 14-pounder. The state record came out of the reservoir in 1989 weighing 23 pounds 2 ounces. The chance of hooking into a 30-inch fish is what excites most anglers.
A fish finder can help locate the bulls. They will usually be found alone or with only one or two other fish. The best bite is from about 11a.m. to 3 p.m.
"Most anglers try for bull trout due to the fact that they can grow to be a big fish and put up a fight much like a huge brown trout," he said. When trolling, Garrison uses bait-casting reels with 12-pound test. For casting he uses spin-casting reels with 10-pound test.
Besides bull trout, anglers also have the opportunity to catch kokanee, brown trout and even bass later in the season. On slow days when the bulls aren't biting, anglers can be seen jigging for kokanee. Anglers need to be aware of a new law that states - It is unlawful to continue fishing for any fish once a bull trout has been harvested. So if you plan on fishing for other fish besides bull trout, you better do that first and try for bull trout afterwards.
Bull trout can also be caught in the Deschutes and Crooked River Arms of the reservoir but anglers usually have better luck for more and bigger fish in the Metolius Arm.
Some bull trout are tagged. If you happen to catch one of them, leave the tag in the fish if you release it and write down the information and turn it in to ODFW. If you keep the fish, return the tag to ODFW.
The success of the bull trout population in Lake Billy Chinook begins in the tributaries of the Metolius River. Streams flowing into the Metolius River have some of the most robust bull trout populations in the west, according the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife.
These streams survived a lot of the past habitat degradation that occurred in Central Oregon and weren't entirely fished out when Round Butte Dam was built in 1964.
Most bull trout spawn from mid-July to early October in the small, cold water tributaries of the Metolius River. The juvenile fish remain in the streams for two to three years before migrating back downstream to Lake Billy Chinook, usually in May or June.
The fish will then spend another two to three years in the reservoir before heading back up the river to spawn when they are four to six years old. After spawning is completed in the smaller streams, most bull trout adults will return to the Metolius after about two weeks, then move back down to the reservoir within about a month.
When compared to other basins in the west containing bull trout, the Metolius River tributaries have some of the highest densities documented for juvenile fish with up to 21 juveniles per 100 square meters of habitat. The smaller streams have undercut banks, overhanging vegetation and large woody debris, all important habitat components for the trout.
Two major changes occurred to allow the bull trout population to increase. The kokanee population increased and established itself in the basin, providing a prey source. Restrictive angling regulations were imposed in 1982 limiting the catch from 10 bull trout per day to one and no harvest of wild trout in the Metolius River and most of its tributaries.
There are several historic photos of anglers with huge bull trout from the Metolius River and the upper Deschutes River. The last bull trout observed in Crane Prairie Reservoir was 1955 and in the Deschutes River upstream of Bend in 1954.
Weather on the lake is usually nice in March, but be prepared for chilly and windy conditions. It's best to launch from the Crooked River boat ramp and head down to the Metolius Arm.
Regulations: Metolius Arm – open to angling March 1 through October 31. The limit for bull trout is one per day at least 24 inches long. The limit on kokanee is 25 a day, with no size limits. Bull trout must be released unharmed unless kept in the daily catch limit.
Call Garrison's Guide Service at 541-593-8394 for more information or to book a trip. Besides a fishing license, a tribal angling permit is needed to fish in the Metolius arm of the reservoir. These permits can be purchased in Culver.


text:
July 31, 2007, 9:48 am
Paying cash for health care
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text:
Cast John Gilbert (Count Vronsky), Greta Garbo (Anna Karenina), George Fawcett (Grand Duke), Emily Fitzroy (Grand Duchess), Brandon Hurst (Karenin), Philippe de Lacy (Serezha) Production Company Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Producer Irving Thalberg Photography William Daniels Scenario Frances Marion, adapted from Anna Karenina by Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy Titles Marion Ainslee, Ruth Cummings Art Direction Cedric Gibbons, Alexander Toluboff
Presented at SFSFF 1999
Print Source Warner Bros. Classics
Musical Accompaniment Dennis James on the Mighty Wurlitzer
Essay by Rebecca Peters
Tolstoy's Anna Karenina (1877) was re-titled Love when it reached the screen in November of 1927, but it's possible that any story starring John Gilbert and Greta Garbo would have been given this title by studio executives. What better way to capitalize on the movie magazines, which were breathlessly reporting that Garbo was on the verge of marrying her costar. Love was highly profitable (costing MGM $488,000, it earned more than $1,600,000 in rentals worldwide) with reviews to match. Time wrote in December 1927, "It isn't Tolstoy, but it is John Gilbert and Greta Garbo, beautifully presented and magnificently acted," and Variety added, "They are in a fair way of becoming the biggest box office team this country has yet known."
John Gilbert was born John Pringle, the son of stock company parents, on July l0, 1899, in Logan, Utah. He spent most of his childhood backstage and in boardinghouses, lonely and ignored, while his beautiful if unmaternal mother toured with one stock company after another following her early divorce. Because of this itinerant lifestyle, Gilbert became almost completely self-educated — he was a voracious reader. When he was 14, his mother died and he was completely on his own. The future matinee idol was an extremely likeable if near-starved teenager (115 lbs. at almost six feet tall) when he entered films in 1915 as a $15-a-week extra in westerns being filmed in the wilds of Santa Monica. Within a few years, directors began to notice the eager young bit player's growing photogenic qualities and gradually cast him in featured roles, some of them unsympathetic character parts, which Gilbert welcomed.
In 1924, Gilbert rose from leading man to star at the newly formed Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studio in its first production, He Who Gets Slapped, starring Lon Chaney and Norma Shearer. One hit soon followed another: The Big Parade (for which Gilbert won Photoplay's Best Performance medal, a forerunner to the Academy Award) and The Merry Widow in 1925; La Bohème and Bardelys the Magnificent in 1926. Gilbert was second only to Rudolph Valentino as reigning "Great Lover of the Screen" in publicity parlance. Indeed, he was actually better accepted by both male and female American audiences than Valentino and played a wider range of roles, still welcoming opportunities for offbeat or unromantic casting, as in The Snob (1924) and Man, Woman, and Sin (1927). But the "Great Lover" sobriquet was hard to shake and rankled him as it led to roles in increasingly formulaic film stories.
In 1925, MGM general manager Louis B. Mayer signed a new European discovery to a five-year contract: 19-year-old Greta Garbo (b. Greta Gustafson, 1905), but the studio was perplexed as to how to best "type" the special quality she seemed to possess. It was on her third film for MGM, Flesh and the Devil, that she met her new costar John Gilbert. He was charmed by her vulnerability, which was reminiscent of his own, and he guided her through the filming. Their mutual rapport was instantaneous and the chemistry was evident on-screen. Garbo trusted Gilbert implicitly, telling Photoplay in 1930, "I don't know how I should have managed if I had not been cast opposite John Gilbert …. If he had not come into my life at this time, I should probably have [gone] home to Sweden at once, my American career over."
The MGM adaptation of Anna Karenina was originally conceived as a project for Lillian Gish before it was given to Garbo as her first sympathetic role, and even then filming was begun twice; first as Anna Karenina with Ricardo Cortez as Vronsky, then scrapped and relaunched as Love with John Gilbert and director Edmund Goulding. Despite these reshufflings in cast and crew the studio decided to safeguard the new film's box office appeal against even the threat of Tolstoy: two alternate endings were scripted and filmed — one happy, one tragic — and exhibitors were given their choice, with the result that the East and West coasts opted for Tolstoy, while most places in between opted for the happy ending concocted by screenwriter Frances Marion. Both were successful. Gilbert and Garbo appeared in one more silent together, A Woman of Affairs in 1929, and one talking picture, Queen Christina, in 1933.
One of the regrettable and erroneous legends surrounding the end of the silent era concerns John Gilbert's failure in sound films: that his voice was "high-pitched." This rumor continued to circulate over the years as few of his sound films were available for reappraisal. His voice was a perfectly adequate light baritone and was quite skillful when put to use in a good film, such as the brilliant dark comedy Downstairs (1932), which Gilbert wrote. He was in the preproduction stages of the sophisticated jewel-thief comedy Desire with Marlene Dietrich when he died of heart failure in 1936. He was 33 years old.
In 1985, Leatrice Gilbert Fountain, daughter of John Gilbert and silent actress Leatrice Joy, wrote a compassionate and admirably researched biography of her famous father: Dark Star. The definitive biography of Greta Garbo to date is Barry Paris's equally insightful and recommended 1995 Garbo.