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Bush & Brezhnev: Separated at Birth?
By Curtis Lang on Jun 1, 2006
How America is Losing The Great Game
Welcome to the June 1, 2006 edition of the Satya Center newsletter. Warm greetings from your Editor, Curtis Lang.
This newsletter focuses on new articles at Satya Center and on important news stories from around the world offering unusual insights into the immense waves of change engulfing our planet at this time of cultural, economic, religious, political and environmental transformation.
How America is Losing The Great Game
Perhaps the most important issue facing humanity today is the peak oil crisis, which has political, social, economic, cultural, technological and environmental implications so vast that many people, including America's elected officials, simply refuse to deal with the reality of the situation.
The simple fact is that the world has only a limited supply of easily retrievable, easily refinable oil, and that our globalized 21st century economy is now expanding so rapidly that we can no longer provide cheap fuel for our present system of industrial agriculture and our current air and automotive based transportation infrastructure.
The strategic importance of the world's oil fields has long been a pre-eminent policy issue among military analysts around the world. The major military campaigns and imperial ambitions of the major powers engaged in the Three World Wars of the Twentieth Century revolved around control of world oil supplies and supply lines.
As America ascended to its current position of global hegemon during these Three World Wars, the American "way of life" has been synonymous with cheap energy to sustain its suburban lifestyle, its global industrial agricultural system, its worldwide war machine, and the dominance of its global corporations, which all depend upon massive utilization of cheap energy resources to support their far-flung globalized supply lines.
Since the 1970s, when the OPEC nations unveiled their "oil weapon" and the Club of Rome predicted a future of booming population growth and looming shortages of natural resources, the facts have been readily available for those who chose to seek them out.
American oil companies reached their peak of domestic oil production in the 1970s, as predicted by the geologist King Hubbert, who created what is now known as peak oil theory. Hubbert predicted that we would reach peak oil production worldwide around this time, and that the future could only bring the end of cheap oil and the culture that depends upon it.
Since the Seventies, America has relied more and more heavily on imported oil, and since that time, America's military presence and covert wars have impacted oil-producing countries around the world.
Any threat to cheap oil has rightly been seen by a succession of American Presidents as a threat to America's Global Empire. Prior to the ascension of George Bush the Younger, America's proxies, allies and pawns dominated the Middle East, the primary source of cheap oil, and American oil companies had their way North and South, East and West, certain that their interests would be bolstered and protected by American military might and America's covert warriors. Regime change was effected around the world to insure the continuation of the cheap-oil lubricated Pax Americana.
Americans now burn 20+ million barrels of oil per day, and 12 million barrels of that amount are imported from 70 foreign countries, as crude oil and various refined products, but the American economic miracle has stalled for all but the wealthiest, most privileged twenty percent of Americans.
Meanwhile, economic growth in Korea, China, India and Japan is exploding, and the Asian powers collectively seek to insure the oil supplies necessary to continue fueling their drive to lift billions of impoverished Asians into an American Twentieth Century lifestyle. Their rapidly rising energy requirements combined with America's energy profligacy are creating global energy demand that simply cannot be met with today's existing supplies of easy-to-refine oil, today's oil technologies and today's worship of the consumption society.
Over the last forty years, numerous countries have realized the increasing value of their oil reserves and have nationalized their oil infrastructure. Mexico, Middle Eastern oil producers, Ecuador, Brazil and Venezuela have all taken control of their oil resources away from multi-national oil companies during this period.
All this constitutes a threat to US hegemony, but for America, the worst by far is soon to come. America's dependence on foreign oil will soon prove its undoing.
Readers of this newsletter know that Russia, Iran, Japan, Venezuela and China are creating new energy partnerships and new pipelines are being built to provide Middle Eastern and Caspian Sea oil and natural gas to Asian powers at the expense of American interests.
Vladimir Putin, who wrote his graduate school thesis on the creation of a Russian natural gas company, is now creating a multi-national energy conglomerate with geo-strategic influence and has armed Russia with a potent oil weapon.
George Bush the Younger's ill-fated war in Iraq has created a much more volatile Middle East, and turned public opinion in that region firmly against US interests.
Control of OPEC, long firmly in the hands of Saudi Arabian royalty, the Bush family's personal friends and allies, is in danger of passing to the socialist oilman least beloved of George Bush the Younger – Venezuela's Hugo Chavez.
Bush's CIA has engineered at least one or two or three failed Venezuelan coup attempts so far, but Chavez has succeeded in consolidating South American political systems and public opinion behind a decidedly left-wing agenda and ideology.
On the energy front, Chavez had been as busy as Vladimir Putin, building an international energy conglomerate with partners in South America, Asia and in-between that constitutes the greatest immediate threat to Saudi-American energy hegemony.
Recently, as oil prices topped $70 a barrel, Chavez offered to sell over one trillion barrels of Venezuelan heavy crude oil for a guaranteed price of $50 a barrel, over the next 200 years, under one condition – that these reserves be counted as part of Venezuela's official OPEC oil reserves. This accounting shift would give Chavez control of OPEC, which apportions power in its councils according to official oil reserves.
This new accounting procedure would make Venezuela officially the world's 21st century swing oil producer eclipsing Saudi Arabia as the country with the ability to determine global oil prices by a mere turn of a valve. Many energy experts, including Bush advisor Matt Simmons, believe that Saudi reserves are overstated and that Saudi ability to produce more oil to meet growing demand is vastly overstated.
The US Energy Department agrees that Chavez holds the trump cards. The DOE believes Venezuela holds 90% of the world's super-heavy tar oil reserves - an estimated total of 1,360,000,000,000 (1.36 trillion) barrels. This amounts to more oil than King Hubbert believed existed under the ground on the entirety of planet Earth when he made his peak oil predictions in the Seventies.
With prices soaring above $70 a barrel and set to go higher on global markets, Venezuelan heavy oil at $50 a barrel is quite economical. It would be no problem to take the extra time and money to refine this extra-heavy oil and deliver it to global markets at competitive prices. New refineries and supply lines have to built, but the future of oil is really in the hands of the Venezuelan strongman with the red beret.
America, meanwhile, has entered a free-market version of the Brezhnev era, the final era before Gorbachev admitted that the Soviet Emperor wore no clothes. Savvy global analysts are beginning to see the parallels between the endtime of the Soviet Empire and the waning years of Bush's Imperial America.
Bush & Brezhnev: Separated at Birth?
However, socialism in the USSR was a fraud. By the time of Brezhnev, the country was not communitarian in spirit or everyday economic functionality. It was in fact a militaristic, despotic dictatorship with two very distinct classes -- Communist Party members and everyone else. Economically, the country was organized around a simple principle -- what's good for the political bureaucracy and the military is good for the USSR. The needs of the people were subservient to the needs of the Politburo, the Army and the Secret Police, who controlled the Empire through fear and a system of secret prisons known as gulags.
The USSR was a military Empire and simultaneously a Utopian representative democracy. During the Russian Revolution, local workers organized themselves into councils called "soviets" and these "soviets" elected representatives for regional "soviets". These regional soviets elected representatives for higher councils, on up to the Supreme Soviet. Elections were a farce, however, completely controlled by Communist Party bureaucrats who had transformed the soviets into a single party dominated patronage and surveillance system by the time of Brezhnev.
In a strking parallel to the Soviet Union during the Brezhnev era, America's existing social, political, and economic systems appear to be dominant, immovable and totally geared toward preserving the status quo for those in power.
Just as in Brezhnev's USSR, America's economic system, based on an aggressive Utopian ideology out of touch with the real world, provides increasing rewards only for the privileged few.
Over the last twenty-five years in the US, a Utopian economic ideology, free-market laissez-faire capitalism, has been deified as the guiding principle for all segments of society and all forms of social interaction.
A small group of transnational corporations controls the "free market" for their own benefit. These oligopolies control the government agencies charged with regulating their behavior so they can socialize and externalize costs and privatize profits as much as possible.
America has developed a militarized society slavishly devoted to exporting its inflexible economic ideology of fundamentalist free market Utopianism to the rest of the world. Just as the Communists sought to export their Utopia at gunpoint around the world, America now promises to export American style "free market society" and "democracy" through a series of Imperial wars.
America promises to use all its military and economic power to force its own brand of Utopian corporate capitalism on societies everywhere on Earth. American spies, military commanders and diplomats work ceaselessly through a network of hundreds of military bases and through international banking organizations such as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organization to consolidate corporate control of all societies around the world. All this is done in pursuit of a failed Utopia promised to appear as if by magic when societies agree to follow a set of worn-out neo-liberal economic formulas discredited through bitter experience wherever in the world they have been applied.
The American Empire's current President, George Bush the Younger, also aspires to spread American "democracy" around the world, using all the tools at his disposal, primarily the largest military machine in world history.
To facilitate the spread of American style democracy, Bush the Younger espouses a doctrine of pre-emptive warfare, which is synonymous with Imperial wars of aggression designed to displace governments disliked by America and install governments that will be subservient to American interests and serve at the pleasure of the American President.
George Bush the Younger stole the 2004 election from John Kerry. This is not a conspiracy theory, but rather an increasingly provable proposition, as further study and analysis continues to support the stolen election hypothesis. The fact that the Democratic Party has not contested the stolen election points to a fundamental failure of democracy in America.
In a recent Rolling Stone article by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., laying out the growing mountain of evidence indicating massive voter fraud, Kennedy charges that the Republican Party engaged in massive, nationwide voter fraud in what appears to be a systematic way, similar to the type of manipulation common in Third World and Soviet dictatorships.
Kennedy also blames the American media for the 2004 election debacle. Over the last two decades the American news media have come all but completely under the control of a small media oligopoly. Kennedy points out that at the time of the 2004 election, exit polls showing Kerry victorious were dismissed by a compliant American media, reduced to their current role of propaganda machine for the Republican Party.
Kennedy points out that exit polls are considered so accurate that the US government and the American media often use them to provide evidence of voter fraud in Third World countries -- and to demand that fraudulently elected officials step down.
"What is most anomalous about the irregularities in 2004 was their decidedly partisan bent: Almost without exception they hurt John Kerry and benefited George Bush," Kennedy explains. "After carefully examining the evidence, I've become convinced that the president's party mounted a massive, coordinated campaign to subvert the will of the people in 2004. Across the country, Republican election officials and party stalwarts employed a wide range of illegal and unethical tactics to fix the election. A review of the available data reveals that in Ohio alone, at least 357,000 voters, the overwhelming majority of them Democratic, were prevented from casting ballots or did not have their votes counted in 2004 -- more than enough to shift the results of an election decided by 118,601 votes. (See Ohio's Missing Votes) In what may be the single most astounding fact from the election, one in every four Ohio citizens who registered to vote in 2004 showed up at the polls only to discover that they were not listed on the rolls, thanks to GOP efforts to stem the unprecedented flood of Democrats eager to cast ballots. And that doesn?t even take into account the troubling evidence of outright fraud, which indicates that upwards of 80,000 votes for Kerry were counted instead for Bush. That alone is a swing of more than 160,000 votes -- enough to have put John Kerry in the White House."
''It was terrible,'' says Sen. Christopher Dodd, who helped craft reforms in 2002 that were supposed to prevent such electoral abuses. ''People waiting in line for twelve hours to cast their ballots, people not being allowed to vote because they were in the wrong precinct -- it was an outrage. In Ohio, you had a secretary of state who was determined to guarantee a Republican outcome. I'm terribly disheartened.''
"Indeed, the extent of the GOP's effort to rig the vote shocked even the most experienced observers of American elections," Kennedy continues. '''Ohio was as dirty an election as America has ever seen,' Lou Harris, the father of modern political polling, told me. 'You look at the turnout and votes in individual precincts, compared to the historic patterns in those counties, and you can tell where the discrepancies are. They stand out like a sore thumb.'"
Cracks in the Imperial Facade
Despite their disputed success in the 2004 elections, Bush the Younger and his Republican compadres have the lowest approval ratings of any administration in the last fifty years.
The disconnect between America's political, corporate and media elite and the common people is so great that parallels with Brezhnev's Soviet Union are no longer far-fetched. In Brezhnev's time, the Soviet elite refused to face reality about the limits of Soviet power. The economic health of the country was sacrificed on the altar of the military-industrial complex.
The ruble became a global joke. Environmental concerns and provision for basic necessities of the people were luxuries the Soviet elite felt they could no longer afford. Today, the American elite refuses to face reality about a number of critical problems facing the Imperium.
The end of cheap oil is coming. Global warming is upon us. Families and the nation are deeply in debt. The dollar is sliding amid talk of a more truly multi-currency global monetary system. America's health care system is broken. Social Security is under attack by the government itself. America is waging war on its own elders. Rising inequality is creating a two-class society similar to the sharply divided societies of the Soviet Union or Latin American Banana Republics.
Evidence of American incompetence is mounting everywhere one looks, and although America appears to be the invincible world hegemon, there are disturbing parallels between America's current position and the waning days of the Soviet Empire.
Under Brezhnev, the Soviet Union waged a diastrous war in Afghanistan that undermined Soviet pretensions to military invulnerability, cast the Soviet army as a an Imperial aggressor, and set the world's billions of Muslims against Soviet rule everywhere.
Under Bush, America is waging a disastrous war in Afghanistan and Iraq that is undermining American pretensions to military invulnerability, casting the American army as an Imperial aggressor, and setting the world's billions of Muslims against American interests everywhere.
In Brezhnev's USSR, technology in the service of ideology produced monsters of inefficient design and engineering debacles on a regular basis.
America's worship of technology divorced from social consequences is producing monsters such as the levees that broke in New Orleans, the technologies of surveillance and control that threaten human rights and the freedom of speech and the Internet, junk food, industrial agriculture, genetically modified foods, the Hummer and other SUVs that require American troops to oppress and invade oil producing countries to support obsolete engineering solutions that exacerbate the global energy, political and economic crises.
Brezhnev's USSR relied on an oppressive political establishment, secret police, a militarized society, and a fossilized ideology dedicated to world domination to uphold communist rule. In America, the unholy ménage a trois between America's fundamentalist Christian conservative political movement, the US military establishment and the Republican party threatens to undermine the institutions of American democracy and the foundations of American intellectual leadership -- allegations of rigged elections, attacks on basic scientific methodologies, increasingly overt police state tactics applied wholesale at home and abroad, contempt for human rights and international treaties and bloody culture civil wars escalate year by year.
The Soviets built the Berlin Wall, and the American Minutemen, with the help of a rabidly nationalistic and xenophobic Congress, are now in the initial stages of building a Great Wall around America, sealing the US off from the dire threats posed by Mexican immigrant laborers and Canadian tourists without portfolio.
America is moving further and further out of the global mainstream of 21st century culture, politics, economic theory and science. Increased reliance on military solutions to all international issues exacerbates this trend. The American failure to pacify Afghanistan and Iraq has been a most visible demonstration of the sharp limits to America's ability to project power globally. The Iranian government and the Shiite fundamentalist movement across the Middle East are the only winners in these "wars against" terror so far.
As world energy demand continues to spike, America is becoming increasingly dependent upon unstable global energy supply lines originating in countries that are increasingly alienated, even hostile, to America's hegemonic project.
More to the point, there is an evolving, ascending new constellation of energy power-brokers in Asia, the Middle East and South America who are united in their desire to cut American oil companies out of their business dealings and minimize American military interference in their backyards. They have much to gain from mutually supportive trade in oil, natural gas, and advanced weaponry.
Thus America's sharp turn to the right during the reign of the autocratic cowboy, George Bush the Younger, will certainly make it increasingly difficult for America to import energy from the rest of the world on favorable terms of trade as the 21st century energy crisis unfolds.
This is the most important geo-strategic trend of the decade, and the trend most under-reported in the American media, which increasingly resembles the Brezhnev-era Soviet propaganda machine – ubiquitous, ideologically pure, aggressive and inquisitorial, but totally distrusted by the vast majority of citizens.
You can be sure that SatyaCenter.com will continue to bring you the news you won't find in the American media.
Top Satya Center Stories of the Week
Peak oil analyst Richard Heinberg, author of "The Party's Over: Oil, War and the Fate of Industrial Societies," presents Satya Center readers with a new article, "Energy Politics and the Decline of the American Empire".
"With the decline of Washington's 'full-spectrum dominance', and control of global energy resources, we are seeing the emergence of countervailing power blocs, primarily in Asia but also in South America," reports Heinberg. "This is the end of an era."
In this week's remarkable piece, Heinberg provides an overview of the emerging new powers around the world, and a concise analysis of their strengths and weaknesses. Finally, he presents a series of insights detailing how the ongoing decline of the American Empire is progressing. This is a must read for all those interested in the global geo-strategic picture.
In "Immigrants' Rights: The New Revolution", renowned astrologer and political commentator Maya del Mar provides some acute insights into the astrological and sociological trends fueling the current confrontations about immigration in America, and offers some predictions about the future course of this sharply contested political debate, which threatens to restructure the very idea of what it means to be an "American".
"Immigrants have been demonstrating by the hundreds of thousands all over the United States ever since the huge pro-immigrant march in Chicago on March 10," Maya explains. "And they are still marching. . .The birth of a national immigrants' rights movement was triggered by the first of a two-year series of eclipses in Virgo and Pisces," Maya explains. "Recent mass demonstrations are just the beginning of a long political process."
Maya's thoughtful article explains the economic, political and social implications of this "long process" and looks to astrological trends to shed some much-needed light on the road ahead.
Internationally recognized scientist and environmental advocate Dr. Mae-Wan Ho's provides two new Satya Center articles this week. The first article asks the question "What Can You Believe About Bird Flu?"
"Anyone following the streamers of headlines on bird flu in the popular media will be thoroughly bewildered," says Dr. Ho. "Experts and politicians have been telling us that a bird flu pandemic is bound to happen; all it takes is for the deadly H5N1 Asian strain of bird flu that kills more than half of its human victims to mutate so it can pass from human to human instead of from infected chickens to humans. That could happen at any time; a state of emergency is declared, and drugs and vaccines are being stockpiled around the world; all to the benefit of the pharmaceutical industry."
Is a bird flu pandemic imminent?" asks Dr. Ho. "Evidence points to intensive poultry farming as the incubator for deadly bird flu viruses -- globalised trade in live birds and poultry products are the main routes of disease transmission."
Read the article to get all the science left out of the mainstream media's propaganda barrage.
In her other new article, "Fowl Play: What's Behind the Phony Bird Flu Scare?", Dr. Ho challenges the conventional wisdom underlying the news reports we've been reading that blame wild migratory birds and free-range chicken farms for bird flu.
"There is no evidence that wild migrating birds mixing with backyard flocks spreads bird flu," contends Dr. Ho. "Transnational factory farms and the globalised trade in poultry products are to blame."
Dr. Ho's article examines the epidemiological and genetic evidence in her quest to pinpoint the origins of this threatening flu, and analyzes the effects of the scare on the world's poultry industry. This is a must read article for anyone who eats poultry or is concerned about global environmental issues.
New Additions to the Satya Center Crystal Gallery
Jane and I have been busy gathering new tools for lightworkers over the last month or two, and we are taking a break from gardening now and then to post some of the best of what we've found.
There are some very interesting and unique new Lemurian healing crystals, Tibetan and Chinese scepters from the Himalayas, an assortment of startlingly beautiful new jewelry cut according to specifications of sacred geometry to maximize their metaphysical benefits, and more.
Check out the "New Inventory" and send us an email if we can help you find something special or help you in any way.
Breaking News Headlines 24/7 at Satya Center
Read breaking news stories updated 24/7 from Pacific News Service . Tune in to Satya Center's 24/7 environmental news headlines and listen to environmental news radio from Environmental News Network at ENN EarthNews.
Top Stories From Around the Web
Please enjoy these excerpts with links to major stories about crucial global issues gathered around the web. All these stories are feature length, and contain invaluable information and deep analysis of today's most important cultural, political, environmental and economic developments. You won't find this type of writing (often) in the mainstream media. But when you do, it'll be excerpted here! Please click on the links, because so much more is available in the original pieces.
May 05, 2006
It's Not About Oil
By Boris Kagarlitsky
The oil prices have once again gone up, exceeding the $70 per barrel margin. In the earlier years analysts would have talked about "another psychologically important barrier". Now this is no longer the case, as price increase is of no surprise for anyone. However, in Russia, the petrodollar flow produces controversial and neurotic reaction. On the one hand, everything seems fine. On the other hand, the things are getting scary. What is waiting ahead? Everyone gets a feeling that the end of the "oil era" is just around the corner.
. . . The crisis is not about the exhausted resources, but about the inability to use them efficiently in the given circumstances. This means that maintaining economic growth, using old methods, is not going to work. The increasing inefficiency gives rise to constant appreciation of the key resources, which is viewed as another evidence of their "disastrous shortage". By the way, the same thing happened in the USSR by the end of the Brezhnev époque, when the country, having abundant natural resources, practically lacked everything. The end to this was put by the Soviet system collapse, as we all know very well. Now a phenomenon of the similar kind is taking place on the world scale.
The sensation of the oil era ending provokes search of new alternative energy sources. However worried we are about the global warming and ecological disasters, considerable investments into the research programs are being made only when the prices on the "black gold" go off scale. The options then are plenty - from artificially produced oil and synthetic fuel to alcohol engines and solar energy, not to mention that the majority of these methods have been known for decades (the very first oil crisis of the 1970s has called forth many innovations). But the fact is: new technologies not only failed to increase efficiency of global energy sector, they even failed to compete successfully with the oil and bring down its share in the world energy balance. And it's not about them being expensive or underdeveloped. The earliest steam machines were no good either, but this couldn't stop the industrial revolution from moving ahead. It is about the system, which will use the alternative energy as ineffectively as the oil has been wasted. It is about the consumer society, which will never have sufficient resources for its never ending expansion. Even if we have the entire Universe at our disposal, it will change nothing. According to the scientists, the space surrounding our planet is already full of orbital litter.
AsiaTimes Online
May 20, 2006
The accumulation of the wretched
by Pepe Escobar
SAO PAULO - Pentagon planners must have loved what happened in South America's premier hypercity in the past few days; as urban warfare goes, it was more illuminating than Baghdad or Gaza. The leaders of the First Capital Command (PCC, for Primeiro Comando da Capital) - a super-gang involved in drug and arms trafficking, kidnappings, bank robberies and extortion and controlling most of Sao Paulo's overcrowded and notoriously corrupt prisons - declared war against Brazil's wealthiest state.
From inside their prison cells, using US$150 mobile phones, they ordered motorcyclist "bin Ladens" - warriors indebted to the PCC, heavily armed with guns, shotguns, hand grenades, machine-guns and Molotov cocktails - to conduct a violent orgy: spraying police cars with bullets, hurling grenades at police stations, attacking officers in their homes and after-hours hangouts, torching dozens of buses (after passengers had been ordered off), and robbing banks. Almost 100 people were killed in three days. On Monday, the PCC managed single-handedly virtually to paralyze Sao Paulo, the third-largest of the world's hypercities (those with more than 19 million people).
Mike Davis, one of the United States' premier urban theorists and analysts of urban hell, author of City of Quartz and Dead Cities, should have been watching Sao Paulo's civil war first-hand; this is everything the future predicted in his remarkable new book is all about, the slums of the world's mega-cities rebelling against the state. We're heading toward a world where "cities will account for virtually all future world population growth, which is expected to peak at about 10 billion in 2050".
As Davis points out with glee, "Eighty percent of [Karl] Marx's industrial proletariat now lives in China or somewhere outside of Western Europe and the US." Most are ready to explode. This accumulation of the wretched has been enhanced by "policies of agricultural deregulation and financial discipline enforced by the IMF [International Monetary Fund] and World Bank" that spawned "an exodus of surplus rural labor to urban slums even as cities ceased to be job machines". So this "over-urbanization" was driven "by the reproduction of poverty, not by the supply of jobs".
This is one of the unexpected tracks down which a neo-liberal world order is shunting the future. Davis proves his point by quoting an array of United Nations data, from the 16.4% annual growth rate of Sao Paulo favelas (slums) in the 1990s to the 200,000 floaters (unregistered rural workers) who arrive annually in Beijing or the 500,000 who migrate annually to Delhi (of these, 80% end up in slums). Davis dedicates a whole chapter - "SAPing the Third World" - to examining the dire consequences of the dreaded, one-size-fits-all, IMF-imposed "structural adjustment programs" (SAPs).
Abandon all hope those who dream about the glamorously high-tech cities of the future. They will be largely constructed of "crude brick, straw, recycled plastic, cement blocks and scrap wood. Instead of cities of light soaring toward heaven, much of the urban 21st century squats in squalor, surrounded by pollution, excrement, and decay". To see it live, right now, one just has to drive by Kolkata, Mumbai, Manila, Jakarta, Cairo, Changing or Sao Paulo.
According to UN-HABITAT figures, most places with the world's largest percentages of slum-dwellers are in Asia: Afghanistan (98.5%) and Nepal (92%). Mumbai holds the dubious record of being the slum capital of the world - as many as 12 million squatters - followed by Mexico City and Dhaka and then Lagos, Cairo, Karachi, Kinshasa-Brazzaville, Sao Paulo, Shanghai and Delhi.
Exclusion, of course, is the norm, as this correspondent, who has lived and worked in many a teeming, vast, messy hypercity in the developing world, can attest. Mumbai is a classic case, as Davis quotes research according to which the rich own 90% of the land, while the poor are overcrowded in the remaining 10%. "These polarized patterns of land use and population density recapitulate older logics of imperial control and racial dominance. Throughout the Third World, post-colonial cities have inherited and greedily reproduced the physical footprints of segregated colonial cities ... despite the rhetoric of national liberation and social justice."
May 30, 2006
The Four Fundamentalisms and the Threat to Sustainable Democracy
[A version of this talk was delivered to the Brisbane Social Forum, Australia, May 21, 2006.]
by Robert Jensen
The most important words anyone said to me in the weeks immediately after September 11, 2001, came from my friend James Koplin. While acknowledging the significance of that day, he said, simply: "I was in a profound state of grief about the world before 9/11, and nothing that happened on that day has significantly changed what the world looks like to me."
Because Jim is a bit older and considerably smarter than I, it took me some time to catch up to him, but eventually I recognized his insight. He was warning me that even we lefties -- trained to keep an eye on systems and structures of power rather than obsessing about individual politicians and single events -- were missing the point if we accepted the conventional wisdom that 9/11 "changed everything," as the saying went then. He was right, and today I want to talk about four fundamentalisms loose in the world and the long-term crisis to which they point.
Before we head there, a note on the short-term crisis: I have been involved in U.S. organizing against the so-called "war on terror," which has provided cover for the attempts to expand and deepen U.S. control over the strategically crucial resources of Central Asia and the Middle East, part of a global strategy that the Bush administration openly acknowledges is aimed at unchallengeable U.S domination of the world. For U.S. planners, that "world" includes not only the land and seas -- and, of course, the resources beneath them -- but space above as well. It is our world to arrange and dispose of as they see fit, in support of our "blessed lifestyle." Other nations can have a place in that world as long as they are willing to assume the role that the United States determines appropriate. The vision of U.S. policymakers is of a world very ordered, by them.
This description of U.S. policy is no caricature. Anyone who doubts my summary can simply read the National Security Strategy document released in 2002 http://www.whitehouse.gov/nsc/nss/2002/ and the 2006 update http://www.whitehouse.gov/nsc/nss/2006/, and review post-World War II U.S. history http://www.zmag.org/crisescurevts/interventions.htm. Read and review, but only if you don't mind waking up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat of fear. But as scary as these paranoid, power-mad policymakers' delusions may be, Jim was talking about a feeling beyond that fear -- a grief that is much broader and goes much deeper.
Opposing the war-of-the-moment -- and going beyond that to challenge the whole imperial project -- is important. But also important is the work of thinking through the nature of the larger forces that leave us in this grief-stricken position. We need to go beyond Bush. We should recognize the seriousness of the threat that this particular gang of thieves and thugs poses and resist their policies, but not mistake them for the core of the problem.
Liberty Over Safety
By Robert Parry
May 19, 2006
Until now, every generation of Americans has traded safety for liberty. From the Lexington Green to the Normandy beaches, from the Sons of Liberty to the Freedom Riders, it has been part of the American narrative that risks are taken to expand freedom, not freedoms sacrificed to avoid risk.
The Founders challenged the most powerful military on earth, the British army, all the while knowing that defeat would send them to the gallows. The American colonists spurned their relative comfort as British subjects for a chance to be citizens of a Republic dedicated to the vision that some rights are "unalienable" and that no man should be king.
Since then, despite some ups and downs, the course of the American nation has been to advance those ideals and broaden those freedoms.
Only in this generation – only on our watch – has the march reversed.
Instead of swapping safety for liberty, this generation – traumatized by the 9/11 attacks and under the leadership of George W. Bush – has chosen to trade liberties for safety.
Instead of Patrick Henry's stirring Revolutionary War cry of "give me liberty or give me death," this era has Sen. Pat Roberts's instant-classic _expression of self over nation. "You have no civil liberties if you are dead," the Kansas Republican explained on May 18 before the Senate Intelligence Committee, which he chairs.
Roberts's dictum echoed through the mainstream media where it was embraced as a pithy _expression of homespun common sense. But the commentators missed how Roberts's preference for life over liberty was the antithesis of Henry's option of liberty or death.
If Roberts is right, the Minutemen who died at Lexington Green and at Bunker Hill had no liberty; the African-Americans who enlisted in the Union Army and died in Civil War battles had no liberty; the GIs who died on the Normandy beaches or Marines who died at Iwo Jima had no liberty; Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights heroes who gave their lives had no liberty.
If Sen. Roberts is right, they had no liberties because they died in the fight for liberty. In Roberts's view – which apparently is the dominant opinion of the Bush administration and many of its supporters – personal safety for the individual tops the principles of freedom for the nation.
June 5, 2006 Issue
Copyright © 2006 The American Conservative
Iran: Gulf War III?
Attacking the Islamic Republic would mean steep costs and uncertain victory.
by Charles V. Peña
If gas breaking the $3/gallon barrier could dominate the evening news and send Congress into a frenzy, imagine Americans' horror if oil, now $75/barrel, suddenly tops $200. Neither our political will nor our wallets are prepared, but a few stalled SUVs may be the least of our concerns if the U.S. makes good on its threats against Iran.
The blueprint for a pre-emptive strike against Iran's nuclear program is based on Israel's strike against Iraq's Osirak nuclear reactor in June 1981. But this would not be Osirak redux. Unlike Osirak, attacking Iran's nuclear program would require striking multiple targets. The three main targets would likely be Bushehr, which is a complex of light-water reactors where spent fuel rods could be diverted to produce plutonium for nuclear weapons; the previously secret Natanz nuclear facility, believed to be used for uranium enrichment that could be used for nuclear weapons; and Arak, which is the site of two planned heavy-water reactors that could produce plutonium for nuclear weapons. But a decapitating strike against Iran's nuclear program would involve more than just three targets. According to GlobalSecurity.org, "there are perhaps two dozen suspected nuclear facilities in Iran."
In a war game run for The Atlantic in the fall of 2004, retired Air Force Col. Sam Gardiner identified 14 locations for Iran's nuclear-related facilities but developed a pre-emptive strike target list of 125 nuclear, chemical, and biological facilities with approximately 300 aim points—20 of which would require penetrating weapons or bunker busters. The main cause of all the additional aim points is the need to suppress Iran's air defenses, including advanced Russian S-300 and S-400 surface-to-air missiles.
. . . A covert reactor would be a difficult undertaking for the Iranians but cannot be ruled out. A secret uranium-enrichment facility is a more likely possibility. After all, it was two years before the Natanz facility was revealed and then only because it was disclosed by the National Council of the Resistance of Iran, not because it was discovered by U.S. intelligence. We also know that many of Iran's nuclear facilities, like the Tehran research reactor, are located in urban areas, so civilian casualties are almost a certainty. If the U.S. resorts to tactical nuclear weapons, as Hersh suggests it might—and President Bush has said that option has not been taken off the table—a Defense Department-sponsored report by the National Academy of Sciences stated that they could "kill up to a million people or more if used in heavily populated areas." Finally, it is hard to imagine that any government would sit idly by after being bombed on a relatively massive scale: 300 aim points would require at least two weapons each for reliability and to assure a high probability of kill.
, , , If Iran's ballistic missile sites were not taken out in the initial strike, Tehran would have some 500 Shehab ballistic missiles at its disposal for retaliation. The shorter-range Shehab-1 and -2 missiles, variants of the Russian Scud missile, are capable of reaching U.S. targets in the Gulf, including Iraq, where some 130,000 American soldiers are currently stationed. The longer range Shehab-3 missile, based on the North Korean Nodong missile, could reach Israel—and Iran has made clear that this will be an early target: "We have announced that wherever America does something evil, the first place that we target will be Israel," Revolutionary Guards Commander Mohammad-Ebrahim Dehqani said last week. Like the V-2 missiles used by Germany against Britain during World War II, the Shehab missiles would be most effective against civilian populations rather than military targets due to their relative inaccuracy. How well U.S. forces in the Gulf region and the Israelis could withstand an onslaught of Iranian Shehab missiles would depend on the effectiveness of U.S. Patriot and Israeli Arrow missile-defense systems. To date, the Patriot has not lived up to its expectations against Iraqi Scud missiles. On paper, the Arrow has better performance than Patriot PAC-3—greater speed and higher altitude—but it has not proved itself in combat. Moreover, relying on missile-defense systems to blunt Iranian retaliation fails to account for the possibility that Iran's Shehab missiles could be armed with chemical warheads.
Iran could also retaliate by sowing further chaos in already unstable Iraq. In a February 2006 threat assessment presented to the Senate Select Committee On Intelligence, National Intelligence Director John Negroponte stated, "Iran provides guidance and training to select Iraqi Shia political groups and weapons and training to Shia militant groups to enable anti-Coalition attacks. Tehran has been responsible for at least some of the increasing lethality of anti-Coalition attacks by providing Shia militants with the capability to build IEDs [improvised explosive devices] with explosively formed projectiles." But we have yet to feel their full fury. He added, "Tehran's intentions to inflict pain on the United States in Iraq have been constrained by its caution to avoid giving Washington an excuse to attack it." If the United States attacked Iran, Tehran is prepared to step up its activities in Iraq, including covertly deploying elements of its Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
And Iranian retaliation need not be limited to military action. Iranian oil production is fourth in the world and second to Saudi Arabia in the Gulf—nearly 4 million barrels a day.
UK Guardian
The fall of the house of finance
Ann Pettifor
May 22, 2006 12:45 PM
Things are not looking too good in the house that Big Brother finance built. As Larry Elliott wrote in Saturday's Guardian, financial markets are gyrating. Interest rates in both the US and UK look set to rise (painful for the over-borrowed, such as first-time buyers, students, General Motors, the NHS, Man United etc.)
The dollar is volatile and likely to fall further, if not "plummet" (painful for US hedge fund managers who have borrowed other people's money in non-dollar currencies in order to gamble with it: for every notch the dollar falls, the cost of repaying those billions rises.) Daredevils on stock markets (including pension fund managers?) are likely to make losses, and speculators in commodities are taking a hit.
But then, what would you expect from the unregulated house built by finance? As a sector, its players are careless of the interests of what can broadly be defined as industry, labour and the ecosystem (not their problem, guv), but most of all, they are careless of the interests of the poor and poor nations.
UK Independent
Published on Monday, May 15, 2006 by the Independent / UK
West's Failure over Climate Change 'Will Kill 182m Africans'
by Philip Thornton
The poorest people in the world will be the chief victims of the West's failure to tackle global warning, with millions of Africans forecast to die by the end of the century, Christian Aid says in a report out today.
The potential ravages of climate change are so severe that they could nullify the efforts to end the legacy of poverty and disease across developing countries, the charity says.
The report highlights the fact that, despite hand-wringing in the West about the threat to its coastlines from rising temperatures, it is the poorest who are likely to suffer most. It estimates that a "staggering" 182 million people in sub-Saharan Africa could die of disease directly attributable to climate change by 2100. Many millions more face death and devastation from climate-induced floods, famine, drought and conflict.
May 15, 2006
by Bruce Schneier
Who Owns Your Computer?
This essay originally appeared on Wired.com.
When technology serves its owners, it is liberating. When it is
designed to serve others, over the owner's objection, it is oppressive.
There's a battle raging on your computer right now -- one that pits you
against worms and viruses, Trojans, spyware, automatic update features and digital rights management technologies. It's the battle to
determine who owns your computer.
You own your computer, of course. You bought it. You paid for it. But
how much control do you really have over what happens on your machine? Technically you might have bought the hardware and software, but you have less control over what it's doing behind the scenes.
Using the hacker sense of the term, your computer is "owned" by other people.
It used to be that only malicious hackers were trying to own your
computers. Whether through worms, viruses, Trojans or other means, they would try to install some kind of remote-control program onto your system. Then they'd use your computers to sniff passwords, make fraudulent bank transactions, send spam, initiate phishing attacks and so on. Estimates are that somewhere between hundreds of thousands and millions of computers are members of remotely controlled "bot" networks. Owned.
Now, things are not so simple. There are all sorts of interests vying
for control of your computer. There are media companies that want to
control what you can do with the music and videos they sell you. There
are companies that use software as a conduit to collect marketing
information, deliver advertising or do whatever it is their real owners
require. And there are software companies that are trying to make money by pleasing not only their customers, but other companies they ally themselves with. All these companies want to own your computer.
Meditation Moment
"Why do you expect miracles, and why are you so convinced they would change the way you live? No, you would quickly forget and return to your prosaic life.
In the past there were initiates who worked wonders. Those who witnessed them were of course
impressed for a while, but it did not stop them from amusing themselves, committing crimes or even burning the person who performed these miracles.
Jesus worked miracles before an awe-struck crowd, and yet not long after they had received him triumphantly in Jerusalem, shouting: 'Hosanna to the son of David!' this same crowd cried out: 'Crucify him!' Miracles often serve only to entertain the public.
You must seek true miracles in the rising sun, in a flower as it
opens, in the smile of a child, or in the human being as the
Creator conceived him. But it is the transformation of the human
heart that is the greatest miracle, because it is the most
difficult to perform."
-- Omraam Mikhaël Aïvanhov


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Legal Notice
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Dear monofans,
since the interest and the participation of the website Monofans.de has become a little quieter, we, the fanclub management, in consultation with the band, decided to take the website offline. We think that in times of Facebook and Instagram a forum is not up to date anymore. We will continue to exist as monofans and post info on our Facebook page "Monofans.de - Official MONO INC. Fanclub". From 01.06.2019 the website will no longer be available. We thank you for your participation in the forum and look forward to the new challenges.
Your fanclub management
Thies, Hermann, Dieter
Viva Hades

subset: commoncrawl


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Transgender soldier Chelsea Manning stopped eating to protest what she says is the lack of treatment she's receiving behind bars for her gender dysphoria, according to NBC News.
"I need help. I am not getting any. I have asked for help time and time again for six years and through five separate confinement locations," Manning said in a statement.
Manning is serving a 35-year sentence. She was convicted in 2013 on espionage charges for sending hundreds of thousands of classified documents to WikiLeaks. She is being held in the all-male U.S. Disciplinary Barracks in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.
U.S. & World
[NATL] Top News Photos: Pope Visits Japan, and More
"My request has only been ignored, delayed, mocked, given trinkets and lip service by the prison, the military, and this administration," she wrote.
Manning started the hunger strike at 12:01 a.m. CT Saturday.
NBC News reached out to the military for comment about Manning's claims. A U.S. Army official responded and said they have no immediate comment.


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In January 2013 I wrote about what I do to have winter carrots. I begin in the fall of the previous year and plant rye in rows in my future carrot bed. The rye crop is allowed to mature all the way to seed, which around here in zone 7 is mid-June. When it is cut, the harvest is seed and straw. I lightly hoe between the rows of stubble and plant carrots. I keep this bed well watered to get the carrots off to a good start and replant if there are spots lacking good germination. Once everything is growing well the only attention is to weed periodically. The stubble decomposes, gently feeding back the soil for the carrots.
With this post I thought I would show the carrots in a three bed rotation plan that provides greens and carrots for my household through the fall and winter months, while feeding back the soil with cover crops. If you have trouble reading the text on the garden map, click on it and it will open up in a new window, as will all my photos. I grow all of my compost and mulch materials in order to avoid bringing damaging materials into my garden. In the photo you can see the skeleton of this plan. The carrots and kale and collards take up 43% of the space for the year in the total of the three beds. There are 12 bed crop months in each bed for a total of 36 bed crop months. The carrots and greens use 15.5 bed crop months, or 43%. When I plan cover crops I like to have 60% of the bed crop months in the garden in soil building crops. That would mean that the rest of the space in the three beds would need to be devoted to cover crops, plus I need to have some extra in the rest of the garden to make up for the shortage here. The winter rye that is already part of the rotation is a cover crop.
The map you see is for the calendar year, showing the crops that are already in each bed at the beginning of the year. The green areas in the plan show when each bed is available for crops beyond the carrots and greens winter food plan. There is a lot of flexibility here. First I will give suggestions for filling those areas with cover crops. Bed 1 is already filled all twelve months, so look at Bed 2. You will harvest carrots from the fall until you have pulled them all or the weather warms in March and they start sending up a seed stalk. If you still have some then, pull them and store them in plastic bags in the fridge and you can have carrots for weeks in your kitchen. If you want to save seed, leave some of the carrots in the garden to go to seed. That might take until July so you may want to have those on one side of the bed, leaving the rest of the bed for something else. Only save from one variety to avoid crossing. My plan shows the carrots are there until March 1. That could vary and they could be there until they show signs of bolting. For a soil building crop you could plant fava beans or field peas. Favas and field pea plants can be harvested as green biomass for the compost pile when they reach full flower. In my area the blooms of fava beans tend to fall off when the weather gets hot, making it hard to save seed anyway. If you take them while blooming, you could follow with another legume, such as cowpeas or soybeans for biomass. Buckwheat can be planted anytime in there to keep the bed planted and to attract beneficial insects. The goal is to have the bed free by the middle of August for the kale and collard transplants that will overwinter. It helps to put a low tunnel on this bed then. It provides a frame for shade cloth at transplanting that is replaced by a plastic cover when the weather warrants. This low tunnel can be moved from one bed to the other to follow the brassicas crop.
In Bed 3 you can see that it begins the calendar year with kale and collards already there, left from last year's planting. That group of crops (carrots early and kale/collards late) were planted in Bed 3 the previous year as you can see by the rotation arrows, leaving the kale/collards there to overwinter. If the harvest is for greens only, the bed will be ready for the next crop in mid-March. If you intend to save seeds from either kale or collards, those plants will be in the bed until June. Favas or field peas are an option for this bed, but so is spring wheat. That could be followed by cowpeas (or another legume), then buckwheat before it is time to plant the winter rye. In my area rye can go in anytime in October. Plant the rye in rows as to make the carrot planting easier. You can see by the rotation arrows that the crops in Bed 1 will rotate to Bed 3 in the next year and conveniently, the rye will be there, right on schedule.
If you have plenty of compost materials from the other beds in your garden you might prefer to plant crops for eating in those green spaces on the map. In that case, salad crops such as sugar snap peas, lettuce, spinach, and bunching onions could be planted after the carrots or kale and collards. Those crops could be followed by snap beans. Bed 2 needs to be open by mid-August, but you have into the fall in Bed 3 leaving the possibility of planting sweet potatoes in late May/early June after the salad crops. Winter squash is a possibility in Bed 3 and you can use the rye straw harvested from Bed 1 as mulch. Potatoes followed by snap beans could happen in either bed.
Of course, the timing of these crops depends on your location. If you enjoy going to the farmers market for fresh vegetables or belong to a summer CSA, but also like to garden, you may want to consider this winter food plan. It might do well for those of you who like to travel in the summer, as long as you are around for the key planting times. You will find other garden maps and plans in my book Grow a Sustainable Diet. Once you learn how to plan for the whole year, the possibilities are endless.
I will be talking about all of this on Saturday, January 31, 2015 in the presentation that Ira Wallace, of Southern Exposure Seed Exchange, and I are giving at the Virginia Biological Farming Conference in Richmond, VA. Come and see us!


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Mojolicious::Plugin::EPLRenderer - Embedded Perl Lite renderer plugin
# Mojolicious
# Mojolicious::Lite
plugin 'EPLRenderer';
Mojolicious::Plugin::EPLRenderer is a renderer for
epl templates, which are pretty much just raw Mojo::Template.
This is a core plugin, that means it is always enabled and its code a good example for learning to build new plugins, you're welcome to fork it.
See "PLUGINS" in Mojolicious::Plugins for a list of plugins that are available by default.
Mojolicious::Plugin::EPLRenderer inherits all methods from Mojolicious::Plugin and implements the following new ones.
Register renderer in Mojolicious application.


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I have a cache in Sidney that I have disabled. The issue is that it takes a contortionist to get to the cache. I have since added magnets to the container and I am replaceing it today. (An idea I first came accross on one of Mapachi's caches, Thanks Pat)
I purchased the magnets at a craft store in Waterville and I'm not really that thrilled with them. They did not seem too strong so I used a lot of them in order to make sure the cache is secure.
Does anyone know of a local (Central Maine) store that sells quality items to assist in the creation of caches? I found some stuff online, but it would be nice to support a local store, even if it's a chain.


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Korres Wild Rose Overnight Sleeping Facial (40ml) for all skin types. Corrective facial/ skin retexturising & moisturising.
Overnight sleeping facial for intense hydration, skin retexturising and brightness.
Acts over night, when skin absorption of actives is at its highest levels. Wild Rose, a natural source of vitamin C, combined with pure vitamin C, offers radiance and restores even skin tone.
Low-molecular-weight Hyaluronic boosts the synthesis of collagen, while Aloe and Jojoba oil leave skin deeply moisturised, smooth and radiant.
After cleansing apply onto face and neck, avoiding the eye area. Do not rinse. Ideal for everyday use.
(including VAT 23%)


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CHICAGO, Jan. 6 (UPI) -- Thirty-four states were under wind chill alerts Monday as a record-breaking blast of arctic air swooped down on the United States.
A record-setting minus 16 degrees was recorded in Chicago while in Minnesota morning temperatures were in the minus 20s.
Thousands of flights across the country were delayed or canceled, FlightAware.com reported. At midmorning, there were 2,471 delays and 3,282 cancellations.
Northern Indiana was virtually closed to travel with stretches of Interstates 94 and 65 closed in both directions, the Chicago Tribune reported. Indiana state police said driving was hazardous on almost every major road.
Thousands of customers in the Indianapolis area were without power Monday, AccuWeather.com reported, in bitter cold temperatures that will stay below zero until Tuesday.
Chicago's transit systems also was experiencing problems, with nine of Metra's 10 commuter rail lines reporting delays of 15 to 70 minutes. The South Shore Indiana Commuter Rail system was suspended entirely.
Multiple school systems throughout the United States were closed, as were many public and private colleges, houses of worship, zoos and some businesses, including ski resorts.
In Duluth, Minn., the city said snow-removal operations planned for Tuesday in the city's downtown were postponed because of the cold weather, the Duluth News Tribune reported.
The city said the conditions would expose city crews to dangerous temperatures and wind chills. At midmorning, the temperature was minus-20.
The National Weather Service in Minneapolis said in its wind chill advisory Monday the "historic and life-threatening cold outbreak" would remain in Minnesota and Wisconsin through Tuesday.
"The coldest air mass since 1996 will continue to bring dangerous wind chills into Tuesday," the NWS advisory said, noting that exposed flesh will freeze in 10 minutes with wind chills of 35 below zero.
During the past week, at least 13 people have died of weather-related causes -- 11 in highway accidents, one from hypothermia and one, a woman with Alzheimer's disease, who wandered away from her home and was found dead in a wooded area about 100 yards away, CNN reported.
In Chanhassen, Minn., three restaurants closed Sunday because of a water main break that was repaired several hours later, the Star Tribune in Minneapolis reported.
Four-hundred to 500 residents of an apartment complex in Rogers, northwest of Minneapolis, fled their apartments into the below-zero outdoors after a propane heater pressed into service exploded, police said. The cause of the explosion wasn't known and the state Fire Marshal's Office and the Office of Pipeline Safety were investigating.
After the initial blast, fireballs lit the sky intermittently for 35 to 40 minutes until authorities found and closed the fuel valve, the Star Tribune said.
AccuWeather.com also reported airports in Bloomington and Terre Haute, Ind., were closed.
In Maine, freezing rain is causing hazardous driving conditions in some areas and speeds have been reduced to 45 mph.
The icebox conditions in the Midwest will work their way east Tuesday, CNN said. New York, which was forecast to reach 50 degrees Monday, could tumble to as low as minus 7 Tuesday.
The extreme temperatures and blustery winds produced by the arctic cyclone created dangerously cold wind chills as far south as central Florida and Brownsville, Texas, NWS said.
Poor visibility from blowing snow trapped the Southern Illinois University men's basketball team, returning home from a 66-48 loss to Illinois State, on the side of Interstate 57 late Sunday, SIU Athletic Director Mario Moccia said.
The bus driver pulled off the highway to get out of the way of traffic until visibility improved, but when the driver tried to get back on the road, the bus had no traction and was stuck, CNN reported.
"They're just hanging out, they're watching movies," Moccia told CNN late Sunday night.
He said the bus had plenty of fuel, heat and food, and the team was waiting for a tow truck.
Players later tweeted they would be spending the night in a church in Tuscola, Ill.
"Somehow this eventful day/night has led to our team sleeping on the floor of a church in Tuscola. What a journey it has been," Dawson Verhines tweeted.


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A Fast and Powerful Text Editor: Sublime Text 2
I tried Sublime Text 2 today and it looks great. Note that ST2 is not open source and you should purchase a license if you want to use it after evaluation. However, there is currently no enforced time limit for the evaluation.
First of all, it is cross-platform (Linux, Windows, OS X). There is no need to install it: just download an archive file and unpack it. Under Linux I put it to
/opt (
/opt/Sublime\ Text\ 2). In order to call it with the command "
st", I put the following script in my
$HOME/bin directory (where
$HOME/bin is in my
#!/bin/sh # call ST2 with parameters in the background /opt/Sublime\ Text\ 2/sublime_text "$@" &
ST2 has tons of plugins available. To install them easily, first install "Sublime Package Control" (follow this link, everything is explained there).
I find the following plugins particularly useful:
- SublimeRope (code-completion/refactoring)
- SublimeLinter (check your syntax on the fly)
- SublimeREPL (python/bash/cmd/etc integrated console)
How to install a plugin: in ST2, press Ctrl+Shift+P. Select "Package Control: Install Package". Then choose a plugin to be installed.
Color Scheme: well, I tried 'em all but I didn't really like any of them. So I stayed with the default (Monokai). If you know a cool color scheme, let me know.
In Python, it's a good idea not to mix tabs and spaces. Here is how to replace tabs with spaces automatically: under Preferences -> Settings-User, add the following line:
"translate_tabs_to_spaces": true
Rename multiple instances of a word (beware, in the case of variables scope is not taken into account): Alt+F3.
User config files are stored in
If you want to enable / disable the automatic linting, add the following lines to SublimeLinter's user keymap (thanks jswartwood for the tip):
// Enable background linting { "keys": ["ctrl+shift+l"], "command": "sublimelinter_lint", "args": {"action": "on"} }, // Disable linting { "keys": ["ctrl+shift+d"], "command": "sublimelinter_disable", "args": {"action": "off"} },
- 10 Reasons Why I've Switched From Netbeans To Sublime Text 2 For PHP Development
- Why I Switched From Netbeans To Sublime Text 2 For PHP Development
- 9 reasons you must install Sublime Text 2. Code like a man, man.
Update (20120813)
I found a nice color scheme, available here (down at the Bonus Options, direct link here). "Unzip and place the extracted tmtheme files in the Sublime Text 2 Packages/User folder, then enable the colour scheme via Preferences -> Color Scheme -> User".


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History of EdPrint, Inc.
- Written by Woodinville Weekly Staff
Masthead from the front page of the first edition of the Woodinville Weekly, dated November 1, 1976. The topic of incorporation of Woodinville and the historic Saginaw Sawmill were top stories.
Since 1976, when owner Carol Edwards first began putting out the paper in her garage, The Woodinville Weekly has been dedicated to bringing local news, issues and events to the community. As the area has grown, so too has the paper, from a circulation of 5,000 to approximately 30,000 today.
The Woodinville Weekly and its two sister publications, The Northlake News and The Valley View, serve the communities of Woodinville, Duvall, Carnation, Bothell, Kenmore and Lake Forest Park.
Carol Edwards started the Woodinville Weekly in her garage the spring of 1976. Edwards, a civic leader and vital force within the Woodinville community, published the paper through 2007 until her death, October 27, 2007, from ALS.
Edwards once commented on the papers' beginnings, "My family, including six very small children, had moved to Woodinville in 1976. My parents lived here and I was returning to the Northwest from California. By fall of that year, I was desperate for information. What activities were there for kids, where was a library, what was going on in town and what was available in the way of services? As a former teacher, social worker, sheriff's marshal and organic farmer, I had a lot of experience with hard work, information gathering and dissemination. I also had an AB Dick table-top press and an eight-foot process camera which I had bought on a whim a year earlier and hauled with me to Woodinville."
"I was committed to a free paper for people paid for by advertising. I packed up the kids and went to Woodinville stores and asked for ads to start the paper. My garage was converted to a production space and I borrowed a carbonribbon typewriter. ...Once the paper was set, I got a neighbor to help me shoot the negatives, make the plates and run the press. The small size of the paper was due to the size of the camera and press."
Staff became accustomed to working under difficult circumstances from these very humble beginnings. The operation moved several times to various locations throughout the years, currently occupying a 3,000 Square Foot space in downtown Woodinville near the post office.
The paper has gone from the low-tech operation of "cut and paste" to an all Digital system. The Woodinville Weekly was the first news publication in Washington state to be on the Internet.
For more than 30 years, the dedicated staff has brought news and information to the surrounding areas, continuing Carol Edwards' dedication and commitment to the community from her earliest vision. The Woodinville Weekly is currently a team effort with more than a dozen staff members.
Others from the community contribute to the paper in many ways, from guest columnists to photographers. Edwards reflected in 2001, "it was exhausting work for us all, but there was a commitment then, and now, to the importance of providing community news to residents ... we haven't ever missed an issue!"
Eastside Media Corp acquires the Woodinville Weekly in July 2019.


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BabyPing is a wireless webcam that allows you to monitor your baby in his or her cot, all from the comfort of your sofa via your iPhone or iPad. The system consists of two parts: a wireless camera that connects to your home network, via Wi-Fi, and a dedicated app for your iPhone or iPad.
The key selling point here is simplicity. While it's possible to set up a similar system up with the independent components, BabyPing makes it incredibly easy using a one-box (two if you count the iPhone) solution.
To set up, you start by connecting the camera to your router, load the app and follow the on-screen instructions. Once you've set up the camera - which, incidentally, we've tested before, but for security applications - you are ready to put it in your nursery. You will need a power socket close to the cot.
Once in the nursery the camera is fairly discreet. An automatic night vision mode switches on whenever it detects darkness, and, importantly, the camera does this without blasting the baby's room with light, so you won't wake your bundle of screams in the night when checking on them.
As BabyPing uses your Wi-Fi network to operate it doesn't send off or receive any extra signals. That means you don't pick up your neighbours baby monitor by accident. And, despite it sending video over our network, we didn't notice a drop in our web surfing while the system was running.
Loading the accompanying app for your iPhone or iPad is free. As long as you are on the same wireless network you can "dial" into the camera to have a gander.
The app is clever enough to detect sound to give you a warning, but all without giving you a tonne of static like most monitors do. The camera itself is good enough to work when there is little to no light, meaning you can pretty much see what's going on even when the lights are out.
We especially like the option of setting the alerts to vibrate, so you don't even have to disturb the rest of the room when your baby starts crying. Handy at a dinner party, for example. Those who are really paranoid will also presumably like the fact that you can have the camera running constantly, even if you want to do something else with your iPad or iPhone.
If you are looking for a more high-tech baby monitoring solution BabyPing certainly delivers.
It is easy to set up, works well in use, and the added benefit of being Wi-Fi means your wireless network isn't affected by the radio signal from a more traditional baby monitoring system.
Clever, but at £165 it's expensive.


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Providing Door-To-Door
Non Emergency Medical Transportation
TLC Medical Transport is a non-emergency medical transportation
provider. We are committed to providing the highest quality and most efficient service to our clients throughout the Southern California area. We provide professional door-to-door local and long distance non emergency medical transportation.
Our Mission
Our mission is to provide safe, timely, courteous and personalized transportation services that get you comfortably to and from your destination. TLC MEDICAL TRANSPORT works closely with hospitals, insurance providers, long-term care facilities, healthcare networks and managed care organizations to determine how to best serve our clients in need of non-emergency medical transportation. TLC focuses on ensuring that the patient receives high-quality service at the most efficient cost.
Transporation Services
- Doctor Appt's
- Clinics
- Hospitals
- Dialysis
- Rehab Centers
- Special Engagements
- Hospice
- Nursing Facilities
- Dental Appointments
- Airport Drop-off
- Surgery Centers
- Hospital Discharges
Business Partners
Rural Metro / Pacific Ambulance
The largest 911 paramedic and non-emergency
ambulance provider in San Diego County.
TLC is in compliance with the requirements of The Metropolitan Transit System and the San Diego Sheriff's Department with regard to non-emergency transportation services.


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Read the opposing arguments from Loyal Homer and Bleacher Fan.
Here we are in early May and the MLB standings are a bit confusing. The team with the best record in baseball is not the team many predicted – it's the Cleveland Indians of all teams. A 18-8 April does not earn any team a championship, but it is as noteworthy as the New York Yankees' 17-8. It's as good as the Phillies as well. Since the Yankees and the Phillies are legitimate name-brand contenders, then the Indians must be for real also, right?
Unfortunately, that question does not have a simple answer… making it a great candidate for an eternal baseball debate. Does a strong April REALLY matter for Major League Baseball teams?
Loyal Homer will argue that an excellent April is not indicative of a great season while Bleacher Fan will argue that a great April means a great season is in the works.
Who do you agree with? Check back here and find out how the judge rules later this week.


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When I turn wifi on my 3g connection shuts down, which is fine in most cases however I need to connect to a LAN at work that is not connected to the internet and I'd prefer not to lose my data connection when I connect to the work intranet.
How can I keep both connections active?
Ideally I could limit this desired behavior to this one SSID, because I want it to continue to operate with the default behavior for all other wifi connections. If that can't be done is like a solution that is easy to toggle on and off.
I'm using a VZW Galaxy Nexus on CM9.


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Drexel North Theatre
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Interior shot of the Drexel North after conversion to a Revco drug store. Public domain photo by Mark Fontana obtained from Wikipedia.
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Ever been told you're "too emotional" or "overly sensitive"? Maybe these traits have felt like liabilities, especially in the workplace? According to Leela Francis, author of "Woman's Way Home," these characteristics can be a source of empowerment and should be celebrated.
"We are feeling, empathic, nourishing individuals and we live in a crazy, fast, high-tech world," Francis said. "We are able to deeply love and nurture and care for others and that's what grows humans into healthy adults."
But while it's important to tap into our emotional side, Francis said there's a time and a place for sharing our feelings.
"I think one of the reasons emotionalism has gotten a bad rap is because, while it's important to be able to give ourselves the freedom to feel, it's also important to become a master at choosing how and when to express those feelings," she said. "If we don't master that, then our emotions do leak out in inappropriate ways."
Here are Francis' tips to harness your feelings into a source of power:
Don't dump your emotions on others.
"Nobody has the right to demand that you be the witness to their acting out," she said. "It's like going to the bathroom. This is something that you need to attend to yourself. There's a difference between sharing what you are feeling and the emotional acting out of your emotions. Nobody else is responsible for your emotions but you."
Listen to your body.
Francis said the reason we feel "sick to our stomachs" or have an "aching heart" is because our feelings can be so powerful, they can sometimes cause a physical reaction in the body.
"If we can cultivate a practice of staying with our feelings instead of running away and into our heads, we find we can tolerate those uncomfortable feelings — and as we do that we become more empowered, authentic and more genuinely fulfilled."
Never underestimate the power of an emotional connection.
"What drives people to do destructive things, either to ourselves or to others, is a lack of love, a lack of intimacy, a lack of feeling valued in the world…. More and more people are getting laid off and with stress in the workplace, the personal interactions and relationships you form, that's what wins out. We are all craving genuine, fulfilling heart connections with people. I think it's something we all know but really isn't addressed."
Latest Lifestyles
Don't live to please others.
"The most destructive thing we can say to ourselves is 'Who do I have to be in order to be loved?' That's the most destructive thing in the lives of everybody, but especially to women. Intimacy with others can start when we are intimate with ourselves."
Twitter: @jenweigel


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So this weekend, I kicked off my weekend with a long run on Friday morning, before leaving for the snow. Lately I have been listening to different music on my run and what got me through this 6 miler was classical and some Beiber. What the random combo, but it worked out well. I finally am starting to get that feeling that I'm not going to die out while running, which was plaguing my runs for quite some time. Literally, I felt like every step I took I was going to just fall over, but now I'm finally starting to feel that 'fitness' come back and not struggle as much. I know starting from basically scratch again makes things difficult but nothing compares to that feeling where you start to 'get it' and running makes sense again. Hooray for not feeling terrible.
Friday we left and went to the snow! It was so much fun to hang out with some friends of B's from work and just enjoy time away.
It wasn't TOO cold, that is why B is in short sleeves, and he also has the super power of never being cold…
We were a little worried about George liking the snow and being cold, but he loved the snow and was a champ! Him and his friend Mogaly played all weekend long, and snuggled up.
George was out the whole way home! So tired from the snow! :)
When we finally got back yesterday, it was just about afternoon so I decided to run to the gym and work out and run home and it was great to go running. I had the good feeling of not dying and not stopping at all and am glad that I finally am getting that groove back. I was starting to think that I wouldn't ever be able to run over 2 miles ever again. I did seem to do too many squats though and now my legs are killing me.
As the Holidays are quickly approaching, I'm going to work really hard to eat healthy for the last few days leading up to Thanksgiving and for those days between Thanksgiving and Christmas. I know once I'm off work for Christmas Break, I will eat healthy because at home I realize I don't eat as much for some reason, but when I'm at work I feel like I'm starving all day long. Strange but true.
I'm looking forward to my 8 miler this weekend and finally feeling like the longer mileage is agreeing with me!


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Hello Norm,
I have decided to start fresh as I was getting to jumbled on this..... I will include what I have so far as I don't know where to go from here. On my Business class that extends the InfoClass, there should be a return of fName but I cant get anything to return anything.... I will need to add it to an ArrayList of some kind until the user is all done... I will also have to recall all data either (either kind of contact).. Any direction will greatly be appreciated.
Code:package contacts2; //import java.util.ArrayList; import java.util.Scanner; import java.util.ArrayList; /** * * @author Drew */ public class Contacts2 { /** * @param args the command line arguments */ public static void main(String[] args) { //Instantiates the Scanner Class Scanner in = new Scanner(System.in); //Asks user which kinda of contact 1)Business or 2) Personal System.out.println("Please enter B for a business contact or P for a personal contact: "); String cont = in.next(); if(cont.equals("B")) { Business fno = new Business(); Business lno = new Business(); Business ado = new Business(); Business pno = new Business(); Business emo = new Business(); Business poso = new Business(); Business orgo = new Business(); fno.firstName(); } // else //{ // System.out.print("You chose else: "); //} } }Code:package contacts2; import java.util.Scanner; import java.util.ArrayList; /** * * @author Drew */ public class Business extends ContactInfo { Scanner in = new Scanner(System.in); ArrayList<Business> busContact = new ArrayList<Business>(); public String firstName() { System.out.println("What is your Fisrt Name: "); String fName = in.next(); //return fName; //System.out.println("This is some txt!!" + fName); return fName; } }


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Chesapeake Shakespeare Company Theater 7 South Calvert Street, Baltimore MD 21202
Chesapeake Shakespeare Company has transformed a 19th-century landmark in downtown Baltimore into an intimate theater for the classics. Designed by architects Cho, Benn, Holback + Associates and constructed by Southway Builders, the theater creatively reuses the former Mercantile Deposit and Trust Company bank building. Inside, visitors will see the original columns and vault doors, ornately decorated ceiling, and a catwalk used by bank guards who patrolled the trust's perimeter. Built like a fortress with double walls and iron window grates, the Mercantile building survived Baltimore's Great Fire of 1904. It is listed in the National Register of Historic Places.
Chesapeake Shakespeare Company-In-The-Ruins PFI Historic Park
Join us for Shakespeare under the stars in our summer home in Ellicott City, Md. Each summer, CSC builds a stage in the picturesque Patapsco Female Institute (PFI) Historic Park. The reinforced stone ruins of a 19th-century girls' school provide the theater's magnificent backdrop. Bring a picnic, a bottle of wine, and your whole family. Use our chairs or your blanket. The park is located on a wooded hillside just above historic Ellicott City's Main Street. Feel free to wander in the ruins and on the well-landscaped grounds: the park is a Howard County treasure. All tickets are for general admission seating. The night songs of the toads and the glow of the fireflies are free.


text: Tim Whitmer & KC Express Calendar Add to Calendar Add to Timely Calendar Add to Google Add to Outlook Add to Apple Calendar Add to other calendar Export to XML When: June 6, 2020 @ 4:30 pm – 8:30 pm Repeats 2020-06-06T16:30:00-05:00 2020-06-06T20:30:00-05:00 Where: The Phoenix 302 W 8th St Kansas City, MO 64105 USA Live Music Living up to his motto of "Let the Good Times Roll", Tim has been playing at the Phoenix since the day it opened and his show always gets better! Tim's group, the award winning KC Express, consists of some of Kansas City's premier musicians. The band includes Tom DeMasters on guitar, Rick Huyett on bass and Ray DeMarchi on drums. In addition, each week Tim features the amazing vocals of either Millie Edwards or Lori Tucker.


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Trade News
Murray Hill, New Jersey, U.S., 2 February 2010 -- For semiconductor manufacturers looking for a sub-atmospheric dopant gas source that will deliver high performance at a lower cost, Linde North America has the answer: the Genii™ Sub-Atmospheric Gas Sources.
Linde North America is a member of The Linde Group, a world leading gases and engineering group and a major supplier of high-purity gases and technology to the semiconductor and electronics manufacturing industries. The new Linde ion implantation gas sources use chemical complexing or electrochemical generation as a means to achieve the desired performance characteristics required by integrated circuit (IC) manufacturers.
Ion implantation is a critical step in the manufacture of integrated circuits. It is the method of introducing doping gases such as arsine, phosphine and boron trifluoride, to the silicon substrate. IC manufacturers prefer using dopants in sub-atmospheric pressure cylinders because of the inherent safety compared with higher pressure alternatives.
"The Genii Sub-Atmospheric Gas Sources from Linde provide IC manufacturers with a lower cost-of-ownership, high-performance alternative to other sub-atmospheric products currently on the market," said Peter Thomas, vice president of marketing for Linde's electronics business.
Beta testing at an IC maker's site proved that the Genii gas sources can reduce a manufacturer's ion implant source costs by a minimum of 20 percent with no impact on device performance.
Linde is offering two technologies in the Genii dopant line. One generates arsine at sub-atmospheric pressure from an electrochemical generator housed in the cylinder. The second delivers enriched boron trifluoride or phosphine through chemical complexing with ionic liquids contained in the cylinder. "Both technologies deliver the kind of performance and efficiencies IC manufacturers require," Thomas said. "And they are a demonstration of Linde's ongoing commitment to developing new products for the electronics industry," he said.
The Linde Group is a world leading gases and engineering company with almost 50,000 employees working in around 100 countries worldwide. In the 2008 financial year it achieved sales of EUR 12.7 billion (USD 15.9 billion). The strategy of The Linde Group is geared towards sustainable earnings-based growth and focuses on the expansion of its international business with forward-looking products and services. Linde acts responsibly towards its shareholders, business partners, employees, society and the environment – in every one of its business areas, regions and locations across the globe. Linde is committed to technologies and products that unite the goals of customer value and sustainable development.
For more information about Linde in North America visit http://www.lindeus.com
Peter Gavigan
Linde North America Corporate Communications
Telephone: +1.908.771-1512
Email: firstname.lastname@example.com


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Marcus Buckingham has done it again. In this week's HuffPo installment, Buckingham gets started by citing Time magazine's special on the State of Women as saying that the gender war is over, and it was a tie. But Buckingham takes it one step further:
I'm not so sure. In a war, no matter the outcome of a certain skirmish or battle, the winner is the party whose attitudes, behaviors and preoccupations come to dominate the postwar landscape. By this measure, the outcome of the gender wars, if wars they were, is clear: women won.
He makes his case by saying that "men's attitudes more and more resemble women's attitudes", citing the fact that fewer men now believe that men should be the breadwinners, women the caretakers, than did in 1977. He says that "men's behaviors are becoming more and more like women's", using the fact that men now do more housework than they did in 1977 as evidence. He even cites popular culture:
Even our entertainment heroes have lost their masculine muscle. Arnold, Bruce, and Stallone are long gone from the screen, but even the flirty, flaky, funny adolescents–Tom, Brad, Jim, and Will–no longer charm us quite as much as they once did. Instead our leading men are the likes of Zac Efron who, though he can still "Michael Jordan" it on the court, now has to sing and dance charmingly to earn our affection.
Um, okayyyy. But here's where it gets interesting:
The war is over. Women won. And, as ever, to the victor go the spoils.
And what are the spoils of this particular war?
The spoils are choice. Women have more choice than ever before in their work, home, and lifestyles. And yes, men are becoming more like women, and so men are starting to face the same multitude of choices that women tackle.
Today, with many companies offering paternal leave, men now have the choice to stay at home after the birth of their newborn… But they also have the choice to take advantage of this leave and stay at home wondering whether or not this absence will hurt their careers.
Men have the choice to stay at home even longer and assume the chief caregiver role… But they have to face the fact that, in making this choice, their skills might become obsolete and their wages, when they re-enter the workforce, will wind up reflecting their out-of-date proficiency.
Men have the choice to arrange their schedules so they can pick up the kids from school twice a week. And they have the choice not to, and then to feel guilty about this choice.
The choice-filled world that women have bestowed on men is a tough world. Tough on women; even tougher on men. At least that's what the data reveal. In 1977, 41 percent of women reported feeling some level of work/life conflict, whereas only 35% of men did. Today, about the same percentage of women report work/life conflict, but 59 percent of men are now similarly torn.
Buckingham, Buckingham, Buckingham. Welcome to our world. While what he has to say about our choices is interesting (as is his use of self-reported statistics to back up his points), what's more interesting is what he doesn't say. Like this:
A study in the current issue of The Academy of Management Journal reveals that bosses generally perceive women workers to have more family-work conflict than men, even though this isn't the case. And this belief, mistaken though it is, leads supervisors to take a negative view of women employees' suitability for promotion.
Or this, from the Economix blog at the New York Times' web site:
In most jobs, the gap between men's and women's earnings narrows greatly when you adjust for factors like career path and experience. But at the top of the income scale–jobs paying more than $100,000–the salary gap between equally qualified men and women is still vast.
Or this, which Laura Liswood, co-founder of the Council of Women World Leaders, wrote yesterday:
In its annual measurement of global progress in the lives of women and girls, released October 27, 2009, the World Economic Forum reported some major improvements in surprising places. The 2009 Global Gender Gap Report–which, country by country, examines data indicating the resources and status of women compared to men–ranks Lesotho, for example, in the top 10, a marked improvement from its place at 16 last year and 43 in 2006. By contrast, the United States moved down three slots last year and now ranks 31st.
In terms of why you might be a little irritated by that, feel free to pick your poison: that the U.S. is ranked 31st, or that we moved down three slots last year. I myself am having a little of both. Liswood spells out the characteristics of our grouping thus:
Group III Gaps in these countries (including the United States and United Kingdom) have been almost completely closed in education and health; progress is occurring on economic and political participation. What is lagging is women's presence at the highest levels of power be it management of a business or head of state or government or parliament. Countries that adopt quotas for business or politics often see an immediate jump in their standing once these mechanisms kick in.
Ooh, quotas. Scary. But why should we be so opposed? As Latoya Peterson notes in her Jezebel piece about the report:
Norway has legislation that demands all public institutions "promote gender equity, and these efforts are to be documented each year." The top ranking country, Iceland, passed this type of legislation back in 2000 as the Act on Equal Status and Equal Rights of Women. Finland employs an "Ombudsman for Equality, the Gender Equality Unit, and the Council for Equality" in its pursuit of gender parity. And in Sweden, there is an Ombudsman on Discrimination, as well as measures taken in schools and workplaces to ensure women do not face bias.
Why should we care what goes on in Iceland, Finland, Norway, and Sweden? They hold the top four spots in that report. The one where the U.S. ranks 31st.
Let's read just a little more from Liswood:
Data are a necessary component to start the process of resource allocation and policy shift. Data collection alone can't make the sea level rise, but many political and business leaders hide behind the excuse that women must 'make the case' for change. The case can rarely be made without information that proves what women may intuitively already know. And looking at a gender gap that has been indexed should give leaders pause if they are not fully utilizing 50 percent of their talent.
It certainly should. The thing is, if we were to proactively address the measurable inequities, like Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Finland, then–if Buckingham's right–everyone would stand to benefit. But where Buckingham–where the very United States–has fallen short, is in viewing it as a personal issue, an issue of behavior, or attitude, or whether Zac Ephron is cashing in at the box office… In choosing to look at such heavy decisions merely as personal dilemmas, left to each of us to handle on our own, in our own way, we are missing the point. Yes, we have choices in our lives, and it stands on each of us to make them. But they're made harder by the lack of institutional support. The war may be over, but the battle has just begun.


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ALLSTON, Mass. – Portland Thorns FC attempted a club record 15 shots on goal and forward Christine Sinclair became the third player in National Women's Soccer League history to register 10 or more shots in a match, but Thorns FC could not overcome a two-goal halftime deficit in a 2-0 loss against the Boston Breakers at Harvard Stadium on Sunday night.
Thorns FC (9-8-6, 33pts) remain in fourth place in the NWSL standings with just one game remaining on the regular-season schedule. Still in the race for the final two postseason berths – the Washington Spirit, Chicago Red Stars, Western New York Flash and Sky Blue FC all mathematically remain able to claim a spot in the playoffs as the regular season nears its conclusion.
After conceding two early goals, Portland peppered Boston goalkeeper Alyssa Naeher with 13 shots, including 10 on goal, in the second half and finished with a 20-8 advantage overall in the match. Sinclair set a Thorns FC single-game record for shots (11), becoming just the third player in NWSL history to tally 10 or more shots in a match. Sinclair's seven shots on goal set both a single-game record for the club and a NWSL record, breaking the previous record set by forward Alex Morgan and FC Kansas City midfielder Lauren Holiday (6).
Naeher kept Portland off the board with 10 saves in the match, while Morgan, who finished the match with five shots (5 on goal), and midfielder Amber Brooks each saw efforts cleared off the goal line in the second half.
Portland pushed for a goal in the opening 20 minutes of the second half as Sinclair turned outside the box and split a pair of defenders before bending a shot towards the left post, but Naeher dove to her right to parry the ball out for a corner kick in the 50th minute. In the 63rd minute, midfielder Vero Boquete created space near the edge of the box, threading a ball into midfielder Allie Long. Long fired a shot from inside the goal box, but Naeher dove to make the save.
In the 14th minute, goalkeeper Nadine Angerer made the initial save on defender Cat Whitehill's shot off a corner kick, but defender Rachel Wood collected the loose ball and converted the rebound from inside the box to put Boston in front, 1-0. The Breakers doubled their lead in the 28th minute, as midfielder Lianne Sanderson quickly switched the point of attack to find midfielder Heather O'Reilly breaking down the right flank. O'Reilly drove towards the box and delivered a shot inside the upper left corner.
Thorns FC return to the Rose City for their regular-season finale against Pacific Northwest-rival Seattle Reign FC on Sunday, Aug. 17, at Providence Park. Sunday's match, sponsored by Alaska Airlines, will be broadcast live locally on Comcast SportsNet Northwest with a live webstream on ESPN3.com; kickoff is set for 2 p.m. (Pacific).
- Portland tallied 20 shots in a match for the fourth time this season on Sunday night.
- Forward Christine Sinclair set single-game club records for shots (11) and shots on goal (7), breaking the previous record of 10 shots set by forward Alex Morgan on July 14, 2013 against Western New York and six shots on goal by Morgan against Sky Blue FC on July 31, 2013.
- Sinclair became just the third player in NWSL history to register 10 or more shots in a match along with Seattle Reign FC midfielder Megan Rapinoe and Morgan
- Sinclair's seven shots on goal set a NWSL single-game record, surpassing Morgan and FC Kansas City midfielder Lauren Holiday's previous record marks set in 2013 (6).
- Thorns FC attempted a club record 15 shots on goal in the match.
- Portland's 13 shots in the second half tied the team's record this season for most shots in a half. Portland registered 13 shots in the second half twice against Washington on June 15 and June 21.
- Defender Nikki Marshall made her 45th consecutive regular-season start for Thorns FC on Sunday.
Portland Thorns FC (9-8-6, 33pts) at Boston Breakers (5-15-2, 17pts)
Aug. 10, 2014 – Harvard Stadium (Allston, Mass.)
Goals by Half 1 2 F
Portland Thorns FC 0 0 0
Boston Breakers 2 0 2
Scoring Summary
BOS: Wood (Whitehill), 14
BOS: O'Reilly (Sanderson), 28
Misconduct Summary
POR: Sinclair (Caution), 29
BOS: King (Caution), 53
Lineups & Stats
POR: GK Nadine Angerer, D Becca Moros (Van Hollebeke, 86), D Nikki Marshall, D Emily Menges D Steph Catley (Huffman, 71), M Allie Long, M Amber Brooks, M Vero Boquete, M Mana Shim (McDonald, 55), F Christine Sinclair ©, F Alex Morgan
Substitutes Not Used: GK Michelle Betos, M Angie Kerr
TOTAL SHOTS: 20 (Sinclair, 11); SHOTS ON GOAL: 15 (Sinclair, 7); FOULS: 2 (Catley, Long, 1); OFFSIDES: 4; CORNER KICKS: 5; SAVES: 4
BOS: GK Alyssa Naeher, D Rachel Wood, D Courtney Jones, D Julie King, D Cat Whitehill © (Sierra, 78), M Kristie Mewis (Reeves, 73), M Heather O'Reilly, M Lianne Sanderson, M Nikki Washington, F Katie Schoepfer (Lohman, 58), F Mollie Pathman
Substitutes Not Used: GK Jami Kranich, M Maddy Evans, M Bianca D'Agostino, D Chelsea Stewart
TOTAL SHOTS: 8 (O'Reilly, 3); SHOTS ON GOAL: 6 (O'Reilly, 2); FOULS: 4 (Four players, 1); OFFSIDES: 1; CORNER KICKS: 3; SAVES: 12
Referee: Timon Berry
Assistant Referees: Amanda Ross, Ian McKay
4th Official: Randall Kelley
Attendance: N/A
Weather: Partly, 74 degrees
All statistics contained in this box score are unofficial