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Green Bay Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers said he has a fractured left collarbone and has no idea yet how long he will be out.
The 2011 NFL MVP offered details of the injury on his weekly radio show on 540-AM ESPN. He got hurt after getting sacked by Shea McClellin on a third-down play during the Packers' first series while he was scrambling outside the pocket. He hurt his left, non-throwing shoulder.
"I do have a fractured collarbone. That's a significant injury," Rodgers said. "We'll know more about the severity and the timetable later this week."
Rodgers said he was holding out hope he would heal quickly. "In this case, it was considerably more pain than I've felt in a long time," he added.
That collective groan you heard came from the state of Wisconsin.
The Packers had reeled off four consecutive wins despite being without top players like linebacker Clay Matthews (thumb), Randall Cobb (leg) and Jermichael Finley (neck).
Rodgers entered Monday night's game having completed 67 percent of his 249 pass attempts for 2,191 yards and a 108.0 quarterback rating. He has 15 touchdown passes and four interceptions.
Rodgers got emotional at one point during his 15-minute radio appearance when he described the reception he got from fans as he walked back to the sideline in green warmups in the third quarter.
"We put our bodies on the line. We do it because we love this game. But when I walked back out on that field — I'm getting a little choked up here just thinking about it," Rodgers said, "that was one of the top five moments of my career there."
Texans' Kubiak had mini-stroke, out indefinitely
Houston Texans coach Gary Kubiak was released from a Houston hospital after suffering what the team said was a mini-stroke during Sunday's loss to Indianapolis.
Team officials said the 52-year-old Kubiak suffered a transient ischemic attack at halftime and is expected to make a full recovery, but the Texans said they aren't sure when he'll resume his coaching duties.
"I've been through an ordeal and my focus now is to get back to good health," Kubiak said in a statement released by the team. "Doctors have told me I will make a full recovery."
Kubiak collapsed on the field and was rushed to a hospital. The Texans blew an 18-point lead without him and the 27-24 setback was the team's sixth consecutive loss.
A transient ischemic attack, or TIA, occurs when blood flow to the brain is briefly interrupted, typically by a blood clot or narrowed blood vessels. TIAs often are called mini-strokes and can cause stroke-like symptoms including sudden dizziness, numbness, vision loss or unconsciousness, although symptoms last only a few minutes or a few hours and no permanent brain damage occurs. TIAs often are warning signs for a future stroke.
Defensive coordinator Wade Phillips, a former head coach for Dallas, took over after Kubiak was taken to the hospital and ran Houston's practice on Monday.
Struggling Steelers have few options
Pittsburgh Steelers head coach Mike Tomlin insisted he's "not opposed to turning over any stone" to breathe some life into his listless team.
Midway through the season at 2-6, there may be no stones left.
Tomlin and general manager Kevin Colbert have tried it all in the two months the franchise has appeared in free fall following a decade of nearly unparalleled success. Since reaching 6-3 with an overtime win against Kansas City last November, the Steelers are 4-11.
Tomlin stressed on Tuesday the potential for turning it around remains in the locker room, even after last weekend's 55-31 loss at New England. Any sweeping changes will have to wait until after the season. Until then, Tomlin will press on with an under-achieving group that he had a major hand in putting together. He has faith better football is ahead.
"We've got 53 capable guys, plus eight on the practice squad, at our disposal and I consider all guys as viable options," he said. "I think that would be selling them short if I didn't take that approach."
Ware's return expected for Cowboys
Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones said defensive end DeMarcus Ware was likely to return after missing the first three games of his nine-career with a thigh injury.
The Cowboys also waived defensive tackle Marvin Austin, who missed Sunday's game against Minnesota with a back injury. Coach Jason Garrett said Austin injured his back in Friday's practice. Austin played against Detroit less than a week after signing with Dallas and had one tackle in his only game.
Bengals sign tackle to fill Atkins' spot
The Cincinnati Bengals signed defensive tackle Kheeston Randall to fill the roster spot of All-Pro Geno Atkins, who is out for the season with a torn knee ligament.
Randall was the Dolphins' seventh-round pick last year and played in 12 games. He was waived by Miami on Aug. 31.
Atkins tore the anterior cruciate ligament in his right knee during a 22-20 overtime loss in Miami last Thursday.
The Bengals put Atkins on injured reserve Monday and replaced him by signing defensive tackle Christo Bilukidi, a sixth-round pick of the Raiders last year. The deal later was voided by the NFL because Bilukidi didn't have a current work permit from Canada to keep playing in the United States after the Raiders waived him, so the Bengals signed Randall on Tuesday.


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Enter Our Photo Contest »
It's time to show off your garden filled with American Meadows products!
Show meShowing plants & seeds that grow in my area:
Polar Bear illuminates the meadow with large, pure white blooms that can be up to 4" across. A truly elegant, beautiful statement in the summer months.
Easy! Easy! Why everybody loves Zinnias: Probably no plant can give you more color for less work. It's because the zinnia is one of the easiest plants to grow from seed (any child can do it, and many do!), they'll give you every color but blue, and they bloom all season up until frost. Can you think of another flower that does all that?
How to grow them: Good full sun is really all that's required, although some of the newer hybrids will even bloom in partial shade. As for water, they don't need much, since they're from hot desert-like habitats. Soil? Almost any soil will do, but they prefer fast-draining gritty soil, if you have that available.
Zinnia seeds are perfect for starting indoors to have bloom early. But be sure you wait until every frost is gone, and the soil has warmed up a bit before setting them out. They're super-sensitive to frost--after all, these plants are from frost-free regions, and don't like cold soil. If you'd rather, you can just wait until spring arrives, and sow them outside. They're very undemanding.
The Wildflower that's been all dressed up for years. There about 20 species of Zinnia in the wild, all in the arid, rocky soils of North, Central and South America, most common in Mexico. If you saw the wild plants, you'd be amazed, since Zinnias are one of our most heavily-hybridized wildflowers, and the somewhat "ragged" originals look nothing like our garden beauties. That's because hybridizers discovered them early, and have been "working on them" for decades.
The Wild Ones The most commonly hybridized species is Zinnia elegans, a common wild plant in Mexico. But in recent years, work has been done on some of the other species. Like the dahlia (also from Mexico) the Zinnia takes quickly and willingly to almost anything the hybridizers want to do: Taller, shorter, or bigger flowers. Multi-colored flowers. You name it, and they seem to be able to do it to Zinnias.
Because of that, these flowers have been staples among major color-makers in gardens since your great-grandmother's time, and more and more beautiful zinnias are created for our gardens almost every year.
|Associated SKUs
ZEPBQP (1/4 Pound)
ZEPBLB (1 Pound)
|Common Name
|Zinnia Polar Bear
|Botanical Name
|Zinnia elegans
|Seed Life Cycle
|Light Requirements
|Full Sun
|Flower Color
|Mature Height
|30-40" tall
|Bloom Time
|Summer to Fall
|Ships As
|1/4 lb covers 1,555 sq ft.
1 lb covers 6,220 sq ft.
|Soil Moisture
|Average, Well Draining
|Soil Type
|Clay Soil, Sandy Soil, Loamy Soil
|Native To
|North America
|Native To
|Ideal Region
|Northeast, Southeast, Midwest, Southwest, West, Pacific Northwest
|1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10
|Deer Resistant, Easy to Grow, Containers, Extended Blooms
|Is It Storable?
|Yes - You can store your seed in any cool (not freezing) dry place that is not subject to extreme temperature variations.
|Yes - Learn More
|Ships to Hawaii, Alaska & Canada
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Comments about American Meadows Zinnia Seeds Polar Bear:
I love Zinnias and planted these along with Red Cherry Queens! What a sight. Will be planting these again & again. White Zinnia is unusual in my experience.
To determine if a plant is sufficiently cold hardy, the USDA created numbered zones indicating winter low temperatures; the lower the zone number the colder the winter.
Enter your Zip Code to find your USDA Planting Zone
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subset: commoncrawl


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State Selection
Please use this page to begin our discussion on which states we will be visiting. Thanks to Nancy for kicking off our discussion :).
Nancy Bolts' Comments
Assuming we still want to do the state visits and having studied the 2006 Internet report (by the way, did you realize that Arkansas is missing?) and the most recent Davis study, I still have questions about the best way to determine which states to visit.
Our preliminary criteria included the following:
Pick states where there were a high percentage of public libraries with significant high speed access (we did not define how high was high).
Pick state where there were a low percentage of public libraries with significant high speed access (again, we didn't define how low was low)
For the high bandwidth states, interview telecommunications and government people and state library and practicing librarians about the connectivity:
- how they got the bandwidth they got
- how is the connectivity achieved
- are they in a coalition, with whom
- how much does it cost a month
- how did they decide how much bandwidth they needed
- what techniques did they use to convince whomever that they needed the bandwidth they got
For the low bandwidth states, interview the same people about the barriers they face in getting high speed bandwidth.
In looking at the data in the 2006 Internet survey that John B sent to us, I combined the lowest two columns (less that 56 kpbs and less than 128 kbps) to find the states with the lowest high speed connectivity. I also looked at which states had the least percent over 769 kbps. These two figures are shown below:
|% less than 128 kbps
|% more than 769 kbps
I'm looking for those with the highest percentages in the first column and the lowest in the second. Based on this should we choose: Mississippi? Alaska (or do they have a unique set of problems and it's not worth visiting)? Wyoming? Idaho?
I took the highest two columns (greater than 769 and 1.5 mbps) and came up with these states.
|% >769 kbps
|% > 1.5mbps
|Rhode Island
|South Carolina
I'm looking for those with the lowest percentage in the first column and the highest in the second column.. Based on this data we could choose any of these.
Other factors that could be considered would be:
1. Where do we already have really good information from people on our team (for example, if Wisconsin were on the list, can't we get a lot of information from Bob?) Who else knows a lot about some of these states. (Linda and Iowa??)
2. Should we go to the states where the Interent 2006 did case studies? Have these states been interviewed enough?
3. For the high connectivity states, do we want to go places where there is one statewide network or where there are many different configurations to get a broader spectrum of information?
Moving to the Davis/Ryan survey, we get a different perspective. We were deliberately vague in our definition so the data are very general. Those states with the lowest connectivity are Alaska (again), Idaho (also on my list) and Texas.
There is a very large number indicating over 90% connectivity. Mississippi is high on this list while low on the Internet 2006 survey. Duplicates on the two studies include Georgia, Maryland, Ohio, and Rhode Island.
Of particular interest on the Davis/Ryan survey were some of the comments. Based on the comments alone, I was intrigued by Oklahoma, Missouri, Mississippi, Wisconsin, and Texas. I do wish we had included power companies in the list about how broadband connectivity is achieved.
Finally, John Windhausen put forth a paper for the Denver conference that was held in early September. It's called Libraries Access to Broadband Services: Issues, Obstacles and Recommendations. He presents three models of high speed connectivity: Government owned and operated Commercially-owned monopoly regulated to the government Free market Where are these models in operation in the country and could they be used to choose the states?
So those are some thoughts. What criteria would the rest of you use? Suggestions for states and why?
Notes from Meeting on Jan. 21
Sucessful, but with issues
- Ohio
- Georgia
- Maryland
- Wisconsin
- Maine
- Missouri
- Connect Kentucky
Less than Successful
- Idaho
- Missouri
- Kansas
Should we go to states where we have a good contacts? Or phone interviews?


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Records could tumble at Dick's Sporting Goods Park this Saturday, when the LA Galaxy tackle the Colorado Rapids, but history has already been made with the news that the Rapids have signed the club's first jersey deal.
Join hosts David Lindholm and Richard Fleming as they consider the Ciao Telecom news, reflect on the 'demise' of English soccer, and hear from Shane O'Neill following his Superbowl forfeit in Seattle.
And 'Numpty of the Week' makes its regular appearance, with Fleming pulling few punches as he launches into the latest recipient.
- CLICK HERE to download all episodes on iTunes.
Join the conversation! Email us at email@example.com or provide your feedback and opinions to hosts David Lindholm (@lindholm) and Richard Fleming (@flemingsport) via twitter.


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While Sean and I were in Hawaii, we made sure to thoroughly spoil Gram with as much good cooking as possible. One of my breakfast specialties is pancakes. I can only give my wonderful King Arthur cookbook credit for the recipe (at least most of it), but the pancakes went over incredibly well. In fact, that's the first time in a while that I've prepped a whole batch of the recipe and the entire batch got eaten. By 5 people! Sean's uncle, Harry, was the biggest devourer of the pancakes. At one point in our breakfast conversation, he called them belly patches. Apparently, this is what his family called them because pancakes are so filling. They patch up your belly. We all got great amusement from that and I have to admit that even Sean and I've started calling them that.
Here's the recipe for belly patches. I've also put the recipe for the "quick mix" version. This is so that you can have all of the dry ingredients prepped and you just have to add a couple wet ingredients and you've got pancakes ready. Hope everyone enjoys the recipe!
Belly Patches
4 cups all-purpose flour (use King Arthur. Seriously, it's worth it)
2 to 4 tbsp sugar (I use 3 tbsp flour and I usually use vanilla sugar, if it's in my pantry)
1 tbsp baking powder
1 tsp salt
1 tsp baking soda
4 eggs
1 quart buttermilk, yogurt or sour milk (I use buttermilk, but that's because I never have yogurt or sour milk on hand)
1/2 cup (1 stick) unsalted butter, melted
1 tsp vanilla extract (this is my additional ingredient, it's well worth it)
In a large mixing bowl, mix all of the dry ingredients thoroughly
In a second bowl, beat the eggs and buttermilk together until they are light and fluffy. Add the butter. Add the wet mixture to the dry ingredients and stir gently until the dry ingredients have been blended. Don't over mix!
Heat a cooking griddle (I use an electric griddle, but a griddle on a gas stove or just a square griddle works great as well) to 360 degrees. If you're on a stove top, water should dance on the surface.
Pour the pancake mixture onto the griddle in your desired pancake size. I use one of my dishers, which I believe equates to about 1/4 cup. Let the pancakes cook until the bubbles in the batter don't fill back in when they pop. Flip the pancake and cook for about half the time the first side cooked in.
I usually put a little butter on my pancakes, but these really don't need it. Maple syrup is my favorite topping, but fruit works well too. Honey. Lilikoi butter. Just about anything will be good on top of these guys. They're great just plain, too.
Note1: This can also be used as a great waffle recipe. The only thing I do differently is I separate the egg yolk and white. The egg yolks go into the buttermilk. I beat egg whites to a soft peak and then fold them into the final batter right before I start cooking the waffles. It makes them slightly lighter and crispier (just the way Sean and I like our waffles).
Note2: This recipe can very easily be split in half. A half-recipe can feed about 3 people (or 2 if one them is Harry ;)). Just remember 1 tbsp = 3 tsp.
Speaking of which, we have a new waffle iron to try out this morning, so I'm off to go make some belly patches, waffle style. Hope you enjoy the recipe!


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Of all the goddesses, Freya is probably the most complex and enigmatic. Her name simply means "woman" and leads etymologically to the modern German word Frau. After examining both her Scandinavian and her German characterizations, it will become clear that she synthesizes several elements of the early Germanic view of womanhood. Much as Odin has his many names and aspects, Freya appears in various guises throughout the mythic corpus.
Freya is often identified with Gullveig ("gold-draught"), a character who appears in the section of the Eddic poem Völuspá ("Prophecy of the Seeress") that immediately precedes a description of the first war in the world - the conflict between the Æsir (the war gods) and the Vanir (the fertility gods). "She [the prophetess who narrates the poem] remembers the first war in the world, / when they buttressed Gullveig with spears / and in One-eye's hall they burned her; / three times they burned her, three times she was reborn, / over and over, yet she lives still."
|Smelting gold with crucible and tongs
|Freya by James Doyle Penrose (1890)
Völuspá continues: "Heid they called her, wherever she came to houses, / the seer with pleasing prophecies, she charmed them with spells; / she practiced seid wherever she could, with seid she played with minds, / she was always the favourite of wicked women." The proper name Heid means "brightness" and reinforces the identification of Freya with gold. Seid is a form of magic or sorcery associated with female practitioners in the Eddas and Sagas. Its only male practitioner was Odin, and there are several instances where he is accused on unmanliness on account of his practice of it. From various accounts in the Icelandic Sagas, seid was a sort of shamanistic practice that involved a costumed prophetess sitting on a high seat and delivering responses to questions about the future, much as the prophetesses of Völuspá and Baldrs draumar ("Baldur's Dreams") answer the questions of Odin.
|Veleda in Walhalla Temple (circa 1842, Germany)
How does Freya help to bring about the first war? She introduces desire to the gods. Prior to her arrival, they apparently existed in a blissful state. Unlike the Biblical Eve, however, Freya is not portrayed (at this point in the mythology) as a temptress who uses her wiles to manipulate in pursuit of her own goals. It is, instead, her innate desirability that brings out the weakness and lust of the other gods. By personifying gold and magic, she represents both wealth and power, and the uncontrollable desire for these two forces is what sets in motion the events that, inexorably, lead to Ragnarök. The seeds of destruction appear very early in the mythological time-line; the gods, it seems, are doomed by their own failings almost from their very beginning.
|Wolfingen / Karavukovo - town center
In light of the connection of hanging with Wodan, the primary god of the continental Germans, it is also interesting to note that there were instances of suicide by hanging in our family, the last one occurring in the 1990s. Maybe Carl Jung is right when he argues that there is a collective memory of a people - that certain psychological concepts survive throughout the ages. We have to wonder whether psychological makeup is expressed in religion, or whether religious concepts determine individual psychology.


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Thursday, December 8 2005
"All About Christmas Eve"
HARK THE HAROLD ANGELS SING--After a little girl is mistakenly shot, Pratt (Mekhi Phifer) and Weaver (Laura Innes) desperately try to bring her back to life. Meanwhile, nurse Haleh (Yvette Freeman)) holds her annual choir tryouts and everyone is surprised at who is chosen to sing the solo. Eve (Kristen Johnston) crosses the line with a patient and causes management to get involved. Abby (Maura Tierney) and Kovac (Goran Visnjic) exchange Christmas gifts but, Abby's (Maura Tierney) gift to him is bigger than expected. Also starring Shane West, Parminder Nagra, John Leguizamo and Linda Cardellini.


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speakers with the RS 244C, this versatile bookshelf speaker is compact enough to
sit comfortably on virtually any shelf, stand or tabletop.


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Pimp your wing with a Cross Country logo. The logo is 2.75 metres wide, and fits nicely in the middle of the wing span.
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Company number: SC189572. VAT number: 717 2472 38


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Online database service company TrackVia recently conducted a study in conjunction with Amplitude Research among a nationwide panel of business and consumer professionals. The study is based on 300 surveys completed by non C-level employees throughout the United States who use computers and software as part of their daily jobs.
When asked what the biggest cause of wasted time is during the work week, only 4.7% of respondents named checking Facebook, Twitter, or other personal social media accounts. In contrast, 14% of respondents said talking with co-workers accounted for the bulk of their wasted work time, while 11% named computer glitches, and 9% cited Internet surfing. Interestingly (or maybe disturbingly), 6% said that "addressing misunderstandings" with co-workers as their number-one time waster at work.
[ Read 5 Social Skills IT Pros Must Have. ]
The survey also gauged respondents' feelings about the usefulness of formal rules, policies, and procedures at their workplace. Fifteen percent said procedures increased productivity somewhat, and 4% said they reduced productivity somewhat.
When it comes to social media, more companies have determined that the benefits far outweigh the risks. They also have found that, as with acceptable use policy around general Internet use, social media policy is key to protecting the company, as well as to encourage employees to use it safely and productively. Many companies, for example, include not only what employees should not be doing on social media sites but also what they should be doing.
The TrackVia-Amplitude research also included some interesting data about more traditional social interaction—in-person meetings. Eleven percent of the survey takers said meetings were the number-one time waster at work. Among those who spend time in meetings, 37% said at least half of the time in meetings was wasteful. In the all-or-nothing camp, 8% of respondents said meetings are 100% productive, and 1% said meetings were 100% unproductive.
Maybe fewer meetings and more social networking would help.
What are the biggest time wasters at your organization? Is the use of social networking seen as a time sink or a business booster? We welcome your comments below.
Follow Deb Donston-Miller on Twitter at @debdonston.
Social media make the customer more powerful than ever. Here's how to listen and react. Also in the new, all-digital The Customer Really Comes First issue of The BrainYard: The right tools can help smooth over the rough edges in your social business architecture. (Free registration required.)


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Halewood School
Dolphin Music has supplied a teacher to support staff and students at Halewood School in the build up to GCSE deadlines. With changes in Music Department staff and problems with equipment Dolphin Music was able to assist the school by sending its own qualified teacher/engineer to lend a hand. Halewood have potentially an excellent music technology facility and in the coming months and years Dolphin Music hopes to develop a partnership through which continued support can be offered.
Our teacher/engineer began by resolving some technical issues that had arisen on their older systems and installing software. He then returned to the school to deliver three lessons for students working on their compositions coursework – bespoke guideline handouts were prepared for students and staff to keep.
This work with Halewood school is the perfect example of how Dolphin Music seeks to nurture long term partnerships with our education customers by supporting staff and students in a wide variety of ways.
Links to Relevant Products:
Dolphin Music Engineer or Teacher Hire [Cost Per Day]
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Dolphin Music Education PC Classroom System 002
The Music PC from Dolphin Music is specifically designed for Education. It features - 3.0 Ghz Pentium 4, 41024MB DDR Memory, 160GB Hard Drive, DVD-R Writer and XP Home. The Dolphin Music Classroom System 002 includes the Music PC plus M-Audio's Ozone MIDI keyboard/audio-interface, Cubase Studio 4 and Reason 3. Ideal for KS2, KS3 & 4 plus 6th Form & Higher Education use.
Propellerheads Reason 3 Educational
Educational priced Reason. For students and for schools.


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Former Mamtek CEO Granted Missouri Public Defender
HUNTSVILLE, Mo. (AP) - The former CEO of a failed sweetener facility is back in Missouri to face charges that he spent public money intended for the planned Moberly factory for his personal use.
Ex-Mamtek U.S. Inc. head Bruce Cole faces fraud and stealing charges after plans to build the plant collapsed. Prosecutors say he used some of the money from a $39 million bond to avoid foreclosure on his Beverly Hills home.
Cole was assigned a public defender in his initial court appearance Monday after arriving at the Randolph County Jail two days earlier. Associate Circuit Judge Mason Gebhardt denied Cole's request to lower his $500,000 cash bond.
Cole faces one felony count of stealing and four counts of securities fraud. Construction on the Moberly plant stopped when a bond payment was missed.


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Trotsky and the Wild Orchids (1992)
Richard Rorty
Reprinted from Philosophy and Social Hope (Penguin Books, 1999).
[3] If there is anything to the idea that the best intellectual position is one which is attacked with equal vigour from the political right and the political left, then I am in good shape. I am often cited by conservative culture warriors as one of the relativistic, irrationalist, deconstructing, sneering, smirking intellectuals whose writings are weakening the moral fibre of the young. Neal Kozody, writing in the monthly bulletin of the Committee for the Free World, an organization known for its vigilance against symptoms of moral weakness, denounces my 'cynical and nihilistic view' and says 'it is not enough for him [Rorty] that American students should be merely mindless; he would have them positively mobilized for mindlessness'. Richard Neuhaus, a theologian who doubts that atheists can be good American citizens, says that the 'ironist vocabulary' I advocate 'can neither provide a public language for the citizens of a democracy, nor contend intellectually against the enemies of democracy, nor transmit the reasons for democracy to the next generation'. My criticisms of Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind led Harvey Mansfield - recently appointed by President Bush to the National Council for the Humanities - to say that I have 'given up on America' and that I 'manage to diminish even Dewey'. (Mansfield recently described Dewey as a 'medium-sized malefactor'.) His colleague on the council, my fellow philosopher John Searle, thinks that standards can only be restored to American higher education if people abandon the views on truth, knowledge and objectivity that I do my best to inculcate.
Yet Sheldon Wolin, speaking from the left, sees a lot of similarity between me and Allan Bloom: both of us, he says, are intellectual snobs who care only about the leisured, cultured elite to which we [4]belong. Neither of us has anything to say to blacks, or to other groups who have been shunted aside by American society. Wolin's view is echoed by Terry Eagleton, Britain's leading Marxist thinker. Eagleton says that 'in [Rorty's] ideal society the intellectuals will be "ironists", practising a suitably cavalier, laid-back attitude to their own belief, while the masses, for whom such self-ironizing might prove too subversive a weapon, will continue to salute the flag and take life seriously'. Der Spiegel said that I 'attempt to make the yuppie regression look good'. Jonathan Culler, one of Derrida's chief disciples and expositors, says that my version of pragmatism 'seems altogether appropriate to the age of Reagan'. Richard Bernstein says that my views are 'little more than an ideological apologia for an old-fashioned version of Cold War liberalism dressed up in fashionable "post-modem" discourse'. The left's favourite word for me is 'complacent', just as the right's is 'irresponsible'.
The left's hostility is partially explained by the fact that most people who admire Nietzsche, Heidegger and Derrida as much as I do - most of the people who either classify themselves as 'postmodernist' or (like me) find themselves thus classified willynilly - participate in what Jonathan Yardley has called the 'America Sucks Sweepstakes'. Participants in this event compete to find better, bitterer ways of describing the United States. They see our country as embodying everything that is wrong with the rich post-Enlightenment West. They see ours as what Foucault called a 'disciplinary society', dominated by an odious ethos of'liberal individualism', an ethos which produces racism, sexism, consumerism and Republican presidents. By contrast, I see America pretty much as Whitman and Dewey did, as opening a prospect on illimitable democratic vistas. I think that our country - despite its past and present atrocities and vices, and despite its continuing eagerness to elect fools and knaves to high office - is a good example of the best kind of society so far invented.
The right's hostility is largely explained by the fact that rightist thinkers don't think that it is enough just to prefer democratic societies. One also has to believe that they are Objectively Good, that the institutions of such societies are grounded in Rational First Principles Especially if one teaches philosophy, as I do, one is expected to tell [5] the young that their society is not just one of the better ones so far contrived, but one which embodies Truth and Reason. Refusal to say this sort of thing counts as the 'treason of the clerks' - as an abdication of professional and moral responsibility. My own philosophical views - views I share with Nietzsche and Dewey - forbid me to say this kind of thing. I do not have much use for notions like 'objective value' and 'objective truth'. I think that the so-called postmodernists are right in most of their criticisms of traditional philosophical talk about 'reason'. So my philosophical views offend the right as much as my political preferences offend the left.
I am sometimes told, by critics from both ends of the political spectrum, that my views are so weird as to be merely frivolous. They suspect that I will say anything to get a gasp, that I am just amusing myself by contradicting everybody else. This hurts. So I have tried, in what follows, to say something about how I got into my present position - how I got into philosophy, and then found myself unable to use philosophy for the purpose I had originally had in mind. Perhaps this bit of autobiography will make clear that, even if my views about the relation of philosophy and politics are odd, they were not adopted for frivolous reasons.
When I was 12, the most salient books on my parents' shelves were two red-bound volumes, The Case of Leon Trotsky and Not Guilty. These made up the report of the Dewey Commission of Inquiry into the Moscow Trials. I never read them with the wide-eyed fascination I brought to books like Krafft-Ebing's Psychopathia Sexualis, but I thought of them in the way in which other children thought of their family's Bible: they were books that radiated redemptive truth and moral splendour. If I were a really good boy, I would say to myself, I should have read not only the Dewey Commission reports, but also Trotsky's History of the Russian Revolution, a book I started many times but never managed to finish. For in the 1940s, the Russian Revolution and its betrayal by Stalin were, for me, what the Incarnation and its betrayal by the Catholics had been to precocious little Lutherans 400 years before.
My father had almost, but not quite, accompanied John Dewey to [6] Mexico as PR man for the Commission of Inquiry which Dewey chaired. Having broken with the American Communist Party in 1932, my parents had been classified by the Daily Worker as Trotskyites', and they more or less accepted the description. When Trotsky was assassinated in 1940, one of his secretaries, John Frank, hoped that the GPU would not think to look for him in the remote little village on the Delaware river where we were living. Using a pseudonym, he was our guest in Flatbrookville for some months. I was warned not to disclose his real identity, though it is doubtful that my schoolmates at Walpack Elementary would have been interested in my indiscretions.
I grew up knowing that all decent people were, if not Trotskyites, at least socialists. I also knew that Stalin had ordered not only Trotsky's assassination but also Kirov's, Ehrlich's, Alter's and Carlo Tresca's. (Tresca, gunned down on the streets of New York, had been a family friend.) I knew that poor people would always be oppressed until capitalism was overcome. Working as an unpaid office boy during my twelfth winter, I carried drafts of press releases from the Workers' Defense League office offGramercy Park (where my parents worked) to Norman Thomas's (the Socialist Party's candidate for president) house around the comer, and also to A. Philip Randolph's office at the Brotherhood of Pullman Car Porters on i25th Street. On the subway, I would read the documents I was carrying. They told me a lot about what factory owners did to union organizers, plantation owners to sharecroppers, and the white locomotive engineers' union to the coloured firemen (whose jobs white men wanted, now that diesel engines were replacing coal-fired steam engines). So, at 12, I knew that the point of being human was to spend one's life fighting social injustice.
But I also had private, weird, snobbish, incommunicable interests. In earlier years these had been in Tibet. I had sent the newly enthroned Dalai Lama a present, accompanied by warm congratulations to a fellow eight-year-old who had made good. A few years later, when my parents began dividing their time between the Chelsea Hotel and the mountains of north-west New Jersey, these interests switched to orchids. Some 40 species of wild orchids occur in those mountains, and I eventually found 17 of them. Wild orchids are uncommon, and [7] rather hard to spot. I prided myself enormously on being the only person around who knew where they grew, their Latin names and their blooming times. When in New York, I would go to the 42nd Street public library to reread a nineteenth-century volume on the botany of the orchids of the eastern U S.
I was not quite sure why those orchids were so important, but I was convinced that they were. I was sure that our noble, pure, chaste, North American wild orchids were morally superior to the showy, hybridized, tropical orchids displayed in florists' shops. I was also convinced that there was a deep significance in the fact that the orchids are the latest and most complex plants to have been developed in the course of evolution. Looking back, I suspect that there was a lot of sublimated sexuality involved (orchids being a notoriously sexy sort of flower), and that my desire to learn all there was to know about orchids was linked to my desire to understand all the hard words in Krafit-Ebing.
I was uneasily aware, however, that there was something a bit dubious about this esotericism - this interest in socially useless flowers. I had read (in the vast amount of spare time given to a clever, snotty, nerdy only child) bits of Marius the Epicurean and also bits of Marxist criticisms of Pater's aestheticism. I was afraid that Trotsky (whose Literature and Revolution I had nibbled at) would not have approved of my interest in orchids.
At fifteen I escaped from the bullies who regularly beat me up on the playground of my high school (bullies who, I assumed, would somehow wither away once capitalism had been overcome) by going off to the so-called Hutchins College of the University of Chicago. (This was the institution immortalized by A.J. Liebling as 'the biggest collection of juvenile neurotics since the Children's Crusade'.) Insofar as I had any project in mind, it was to reconcile Trotsky and the orchids. I wanted to find some intellectual or aesthetic framework which would let me - in a thrilling phrase which I came across in Yeats - 'hold reality and justice in a single vision'. By reality I meant more or less, the Wordsworthian moments in which, in the woods around Flatbrookville (and especially in the presence of certain coralroot orchids, and of the smaller yellow lady slipper), I had felt [8] touched by something numinous, something of ineffable importance. By justice I meant what Norman Thomas and Trotsky both stood for, the liberation of the weak from the strong. I wanted a way to be both an intellectual and spiritual snob and a friend of humanity - a nerd recluse and a fighter for justice. I was very confused, but reasonably sure that at Chicago I would find out how grown-ups managed to work the trick I had in mind.
When I got to Chicago (in 1946), I found that Hutchins, together with his friends Mortimer Adler and Richard McKeon (the villain of Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance), had enveloped much of the University of Chicago in a neo-Aristotelian mystique. The most frequent target of their sneers was John Dewey's pragmatism. That pragmatism was the philosophy of my parents' friend Sidney Hook, as well as the unofficial philosophy of most of the other New York intellectuals who had given up on dialectical materialism. But according to Hutchins and Adier, pragmatism was vulgar, 'relativistic', and self-refuting. As they pointed out over and over again, Dewey had absolutes. To say, as Dewey did, that 'growth itself is the only moral end', left one without a criterion for growth, and thus with no way refute Hitler's suggestion that Germany had 'grown' under his rule. To say that truth is what works is to reduce the quest for truth to the quest for power. Only an appeal to something eternal, absolute, and good - like the God of St Thomas, or the 'nature of human beings' described by Aristotle - would permit one to answer the Nazis, to justify one's choice of social democracy over fascism.
This quest for stable absolutes was common to the neo-Thomist and to Leo Strauss, the teacher who attracted the best of the Chicago students (including my classmate Allan Bloom). The Chicago faculty was dotted with awesomely learned refugees from Hitler, of which Strauss was the most revered. All of them seemed to agree that something deeper and weightier than Dewey was needed if one was to explain why it would be better to be dead than to be a Nazi. This sounded pretty good to my 15-year-old ears. For moral and philosophical absolutes sounded a bit like my beloved orchids - numinous, hard to find, known only to a chosen few. Further, since Dewey was a hero to all the people among whom I had grown up, scorning [9] Dewey was a convenient form of adolescent revolt. The only question was whether this scorn should take a religious or a philosophical form, and how it might be combined with striving for social justice.
Like many of my classmates at Chicago, I knew lots of T. S. Eliot by heart. I was attracted by Eliot's suggestions that only committed Christians (and perhaps only Anglo-Catholics) could overcome their unhealthy preoccupation with their private obsessions, and so serve their fellow humans with proper humility. But a prideful inability to believe what I was saying when I recited the General Confession gradually led me to give up on my awkward attempts to get religion. So I fell back on absolutist philosophy.
I read through Plato during my fifteenth summer, and convinced myself that Socrates was right - virtue was knowledge. That claim was music to my ears, for I had doubts about my own moral character and a suspicion that my only gifts were intellectual ones. Besides, Socrates had to be right, for only then could one hold reality and justice in a single vision. Only if he were right could one hope to be both as good as the best Christians (such as Alyosha in The Brothers Karamazov, whom I could not - and still cannot - decide whether to envy or despise) and as learned and clever as Strauss and his students. So I decided to major in philosophy. I figured that if I became a philosopher I might get to the top of Plato's 'divided line' - the place 'beyond hypotheses' where the full sunshine of Truth irradiates the purified soul of the wise and good: an Elysian field dotted with immaterial orchids. It seemed obvious to me that getting to such a place was what everybody with any brains really wanted. It also seemed clear that Platonism had all the advantages of religion, without requiring the humility which Christianity demanded, and of which I was apparently incapable.
For all these reasons, I wanted very much to be some kind of Platonist, and from 15 to 20 I did my best. But it didn't pan out. I could never figure out whether the Platonic philosopher was aiming at the ability to offer irrefutable argument - argument which rendered him able to convince anyone he encountered of what he believed (the sort of thing Ivan Karamazov was good at) - or instead was aiming [10] at a sort of incommunicable, private bliss (the sort of thing his brother Alyosha seemed to possess). The first goal is to achieve argumentative power over others - e.g., to become able to convince bullies that they should not beat one up, or to convince rich capitalists that they must cede their power to a cooperative, egalitarian commonwealth. The second goal is to enter a state in which all your own doubts are stilled, but in which you no longer wish to argue. Both goals seemed desirable, but I could not see how they could be fitted together.
At the same time as I was worrying about this tension within Platonism - and within any form of what Dewey had called 'the quest for certainty' -I was also worrying about the familiar problem of how one could possibly get a noncircular justification of any debatable stand on any important issue. The more philosophers I read, the clearer it seemed that each of them could carry their views back to first principles which were incompatible with the first principles of their opponents, and that none of them ever got to that fabled place 'beyond hypotheses'. There seemed to be nothing like a neutral standpoint from which these alternative first principles could be evaluated. But if there were no such standpoint, then the whole idea of 'rational certainty', and the whole Socratic-Platonic idea of replacing passion by reason, seemed not to make much sense.
Eventually I got over the worry about circular argumentation by deciding that the test of philosophical truth was overall coherence, rather than deducibility from unquestioned first principles. But this didn't help much. For coherence is a matter of avoiding contradictions, and St Thomas's advice, 'When you meet a contradiction, make a distinction,' makes that pretty easy. As far as I could see, philosophical talent was largely a matter of proliferating as many distinctions as were needed to wriggle out of a dialectical comer. More generally, it was a matter, when trapped in such a comer, of redescribing the nearby intellectual terrain in such a way that the terms used by one's opponent would seem irrelevant, or question-begging, or jejune. I turned out to have a flair for such redescription. But I became less and less certain that developing this skill was going to make me either wise or virtuous.
Since that initial disillusion (which climaxed about the time I left [11] Chicago to get a Ph.D. in philosophy at Yale), I have spent 40 years looking for a coherent and convincing way of formulating my worries about what, if anything, philosophy is good for. My starting point was the discovery of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, a book which I read as saying: granted that philosophy is just a matter of out-redescribing the last philosopher, the cunning of reason can make use even of this sort of competition. It can use it to weave the conceptual fabric of a freer, better, more just society. If philosophy can be, at best, only what Hegel called 'its time held in thought', still, that might be enough. For by thus holding one's time, one might do what Marx wanted done - change the world. So even if there were no such thing as 'understanding the world' in the Platonic sense - an understanding from a position outside of time and history - perhaps there was still a social use for my talents, and for the study of philosophy.
For quite a while after I read Hegel, I thought that the two greatest achievements of the species to which I belonged were The Phenomenology of Spirit and Remembrance of Things Past (the book which took the place of the wild orchids once I left Flatbrookville for Chicago). Proust's ability to weave intellectual and social snobbery together with the hawthorns around Combray, his grandmother's selfless love, Odette's orchidaceous embraces of Swann and Jupien's of Charlus, and with everything else he encountered - to give each of these its due without feeling the need to bundle them together with die help of a religious faith or a philosophical theory - seemed to me as astonishing as Hegel's ability to throw himself successively into empiricism, Greek tragedy, Stoicism, Christianity and Newtonian physics, and to emerge from each, ready and eager for something completely different. It was the cheerful commitment to irreducible temporality which Hegel and Proust shared - the specifically anti-Platonic element in their work - that seemed so wonderful. They both seemed able to weave everything they encountered into a narrative without asking that that narrative have a moral, and without asking how that narrative would appear under the aspect of eternity.
About 20 years or so after I decided that the young Hegel's willingness to stop trying for eternity, and just be the child of his time, was [12] the appropriate response to disillusionment with Plato, I found myself being led back to Dewey. Dewey now seemed to me a philosopher who had learned all that Hegel had to teach about how to eschew certainty and eternity, while immunizing himself against pantheism by taking Darwin seriously. This rediscovery of Dewey coincided with my first encounter with Derrida (which I owe to Jonathan Arac, my colleague at Princeton). Derrida led me back to Heidegger, and I was struck by the resemblances between Dewey's, Wittgenstein's and Heidegger's criticisms of Cartesianism. Suddenly things began to come together. I thought I saw a way to blend a criticism of the Cartesian tradition with the quasi-Hegelian historicism of Michel Foucault, lan Hacking and Alasdair Maclntyre. I thought that I could fit all these into a quasi-Heideggerian story about the tensions within Platonism.
The result of this small epiphany was a book called Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Though disliked by most of my fellow philosophy professors, this book had enough success among nonphilosophers to give me a self-confidence I had previously lacked. But Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature did not do much for my adolescent ambitions. The topics it treated - the mind-body problem, controversies in the philosophy of language about truth and meaning, Kuhnian philosophy of science - were pretty remote from both Trotsky and the orchids. I had gotten back on good terms with Dewey; I had articulated my historicist anti-Platonism; I had finally figured out what I thought about the direction and value of current movements in analytic philosophy; I had sorted out most of the philosophers whom I had read. But I had not spoken to any of the questions which got me started reading philosophers in the first place. I was no closer to the single vision which, 30 years back, I had gone to college to get.
As I tried to figure out what had gone wrong, I gradually decided :hat the whole idea of holding reality and justice in a single vision had leen a mistake - that a pursuit of such a vision had been precisely what led Plato astray. More specifically, I decided that only religion - only a nonargumentative faith in a surrogate parent who, unlike my real parent, embodied love, power and justice in equal measure – could do the trick Plato wanted done. Since I couldn't imagine becoming religious, and indeed had gotten more and more raucously [13] secularist, I decided that the hope of getting a single vision by becoming a philosopher had been a self-deceptive atheist's way out. So I decided to write a book about what intellectual life might be like if one could manage to give up the Platonic attempt to hold reality and justice in a single vision.
That book - Contingency, Irony and Solidarity - argues that there is no need to weave one's personal equivalent of Trotsky and one's personal equivalent of my wild orchids together. Rather, one should try to abjure the temptation to tie in one's moral responsibilities to other people with one's relation to whatever idiosyncratic things or persons one loves with all one's heart and soul and mind (or, if you like, the things or persons one is obsessed with). The two will, for some people, coincide - as they do in those lucky Christians for whom the love of God and of other human beings are inseparable, or revolutionaries
who are moved by nothing save the thought of social justice. But they need not coincide, and one should not try too hard to make them do so. So, for example, Jean-Paul Sartre seemed to me right when he denounced Kant's self-deceptive quest for certainty, but wrong when he denounced Proust as a useless bourgeois wimp, a man whose life and writings were equally irrelevant to the only thing that really mattered, the struggle to overthrow capitalism.
Proust's life and work were, in fact, irrelevant to that struggle. But that is a silly reason to despise Proust. It is as wrong-headed as Savonarola's contempt for the works of art he called 'vanities'. Singlemindedness of this Sartrean or Savonarolan sort is the quest for purity of heart - the attempt to will one thing - gone rancid. It is the attempt to see yourself as an incarnation of something larger than yourself (the Movement, Reason, the Good, the Holy) rather than accepting your finitude. The latter means, among other things, accepting that what matters most to you may well be something that may never matter much to most people. Your equivalent of my orchids may always seem merely weird, merely idiosyncratic, to practically everybody else. But that is no reason to be ashamed of, or downgrade, or try to slough off, your Wordsworthian moments, your lover, your family, your pet, your favourite lines of verse, or your quaint religious faith. There is nothing sacred about universality which makes the shared [14] Automatically better than the unshared. There is no automatic privilege of what you can get everybody to agree to (the universal) over what you cannot (the idiosyncratic).
This means that the fact that you have obligations to other people (not to bully them, to join them in overthrowing tyrants, to feed them when they are hungry) does not entail that what you share with other people is more important than anything else. What you share with them, when you are aware of such moral obligations, is not, I argued in Contingency, 'rationality' or 'human nature' or 'the fatherhood of God' or 'a knowledge of the Moral Law', or anything other than ability to sympathize with the pain of others. There is no particular reason to expect that your sensitivity to that pain, and your idiosyncratic loves, are going to fit within one big overall account of how everything hangs together. There is, in short, not much reason to hope for the sort of single vision that I went to college hoping to get.
So much for how I came to the views I currently hold. As I said earlier, most people find these views repellent. My Contingency book got a couple of good reviews, but these were vastly outnumberedby reviews which said that the book was frivolous, confused andirresponsible. The gist of the criticisms I get from both left and right is pretty much the same as the gist of the criticisms aimed at Dewey by the Thomists, the Straussians and the Marxists, back in me 1930s and 1940s. Dewey thought, as I now do, that there was nothing bigger, more permanent and more reliable, behind our sense of moral obligation to those in pain than a certain contingent historical phenomenon - the gradual spread of the sense that the pain of others matters, regardless of whether they are of the same family, tribe, colour, religion, nation or intelligence as oneself. This idea, Dewey thought, cannot be shown to be true by science, or religion or philosophy - at least if 'shown to be true' means 'capable of being made evident to anyone, regardless of background'. It can only be made evident to people whom it is not too late to acculturate into our own particular, late-blooming, historically contingent form of life.
This Dewey an claim entails a picture of human beings as children of their time and place, without any significant metaphysical or biological [15] limits on their plasticity. It means that a sense of moral obligation is a matter of conditioning rather than of insight. It also entails that the notion of insight (in any area, physics as well as ethics) as a glimpse of what is there, apart from any human needs and desires, cannot be made coherent. As William James put it, 'The trail of the human serpent is over all.' More specifically, our conscience and our aesthetic taste are, equally, products of the cultural environment in which we grew up. We decent, liberal humanitarian types (representatives of the moral community to which both my reviewers and I belong) are just luckier, not more insightful, than the bullies with whom we struggle.'
This view is often referred to dismissively as 'cultural relativism'. But it is not relativistic, if that means saying that every moral view is as good as every other. Our moral view is, I firmly believe, much better than any competing view, even though there are a lot of people whom you will never be able to convert to it. It is one thing to say, falsely, that there is nothing to choose between us and the Nazis. It is another thing to say, correctly, that there is no neutral, common ground to which an experienced Nazi philosopher and I can repair in order to argue out our differences. That Nazi and I will always strike one another as begging all the crucial questions, arguing in circles.
Socrates and Plato suggested that if we tried hard enough we should find beliefs which everybody found intuitively plausible, and that among these would be moral beliefs whose implications, when clearly realized, would make us virtuous as well as knowledgeable. To thinkers like Allan Bloom (on the Straussian side) and Terry Eagleton (on the Marxist side), there just must be such beliefs - unwobbling pivots that determine the answer to the question: Which moral or political alternative is objectively valid? For Deweyan pragmatists like me, history and anthropology are enough to show that there are no unwobbling pivots, and that seeking objectivity is just a matter of getting as much intersubjective agreement as you can manage.
Nothing much has changed in philosophical debates about whether objectivity is more than intersubjectivity since the time I went to college - or, for that matter, since the time Hegel went to seminary. Nowadays we philosophers talk about 'moral language' instead of 'moral experience', and about 'contextualist theories of reference' [16] rather than about 'the relation between subject and object'. But this is just froth on the surface. My reasons for turning away from the anti-Deweyan views I imbibed at Chicago are pretty much the same reasons Dewey had for turning away from evangelical Christianity
and from the neo-Hegelian pantheism which he embraced in his 20s. They are also pretty much the reasons which led Hegel to turn away from Kant, and to decide that both God and the Moral Law had to be temporalized and historicized to be believable. I do not think that I have more insight into the debates about our need for 'absolutes' than I had when I was 20, despite all the books I have read and arguments I have had in the intervening 40 years. All those years of reading and arguing did was to let me spell out my disillusionment with Plato - my conviction that philosophy was no help in dealing with Nazis and other bullies - in more detail, and to a variety of different audiences.
At the moment there are two cultural wars being waged in the United States. The first is the one described in detail by my colleague James Davison Hunter in his comprehensive and informative Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America. This war - between the people Hunter calls 'progressivists' and those he calls 'orthodox' - is important. It will decide whether our country continues along the trajectory defined by the Bill of Rights, the Reconstruction Amendments, the building of the land-grant colleges, female suffrage, the New Deal, Brown v. Board of Education, the building of the community colleges, Lyndon Johnson's civil rights legislation, the feminist movement, and the gay rights movement. Continuing along this trajectory would mean that America might continue to set an example of increasing tolerance and increasing equality. But it may be that this trajectory could be continued only while Americans' average real income continued to rise. So 1973 may have been the beginning of the end: the end both of rising economic expectations and of the political consensus that emerged from the New Deal. The future of American politics may be just a series of increasingly blatant and increasingly successful variations on the Willie Horton spots. Sinclair Lewis's It Can't Happen Here may become an increasingly plausible scenario. Unlike Hunter, I feel no [17] need to be judicious and balanced in my attitude toward the two sides this first sort of culture war. I see the 'orthodox' (the people who think that hounding gays out of the military promotes traditional family values) as the same honest, decent, blinkered, disastrous people who voted for Hitler in 1933. I see the 'progressivists' as defining the only America I care about.
The second cultural war is being waged in magazines like Critical Inquiry and Salmagundi, magazines with high subscription rates and low circulations. It is between those who see modern liberal society as vitally flawed (the people handily lumped together as 'postmodernists') and typical left-wing Democrat professors like myself, people who see ours as a society in which technology and democratic institutions can, with luck, collaborate to increase equality and decrease suffering. This war is not very important. Despite the conservative columnists who pretend to view with alarm a vast conspiracy (encompassing both the postmodernists and the pragmatists) to politicize the humanities and corrupt the youth, this war is just a tiny little dispute within what Hunter calls the 'progressivist' ranks.
People on the postmodernist side of this dispute tend to share Noam Chomsky's view of the United States as run by a corrupt elite which aims at enriching itself by immiserating the Third World. From that perspective, our country is not so much in danger of slipping into fascism as it is a country which has always been quasi-fascist. These people typically think that nothing will change unless we get rid of humanism', 'liberal individualism', and 'technologism'. People like me see nothing wrong with any of these -isms, nor with the political and moral heritage of the Enlightenment - with the least common denominator of Mill and Marx, Trotsky and Whitman, William James and Vaclav Havel. Typically, we Deweyans are sentimentally patriotic about America - willing to grant that it could slide into fascism at any time, but proud of its past and guardedly hopeful about its future.
Most people on my side of this second, tiny, upmarket cultural war have, in the light of the history of nationalized enterprises and central planning in central and eastern Europe, given up on socialism. We are willing to grant that welfare state capitalism is the best we can hope for. Most of us who were brought up Trotskyite now feel forced [18] to admit that Lenin and Trotsky did more harm than good, and that Kerensky has gotten a bum rap for the past 70 years. But we see ourselves as still faithful to everything that was good in the socialist movement. Those on the other side, however, still insist that nothing will change unless there is some sort of total revolution. Postmodernists who consider themselves post-Marxists still want to preserve the sort of purity of heart which Lenin feared he might lose if he listened to too much Beethoven.
I am distrusted by both the 'orthodox' side in the important war and the 'postmodern' side in the unimportant one, because I think that the 'postmoderns' are philosophically right though politically silly, and that the 'orthodox' are philosophically wrong as well as politically dangerous. Unlike both the orthodox and the postmoderns, I do not think that you can tell much about the worth of a philosopher's views on topics such as truth, objectivity and the possibility of a single vision by discovering his politics, or his irrelevance to politics. So I do not think it counts in favour of Dewey's pragmatic view of truth that he was a fervent social democrat, nor against Heidegger's criticism of Platonic notions of objectivity that he was a Nazi, nor against Derrida's view of linguistic meaning that his most influential American ally, Paul de Man, wrote a couple of anti-Semitic articles when he was young. The idea that you can evaluate a writer's philosophical views by reference to their political utility seems to me a version of the bad Platonic-Straussian idea that we cannot have justice until philosophers become kings or kings philosophers.
Both the orthodox and the postmoderns still want a tight connection between people's politics and their views on large theoretical (theological, metaphysical, epistemological, metaphilosophical) matters. Some postmodernists who initially took my enthusiasm for Derrida to mean that I must be on their political side decided, after discovering that my politics were pretty much those of Hubert Humphrey, that I must have sold out. The orthodox tend to think that people who, like the postmodernists and me, believe neither in God nor in some suitable substitute, should think that everything is permitted, that everybody can do what they like. So they tell us that we are either inconsistent or self-deceptive in putting forward our moral or political views.
[19] I take this near unanimity among my critics to show that most people - even a lot of purportedly liberated postmodernists – still hanker for something like what I wanted when I was 15: a way of holding reality and justice in a single vision. More specifically, they want to unite their sense of moral and political responsibility with a grasp of the ultimate determinants of our fate. They want to see love, power and justice as coming together deep down in the nature of things, or in the human soul, or in the structure of language, or somewhere. They want some sort of guarantee that their intellectual acuity, and those special ecstatic moments which that acuity sometimes affords, are of some relevance to their moral convictions. They still think that virtue and knowledge are somehow linked - that being right about philosophical matters is important for right action. I think this is important only occasionally and incidentally.
I do not, however, want to argue that philosophy is socially useless. Had there been no Plato, the Christians would have had a harder time selling the idea that all God really wanted from us was fraternal love. Had there been no Kant, the nineteenth century would have iad a harder time reconciling Christian ethics with Darwin's story about the descent of man. Had there been no Darwin, it would have 3een harder for Whitman and Dewey to detach the Americans from their belief that they were God's chosen people, to get them to start standing on their own feet. Had there been no Dewey and no Sidney Hook, American intellectual leftists of the 1930S would have been as buffaloed by the Marxists as were their counterparts in France and in Latin America. Ideas do, indeed, have consequences.
But the fact that ideas have consequences does not mean that we philosophers, we specialists in ideas, are in a key position. We are not here to provide principles or foundations or deep theoretical diagnoses, or a synoptic vision. When I am asked (as, alas, I often am) what I take contemporary philosophy's 'mission' or 'task' to be, I get tonguetied. The best I can do is to stammer that we philosophy professors are people who have a certain familiarity with a certain intellectual tradition, as chemists have a certain familiarity with what happens when you mix various substances together. We can offer some advice about what will happen when you try to combine or to [20] separate certain ideas, on the basis of our knowledge of the results of past experiments. By doing so, we may be able to help you hold your time in thought. But we are not the people to come to if you want confirmation that the things you love with all your heart are central to the structure of the universe, or that your sense of moral responsibility is 'rational and objective' rather than 'just' a result of how you were brought up.
There are still, as C. S. Peirce put it, 'philosophical slop-shops on every corner' which will provide such confirmation. But there is a price. To pay the price you have to turn your back on intellectual history and on what Milan Kundera calls 'the fascinating imaginative realm where no one owns the truth and everyone has the right to be understood . . . the wisdom of the novel'. You risk losing the sense of finitude, and the tolerance, which result from realizing how very many synoptic visions there have been, and how little argument can do to help you choose among them. Despite my relatively early disillusionment with Platonism, I am very glad that I spent all those years reading philosophy books. For I learned something that still seems very important: to distrust the intellectual snobbery which originally led me to read them. If I had not read all those books, I might neverhave been able to stop looking for what Derrida calls 'a full presence beyond the reach of play', for a luminous, self-justifying, self-sufficient synoptic vision.
By now I am pretty sure that looking for such a presence and such a vision is a bad idea. The main trouble is that you might succeed and your success might let you imagine that you have something more to rely on than the tolerance and decency of your fellow human beings. The democratic community of Dewey's dreams is a community in which nobody imagines that. It is a community in which everybody thinks that it is human solidarity, rather than knowledge of something not merely human, that really matters. The actually existing approximations to such a fully democratic, fully secular community now seem to me the greatest achievements of our species. In comparison, even Hegel's and Proust's books seem optional, orchidaceous extras.


text: Dave's ESL Cafe's Student Discussion Forums :: View topic - go abroad to study Dave's ESL Cafe's Student Discussion Forums"The Internet's Meeting Place for ESL/EFL Students and Teachers from Around the World!" FAQ Search Memberlist Usergroups Register Profile Log in to check your private messages Log in go abroad to study Dave's ESL Cafe's Student Discussion Forums Forum Index -> English Schools View previous topic :: View next topic Author Message non-chanJoined: 17 May 2004Posts: 16 Posted: Sat Mar 26, 2005 9:04 pm Post subject: go abroad to study I went to LA to study English, cause I wanna change English education in Japan and in my school. I belonged international class in my high school, so I was so surprised after entering college I came to dislike English. It was so boring to take an English class. before I came to dislike English, I thought I could study English in Japan, so I didn't need to go abroad to study English, but I changed my mind after dislike English. I thought I had to go now. so I decided to go. I could study for only 3 weeks in LA. but It became turning point in my career. If you hesitate to go abroad, I want you to go. You can broaden your horizons Back to top Display posts from previous: All Posts1 Day7 Days2 Weeks1 Month3 Months6 Months1 Year Oldest FirstNewest First Dave's ESL Cafe's Student Discussion Forums Forum Index -> English Schools All times are GMT - 8 Hours Page 1 of 1 Jump to: Select a forum Student Forums----------------ComputersCurrent NewsCultureEnglish SchoolsFamilyFilm and CinemaFoodHealth and FitnessHelp CenterHobbiesHolidaysLearning EnglishLiteratureMaking FriendsMusicOpinionsPetsScienceSportsThe Strange and MysteriousTOEFL and Other English ExamsTravel You cannot post new topics in this forumYou cannot reply to topics in this forumYou cannot edit your posts in this forumYou cannot delete your posts in this forumYou cannot vote in polls in this forum Dave's ESL Cafe is maintained by the one and only Dave Sperling. Banner Advertising | Bookstore / Alta Books | FAQs | Articles | Interview with Dave Copyright © 2018 Dave's ESL Cafe | All Rights Reserved | Contact Dave's ESL Cafe | Site Map Teachers College, Columbia University: Train to Teach English Here or Abroad Powered by phpBB © 2001, 2002 phpBB Group


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Nursing is an exciting profession, the future of which has never looked more promising than it does today. Nursing is cited as one of the most sought after professions in the 21st century. These programs are arduous and will demand your full attention and dedication, but
the end result will be well worth the effort.
The Bachelor of Science in Nursing is a four-year program. The first two years of course work provide the strong liberal arts and science foundation vital for preparing the professional with critical thinking, clinical reasoning, communication, problem-solving, and decision-making skills
essential to meet the health care realities of the future. The upper-division nursing major is a four-semester sequence at the junior and senior level where the student participates in a highly interactive classroom and simulation laboratory. The peak
experience for the Berry nursing student is the cross-cultural immersion course which is completed in a global setting.
The Berry College Nursing Faculty and Staff are committed to preparing aspiring nurses with the knowledge, skills, and attitudes, to be a nurse of excellence. We will work with you to ensure that your academic experience, both inside and outside the
classroom, is successful and remembered with pride.


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Linked by Conrad Voorsanger on Thu 2nd Jun 2011 16:28 UTC
OSNews sat down with Ian Seyler, the Founder and Lead Programmer at Return Infinity, the maker and sponsor of Baremetal OS, a 64-bit OS for x86-64 based computers written entirely in Assembly. Editor's note: We'd love to do similar interviews with the people behind other alternative or hobby OS projects. If there's a project that you'd like to learn more about, let us know.
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RE: GNUstep
by twitterfire on Thu 2nd Jun 2011 22:52 UTC in reply to "GNUstep"
While it's a desktop toolkit project, and not an OS project, I think it would be useful for OSNews to interview GNUstep chief maintainer Gregory Casamento to learn about where the project is and where it's heading.
Like someone cares. Ask someone from Gnome, KDE, Windows, Os X, Haiku. Asking something about some project which tries to reimplement a dead project (OpenStep) and has only two users isn't going to be interesting for more than two users.
RE[2]: GNUstep
by Hypnos on Fri 3rd Jun 2011 02:05 in reply to "RE: GNUstep"
1) I believe that GNUstep has changed from reimplementing OpenStep to tracking OSX, so that one can write portable programs for both the Linux and Mac platforms. I think that's interesting.
2) By your logic, OSNews shouldn't cover any of the obscure OS projects either, such as BareMetal. If OSNews isn't doing that, then it has no reason to exist -- just read ArsTechnica.
RE[3]: GNUstep
by twitterfire on Sat 4th Jun 2011 18:38 in reply to "RE[2]: GNUstep"
By your logic, OSNews shouldn't cover any of the obscure OS projects either, such as BareMetal. If OSNews isn't doing that, then it has no reason to exist -- just read ArsTechnica.
That's exactly my point. I had a fair portion of obscure and non obscure operating systems, during my studies at the Univesity.
I would understand the emphasis of some obscure operating system, given two conditions:
1. the said obscure operating systems have technical merits
2. the articles on the site are presented from a scientific point of view and targeted towards OS programmers and OS architects
The typical article on OSnews is targeted to masses and hordes. Is trying to popularize operating systems science like Popular Science is trying to popularize science.
Physicists and mathematicians generally despise Popular Science because it trivializes the science.
OSnews isn't targeted to specialists and the articles are written by guys who don't have a clue about Operating Systems.
I respect Thom Holverda, but he doesn't have a clue about the inner works of operating systems.
He can write about GUI, feature X, feature Y and so on. Which is alright if you are targeting the masses like OSnews.
I think is ok and OSnews should resume on the general points of view about Apple, Windows, Linux, Haiku, Reactos, Syllable and gadgets and H264 vs VP8, and Internet Freedom and Sony.
You know, light talk about Operating Systems and Internet and gadgets.
However, when you try to cross the line and talk about obscure operating systems, you shoud at least have a clue about what an OS really is. Not the case here. I this was targeted about specialists, we wouldn't talk about every guy who pulled another os written in asm from his ass.
We would talk about serious business like monolithic kernel versus micro kernel, we would talk about L4 and L4/Fiasco, we would talk about UNIX, Plan 9, Inferno, distributed operating systems, NT architecture, BSD architecture.
We would interview guys like Andy Tanenbaum, Donald Knuth, scientists from MIT, the guys from L4, someone from FreeBSD or NetBSD kernel team, Theo de Raadt from OpenBSD and a lot of scientists from Windows Team @ Microsoft. And some from former Bell Labs and some from IBM and some from former SUN.
Brian Kernighan, Donald Knuth and Andy Tanenbaum would laugh about operating systems written in assembler pulled from someone's ass. I mean, is great that some guy has a passion and he writes a kernel and a cli. As I forgot a lot of things from my operating system design classes, and I forgot coding in ASM, I can write a functional kernel&cli in less than a month in C. It's a trivial task. In fact me and my colleagues were asked to write a trivial OS for our exams 10 years ago. So we did.
So OSnews, either you are light and talk about mainstream OSes and general usability, either you talk about serious business, but please interview and ask people who know and can give a qualified answer. Not yet just another ASM os.


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Apparently, Someone Forgot To Tell Reality That The Entertainment Industry Was Dying
from the data,-data,-data dept
Funny thing: reality says otherwise.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) has some pretty nice tools and a neat table of jobs in various industry sectors in 1998, 2008 and then projected in 2018. Let's take a look at the entertainment industry, shall we?
Of course, for those of us who have been following/reporting on this for pretty much all of that time, this isn't surprising at all. What we've seen is an explosion in opportunities for independent artists. Before all of this happened, it was much more difficult to be an indie artist, because the major labels and studios really were the gatekeepers. It was almost impossible to succeed without them. These days, however, it's become a choice, and there are so many ways to succeed that don't require the majors. It's no wonder that many more people are making a living as an indie artist than ever before.


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Comprehensive DescriptionRead full entry
CommentsThe common name refers to the yellow coloration of the heartwood, which later becomes light brown after it has been cut and dried. It was used to make gunstocks, small decorative furniture, and other specialty items. Yellow-Wood is an unusual tree with smooth bark, showy flowers, and attractive fall coloration. Therefore, it should be cultivated more often.


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Officers Catch Robber After He Tosses Gun
August 1st, 2012 by milwaukeepolice
On July 11 at about 9:10 p.m., District 3 Police Officers Allen Tenhaken, Markel McKinley and Corianna Chisum were conducting a field interview in the 900 block of North 27th Street. Officer Tenhaken was flagged down by a woman in a white sedan who was pointing east on West Kilbourn Avenue, saying, "He went that way."
Officers McKinley and Chisum attempted to stop the suspect who began running across West Kilbourn Avenue. Officer McKinley took the suspect into custody in the 2400 block of West Kilbourn Avenue. Officer McKinley informed Chisum that the suspect threw a gun down in the street during the foot pursuit. Meanwhile, Officer Tenhaken determined that the suspect had robbed the woman who stopped the officers at the Golden Midtown Store, 801 N. 27th St.
The suspect is a convicted felon. A great job by veteran Officer Tenhaken showing these new officers how great neighborhood relationships are built when police return the public spaces back to the community.


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Each year as a little boy, his eyes filled with wonder as he gazed at the kings of the Krewe of Hercules, adorned in elaborate white and gold costumes.
Each year as a little boy, his eyes filled with wonder as he gazed at the kings of the Krewe of Hercules, adorned in elaborate white and gold costumes.
This was as close to royalty Thad Scott would ever get in his hometown of Houma. At every parade, he watched and wished to one day be part of that legacy.
This year, the 37-year-old Scott gets that chance reigning as Hercules' 29th king.
"I grew up in a Mardi Gras family," he said. "My mom is in Cleopatra, and my dad belongs to Hercules. I've been a member for 14 years, starting in 1999. I remember back then when they rode on the east side of Houma, and all of Mardi Gras was on the east side. It was always a lifelong dream of mine to become king."
Hercules boasts a roster of more than 700 members. It is the largest Carnival krewe in Terrebonne.
Scott's love for the krewe runs deep, he said, and he has spent roughly the past year flying from Houston to New Orleans and back several times. The trips were necessary to fulfill his obligations as king, which required his presence at meetings, parties and charity functions.
"I made a commitment to the krewe, the board members, the dukes and the whole court that if there was a function affiliated with my krewe or court, I would be here," he said. "And my office was very understanding and flexible, so it seems to have worked out well."
However, the extensive travel is not the extent of Scott's dedication to Hercules.
Scott graduated from H.L. Bourgeois High School in 1993 and went on to earn a degree in mechanical engineering from LSU. He then moved to Houston for work with Houma-based Blackhawk Specialty Tools, an oil and gas service provider for cementing and well construction. The company eventually relocated him to the Republic of Singapore in southeast Asia.
Until three years ago when he moved back to Houston, every year for more than a decade, Scott took the 28-hour flight from Singapore to New Orleans, then drove from there to Houma to attend the Hercules parade.
In 2010, Scott was a duke for Hercules. Once he got a little taste of royalty, he started "feeling out" the board members, he said, to see how they felt about his interest in being king. He received positive reactions from everyone.
"Thad Scott is probably one of our most outstanding kings," said S.P. LaRussa, the krewe's captain and founder. "He's been dreaming about being king of Hercules, and it's an honor. It's an honor to represent over 700 riders and to put on not only the biggest tableau and party in town but also the biggest parade. And this guy just played the role the best he could. He did one hell of a job. He and his court were outstanding, and they just did it the right way — Hercules style."
Scott went against the grain at this year's tableau, dressing in black and gold — as opposed to the king's traditional white-and-gold garments. As an avid Harley-Davidson rider, after being introduced, a fellow biker attached his chariot to a Harley and pulled him out to meet the crowd.
"I can guarantee, no past kings or queens have ever experienced that sensation," Scott said.
LaRussa said the way Scott was introduced at Saturday night's tableau was "awesome" and "unbelievable."
"It was probably one of the biggest productions we've had at a tableau," he said.
Scott said with less than a week left to begin his reign in the parade, he can't wait.
"I'm extremely looking forward to turning left on West Park in front of the mall and seeing that sea of people," he said. "It's got me excited."
But it's not just the pageantry and parades that Scott's proud of. He takes extreme pride in the krewe's charity work, including charity done with Council on Aging for Thanksgiving and Christmas.
"Seeing the joy on the faces of the elderly and less fortunate people we help in the area" is a worthwhile feeling, he said. It "puts a new perspective on life."
Scott said the experience and travel has all been worth it.
"I came in with joyous, high expectations, and this experience has far exceeded any of those expectations I had," he said.
And LaRussa said the next king has tough shoes to fill.
"For 29 years we've never had a bad Hercules king," he said. "What happens is, when the new king comes up every year, he tries to outdo the last year's king. So whoever is king for our 30th year, he has a task. How can he outdo Thad Scott?"
Staff Writer Kris Johnson can be reached at 857-2207 or
email@example.com. Follow her on Twitter @krisLjo.


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ECS Z77H2-AX Golden Edition Review
The ECS Golden Board Black Extreme Z77H2-AX is one of the latest motherboards based on the Z77 chipset, which supports both the new and upcoming 3rd generation Core series processors, as well as the current 2nd generation LGA 1155 processors. ECS has chosen this board as a showcase for its NonStop build philosophy, which puts the boards through a rigorous 72 hour military-grade test environment called the Super Marathon. ECS uses the Sahara Burn-in test in an environment set to 50°C for long-term temperature stability testing, along with Apache Long-Life capacitors and Thor Ultra ESD protection. As we all know, gold is an excellent conductor of current and does not oxidize, so ECS has chosen this medium to coat the CPU socket pins and PCIe connections on the Golden Edition motherboard and hopefully improve its overall stability and life span. The Gold 4ever concept, which consists of Golden Quality, Golden Stability, Golden Cooling and Golden Royalty, are the hallmarks of this philosophy and shows the commitment that ECS has put behind its Black Extreme series motherboards. Let's take a look at the rest of the feature set and see how this offering from ECS compares to others on the market.
Closer Look:
Taking the Gold 4ever concept even further, the packaging for Golden Edition is, as you might guess, almost entirely gold-colored, with minimal branding on the outside of the packaging. There are flaps that open on the front and back sides, which go through the feature set of this motherboard in detail. Opening the front panel, we can see the board and information on its golden components. It looks like old King Midas touched just about every part of the Z77H2-AX, from the 15μ gold contacts in the CPU socket, to the Bluetooth dongle, USB 3.0 ports, Wi-fi dongle, and the audio ports. The Gold 4ever concept is detailed as well, with gold coloring all over the board peripherals. On the back of box, there is information on SLI and CrossfireX support, switchable graphics using Lucids Virtu software, PCIe Gen3 support, and Qooltech board cooling, which is advertised to be 20% faster in dissipating thermal load on the board components.
Inside the package are two boxes that contain the Z77H2-AX and the accessory bundle. The bundle includes the user manual, installation guides, and a driver disk. In terms of the hardware portion of the bundle, it is pretty sizable. Included is the gold-colored I/O panel, 3 SLI bridge connections, a USB 3.0 dongle with 3.5 inch bay and expansion slot bracket adapters, SATA 3 and 6 Gb/s cables, a wireless antenna, a certificate of quality, and plugs for the unused ports on the back of the IO panel. The I/O panel has a covering on the back side to reduce EFI emissions.
ECS has several videos on their YouTube channel, but this one deals directly with what it takes to have one of the Z77H2-AX motherboards reach "Golden Board" status. Taking a look through the video, we see just how much work is done on the back-end in terms of testing, torture testing, and tweaking for the best performance.
So without further ado, let's dig into what the ECS Z77H2-AX Golden Board has to offer the consumer besides an incredibly flash box.


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The SPARQL2XQuery Framework : Bridging the Gap between the XML and the Semantic Web Worlds[edit]
The SPARQL2XQuery Framework bridges the gap and creates an interoperable environment between the Web of Linked Data (OWL/RDF/SPARQL) and the XML (XML Schema/XML/XQuery) worlds.
Using the SPARQL2XQuery Framework, XML datasets can be turned into SPARQL endpoints. The SPARQL2XQuery Framework provides a generic method for SPARQL to XQuery translation, with respect to a set of predefined mappings between ontologies and XML Schemas.
Particularly, the SPARQL2XQuery Framework provides mechanisms for: (a) Query translation (SPARQL to XQuery) (b) Mapping specification & generation (Ontology to XML Schema)and (c) Schema transformation(XML Schema to OWL).
Key Features.[edit]
This SPARQL2XQuery Framework is an essential component in the Web of Linked Data that allows setting SPARQL endpoints over the existing XML data, as well as a fundamental part of ontology-based integration frameworks involving XML data sources.
- Schema Transformation. XML Schema to OWL by using the XS2OWL framework.
- Mapping Generation. The mappings between the XML Schemas and their OWL representations can be automatically detected and stored as XML documents.
- Mappings Specification. Mappings between OWL-RDF/S ontologies and XML Schemas can be manually specified and used in the SPARQL to XQuery translation.
- Query Translation. SPARQL to XQuery Translation: Every SPARQL query that is posed over ontologies (RDF/S - OWL), is translated into an XQuery query that can be answered from the XML data.
- Query Results Transformation. The query results are transformed in the preferred SPARQL Query Result XML Format or in RDF format.
- XML - RDF Transformation.Transformation of XML data in RDF syntax and vice versa.
Related Projects.[edit]
- SPARQL-RW : Ontology Mapping and SPARQL Query Rewriting.
- XS2OWL : Transform XML Schema into OWL otnologies.


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MeritBadgeDotOrg:WikiProject Advancement Requirements/Merit Badges
From MeritBadgeDotOrg
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{{Otheruses|''This article is about the [[Merit Badge]] for [[Boy Scout]]s

{{Otheruses|''This article is about the [[Merit Badge]] for [[Boy Scout]]s

Revision as of 20:45, March 30, 2008
< MeritBadgeDotOrg:WikiProject Advancement Requirements
This is the layout to be used for Category:Merit Badges articles. Please use the Talk Page to discuss any suggestions for additions or changes to this article format.
To Do
- Answers, answer keys, cheat sheets, or links to them will be removed.
- Sample text in the grey Copy and Paste text box above to start a new Cub Scout Academic and Sports Award page. At this time, all 40 awards each have a page. Please help keep them in this format and help us add links to related requirements for other awards and outside resources.
- Infobox
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- {{Eagle Required}} navigation footer, if appropriate
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{{Infobox_MeritBadge_Silver or Infobox_MeritBadge_Green |name= |image= |caption= |subject= |field= |status= |created= |discontinued= |requirements revision= |pamphlet revision= |id= }} {{Otheruses|''This article is about the [[Merit Badge]] for [[Boy Scout]]s
 for the Belt Loop and Pin for Cub Scouts, see [[Cub Scout xxx]]
 for the Webelos Activity Pin, see [[xxxx]]''}} == Merit badge requirements == ... {{BSR|2007}} == Help with these requirements == {{Worksheet}} == Notes == == Related awards == == See also == *[] == External links == *[] *[] <-- {{Eagle Required}} if appropriate -->
In the near future, all articles will be automatically categorized through the use of templates:
- {{Infobox_MeritBadge_Silver}} categorizes into Category:Eagle required Merit Badges
- {{Infobox_MeritBadge_Green}} categorizes into Category:Merit Badges
Any manual categorization of these article should be based on topic, for example:
- [[Category:Scoutcraft]], etc.


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Thursday, October 24 at The Animation Guild (11O5 N. Hollywood Way Burbank, California, USA).
The meeting theme is "Women Write Royal," featuring a panel of several writers from the Disney Channel show "Sofia the First," including Head Writer and Executive Producer Craig Gerber.
Schmoozing and networking begins at 6:30 p.m. and the meeting proper starts at 7:00 p.m. Food and soft drinks will be available.
Seating is limited, so please RSVP early. To RSVP, email email@example.com (this is the only address accepting RSVPs - please don't email WIA International). The cut-off for RSVPs is Tuesday, October 22.
Non-members will be asked for a $10.00 donation, members are free.
Visit web site at http://wia.animationblogspot.com/


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Did you, by chance, receive one of those Community Older Adult Needs Surveys? If you didn't, you may complete one online at www.surveymonkey.com/s/coaonline". It needs to be turned via mail or completed online by June 12.
I saw it as a way to gather more information to be used to plead the case for a new Senior Center, which we already have one located on North Jefferson Street. As far as I know it suits the purpose and people use it just fine. I know several persons who do. If anything the building may not be in the most desirable part of town, but that isn't any of our faults.
I've been asked a number of times why it's being considered that we even need a new one. I don't really know why the push, but I bet it's more eye candy for luring those aged out-of-towners they're so desperately hoping to get.
The survey had your typical questions regarding age, sex, ethnicity, and location in the county. It also asked how long you've lived here and where you expect to be in the next 10 years.
I found it interesting that it also asked where you live citing choices for Burr Oak, Burr Oak Village, Constantine Twp., Constantine Village, Fawn River, Florence, Mottville, Sherman, Sturgis City, Sturgis Twp., White Pigeon Twp., Village of White Pigeon, or other.
There are questions about transportation and how far you'd be willing to travel for services, events and activities as well as possible concerns for those facing 55 years plus.
Have they (the powers that be) not turned on their evening news? I think if they did they'd get a pretty good idea of the concerns facing aging adults, and all of us, really. I'm not so sure why the need to include such a question. We all share these concerns, if we're being honest. I don't believe a new building is going to make any of those concerns any better. If it results in higher taxes for residents then my guess is it will only add to them.
Now let's go back to the "where you live" question. I understand the COA's reach and their incredible importance to our county, however, if certain people in our county are thinking we need a new Senior Center or are working towards that idea then shouldn't it be more centrally located? Like, in Centreville?
Here's a novel idea – if there is definitely a need then why not utilize the vacant Village Market building in Centreville. It's perfect. It's large, and spacious, and it offers plenty of parking. Centreville is the county seat.
Wouldn't that make more sense? Ask yourself this – why would someone in Florence Twp. Come all the way over to Sturgis for a Senior Center. It should be more centrally located if it's going to happen.
I hate to see buildings sit empty or new ones go up when there are plenty of other locations available. I'm just sayin'….
Senior center could occupy existing building
Did you, by chance, receive one of those Community Older Adult Needs Surveys? If you didn't, you may complete one online at www.surveymonkey.com/s/coaonline". It needs to be turned via mail or completed online by June 12.


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ClarkeRA on Family Tree Circles
view: full | list
Journals and Posts
Looking for Naliss Family
I am releated to the Naliss name - but I know very little of its origins.
My Great Grandfather James Dixon was born 16 Dec 1867 Helmsley, Yorkshire to a Sarah Dixon his father is recorded on the birth certificate as William Naliss - but James spent his life being called James Dixon.
But on his death (24 Jul 1934 Ecclesall North, Sheffield) he was buried under the name of Naliss - his death certificate gives his name as: "James Naliss - formerly Dixon)".
If anyone has any information on the NALISS surname and its origins - I think Ireland has been mentioned in the past - I would be very grateful.
Clarke Ancestry
About myself
Hi I have been researching my family tree for over a year know and have found some very interesting bits of information about my ancestors. For example my 2xgreat grandfather, William Clarke committed Suicide by Hanging Himself at Lincoln Lunatic Hospital, England in Jan 1886. His son Percy Sewell Clarke died after being run over my the dray he was driving to deliver coal in Linconshire in 1908.
I have created my own website:
To record my Clarkes from Lincolnshire.
Richard Clarke
- Displaying 1-3 of 3 Journals
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