text:
Empires on the Edge of Chaos
Niall Ferguson
Editorial Note:
The following article
is reproduced from the
North-American magazine
"Foreign Affairs",
edition dated March
/ April 2010, pp.18-32.
unknowingly, author Niall Ferguson
discusses in the
text the theosophical Law of
Karmic Cycles,
which can be studied in more
details - and
applied to larger periods of time - in
the works of Helena
P. Blavatsky (1831-1891).
(Carlos Cardoso
There is no better illustration
of the life cycle of a great power than "The Course of Empire", a series of
five paintings by Thomas Cole that hang in the New-York Historical Society. Cole
was a founder of the Hudson River School and one of the pioneers of
nineteenth-century American landscape painting; in "The Course of Empire", he
beautifully captured a theory of imperial rise and fall to which most people
remain in thrall to this day.
Each of the five imagined
scenes depicts the mouth of a great river beneath a rocky outcrop. In the
first, "The Savage State", a lush wilderness is populated by a handful of
hunter-gatherers eking out a primitive existence at the break of a stormy dawn.
The second picture, "The Arcadian or Pastoral State", is of an agrarian idyll:
the inhabitants have cleared the trees, planted fields, and built an elegant
Greek temple. The third and largest of the paintings is "The Consummation of
Empire". Now, the landscape is covered by a magnificent marble entrepôt,
and the contented farmer-philosophers of the previous tableau have been
replaced by a throng of opulently clad merchants, proconsuls, and
citizen-consumers. It is midday in the life cycle. Then comes "Destruction".
The city is ablaze, its citizens fleeing an invading horde that rapes and
pillages beneath a brooding evening sky. Finally, the moon rises over the fifth
painting, "Desolation". There is not a living soul to be seen, only a few
decaying columns and colonnades overgrown by briars and ivy.
Conceived in the mid-1830s,
Cole's great pentaptych has a clear message: all empires, no matter how
magnificent, are condemned to decline and fall. The implicit suggestion was
that the young American republic of Cole's age would be better served by
sticking to its bucolic first principles and resisting the imperial temptations
of commerce, conquest, and colonization.
For centuries, historians,
political theorists, anthropologists, and the public at large have tended to
think about empires in such cyclical and gradual terms. "The best instituted
governments", the British political philosopher Henry St. John, First Viscount
Bolingbroke, wrote in 1738, "carry in them the seeds of their destruction: and,
though they grow and improve for a time, they will soon tend visibly to their
dissolution. Every hour they live is an hour the less that they have to live".
Idealists and materialists
alike have shared that assumption. In his book "Scienza nuova", the Italian
philosopher Giambattista Vico describes all civilizations as passing through
three phases: the divine, the heroic, and the human, finally dissolving into
what Vico called "the barbarism of reflection". For Hegel and Marx, it was the
dialectic that gave history its unmistakable beat. History was seasonal for
Oswald Spengler, the German historian, who wrote in his 1918-22 book, "The
Decline of the West", that the nineteenth century had been "the winter of the
West, the victory of materialism and skepticism, of socialism,
parliamentarianism, and money". The British historian Arnold Toynbee's
universal theory of civilization proposed a cycle of challenge, response, and
suicide. Each of these models is different, but all share the idea that history
has rhythm.
Although hardly anyone reads
Spengler or Toynbee today, similar strains of thought are visible in contemporary
bestsellers. Paul Kennedy's "The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers" is another
work of cyclical history - despite its profusion of statistical tables, which
at first sight make it seem the very antithesis of Spenglerian grand theory. In
Kennedy's model, great powers rise and fall according to the growth rates of
their industrial bases and the costs of their imperial commitments relative to
their GDPs. Just as in Cole's "The Course of Empire", imperial expansion
carries the seeds of future decline. As Kennedy writes, "If a state overextends
itself strategically . . . it runs the risk that the potential benefits from
external expansion may be outweighed by the great expense of it all." This
phenomenon of "imperial overstretch", Kennedy argues, is common to all great
powers. In 1987, when Kennedy's book was published, the United States worried
that it might be succumbing to this disease. Just because the Soviet Union fell
first did not necessarily invalidate the hypothesis.
More recently, it is Jared
Diamond, an anthropologist, who has captured the public imagination with a
grand theory of rise and fall. His 2005 book, "Collapse: How Societies Choose
to Fail or Succeed", is cyclical history for the so-called Green Age: tales of
past societies, from seventeenth-century Easter Island to twenty-first-century
China, that risked, or now risk, destroying themselves by abusing their natural
environments. Diamond quotes John Lloyd Stevens, the American explorer and
amateur archaeologist who discovered the eerily dead Mayan cities of Mexico: "Here
were the remains of a cultivated, polished, and peculiar people, who had passed
through all the stages incident to the rise and fall of nations, reached their
golden age, and perished." According to Diamond, the Maya fell into a classic
Malthusian trap as their population grew larger than their fragile and
inefficient agricultural system could support. More people meant more cultivation,
but more cultivation meant deforestation, erosion, drought, and soil
exhaustion. The result was civil war over dwindling resources and, finally,
Diamond's warning is that
today's world could go the way of the Maya. This is an important message, no
doubt. But in reviving the cyclical theory of history, "Collapse" reproduces an
old conceptual defect. Diamond makes the mistake of focusing on what historians
of the French Annales school called la longue durée, the long
term. No matter whether civilizations commit suicide culturally, economically,
or ecologically, the downfall is very protracted. Just as it takes centuries
for imperial overstretch to undermine a great power, so, too, does it take
centuries to wreck an ecosystem. As Diamond points out, political leaders in
almost any society - primitive or sophisticated - have little incentive to
address problems that are unlikely to manifest themselves for a hundred years
or more.
Did the proconsuls in Cole's "The
Consummation of Empire" really care if the fate of their
great-great-grandchildren was destruction? No. Would they have accepted a tax
increase that would have financed a preemptive strike against the next
millennium's barbarian horde? Again, no. As the UN Climate Change Conference in
Copenhagen last December made clear, rhetorical pleas to save the planet for
future generations are insufficient to overcome the conflicts over economic
distribution between rich and poor countries that exist in the here and now.
The current economic challenges
facing the United States are also often represented as long-term threats. It is
the slow march of demographics - which is driving up the ratio of retirees to
workers - and not current policy, that condemns the public finances of the
United States to sink deeper into the red. According to the Congressional
Budget Office's "alternative fiscal scenario", which takes into account likely
changes in government policy, public debt could rise from 44 percent before the
financial crisis to a staggering 716 percent by 2080. In its "extended-baseline
scenario", which assumes current policies will remain the same, the figure is
closer to 280 percent. It hardly seems to matter which number is correct. Is
there a single member of Congress who is willing to cut entitlements or
increase taxes in order to avert a crisis that will culminate only when today's
babies are retirees?
Similarly, when it comes to
the global economy, the wheel of history seems to revolve slowly, like an old
water mill in high summer. Some projections suggest that China's GDP will
overtake the United States' GDP in 2027; others say that this will not happen
until 2040. By 2050, India's economy will supposedly catch up with that of the
United States, too. But to many, these great changes in the balance of economic
power seem very remote compared with the timeframe for the deployment of U.S.
soldiers to Afghanistan and then their withdrawal, for which the unit of
account is months, not years, much less decades.
Yet it is possible that this
whole conceptual framework is, in fact, flawed. Perhaps Cole's artistic
representation of imperial birth, growth, and eventual death is a
misrepresentation of the historical process. What if history is not cyclical
and slow moving but arrhythmic - at times almost stationary, but also capable
of accelerating suddenly, like a sports car? What if collapse does not arrive
over a number of centuries but comes suddenly, like a thief in the night?
Good Systems Go Bad
Great powers and empires are,
I would suggest, complex systems, made up of a very large number of interacting
components that are asymmetrically organized, which means their construction
more resembles a termite hill than an Egyptian pyramid. They operate somewhere
between order and disorder - on "the edge of chaos", in the phrase of the
computer scientist Christopher Langton. Such systems can appear to operate
quite stably for some time; they seem to be in equilibrium but are, in fact,
constantly adapting. But there comes a moment when complex systems "go critical".
A very small trigger can set off a "phase transition" from a benign equilibrium
to a crisis - a single grain of sand causes a whole pile to collapse, or a
butterfly flaps its wings in the Amazon and brings about a hurricane in
southeastern England.
Not long after such crises
happen, historians arrive on the scene. They are the scholars who specialize in
the study of "fat tail" events - the low-frequency, high-impact moments that
inhabit the tails of probability distributions, such as wars, revolutions,
financial crashes, and imperial collapses. But historians often misunderstand
complexity in decoding these events. They are trained to explain calamity in
terms of long-term causes, often dating back decades. This is what Nassim Taleb
rightly condemned in "The Black Swan" as "the narrative fallacy": the
construction of psychologically satisfying stories on the principle of post
hoc, ergo propter hoc.
Drawing casual inferences
about causation is an age-old habit. Take World War I. A huge war breaks out in
the summer of 1914, to the great surprise of nearly everyone. Before long,
historians have devised a story line commensurate with the disaster: a treaty
governing the neutrality of Belgium that was signed in 1839, the waning of
Ottoman power in the Balkans dating back to the 1870s, and malevolent Germans
and the navy they began building in 1897. A contemporary version of this
fallacy traces the 9/11 attacks back to the Egyptian government's 1966
execution of Sayyid Qutb, the Islamist writer who inspired the Muslim
Brotherhood. Most recently, the financial crisis that began in 2007 has been
attributed to measures of financial deregulation taken in the United States in
the 1980s.
In reality, the proximate
triggers of a crisis are often sufficient to explain the sudden shift from a
good equilibrium to a bad mess. Thus, World War I was actually caused by a
series of diplomatic miscalculations in the summer of 1914, the real origins of
9/11 lie in the politics of Saudi Arabia in the 1990s, and the financial crisis
was principally due to errors in monetary policy by the U.S. Federal Reserve
and to China's rapid accumulation of dollar reserves after 2001. Most of the
fat-tail phenomena that historians study are not the climaxes of prolonged and
deterministic story lines; instead, they represent perturbations, and sometimes
the complete breakdowns, of complex systems.
To understand complexity, it
is helpful to examine how natural scientists use the concept. Think of the
spontaneous organization of half a million ants or termites, which allows them
to construct complex hills and nests, or the fractal geometry of water
molecules as they form intricate snowflakes. Human intelligence itself is a
complex system, a product of the interaction of billions of neurons in the
central nervous system, or what Charles Sherrington, the pioneering
neuroscientist, called "an enchanted loom".
The political and economic
structures made by humans share many of the features of complex adaptive
systems. Heterodox economists such as W. Brian Arthur have been arguing along
these lines for decades. To Arthur, a complex economy is characterized by the
interaction of dispersed agents, a lack of central control, multiple levels of
organization, continual adaptation, incessant creation of new market niches,
and the absence of general equilibrium. This conception of economics goes
beyond both Adam Smith's hallowed idea that an "invisible hand" causes markets
to work through the interactions of profit-maximizing individuals and Friedrich
von Hayek's critique of economic planning and demand management. In
contradiction to the classic economic prediction that competition causes
diminishing returns, a complex economy makes increasing returns possible. In
this version of economics, Silicon Valley is a complex adaptive system; so is
the Internet itself.
Researchers at the Santa Fe
Institute, a nonprofit center devoted to the study of complex systems, are
currently looking at how such insights can be applied to other aspects of
collective human activity, including international relations. This effort may
recall the futile struggle of Edward Casaubon to find "the key to all
mythologies" in George Eliot's novel "Middlemarch". But the attempt is
worthwhile, because an understanding of how complex systems function is an
essential part of any strategy to anticipate and delay their failure.
Whether the canopy of a rain
forest or the trading floor of Wall Street, complex systems share certain
characteristics. A small input to such a system can produce huge, often
unanticipated changes - what scientists call "the amplifier effect". A vaccine,
for example, stimulates the immune system to become resistant to, say, measles
or mumps. But administer too large a dose, and the patient dies. Meanwhile,
causal relationships are often nonlinear, which means that traditional methods
of generalizing through observation (such as trend analysis and sampling) are
of little use. Some theorists of complexity would go so far as to say that
complex systems are wholly nondeterministic, meaning that it is impossible to
make predictions about their future behavior based on existing data.
When things go wrong in a
complex system, the scale of disruption is nearly impossible to anticipate.
There is no such thing as a typical or average forest fire, for example. To use
the jargon of modern physics, a forest before a fire is in a state of "self-organized
criticality": it is teetering on the verge of a breakdown, but the size of the
breakdown is unknown. Will there be a small fire or a huge one? It is very hard
to say: a forest fire twice as large as last year's is roughly four or six or
eight times less likely to happen this year. This kind of pattern - known as a "power-law
distribution" - is remarkably common in the natural world. It can be seen not
just in forest fires but also in earthquakes and epidemics. Some researchers
claim that conflicts follow a similar pattern, ranging from local skirmishes to
full-scale world wars.
What matters most is that in
such systems a relatively minor shock can cause a disproportionate - and
sometimes fatal - disruption. As Taleb has argued, by 2007, the global economy
had grown to resemble an over-optimized electrical grid. Defaults on subprime
mortgages produced a relatively small surge in the United States that tipped
the entire world economy into a financial blackout, which, for a moment,
threatened to bring about a complete collapse of international trade. But
blaming such a crash on a policy of deregulation under U.S. President Ronald
Reagan is about as plausible as blaming World War I on the buildup of the
German navy under Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz.
State of Mind
Regardless of whether it is a
dictatorship or a democracy, any large-scale political unit is a complex
system. Most great empires have a nominal central authority - either a
hereditary emperor or an elected president - but in practice the power of any
individual ruler is a function of the network of economic, social, and
political relations over which he or she presides. As such, empires exhibit
many of the characteristics of other complex adaptive systems - including the
tendency to move from stability to instability quite suddenly. But this fact is
rarely recognized because of the collective addiction to cyclical theories of
Perhaps the most famous story
of imperial decline is that of ancient Rome. In "The History of the Decline and
Fall of the Roman Empire", published in six volumes between 1776 and 1788,
Edward Gibbon covered more than 1,400 years of history, from 180 to 1590. This
was history over the very long run, in which the causes of decline ranged from
the personality disorders of individual emperors to the power of the Praetorian
Guard and the rise of monotheism. After the death of Marcus Aurelius in 180,
civil war became a recurring problem, as aspiring emperors competed for the
spoils of supreme power. By the fourth century, barbarian invasions or
migrations were well under way and only intensified as the Huns moved west.
Meanwhile, the challenge posed by Sassanid Persia to the Eastern Roman Empire
was steadily growing.
But what if fourth-century
Rome was simply functioning normally as a complex adaptive system, with
political strife, barbarian migration, and imperial rivalry all just integral
features of late antiquity? Through this lens, Rome's fall was sudden and
dramatic - just as one would expect when such a system goes critical. As the
Oxford historians Peter Heather and Bryan Ward-Perkins have argued, the final
breakdown in the Western Roman Empire began in 406, when Germanic invaders
poured across the Rhine into Gaul and then Italy. Rome itself was sacked by the
Goths in 410. Co-opted by an enfeebled emperor, the Goths then fought the
Vandals for control of Spain, but this merely shifted the problem south.
Between 429 and 439, Genseric led the Vandals to victory after victory in North
Africa, culminating in the fall of Carthage. Rome lost its southern
Mediterranean breadbasket and, along with it, a huge source of tax revenue.
Roman soldiers were just barely able to defeat Attila's Huns as they swept west
from the Balkans. By 452, the Western Roman Empire had lost all of Britain,
most of Spain, the richest provinces of North Africa, and southwestern and
southeastern Gaul. Not much was left besides Italy. Basiliscus, brother-in-law
of Emperor Leo I, tried and failed to recapture Carthage in 468. Byzantium
lived on, but the Western Roman Empire was dead. By 476, Rome was the fiefdom
of Odoacer, king of the Goths.
What is most striking about
this history is the speed of the Roman Empire's collapse. In just five decades,
the population of Rome itself fell by three-quarters. Archaeological evidence
from the late fifth century - inferior housing, more primitive pottery, fewer
coins, smaller cattle - shows that the benign influence of Rome diminished
rapidly in the rest of western Europe. What Ward-Perkins calls "the end of
civilization" came within the span of a single generation.
Other great empires have
suffered comparably swift collapses. The Ming dynasty in China began in 1368,
when the warlord Zhu Yuanzhang renamed himself Emperor Hongwu, the word hongwu
meaning "vast military power". For most of the next three centuries, Ming
China was the world's most sophisticated civilization by almost any measure. Then,
in the mid-seventeenth century, political factionalism, fiscal crisis, famine,
and epidemic disease opened the door to rebellion within and incursions from
without. In 1636, the Manchu leader Huang Taiji proclaimed the advent of the
Qing dynasty. Just eight years later, Beijing, the magnificent Ming capital,
fell to the rebel leader Li Zicheng, and the last Ming emperor hanged himself
out of shame. The transition from Confucian equipoise to anarchy took little
more than a decade.
In much the same way, the
Bourbon monarchy in France passed from triumph to terror with astonishing
rapidity. French intervention on the side of the colonial rebels against
British rule in North America in the 1770s seemed like a good idea at the time
- a chance for revenge after Great Britain's victory in the Seven Years' War a
decade earlier - but it served to tip French finances into a critical state. In
May 1789, the summoning of the Estates-General, France's long-dormant
representative assembly, unleashed a political chain reaction that led to a
swift collapse of royal legitimacy in France. Only four years later, in January
1793, Louis XVI was decapitated by guillotine.
Although several narrative
fallacies suggest that the Hapsburg, Ottoman, and Romanov empires were doomed
for decades before World War I, the disintegration of the dynastic land empires
of eastern Europe came with equal swiftness. What was impressive, in fact, was
how well these ancient empires were able to withstand the test of total war.
Their collapse only began with the Bolshevik Revolution of October 1917. A mere
five years later, Mehmed VI, the last sultan of the Ottoman Empire, departed
Constantinople aboard a British warship. With that, all three dynasties were
The sun set on the British
Empire almost as suddenly. In February 1945, Prime Minister Winston Churchill
was at Yalta, dividing up the world with U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt and
Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin. As World War II was ending, he was swept from
office in the July 1945 general election. Within a decade, the United Kingdom
had conceded independence to Bangladesh, Bhutan, Burma, Egypt, Eritrea, India,
Iran, Israel, Jordan, Libya, Madagascar, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka. The Suez
crisis in 1956 proved that the United Kingdom could not act in defiance of the
United States in the Middle East, setting the seal on the end of empire.
Although it took until the 1960s for independence to reach sub-Saharan Africa
and the remnants of colonial rule east of the Suez, the United Kingdom's age of
hegemony was effectively over less than a dozen years after its victories over
Germany and Japan.
The most recent and familiar
example of precipitous decline is, of course, the collapse of the Soviet Union.
With the benefit of hindsight, historians have traced all kinds of rot within
the Soviet system back to the Brezhnev era and beyond. Perhaps, as the
historian and political scientist Stephen Kotkin has argued, it was only the
high oil prices of the 1970s that "averted Armageddon". But this did not seem
to be the case at the time. In March 1985, when Mikhail Gorbachev became
general secretary of the Soviet Communist Party, the CIA estimated the Soviet
economy to be approximately 60 percent the size of the U.S. economy. This
estimate is now known to have been wrong, but the Soviet nuclear arsenal was
genuinely larger than the U.S. stockpile. And governments in what was then
called the Third World, from Vietnam to Nicaragua, had been tilting in the
Soviets' favor for most of the previous 20 years. Yet less than five years
after Gorbachev took power, the Soviet imperium in central and Eastern Europe
had fallen apart, followed by the Soviet Union itself in 1991. If ever an
empire fell off a cliff - rather than gently declining - it was the one founded
by Lenin.
the Edge
If empires are complex systems
that sooner or later succumb to sudden and catastrophic malfunctions, rather
than cycling sedately from Arcadia to Apogee to Armageddon, what are the
implications for the United States today? First, debating the stages of decline
may be a waste of time - it is a precipitous and unexpected fall that should
most concern policymakers and citizens. Second, most imperial falls are
associated with fiscal crises. All the above cases were marked by sharp imbalances
between revenues and expenditures, as well as difficulties with financing
public debt. Alarm bells should therefore be ringing very loudly, indeed, as
the United States contemplates a deficit for 2009 of more than $1.4 trillion -
about 11.2 percent of GDP, the biggest deficit in 60 years - and another for
2010 that will not be much smaller. Public debt, meanwhile, is set to more than
double in the coming decade, from $5.8 trillion in 2008 to $14.3 trillion in
2019. Within the same timeframe, interest payments on that debt are forecast to
leap from eight percent of federal revenues to 17 percent.
These numbers are bad, but in
the realm of political entities, the role of perception is just as crucial, if
not more so. In imperial crises, it is not the material underpinnings of power
that really matter but expectations about future power. The fiscal numbers
cited above cannot erode U.S. strength on their own, but they can work to
weaken a long-assumed faith in the United States' ability to weather any
crisis. For now, the world still expects the United States to muddle through,
eventually confronting its problems when, as Churchill famously said, all the
alternatives have been exhausted. Through this lens, past alarms about the
deficit seem overblown, and 2080 - when the U.S. debt may reach staggering
proportions - seems a long way off, leaving plenty of time to plug the fiscal
hole. But one day, a seemingly random piece of bad news - perhaps a negative
report by a rating agency - will make the headlines during an otherwise quiet
news cycle. Suddenly, it will be not just a few policy wonks who worry about
the sustainability of U.S. fiscal policy but also the public at large, not to
mention investors abroad. It is this shift that is crucial: a complex adaptive
system is in big trouble when its component parts lose faith in its viability.
Over the last three years, the
complex system of the global economy flipped from boom to bust - all because a
bunch of Americans started to default on their subprime mortgages, thereby
blowing huge holes in the business models of thousands of highly leveraged
financial institutions. The next phase of the current crisis may begin when the
public begins to reassess the credibility of the monetary and fiscal measures
that the Obama administration has taken in response. Neither interest rates at
zero nor fiscal stimulus can achieve a sustainable recovery if people in the
United States and abroad collectively decide, overnight, that such measures
will lead to much higher inflation rates or outright default. As Thomas
Sargent, an economist who pioneered the idea of rational expectations,
demonstrated more than 20 years ago, such decisions are self-fulfilling: it is
not the base supply of money that determines inflation but the velocity of its
circulation, which in turn is a function of expectations. In the same way, it
is not the debt-to-GDP ratio that determines government solvency but the
interest rate that investors demand. Bond yields can shoot up if expectations
change about future government solvency, intensifying an already bad fiscal
crisis by driving up the cost of interest payments on new debt. Just ask Greece
- it happened there at the end of last year, plunging the country into fiscal
and political crisis.
Finally, a shift in expectations
about monetary and fiscal policy could force a reassessment of future U.S.
foreign policy. There is a zero-sum game at the heart of the budgetary process:
if interest payments consume a rising proportion of tax revenue, military
expenditure is the item most likely to be cut because, unlike mandatory
entitlements, it is discretionary. A U.S. president who says he will deploy
30,000 additional troops to Afghanistan and then, in 18 months' time, start
withdrawing them again already has something of a credibility problem. And what
about the United States' other strategic challenges? For the United States'
enemies in Iran and Iraq, it must be consoling to know that U.S. fiscal policy
today is preprogrammed to reduce the resources available for all overseas
military operations in the years ahead.
Defeat in the mountains of the
Hindu Kush or on the plains of Mesopotamia has long been a harbinger of
imperial fall. It is no coincidence that the Soviet Union withdrew from
Afghanistan in the annus mirabilis of 1989. What happened 20 years ago,
like the events of the distant fifth century, is a reminder that empires do not
in fact appear, rise, reign, decline, and fall according to some recurrent and
predictable life cycle. It is historians who retrospectively portray the
process of imperial dissolution as slow-acting, with multiple overdetermining
causes. Rather, empires behave like all complex adaptive systems. They function
in apparent equilibrium for some unknowable period. And then, quite abruptly,
they collapse. To return to the terminology of Thomas Cole, the painter of "The
Course of Empire", the shift from consummation to destruction and then to
desolation is not cyclical. It is sudden.
A more appropriate visual
representation of the way complex systems collapse may be the old poster, once
so popular in thousands of college dorm rooms, of a runaway steam train that
has crashed through the wall of a Victorian railway terminus and hit the street
below nose first. A defective brake or a sleeping driver can be all it takes to
go over the edge of chaos.
Niall Ferguson is Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History at Harvard
University, a Fellow at Jesus College, Oxford, and a Senior Fellow at the
Hoover Institution at Stanford University. His most recent book is "The Ascent
of Money: A Financial History of the World".
Reproduced from "Foreign
Affairs" magazine ( http://www.foreignaffairs.com ). Copyright © 2002-2010 by the
Council on Foreign Relations, Inc.


text:
What's the Big Deal About Dinosaurs?
From time to time, our readers will notice that we at Apologetics Press write articles regarding dinosaurs. We have even published a children's book titled Dinosaurs Unleashed. Through the years, many have wondered why we occasionally address this topic. What is so important about dinosaurs that warrants them being the focus of various articles and books written by certain Christian apologists?
The reason that some creationists (including those of us at Apologetics Press) feel compelled to write about these extinct reptiles (which, since 1842, have been called dinosaurs) is largely because dinosaurs are the "poster children" for the theory of evolution. Much could be said about how evolutionary-minded moviemakers and advertisers have used dinosaurs to capture the world's attention (see Butt, 2004, p. 3[2]:5-R), but one example regarding their status as the foremost icon of evolution should suffice. In the widely used 100-page middle school science textbook titled Evolution—Change Over Time (published by Prentice Hall), attempts are made to establish evolution as a fact by using a variety of alleged proofs. One piece of "evidence," however, that appears on nearly one out of every three pages centers on dinosaurs. Out of the 100 pages in this textbook, at least 32 of them contain information and/or pictures of these extinct reptiles. The first two chapters in this three-chapter textbook begin with pictures and text about dinosaurs. In several sections of the book (in which the main thrust is not about dinosaurs), students are asked to participate in reading or writing activities that focus on dinosaurs. Truly, the authors and editors of this textbook (which has been used throughout the United States since the mid-1990s) have attempted to indoctrinate young minds with the "truths" of evolution using dinosaurs.
Inarguably, dinosaurs are the "sugar stick" that evolutionists use to capture the attention of both young and old alike. As Christian apologists, we believe it is our responsibility to provide well-researched, logical, biblical, and scientifically accurate materials that counteract and refute the extremely weak "dinosaur-glorified" evolutionary arguments. Obviously, if nearly one-third of the pages in a student's evolutionary science textbook contain information about dinosaurs, young people are going to have questions about these creatures in light of what the Bible teaches. Did these reptiles evolve millions of years ago, or did God create them? Are humans separated from the time of the dinosaurs by 60 million years, or did God create both humans and dinosaurs on day six of Creation? How could humans have lived with such terrifying creatures? If evolutionists are the only ones answering these kinds of questions, what do you think your children and others throughout the world are going to believe about God, the Bible, and Creation?
Evolutionists have had their way with dinosaurs long enough. It is essential for creationists to dispel the "evolutionary aura" surrounding these creatures, and see them for what they really are—testimonies of an Almighty God Who made them alongside His image-bearers (humans—Genesis 1:26-27) during the Creation week (just like the Bible says!).
Butt, Kyle (2004), "Dinosaurs: They're Everywhere! They're Everywhere!," Reason & Revelation, 3[2]:5-R, February, [On-line], URL: https://www.apologeticspress.org/articles/2476.
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subset: commoncrawl


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Cessna 170 Seat Upholstery Kit
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Cessna 170 Aircraft Seat Upholstery systems are comfort guaranteed and built for quick replacement and zero downtime. With many options to choose from you will be able to build the Cessna 170 seat you have always dreamed of and be flying in comfort and style. Our seats are made from the highest quality materials. All materials tested and pass FAR 25.853, 12 second vertical burn test. Paper work included with seats. If you need assistance contact us.


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2 Thessalonians i. 1, 2.-"Paul, and Silvanus, and Timothy, unto the Church of the Thessalonians in God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ: Grace to you and peace from God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ."
The greater part of men do and devise all things with a view to ingratiate themselves with rulers, and with those who are greater than themselves; and they account it a great thing, and think themselves happy, if they can obtain that object. But if to obtain favor with men is so great an advantage, how great must it be to find favor with God? On this account he always thus prefaces his Epistle, and invokes this upon them, knowing that if this be granted, there will be nothing afterwards grievous, but whatever troubles there may be, all will be done away. And that you may learn this, Joseph was a slave a young man, inexperienced, unformed, and suddenly the direction of a house was committed to his hands, and he had to render an account to an Egyptian master. And you know how prone to anger and unforgiving that people is, and when authority and power is added, their rage is greater, being inflamed by power. And this too is manifest from what he did afterwards. For when the mistress made accusation, he bore with it. And yet it was not the part of those who held the garment, but of him who was stripped, to have suffered violence. For he ought to have said, If he had heard that thou didst raise thy voice, as thou sayest, he would have fled, and if he had been guilty, he would not have waited for the coming of his master. But nevertheless he took nothing of this sort into consideration, but unreasonably giving way altogether to anger, he cast him into prison. So thoughtless a person was he. And yet even from other things he might have conjectured the good disposition and the intelligence of the man. But nevertheless, because he was very unreasonable, he never considered any such thing. He therefore who had to do with such a harsh master, and who was intrusted with the administration of his whole house, being a stranger, and solitary, and inexperienced; when God shed abundant grace upon him, passed through all, as if his temptations had not even existed, both the false accusation of his mistress, and the danger of death, and the prison, and at last came to the royal throne.
This blessed man therefore saw how great is the grace of God, and on this account he invokes it upon them. And another thing also he effects, wishing to render them well-disposed to the remaining part of the Epistle; that, though he should reprove and rebuke them, they might not break away from him. For this reason he reminds them before all things of the grace of God, mollifying their hearts, that, even if there be affliction, being reminded of the grace by which they were saved from the greater evil, they may not despair at the less, but may thence derive consolation. As also elsewhere in an Epistle he has said, "For if, while we were enemies, we were reconciled to God through the death of His Son, much more, being reconciled, shall we be saved by His life." (Rom. v. 10.)
"Grace to you and peace," he says, "from God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ."
Ver. 3. "We are bound to give thanks to God alway for you, brethren, even as it is meet."
Again a sign of great humility. For he led them to reflect and consider, that if for our good actions others do not admire us first, but God, much more also ought we. And in other respects too he raises up their spirits, because they suffer such things as are not worthy of tears and lamentations, but of thanksgiving to God. But if Paul is thankful for the good of others, what will they suffer, who not only are not thankful, but even pine at it.
"For that your faith groweth exceedingly, and the love of each one of you all toward one another aboundeth."
And how, you say, can faith increase? That is when we suffer something dreadful for it. It is a great thing for it to be established, and not to be carried away by reasonings. But when the winds assail us, when the rains burst upon us, when a violent storm is raised on every side, and the waves succeed each other-then that we are not shaken, is a proof of no less than this, that it grows, and grows exceedingly, and becomes loftier. For as in the case of the flood all the stony and lower parts are soon hidden, but as many things as are above, it reaches not them, so also the faith that is become lofty, is not drawn downwards. For this reason he does not say "your faith groweth;" but "groweth exceedingly, and the love of each one of you all toward one another aboundeth." Seest thou how this contributes for the ease of affliction, to be in close guard together, and to adhere to one another? From this also arose much consolation. The love and faith, therefore, that is weak, afflictions shake, but that which is strong they render stronger. For a soul that is in grief, when it is weak, can add nothing to itself; but that which is strong doth it then most. And observe their love. They did not love one indeed, and not love another, but it was equal on the part of all. For this he has intimated, by saying, "of each one of you all toward one another." For it was equally poised, as that of one body. Since even now we find love existing among many, but this love becoming the cause of division. For when we are knit together in parties of two or three, and the two indeed, or three or four, are closely bound to one another, but draw themselves off from the rest, because they can have recourse to these, and in all things confide in these; this is the division of love-not love. For tell me, if the eye should bestow upon the hand the foresight which it has for the whole body, and withdrawing itself from the other members, should attend to that alone, would it not injure the whole? Assuredly. So also if we confine to one or two the love which ought to be extended to the whole Church of God, we injure both ourselves and them, and the whole. For these things are not of love, but of division; schisms, and distracting rents. Since even if I separate and take a member from the whole man, the part separated indeed is united in itself, is continuous, all compacted together, yet even so it is a separation, since it is not united to the rest of the body.
For what advantage is it, that thou lovest a certain person exceedingly? It is a human love. But if it is not a human love, but thou lovest for God's sake, then love all. For so God hath commanded to love even our enemies. And if He hath commanded to love our enemies, how much more those who have never aggrieved us? But, sayest thou, I love, but not in that way. Rather, thou dost not love at all. For when thou accusest, when thou enviest, when thou layest snares, how dost thou love? "But," sayest thou, "I do none of these things." But when a man is ill spoken of, and thou dost not shut the mouth of the speaker, dost not disbelieve his sayings, dost not check him, of what love is this the sign? "And the love," he says, "of each one of you all toward one another aboundeth."
Ver. 4. "So that we ourselves glory in you in the Churches of God."
Indeed in the first Epistle he says, that all the Churches of Macedonia and Achaia resounded, having heard of their faith. "So that we need not," he says, "to speak anything. For they themselves report concerning us what manner of entering in we had unto you." (1 Thess. i. 8) But here he says, "so that we glory." What then is it that is said? There he says that they need not instruction from him, but here he has not said that we teach them, but "we glory," and are proud of you. If therefore we both give thanks to God for you, and glory among men, much more ought you to do so for your own good deeds. For if your good actions are worthy of boasting from others, how are they worthy of lamentation from you? It is impossible to say. "So that we ourselves," he says, "glory in you in the Churches of God, for your patience and faith."
Here he shows that much time had elapsed. For patience is shown by much time, not in two or three days. And he does not merely say patience. It is the part of patience indeed properly not yet to enjoy the promised blessings. But here he speaks of a greater patience. And of what sort is that? That which is shown in persecutions. "For your patience," he says, "and faith in all your persecutions and in the afflictions which ye endure." For they were living with enemies who were continually endeavoring on every side to injure them, and they were manifesting a patience firm and immovable. Let all those blush who for the sake of the patronage of men pass over to other doctrines. For whilst it was yet the beginning of the preaching, poor men who lived by their daily earnings took upon themselves enmities from rulers and the first men of the state, when there was nowhere king or governor who was a believer; and submitted to irreconcilable war, and not even so were unsettled.
Ver. 5. "Which is a manifest token of the righteous judgment of God."
See how he gathers comfort for them. He had said, We give thanks to God, he had said, We glory among men: these things indeed are honorable. But that which he most seeks for, who is in suffering, is, deliverance from evils, and vengeance upon those who are evil entreating them. For when the soul is weak, it most seeks for these things, for the philosophic soul does not even seek these things. Why then does he say, "a token of the righteous Judgment of God"? Here he has glanced at the retribution on either side, both of those who do the ill, and of those who suffer it, as if he had said, that the justice of God may be shown when He crowns you indeed, but punishes them. At the same time also he comforts them, showing that from their own labors and toils they are crowned, and according to the proportion of righteousness. But he puts their part first. For although a person even vehemently desires revenge, yet he first longs for reward. For this reason he says,
"That ye may be counted worthy of the kingdom of God, for which ye also suffer."
This then does not come to pass from the circumstance that those who injure them are more powerful than they, but because it is so that they must enter into the kingdom. "For through many tribulations," he says, "we must enter into the kingdom of God." (Acts xiv. 22)
Ver. 6, 7. "If so be that it is a righteous thing with God to recompense affliction to them that afflict you, and to you that are afflicted rest with us at the revelation of the Lord Jesus from heaven with the Angels of His power."
The phrase "If so be that" here is put for "because," which we also use, in speaking of things that are quite evident and not to be denied; instead of saying, "Because it is exceedingly righteous." "If so be," he says, "that it is a righteous thing" with God to punish these, he will certainly punish them. As if he had said, "If God cares for human affairs," "If God takes thought." And he does not put it of his own opinion, but among things confessedly true; as if one said, "If God hates the wicked," that he may compel them to grant that He does hate them. For such sentences are above all indisputable, inasmuch as they also themselves know that it is just. For if this is just with men, much more with God.
"To recompense," he says, "affliction to them that afflict you, and to you that are afflicted rest." What then? Is the retribution equal? By no means, but see by what follows how he shows that it is more severe, and the "rest" much greater. Behold also another consolation, in that they have their partners in the afflictions, as partners also in the retribution. He joins them in their crowns with those who had performed infinitely more and greater works. Then he adds also the period, and by the description leads their minds upward, all but opening heaven already by his word, and setting it before their eyes; and he places around Him the angelic host, both from the place and from the attendants amplifying the image, so that they may be refreshed a little. "And to you that are afflicted rest with us," he says, "at the revelation of the Lord Jesus from heaven with the Angels of his power."
Ver. 8. "In flaming fire rendering vengeance to them that know not God, and to them that obey not the Gospel of our Lord Jesus."
If they that have not obeyed the Gospel suffer vengeance, what will not they suffer who besides their disobedience also afflict you? And see his intelligence; he says not here those who afflict you, but those "who obey not." So that although not on your account, yet on His own it is necessary to punish them. This then is said in order to full assurance, that it is altogether necessary for them to be punished: but what was said before, was said that they also might be honored, because they suffer these things on your account. The one causes them to believe concerning the punishment; the other to be pleased, because for the sake of what has been done to them they suffer these things.
All this was said to them, but it applies also to us. When therefore we are in affliction, let us consider these things. Let us not rejoice at the punishment of others as being avenged, but as ourselves escaping from such punishment and vengeance. For what advantage is it to us when others are punished? Let us not, I beseech you, have such souls. Let us be invited to virtue by the prospect of the kingdom. For he indeed who is exceedingly virtuous is induced neither by fear nor by the prospect of the kingdom, but for Christ's sake alone, as was the case with Paul. Let us, however, even thus consider the blessings of the kingdom, the miseries of hell, and thus regulate and school ourselves; let us in this way bring ourselves to the things that are to be practiced. When you see anything good and great in the present life, think of the kingdom, and you will consider it as nothing. When you see anything terrible, think of hell, and you will deride it. When you are possessed by carnal desire, think of the fire, think also of the pleasure of sin itself, that it is nothing worth, that it has not even pleasure in it. For if the fear of the laws that are enacted here has so great power as to withdraw us from wicked actions, how much more should the remembrance of things future, the vengeance that is immortal, the punishment that is everlasting? If the fear of an earthly king withdraws us from so many evils, how much more the fear of the King Eternal?
Whence then can we constantly have this fear? If we continually hearken to the Scriptures. For if the sight only of a dead body so depresses the mind, how much more must hell and the fire unquenchable, how much more the worm that never dieth. If we always think of hell, we shall not soon fall into it. For this reason God has threatened punishment; if it was not attended with great advantage to think of it, God would not have threatened it. But because the remembrance of it is able to work great good, for this reason He has put into our souls the terror of it, as a wholesome medicine. Let us not then overlook the great advantage arising from it, but let us continually advert to it, at our dinners, at our suppers. For conversation about pleasant things profits the soul nothing, but renders it more languid, while that about things painful and melancholy cuts off all that is relaxed and dissolute in it, and converts it, and braces it when unnerved. He who converses of theaters and actors does not benefit the soul, but inflames it more, and renders it more careless. He who concerns himself and is busy in other men's matters, often even involves it in dangers by this curiosity. But he who converses about hell incurs no dangers, and renders it more sober.
But dost thou fear the offensiveness of such words? Hast thou then, if thou art silent, extinguished hell? or if thou speakest of it, hast thou kindled it? Whether thou speakest of it or not, the fire boils forth. Let it be continually spoken of, that thou mayest never fall into it. It is not possible that a soul anxious about hell should readily sin. For hear the most excellent advice, "Remember," it says, "thy latter end" (Ecclus. xxviii. 6), and thou wilt not sin for ever. A soul that is fearful of giving account cannot but be slow to transgression. For fear being vigorous in the soul does not permit anything worldly to exist in it. For if discourse raised concerning hell so humbles and brings it low, does not the reflection constantly dwelling upon the soul purify it more than any fire?
Let us not remember the kingdom so much as hell. For fear has more power than the promise. And I know that many would despise ten thousand blessings, if they were rid of the punishment, inasmuch as it is even now sufficient for me to escape vengeance, and not to be punished. No one of those who have hell before their eyes will fall into hell. No one of those who despise hell will escape hell. For as among us those who fear the judgment-seats will not be apprehended by them, but those who despise them are chiefly those who fall under them, so it is also in this case. If the Ninevites had not feared destruction, they would have been overthrown, but because they feared, they were not overthrown. If in the time of Noah they had feared the deluge, they would not have been drowned. And if the Sodomites had feared they would not have been consumed by fire. It is a great evil to despise a threat. He who despises threatening will soon experience its reality in the execution of it. Nothing is so profitable as to converse concerning hell. It renders our souls purer than any silver. For hear the prophet saying, "Thy judgments are always before me." (From Ps. xvii. 22, Sept.) For although it pains the hearer, it benefits him very much.
For such indeed are all things that profit. For medicines too, and food, at first annoy the sick, and then do him good. And if we cannot bear the severity of words, it is manifest that we shall not be able to bear affliction in very deed. If no one endures a discourse concerning hell, it is evident, that if persecution came on, no one would ever stand firm against fire, against sword. Let us exercise our ears not to be over soft and tender: for from this we shall come to endure even the things themselves. If we be habituated to hear of dreadful things, we shall be habituated also to endure dreadful things. But if we be so relaxed as not to endure even words, when shall we stand against things? Do you see how the blessed Paul despises all things here, and dangers one after another, as not even temptations? Wherefore? Because he had been in the practice of despising hell, for the sake of what was God's will. He thought even the experience of hell to be nothing for the sake of the love of Christ; while we do not even endure a discourse concerning it for our own advantage. Now therefore having heard a little, go your ways; but I beseech you if there is any love in you, constantly to revert to discourses concerning these things. They can do you no harm, even if they should not benefit, but assuredly they will benefit you too. For according to our discourses, the soul is qualified. For evil communications, he says, "corrupt good manners." Therefore also good communications improve it; therefore also fearful discourses make it sober. For the soul is a sort of wax. For if you apply cold discourses, you harden and make it callous; but if fiery ones, you melt it; and having melted it, you form it to what you will, and engrave the royal image upon it. Let us therefore stop up our ears to discourses that are vain. It is no little evil; for from it arise all evils.
If our mind had been practiced to apply to divine discourses, it would not apply to others; and not applying to others, neither would it betake itself to evil actions. For words are the road to works. First we think, then we speak, then we act. Many men, even when before sober, have often from disgraceful words gone on to disgraceful actions. For our soul is neither good nor evil by nature, but becomes both the one and the other from choice. As therefore the sail carries the ship wherever the wind may blow, or rather as the rudder moves the ship, if the wind be favorable, so also thought will sail without danger, if good words from a favorable quarter waft it. But if the contrary, often they will even overwhelm the reason. For what winds are to ships, that discourses are to souls. Wherever you will, you may move and turn it. For this reason one exhorting says, "Let thy whole discourse be in the law of the Most High." (Ecclus. xx. 20) Wherefore, I exhort you, when we receive children from the nurse, let us not accustom them to old wives' stories, but let them learn from their first youth that there is a Judgment, that there is a punishment; let it be infixed in their minds. This fear being rooted in them produces great good effects. For a soul that has learnt from its first youth to be subdued by this expectation, will not soon shake off this fear. But like a horse obedient to the bridle, having the thought of hell seated upon it, walking orderly, it will both speak and utter things profitable; and neither youth nor riches, nor an orphan state, nor any other thing, Will be able to injure it, having its reason so firm and able to hold out against everything.
By these discourses let us regulate as well ourselves as our wives too, our servants, our children, our friends, and, if possible, our enemies. For with these discourses we are able to cut off the greater part of our sins, and it is better to dwell upon things grievous than upon things agreeable, and it is manifest from hence. For, tell me, if you should go into a house where a marriage is celebrated, for a season you are delighted at the spectacle, but afterwards having gone away, you pine with grief that you have not so much. But if you enter the house of mourners, even though they are very rich, when you go away you will be rather refreshed. For there you have not conceived envy, but comfort and consolation in your poverty. You have seen by facts, that riches are no good, poverty no evil, but they are things indifferent. So also now, if you talk about luxury, you the more vex your soul, that is not able perhaps to be luxurious. But if you are speaking against luxury, and introduce discourse concerning hell, the thing will cheer you, and beget much pleasure. For when you consider that luxury will not be able to defend us at all against that fire, you will not seek after it; but if you reflect that it is wont to kindle it even more, you will not only not seek, but will turn from it and reject it.
Let us not avoid discourses concerning hell, that we may avoid hell. Let us not banish the remembrance of punishment, that we may escape punishment. If the rich man had reflected upon that fire, he would not have sinned; but because he never was mindful of it, therefore he fell into it. Tell me, O man, being about to stand before the Judgment-seat of Christ, dost thou speak of all things rather than of that? And When you have a matter before a judge, often only relating to words, neither day nor night, at no time or season dost thou talk of anything else, but always of that business, and when thou art about to give an account of thy whole life, and to submit to a trial, canst thou not bear even with others reminding thee of that Judgment? For this reason therefore all things are ruined and undone, because when we are about to stand before a human tribunal concerning matters of this life, we move everything, we solicit all men, we are constantly anxious about it, we do everything for the sake of it: but when we are about, after no long time, to come before the Judgment-seat of Christ, we do nothing either by ourselves, or by others; we do not entreat the Judge. And yet He grants to us a long season of forbearance, and does not snatch us away in the midst of our sins, but permits us to put them off, and that Goodness and Lovingkindness leaves nothing undone of all that belongs to Himself. But all is of no avail; on this account the punishment will be the heavier. But God forbid it should be so! Wherefore, I beseech you, let us even if but now become watchful. Let us keep hell before our eyes. Let us consider that inexorable Account, that, thinking of those things, we may both avoid vice, and choose virtue, and may be able to obtain the blessings promised to those who love Him, by the grace and lovingkindness, &c.


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WorldMark Anaheim
201 West Katella Avenue, Anaheim, CA USA
Less than two miles away from thrilling theme parks and just steps away from the Anaheim Garden Walk you will find WorldMark Anaheim. With all the comforts of home, you will have only to enjoy your vacation! The resort suites are equipped with a full kitchen, living/dining area, and a washer/dryer. This beautiful property offers a rooftop sundeck with two hot tubs for relaxing and basking in the California sun.


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21 July 2024
Embajada del Libano en la República de Colombia
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República del Líbano
Embajada del Libano en la República de Colombia
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Turísmo en el Líbano
Latest news of the Ministry Foreign Affairs and Emigrants
Sitios Web
To download and to fill the visa application, please click on the below
Two Options: Obtain Visa at Beirut International airport or Obtain Visa from the Embassy .
Obtain Visa at Beirut International airport
The following is a list of countries whose citizens can obtain an entry visa upon arrival at Beirut International Airport or any other port of entry if there is no Israeli visa or seal on their passport.
Andorra, Antigua and Barbuda, Argentina, Armenia, Australia, Austria, Azerbaijan, The Bahamas, Barbados, Belarus, Belgium, Belize, Bhutan, Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, Chile, China Republic, Czech Republic, Costa Rica, Croatia, Cyprus, Denmark, Dominican Republic, Estonia, Finland, France, Great Britain, Georgia, Germany, Greece, Hong Kong, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Kazakhstan, Islamic Republic of Iran, Kyrgyzstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Macedonia, Macau (S A R), Malaysia, Malta, Mexico, Moldova, Monaco, Montenegro, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Palau, Panama, Peru, Poland, Portugal, Russia, Romania, Saint Kitts & Nevis, Samoa, San Marino, Serbia, Singapore, Slovakia, Slovenia, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Tajikistan, Turkey ( exclusively at the airport), Trinidad & Tobacco, Turkmenistan, USA, Ukraine, Uzbekistan, Venezuela, Yugoslavia.
There is no fee for the Airport's visa valid for one month and one entry only. Holders of Iraqi passports can be issued tourist visas upon their arrival to Lebanon via Beirut Airport, if they hold two thousand dollars in cash, hotel booking or known address, and a return ticket. Obtain Visa from the Embassy You can obtain a visa at the Embassy or by mail . The validity of a visa is 90 days starting from the issue date. - The duration of a visa is 15 days, one, three or six months starting from the day of entry to Lebanon.
In case of a visa for an underage child, both parents should sign a consent letter authorizing the child to travel. A visa will not be issued on any passport or travel document stamped with an Israeli visa or seal. Moreover, a Lebanese visa is rendered invalid if an Israeli visa or seal is stamped on the passport.
Required papers for Visa:
You need to fill out a Visa Application Form and present it to the Embassy with the followings:
a. Valid original passport with 2 clear colored photocopies of the pages that contain the full name, photo, passport #, issue date, and expiry date.
b. One recent color photos (Size 4,3 x 3,5 cm not drawn from another photos) showing full details of the face with a white background.
c. FOR MINORS UNDER 18 YEARS OF AGE, a consent letter to issue a passport or a visa is required from both parents. Authorizing the child to obtain a Visa In person: at the Embassy in front of the Consular Officer.
By mail: in front of a notary public.
d. University/ School or Work attestation
e. Prepaid self-addressed (return) envelope and a phone number.
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Farmers markets are one of the best sources for fresh fruits and vegetables, and also a good way to help support local farms and dairies. Below is a list of specific upcoming market dates. You can also see a complete list of our local farmers markets.
You can focus or expand your events search on our Events Calendar page.
Please note: events are entered by the individual event-holders. Please check the event websites or contacts to be sure the event has not been delayed by weather or canceled.


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Rug Yarn - Caribbean
Caribbean Teal Blue
Our custom line of wool rug yarn has been specifically designed for punch needle and rug hooking crafts!
Compatible with the Regular sized Oxford Punch Needles (8, 9 and 10) and equivalent punch needle sizes from other brands, this durable New Zealand wool stands up to wear and use, enabling you to create functional pieces including pillows and rugs that will last a lifetime.
- 125 g / 4.4 oz
- 100% New Zealand Wool
- 6-7 wpi (wraps per inch)
- Hand-dyed in India
- Approx. 62 yds per skein
- Strong and durable for creating long lasting, functional pieces
- Designed for use with the Regular sizes of Oxford Punch Needle
- Perfect for punch needle, rug hooking, and weaving crafts
We cannot accept returns or exchanges on yarn, so please make sure you have selected your colors carefully! If you have questions about the difference between shades, we recommend purchasing one of our Yarn Color Cards so you can see samples of all of our 42 colors before you place an order. You can see our full return policy here.


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Serving Upstate NY, Rome, Utica, Syracuse
An important part of a sealed crawl space is a reliable sump pump system. Without one, your crawl space will still be vulnerable to groundwater, as well as unnoticed plumbing leaks.
The SmartSump™ Crawl Space Sump Pump protects vulnerable crawl spaces by combining an intelligent WaterWatch® alarm system with a sump pump that's specifically designed for crawl spaces.
Start protecting your home from groundwater and leaks today. Schedule your free on-site crawl space sump pump estimate in Syracuse, Utica, Rome or nearby.
You no longer have to worry about leaks or sump failures because the WaterWatch® alarm makes homeowners aware of crawl space water issues as soon as they begin. Any water from a plumbing leak or sump failure must first pass by the alarm and will then drain down into the sump. The alarm will sound immediately if this happens, so you'll know you have a leak in your crawl space.
Crawl spaces without a SmartSump™ can remain wet for days, weeks, and even months without the homeowner realizing there's a water problem, but this alarm-equipped sump pump system gives you the comfort of knowing you're protected.
Along with a cast-iron Zoeller® sump pump, this system includes a floor drain to collect water from leaks and a WaterWatch® sump pump alarm that will sound off to notify you of any plumbing leaks or sump failures. Additionally, both our lid and floor drain are specially designed to prevent collected water from evaporating back out into your crawl space. Our optional battery backup sump pump can be included, pumping out more than 11,500 gallons of water on a single charge for maximum protection.
The SmartSump™ Crawl Space Sump Pump is fully compatible with our complete crawl space vapor barrier system. If you have no groundwater concerns but would still like to be protected from plumbing leaks, you may also want to consider our crawl space drain system.
Call us for a free crawl space sump pump quote today! We offer a wide range of sump pump systems and waterproofing solutions to help keep your basement or crawl space dry. The TripleSafe™ Sump Pump System offers extra levels of failure protection with both a high-powered backup pump and a battery-powered pump to protect against power outages.
Plus, with products like the TimeMachine Data Logger, you can track your sump pump's battery status, pump cycles, the below-grade space's relative humidity, and temperature, and much more with an easy-to-use app available on both Apple IOS and Android. We service Cicero, Auburn, Watertown, Oswego, Cortland, Oneonta, Jamesville and many nearby areas in New York.
Looking for a price? Get a no cost, no obligation free estimate.


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Relevant Links
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Ghana History Population Politics
Ghana is bounded on the north and northwest by Burkina Faso, on the east by Togo, on the south by the Atlantic Ocean, and on the west by Cote d'Ivoire. Formerly a British colony known as the Gold Coast, Ghana was the first nation in sub-Saharan Africa to achieve independence (1957). The country is named after the ancient empire of Ghana, from which the ancestors of the inhabitants of the present country are thought to have migrated. The total land area is 92,100 square miles (238,537) square kilometres).
Ghana is a lowland country, except for range of hills on the eastern border. The sandy coastline is backed by a coastal plain that is crossed by several rivers and streams, generally navigable only by canoe. In the west the plain is broken by heavily forested hills and many streams and rivers. To the north lies an undulating savanna that is drained by the Volta river, which flows south to the sea through a narrow gap in the hills. Lake Volta, in the east, is one of the largest artificial lakes in the world. Ghana's highest point, in the eastern hills, is about 2,900 feet (884 meters) above sea level.
The climate of Ghana is tropical, but temperatures vary with season and elevation.
Except in the north, two rainy seasons occur, from April to June and from September to November. In the north the rainy season begins in March and lasts until September. Annual rainfall ranges from about 40 inches (1,015 millimetres) in the north to about 80 inches (2,300 millimetres) in the south-east. The harmattan, a dry, north wind, blows from December to March lowering the humidity and creating hot days and cool nights in the north. In the south the effects of the harmattan are felt in January. In most areas the highest temperatures occur in March, the lowest in August. The average annual temperature is about 86F (30C).


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The first time I saw these ugly bedrooms, I did not know if I should laugh or cry! That someone then consider this to be trendy and makes a blog post about this shit is even worse. I other wise love beautiful bedrooms, so this trend makes me really angry. Enough is enough and how much more ugly trends can we suffer through!
My mother always said that honesty lasts the longest! Then I am honest in saying that this is the ugliest most unkempt ugly bedrooms I've seen so far in interior design and as a blogger Ive seen much…belive me.
Who comes up with all these terrible trends? and are people blind slaves of trends, in the same way that we all have become enslaved to technology?
Decor like a trashy drug addict HOT trend 2017!
Or just dont decorate AT ALL!
Dark depressing and dull a perfect trend to meat the dark winter with!
All this with trends makes me immediately think of the fairy tale of The Emperor's New Clothes. Everyone thought the narcissistic emperor's clothes were sooo fine, until a little honest child pointed and said … .but he is nakeeeed! Only THEN the crowd reacted, came out mass hypnosis, began to laugh hysterical and the emperor fled in panic ashamed.
The most comical is that in the blog post where the photos above were featured said … In These amazing bedrooms you wanna snooze forever. I rather say never awake again! If Sleeping Beauty had awakened to the sight of these distasteful decorated bedrooms with shabby sheets, she had ignored the prince and gone to sleep for another 100 years.
Or at least until the ugly trash-trend is over!
Of course, even I think that some trends are fine and also like to write about a few, but that one above is definitely not one of them :)
Be unique, be yourself!
All rights reserved - Copyright 2024


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Baltimore-area hospital CEOs and presidents boast seven-figure salaries, club and gym memberships, and paid financial planning and tax services as part of compensation packages from their nonprofit employers.
According to a survey of Baltimore-area hospitals, the highest-ranking executives were often the recipients of financial payouts and perquisites that many private-sector companies have abandoned in the face of intense public debate about excessive CEO pay. The heads of hospital systems, which oversee many facilities, tended to make the biggest salaries and incentives. Eight top executives made more than $1 million, and the largest CEO pay package totaled $7.8 million.
The article described some of the more corpulent compensation packages.
St Joseph Medical Center
One was from St Joseph Medical Center, already under fire for for the lavish use of cardiac procedures by one of its staff doctors:
St. Joseph Medical Center, a member of Catholic Health Initiatives, said in a statement that it offers a level of compensation that allows it to compete for talent. The hospital paid former CEO John K. Tolmie $846,128 in salary, bonus and other pay, the latest IRS filing shows.
'Hospital CEOs have one of the most demanding, high-pressure jobs in the nation, dealing on a daily basis with everything from ever-changing regulations to workforce shortages and lower reimbursement for services,' the hospital statement said.
Tolmie resigned in May 2009 after being on administrative leave to avoid a conflict of interest during a federal investigation. Since then, one of the hospital's cardiologists, Dr. Mark G. Midei, has been accused of performing hundreds of unnecessary heart procedures.
Mercy Medical Center:
Mercy Medical Center head Thomas Mullen made $1.08 million in compensation during fiscal 2009. The hospital said in a statement that it 'believes this compensation to be appropriate given the responsibilities of serving as a president and CEO of a $520 million health system.'
Johns Hopkins
One might expect the CEO of the Johns Hopkins hospital system to be paid well, but he was paid particularly well since he also seemed to have the full-time, separately paid position of dean of the medical school:
Edward Miller, CEO of Johns Hopkins Medicine, made $729,297. He also gets paid separately for his position as dean of the School of Medicine at Johns Hopkins University. The fiscal 2009 filing for the medical school was not yet available. But Miller collected $1.4 million for that job the year before.Summary
A chart of the compensation of all CEOs is here. As noted in the article, eight CEOs got more than $1 million, and another three got over $900,000.
A Baltimore Sun commentator noted that not only did the CEOs get large salaries, but:
Close to a dozen had personal dues for 'social clubs' financed by your charitable donations, tax dollars and health insurance premiums. Many enjoy lavish and opaque executive retirement plans that also put upward pressure on the medical costs that threaten government budgets and the economy.
As we have noted before, he pointed out that it is unseemly for not-for-profit hospitals, which are supposed to be devoted to the mission of caring for patients, usually explicitly including poor patients, and which are funded to a great extent by government programs and the income from donations, to make millionaires out of their top hired executives:
Hospitals aren't Goldman Sachs. They're not Stanley Black & Decker or Microsoft, either. They're nonprofits, getting charitable donations and huge government subsidies beyond all the loot they rake in from Medicare and Medicaid. If the newly required disclosures on the IRS 'Form 990' put pressure on hospital boards and CEOs to tone it down, it's about time.
People who donate to hospitals, thinking they are doing so to provide better health care, or to help out the less fortunate, may be surprised to hear about the hospital CEO as millionaire:
For some hospital donors, the revelations are transparently shocking.
'Donors are completely outraged,' says Ken Berger, president of Charity Navigator, an organization that helps people make smart giving choices. 'Donors tell us more than anything that they're just blown away by the fact that an organization that is a charity basically is creating millionaires in its leadership.'
'The most common remark we get is this: 'I've been giving to this organization for years, and I can't believe what the CEO is making, and I will never support this organization again.' '
I am glad that newspaper commentators are getting even more wound up on this issue than I have:
Why any hospital executive should need a company-paid club membership is a deep mystery. It can't be to woo potential donors. No donor with half a brain wants to endow an institution so employees can play golf with her money.
It shouldn't be to wine and dine business prospects. A hospital's business is collecting revenue for medical care. To be frank, there's too much of that going on already for the good of the country's wallet. Hospitals are far too focused on sales and marketing and not enough on delivering quality, efficient care.
Hospital trustees on any compensation committee can deliver a windy treatise about how pay for senior executives is ethical, carefully considered and worth every penny.
It's all a crock. The 'independent' compensation consultants that boards rely on are often referred by the CEO himself. The consultants know they can't make waves, or they won't get hired to rubber-stamp executive pay at other hospitals. To justify high pay, boards and consultants often use unrealistic comparisons from much bigger institutions or from the for-profit sector.
It doesn't take $1 million to get a great boss.
But it gets worse. People who love to play golf on company money, and feel entitled to make a million or more are not the right people to lead organizations that are supposed to focus first on health care, including health care for the less fortunate. Moreover, people who get used to the pay and perks are likely to focus on keeping them coming, rather than the mission, even if they started out with some devotion to the mission. Furthermore, the excessive pay and perks are perverse incentives, telling the CEOs that they are wonderful people, they can do no wrong, and should stand for no criticism, all further diverting them from what they really are supposed to be doing: upholding the mission.
As we have said many times before, true health care reform would encourage leadership of health care who understand health care and care about its mission, rather than those who see a quick way to make a small fortune.


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Most of the posts that usually gather in the blog hop are activities. Before we get to activities, we might want to ask ourselves some questions, like "What is multiplication?" Multiplication can be modeled in many ways, and it's important to give young kids a chance to think about it through lots of different frameworks. Your own conceptions of multiplication may grow as you think about it.
One resource that will help you broaden your perspective on multiplication (along with a number of other math topics) is the lovely book Moebius Noodles. (It's $15 for the paperback version, and whatever you decide to pay for the pdf version.) It is full of activities to share with young kids.
I also love the art connection made by Waldorf schools, with their multiplication stars. Beauty helps us love what we're doing, which helps us learn.
As we teach, the more we can see the child's understanding, and help that grow, instead of telling them what is so, the better off we are. I can think of two ways we might just tell children our adult understanding, without giving them enough opportunities for exploration. One is in the commutative nature of multiplication, noticing that 3x5 = 5x3. Kids don't see that at first. If we tell them, we take away their chance to discover it. I never knew that until I read 'Third Graders Explore Multiplication', a chapter by Virginia Brown in the book What's Happening In Math Class, Volume 1, edited by Deborah Schifter. [You might be interested to know that mathematicians study versions of multiplication that are not commutative. Matrices are a tool for solving systems of equations, if A and B are matrices, AB may not equal BA.]
The other example I'd like to share of this is our knowledge that to multiply by ten we just "add a zero". (Why does that work?) Here's an excerpt from the chapter 'Trust, Montessori Style', by Pilar Bewley in the soon-to-be-published book Playing With Math (edited by me):
Answer Versus Process
Five-and-a-half-year-old Roland came to ask if he could multiply 8,696 times 10 using the stamp game. I was thrilled to see his interest in math taking off again after an unfortunate temper tantrum with the addition blank chart. I suggested he borrow a stamp game box from another classroom to supplement the one we have in ours, and he got started.
It took him a while to figure out where he would do the work, and then he painstakingly began to make 8,696 with the stamps… Six units, nine tens, six hundreds, and eight thousands… Leave a space and repeat… Six units, nine tens, six hundreds, and eight thousands…
He made the amount five times before it was time to go home, and he left his work out so he could return to it the next day. (Can you imagine what that looks like, once you've made 8,696 with little colored tiles ten times? How cool!)
"I'm going to get right back to work as soon as I change my shoes," he declared before leaving that afternoon. "I won't even talk to anybody!"
I waited eagerly for him to arrive the next morning, looking forward to the moment when he would put AAAAAALLLLLL those tiles together in neat rows by category, and he would have to exchange several times (not to mention his surprise at seeing all the units disappear when multiplying by ten).
Instead Roland came in, shook my hand, and said: "My dad told me that all I have to do is add a zero to 8,696 and I'll have my answer, because when you multiply by ten you just add a zero."
My heart sank. Oh no, Dad! You robbed your son of such a cool experience! He was getting ready to see what ten times 8,696 looks like, and would have discovered the process that takes place during multiplication. He won't be doing multiplication tables for at least two more years in public school - the answer doesn't matter yet, but the process could have really taught him something valuable.
Although I firmly believe that math is about understanding, multiplication facts are one of the few things that need to be memorized. Many students come to college not knowing those basic facts. When I was teaching beginning algebra, I gave a quick quiz on all the basic multiplication facts, and required students to keep trying until they could get 85% right. Here are some of the suggestions I offered them:
- Try some of the games at Math Playground.
- Use these flash cards, which help you visualize the numbers.
- Play the Product Game.
Those suggestions were for adults who were likely to have emotional baggage about not yet knowing something basic. For kids, just have fun. Make up games (like John Golden does) using dice or cards, go on scavenger hunts, or tell stories. (Perhaps you could tell stories about the large family, who have to buy in bulk because they have so many children. Each child needs 3 pair of shoes, for dress-up, play, and beach. How many shoes are in that house?)
Hmm, all of that and I haven't even mentioned division. I guess that will have to wait for its own post.


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Yoga for Depression and Anxiety – Help without Drugs
Michael Auryn
Waking Times
Nearly one in five Americans suffers from an anxiety disorder, according to the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH). Stress and stress-related diseases have skyrocketed since the industrial revolution, with stress being a daily reality for most Americans. Those with anxiety disorders are at higher risk for coronary heart disease, heart attacks and strokes. Not to mention the difficulty of being deeply uncomfortable on a daily basis. Luckily, there are simple and natural ways to combat such stresses, with yoga for depression and anxiety being one of them.
Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy (CBT) is considered one of the most time-tested, verified and accepted form of treatment. It is recommended that anxiety-sufferers try this approach as a first line of defense. However, some people may not find improvement in therapy or may want to take control of their anxiety by initiating their own recovery-programs concurrent with therapy.
Prescription drugs are also among the most commonly used form of treatments. It is important to note that prescription drugs may show great efficacy in reducing or eliminating symptoms, but that is the extent of their benefit: symptoms. Pills do not address the root causes of the anxiety; they merely suppress its effects.
The drugs may work for some, but a whole host of side-effects also appear, and when a patient misses a dose or goes off the drug, the anxiety can return in full force. The drug hides the symptoms but does not change behavior and outlook in a permanent way. That is why many people have looked to alternative therapies like yoga to help combat their anxiety.
Yoga for Depression and Anxiety
Controlled studies have shown that yoga for depression and anxiety can be very effective, having a direct, potent and lasting effect on anxiety disorders. One such study involved a group of veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder. They engaged in a program featuring guided meditation, yoga asanas (stretching poses), stress reduction techniques and breathing exercises. After six weeks the group had an overall decrease of 15 points on the Clinician Administered PTSD Scale (CAPS), moving the group from moderate to severe anxiety down to mild through moderate. The improvement was dramatic and the control group showed no improvement.
In a 2005 German study, distressed women who participated in yoga for three months showed a 50 percent drop in depression, a 30 percent drop in anxiety and a 65 percent increase in overall wellbeing – clear research that shows yoga for depression and anxiety works.
Anxiety is a maladaptive response of the brain, meaning that it serves no practical survival function. Fear, anxiety and an excited nervous system are part of a fight-or-flight response that protects us from danger. Anxiety sufferers experience the same hyperactive nervous system, but they do so in benign situations.
Yoga has been shown to counteract this response. Studies have shown that consistent yoga practice can lead to lower heart rate, lower blood pressure, calm breathing and a relaxed thought process in lieu of an overactive cycle of worries and negative thoughts.
Many anxiety sufferers have a low pain tolerance. Chronic pain is common among many people with anxiety disorders. At the University of Utah, regular yoga practice was shown to correlate with a high pain tolerance. The evidence suggests that by relaxing the mind and body, yoga can reduce the pain-related aspects of anxiety.
These studies are part of a growing pool of research that clearly proves that yoga for depression and anxiety can be positively powerful. With tens of thousands of yoga studios in America, this ancient practice is no longer viewed as a new-age pseudoscience. It can deliver powerful results in the treatment of anxiety and the promotion of a relaxed mind and body. Through yoga, anxiety sufferers can take control of their condition and be proactive about its treatment. By engaging in a regular practice, these people can create permanent changes in the way their brain perceives and responds to stress. This approach tackles the deep, root causes of the disorder to make permanent changes that improve well-being.
Additional Sources:
National Institute of Mental Helath
This article originally appeared at NaturalSociety.com, an excellent source for alternative health truth news.
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Severe ice crusting during February and March 2003 smothered both winter grains and alfalfa fields throughout central and southern Ukraine. Approximately 50 percent of Ukraine's winter wheat perished over the winter, including nearly 90 percent in the Dnipropetrovsk region, which is one of Ukraine's top grain producing regions. The ice also destroyed 90 percent of the barley crop, and 30 percent of the rye crop.
The difference between a normal year of winter crop production and this spring's devastating losses is shown in the pair of images of above, captured on April 17, 2003 (top), and April 21, 2002 (bottom), by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) aboard NASA's Terra spacecraft. The false-color composite shows vegetation as green, bare ground as brownish-red, clouds as light blue, and water as black or dark blue.
Bare soil dominates this year's image, with most of the Ukraine (center), southwestern Russia (right), and Moldova (southwest of Ukraine) swathed in deep reddish brown. Slim ribbons of green vegetation line the small rivers feeding into the Dnieper River (center), and in the upper left corner, the Pripet Marshes appear green as well. At bottom center is the northern part of the Black Sea, with the Sea of Azov to the northeast. The Russian landscape to the east of the Sea of Azov had dramatically less vegetation this spring than last.
According to statistics from the USDA Foreign Agricultural Service, this year's winterkill in Ukraine was the worst in recent history (see graph). The wheat production estimate of 9.5 million tons put out in May by the Production Estimates and Crop Assessment Division (PECAD) of the Foreign Agricultural Service was the lowest in 40 years. Read more about the crop damage in an article by PECAD.
Image courtesy Jeff Schmaltz, MODIS Rapid Response Team, NASA GSFC


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Please welcome today's guest contributor, Karen Griffin, a PhD student at the University of Lincoln who is trying to figure what makes relationships with dogs work. Please read on, as she is hoping for your help!
Hi Mia & Julie,
I am currently working on a study to examine factors that affect successful dog relationships and placements. I am using a new approach to do this, which involves dog owners and shelter/rescue staff assessing dogs using a set of game-like tests.
The abandonment of dogs is a problem that affects much of the world. In the UK between 2014 and 2015, local authorities handled over 100,000 stray dogs. In the US, the problem is even more monumental; recent estimates suggest that nearly four million dogs enter shelters nationally per year, and over one million of those are euthanized.
What makes some relationships work? Flickr Creative Commons |
These are frightening statistics, and science has taken notice in recent years, aiming to understand and help reduce this epidemic. However, much of this research is narrow in focus and scope, by relying on the analysis of retrospective data, that's collected by shelters when dogs are relinquished, or in the way it conceptualizes the dog-owner relationship. In the case of the latter, the dog-human relationship is traditionally understood as a static, unchanging one (e.g. Prato-Previde et al., 2003; Marston et al., 2005). At the same time, there are indications that our lifestyles and relationships with dogs are not fixed, but dynamic.
Credit: Steve Benisty
So now the question is, what do we do about this? How can we understand or predict which dogs and owners will be able to resolve conflict and thus which relationships will succeed? My research has hypothesized that behavioural flexibility (i.e., adaptability) is central to this, so I am assessing this in both humans (i.e., long-term dog owners, dog adopters, and dog relinquishers) as well as dogs.
Game time
This is where I need help! I created a citizen science study that dog lovers worldwide can join. I have developed a set of four game-like tests that assess behavioural flexibility in dogs:
- L-Shaped Food Finding Test
- Time Alone Test
- Three-Toy Test
- Pointing Test
About you
I am seeking help from people in these two groups:
I am seeking help from people in these two groups:
- Long-term dog owners to participate with their own dog(s) (i.e. people who have owned their dog for at least three years)
- Animal shelters, rescue centres, rehoming organizations to participate with dogs without a current home
Time commitment
The study should take approximately 10 minutes per test plus 10 minutes for set-up and background survey completion. An hour should be sufficient for everything. Please note, you do not have to complete all four tests to participate.
The study should take approximately 10 minutes per test plus 10 minutes for set-up and background survey completion. An hour should be sufficient for everything. Please note, you do not have to complete all four tests to participate.
Dog owners link for questionnaire and games: http://www.thedogrehomingproject.org/want-to-get-your-dog-in-on-the-fun/
Participate with a shelter or rescue dog (dog without a current home): http://www.thedogrehomingproject.org/get-involved-contribute-to-the-science/work-or-volunteer-in-an-animal-shelter-or-for-a-dog-rescue/
Please don't hesitate to contact me should you have any questions: email@example.com Thank you for considering contributing to this study of what makes relationships stick!


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Data Center Power Problems
Power Problems Cause Disturbances and Downtime
Data centers require a high level of electrical reliability, and uninterrupted availability continues to be a significant concern for data center managers. Power quality issues can cause equipment failure, downtime, data corruption, and are expensive for your operations.
To avoid power disturbances and system downtime, it's important to identify power anomalies in your facility and implement preventive steps to reduce risks.
What Causes Power Problems?
Although power anomalies can originate outside your facility, equipment and processes within the data center create most power problems. Power anomalies can be a nuisance, or can lead to a complete power failure.
Power supply interference can come in multiple forms:
- Voltage transients and surges
- Voltage swells, sags, and spikes
- Voltage imbalance or fluctuations
- Power frequency variation
- Poor facility grounding
Causes of power quality issues include load changes, breaker faults, short circuits, or ground faults. Any of these issues can lead to hardware damage or loss of critical processing equipment.
What You Can Do?
Understanding your data center's environment and equipment capacities can help you identify problems. When exploring power quality issues consider this:
- Appropriate Equipment
As a facility grows, demands on the power system increase. Assess the capacity of your data center infrastructure. Can it be scaled for future growth? Having the appropriate equipment in place, such as modular/scalable UPS systems can help with future growth, and minimize risk of power failure. For example, UPS systems provide conditioned backup power to keep vital operational systems running while reducing the risk for harmonic disruptions and line transients. Also investing in power monitoring software can help manage power quality issues and predict future problems. - Environment
One of the most overlooked factors that could be affecting your data center power is the environment. Regular maintenance of support equipment, generators, UPS & AC systems will increase uptime in the data center.
Addressing power quality issues can be a critical challenge for data center and facility managers whose operations are dense and complex.
As your Vertiv partner, we can help you implement solutions to minimize the risk of future power issues while maximizing operational efficiency and equipment lifespan.
We provide a full line of data center power solutions including power distribution, control, and monitoring. We also offer a data center assessment to help you assess power issues and implement best practices in data center power performance. Contact us today to learn more.


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Hutch Telecommunications, Sri Lanka's preferred choice for mobile broadband services has enhanced its popular cliQ app enabling all its 078 & 072 subscribers to enjoy unlimited Internet experience on its nationwide Bigger and Better 4G network.
072 subscribers have been enjoying cliQ 3G since 2017 and post the take-over of Etisalat Sri Lanka last year by Hutch and the deployment of a new nationwide 4G network, the new cliQ app has now been optimised to offer Cliq 4G to both 078 and 072 subscribers.
cliQ is a mobile application with which users can conveniently purchase Time-based Internet packages and enjoy an unlimited internet experience on their smartphones. It provides unlimited mobile Internet access in Time blocks instead of fixed data quotas which means users will have peace of mind and not have to constantly worry about suddenly running out of data or even wonder where all the data has disappeared to.
The App is available on Google Playstore, Apple App Store and Huawei AppGallery.
The new Hutch cliQ will enable users to seamlessly and conveniently go online on either their 3G or 4G smartphones by purchasing a choice of 3G or 4G network cliQ plans starting from 30 minutes up to 30 Days for both Pre-paid and Post-paid customers.
"With the new enhancement of cliQ to 4G , we are able to deliver further on our promise of even more accessible and convenient mobile data experience to Sri Lankan consumers to complement their digital lifestyles and needs," AGM Data, VAS & Digital Yarthav Mathiaparanam noted.


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All flowers and gifts will be delivered beautifully presented in wraps finished with pretty ribbons. Your personal message will be laminated and sealed in an envelop or displayed on your gift hamper.
Q: CAN I SEE THE FINAL PRODUCT BEFORE IT IS DELIVERED?We provide completed product photos for every item you ordered before delivery. This will be sent to your mobile via sms complete with delivery details tracking of your product.
Q: CAN I INCLUDE A PERSONAL MESSAGE WITH MY ORDER?You can add your personal message with every gift by using the message field as shown below. Your message will be laminated and sealed in an envelop or displayed on your gift hamper
You can preorder from 1st DEC to 20 DEC now for our christmas gifts and hampers. The last day for delivery for christmas collections will be on 24 DEC. The delivery timing for our christmas period will be between 0800-1200, 1300-1800 & 1900-2200. You'll receive an exact timing of your delivery via sms and or email a day before your specified delivery.
Q: WHAT ARE THE DELIVERY CHARGES?Delivery to any locations in Singapore or in Sentosa is free. There are no extra charges for delivery to airports, hotels, offices or high security areas. All orders can be delivered within 6 hours upon completion of your order. We do cater for urgent delivery within 3 hours of your order for an extra charge of SGD$30 and urgent delivery within 3-6 hours of your order for an extra charge of SGD$20.
Q: CAN I ARRANGE FOR SPECIAL REQUESTS DURING DELIVERY?Yes! Our delivery team are trained with a common aim to keep customer's satisfaction at heart thus we will coordinate with any requests made to make the delivery surprise a possible one.
Q: CAN I TRACK MY DELIVERY?We provide full tracking information from the time your ordered product is on the way to the exact timing it will be arriving through our SMS system. You will receive an email with the signed delivery order when your recipient receives the product.