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text:
As the saying goes, nothing lasts forever — and that goes for most companies. Then again, with the right succession plan in place, you can do your part to ensure your business continues down a path of success for at least another generation. From there, it will be your successor's job to propel it further into perpetuity.
Some business owners make the mistake of largely ignoring succession planning under the assumption that it's taken care of within their estate plans. Others create a succession plan but fail to adequately integrate it into their estate plan. To avoid these mistakes, it's important to recognize the difference between succession planning and estate planning.
Similar, but different
Essentially, succession planning is the careful identification and training of those who will not only take over the day-to-day operations of your company, but also lead it forward to future growth. Your family members and other heirs will likely be affected here. But many others will be as well — including your named successor (whether or not a family member), business partners, employees, vendors and customers.
Estate planning, meanwhile, involves determining the distribution of your assets through gifting strategies, wills and other tools (such as trusts and insurance). The people affected by it are your family members and other heirs.
Because of this important distinction, it's critical to undertake succession planning and estate planning as a joint effort. After all, who gets leadership responsibilities in the business and who gets ownership interests in the business may or may not be the same.
You must ask yourself who is best suited to run the business when you depart, and what ownership transfer plan will treat you and all of your heirs fairly or otherwise achieve your estate planning goals. This includes, among other things, knowing when you want to retire and how much income you'll need to do it.
Success today and tomorrow
Do you have both a clear succession plan and a well-documented estate plan? And are the two compatible in every respect? To make absolutely sure you can answer "yes" to both of these questions, please contact us. Our firm can help you develop plans that will distribute your assets per your wishes while putting your company in the best position to succeed going forward.
© 2017

subset: commoncrawl


text:
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Online readers, and especially those not involved in the "Ivory Wars" clearly set out in the endnotes of The Color of Ivory, should be aware of at least two things before embarking on this review. First, that seven years ago Carolyn Connor wrote an article on traces of color on the Joshua plaques in the Metropolitan Museum of Art,1 interesting because it enlarged greatly on Kurt Weitzmann's observation in 1930 that their "rosette bands show traces of red and blue color of later date but which surely are [to be considered] modern only with difficulty."2 Second, that I have already written a short, critical notice of The Color of Ivory3 and agreed to the editors' request for the present review only because I consider the issue that it raises, and in particular, the manner of argumentation that Connor employs, to be of some concern; neither could be properly discussed within the 190-word limit imposed on the authors of such notices.
The outward appearance of Connor's book is one of rigorous scientific objectivity. Following an Introduction in which the errors and omissions of previous scholars (including the present author's) are duly noted, Chapter 1 presents a brief history of her interest in the objects and a description of the "materials and methods" used in their analysis. We are then introduced to the "Database" (printed as Appendix A) of what she calls the "Ivory Project," a schema in which she classifies the traces of color that she found on 100 pieces in museums from New York to St. Petersburg. Belying Connor's subtitle, thirty-six of these are Late Antique. To justify their presence, three such objects are included in the fifteen "Case Studies" that occupy the majority of this chapter. Its successor includes the real meat of her thesis: pp. 25–28 represent the reports of two conservators who undertook to analyze the pigments discovered "under the Scanning Electron Microscope by means of energy dispersive X-ray spectometry." To these results I shall return below. Thereafter comes a chapter on "The Ancient Tradition of Polychrome Ivories," at the end of which one Late Antique diptych (the Asclepius and Hygieia in Liverpool) is mentioned, and then a chapter devoted to "The Testimony of Ancient and Medieval Texts" (pp. 47–65, where Late Antique and Byzantine discourse makes its appearance on p. 62). Chapter 5 attempts to pull together the significance of all of this for "the Byzantine Aesthetic," which in Connor's view, as conveyed by the title of her Conclusion, requires "Shifting the Paradigm." The book ends with the above-mentioned Database and six serviceable black-and-white drawings noting the location of colors on the Metropolitan's Joshua plaques.
We are thus returned to the point of departure. But from this moment on Connor engages in a series of misrepresentations and omissions that, whether deliberate or not, serve to magnify her own contribution. Already on the first page, having introduced Weitzmann's book on the Joshua Roll into the argument, she claims that he "addresses the iconography, inscriptions, and style of both manuscript and ivories but never discusses color." Of course he did not: in his book on the Roll, Weitzmann referred the reader specifically to his earlier description of the plaques, including the comments on color with which I began this review. And so it goes throughout the book. The Forty Martyrs plaque in Berlin, which today retains only "clear traces of localized" color, is described as "probably cleaned in order to regularize its appearance when the pigment started to flake off." This is not so. When I examined it before the cleaning in 1987, it was evident that much of the pigment was a later addition; red and blue paint had dropped onto the shoulders and hands of some of the martyrs. As Hans-Georg Severin, then the director of the Skulpturengalerie, realized, and as he made clear in an article that Connor ignores,4 the taste embodied in the painted decoration was utterly at odds with what she calls the Byzantine aesthetic. Similarly, the Metropolitan Museum's removal of the color from the "Oppenheim casket" (her name for the box with the Deesis, archangels, and apostles), she fails to observe that no polychromy was found under its later lock plate—a clear sign, as Charles T. Little put it, that "the entire casket was never intended to have color."5 A final example of omission is more embarrassing to report since it involves my own work. Discussing at length the Dumbarton Oaks Emperor plaque and its partner in Gotha, the first of which displays some paint, she remarks that these "are very likely surviving tenth-century examples of the 'decorated ivory plaques' awarded officials on the ceremonial occasions of conferring the titles referred to in the Kletorologion of Philotheos."6 Johanna Flemming had had this insight in 1978 and I, unaware of Flemming's work, arrived at the same conclusion in 1985.7 I repeated it in 1994, citing Flemming's article.8 My discussions appeared in books that Connor otherwise cites repeatedly; no reference to any of these readings appears in The Color of Ivory.
But more than academic bad manners affects Connor's central argument, which begins with the pigment analyses of five pieces (the Joshua plaques, the Forty Martyrs triptych in the Hermitage, and the Metropolitan's Deesis box) conducted at this last museum's Department of Objects Conservation. These identify natural ultramarine and lapis lazuli blues,9 natural cinnabar and dry-process vermilion reds, greens from malachite and terre verte, browns and blacks that were mixtures of malachite, terre verte, and cinnabar, and gold foil laid directly on the ivory. Leaning heavily on such cautious phrasing as one conservator's observation that the use of natural ultramarine "would be consistent with a medieval date," Connor then elaborates on the history of these pigments, citing texts from the elder Pliny to Cennino Cennini. There is nothing wrong with searching for philological corroboration of an idea, but it would have been more to the point to recall that natural ultramarine was used by Poussin and van Dyck, by Hogarth, and by van Meegeren in his fake Vermeers and Pieter de Hoochs.10 As to dry-process vermilion, Connor tells us that it was "described in a text dating from around 800 B.C.E.," but surely the proper question is how long it continued to be employed: the answer is certainly as late as Monet's Water Lilies after 1916. A malachite-based green was identified in Renoir's Chrysanthemums in Chicago, and terre verte was found in a nineteenth-century collection of artist's pigments in Stuttgart.
Obviously, none of this requires that all the colors on Late Antique and Byzantine ivories were later additions. But it does mean that the onus of proof is on the investigator who claims that they are original, and this obligation is excluded by definition from chapters devoted to ancient and medieval testimonies. Indeed, nowhere in the book is there even mentioned the rage for polychromy in nineteenth-century Europe. This is not the place to discuss the cult at length. But one might well suppose that someone so concerned with antiquity as Connor is would pay some attention to the famous lecture "Sollen wir unsere Statuen bemalen?" delivered in 1884 by Georg Treu, the excavator of Olympia, and his subsequent Ausstellung farbiger und getönter Bildwerke,a blockbuster show of 330 ancient and modern objects, mounted at the Königliche Nationalgalerie in Berlin in the following year.11 For our present purposes, outstanding among these were creations of Wilhelmine Germany (see nos. 193–266), in which, as in the "copy" of the Athena Parthenos made in 1884 (no. 53), the flesh of the figures was left unpainted while almost everything else was liberally colored. This is precisely the distinction that obtains in Connor's "reconstructions" of the plaques depicting the Gibeonites before Joshua and the Asclepius and Hygieia (pls. IV, VIII).
In France things went further. Even before the astonishing discovery of the painted terracotta figures at Tanagra in 1873—eventually responsible for Gérôme's famous canvas, Painting Breathes Life into Sculpture—the sculptor Le Harivet-Durochet discovered that his relief in the chapel of the Immaculate Conception at Sées had been painted at the orders of the clergy. Gérôme's Tanagra of 1890 was a marble personification in which the lips, eyes, and hair were accented in color, while his chryselephantine statue of Bellona, shown at the Salon of 1893 and at the Royal Academy in London, had head and limbs of tinted ivory carved by the sculptor Moreau-Vauthier.12 All in all, we must take into account what Günter Bandmann called "local and epochal differences" in attitudes toward materials; as he pointed out, well into the nineteenth century, pursuant to the Idealist credo that they were subordinate to artistic form and concetto,—the most expensive materials gold, ivory, precious stones were seen to be enhanced when they were painted.13
Where, then, do Late Antique and Byzantine ivories fit in this enlarged picture? As has long been recognized, presentation diptychs of the fifth and sixth centuries retain traces of color at least some of which may be original. But our understanding of this situation is not helped when Connor tells us that "a large piece of bright orange-red pigment adhered to Asclepius' robe, while numerous green crystals appeared in the folds of his cloak." In fact, he wears a single garment and no red appears on his robe in the "reconstruction." So, too, both he and Hygieia are described in the text as "red-haired," yet in the plate her hair has the same pallid mauve tint as is visited on her flesh. Connor makes no reference whatsoever to the tabulae ansatae above, and the bases below, these statues, where both Delbrueck and common sense suggest the former presence of painted inscriptions.
Byzantine ivories, on the other hand, may well have displayed far less polychromy than is claimed for them. On the Gibeonite plaque, Connor shows a long inscription all but totally effaced with a dark blue pigment presumably applied by the craftsman who had previously and painstakingly carved it.14 The tenth-century Emperor diptych leaf in Washington, we are told, "proves to have been brightly painted, with a green-stained border over parts of which were substantial remnants of bright blue paint."15 These traces are still there but the question remains when they were applied. Perhaps because it is not in her database, there is no discussion of the other leaf in Gotha. This has no corresponding polychromy, an absence that strongly suggests the color on the Washington leaf is a later addition. In a generalization, Connor argues that color has been "intentionally removed in the restoration of ivories by owners whose tastes preferred them to be monochrome,"16 adding in an endnote that "[j]udging from the consistency with which similar color traces reappear over and over again in the test group, it is highly unlikely that this was coincidentally the product of many individuals making similar decisions to repaint over a long period of time and in widely diverging circumstances and geographical locations." To which one can only respond by asking whether it is likely, given this diversity of provenance, that so many objects were so assiduously stripped of their color. Connor has sensitized us to the presence of paint,17 some of which may indeed be vestiges of a pristine state. Beyond the question of repainting, there looms the larger issue of the original extent of this decoration. At present there exists no reason to suppose that most Byzantine ivories were any more extensively colored than those of medieval Islam, the Anglo-Saxon, or the Gothic world.18
Anthony Cutler
Department of Art History, Pennsylvania State University
1 "New Perspectives on Byzantine Ivories," Gesta 30 (1991), 100–111.
2 Adolf Goldschmidt and Kurt Weitzmann, Die byzantinischen Elfenbeinskulpturen des X.–XIII. Jahrhunderts, I, Kästen (Berlin: Bruno Cassirer, 1930), nos. 1–3.
3 Choice 36, 1, September 1998, no. 36–0086, 109.
4 "Zu drei restaurierten Kunstwerken der Frühchristlich-Byzantinischen Sammlung," Jahrbuch Preussicher Kulturbesitz 24 (1987), 125–35, esp. 132.
5 The Glory of Byzantium. Art and Culture of the Middle Byzantine Era A.D. 843–1261, eds. Helen C. Evans and William D. Wixom, exh. cat. (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1997), no. 78.
6 This entire discussion is confused. Connor claims that "it is unclear from the texts whether the tablets, the writing, or the codicils were purple." Yet the Kletorologion differentiates between "decorated ivory plaques" and inscribed codicils, as Nicolas Oikonomides, Les Listes de préséance byzantines du IXe et Xe siecle, (Paris: CNRS, 1972), 93 n. 41, showed, citing numerous references in the Book of Ceremonies to the presentation either of codicils alone (De cer., 238 lines 11, 15; 239 lines 11–13; 240 line 22 and passim) or of ivory plaques alone (De cer. 248 line 11; 249 line 22; 251 line 4). Moreover, Philotheos, 95 line 11, himself says that the insignia of the anthypatos consist of purple inscribed codicils. It is clear that it is not the diptychs that were "purple dyed" and that the "purple inscribed codicils" were not "plaques made of ivory dyed purple and inscribed" (Connor, 63).
7 Johanna Flemming in Byzantinische Kunstexport, ed. Heinrich L. Nickel (Halle: Martin-Luther-Universität, 1978) 191; Anthony Cutler, The Craft of Ivory. Sources, Techniques and Uses in the Mediterranean World: A.D. 200–1400 (Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks, 1985), 53.
8 Anthony Cutler, The Hand of the Master. Craftsmanship, Ivory and Society in Byzantium (9th–11th Centuries) (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 235, 281 n. 35.
9 One would have thought that more relevant than the inlays in this material on the Assyrian ivories from Nimrud that Connor adduces, drawing her information from Richard Barnett, would be the information provided by the Byzantine Book of the Eparch (a 10th-century text and therefore contemporary with many of the ivories in question) about the lapis lazuli (and indigo) brought into the Empire by Muslim merchants. But here, as throughout, the Byzantine evidence is slighted in favor of Ancient Near Eastern and Classical sources.
10 These uses and those cited immediately below depend on a source no more esoteric than the papers by various hands in Artists' Pigments. A Handbook of their History and Characteristics, II, ed. Ashok Roy (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art , 1993). Natural ultramarine was available to me as a child in my Winsor and Newton's paint-box.
11 In addition to the catalogue itself (Berlin: Mittler, 1885), a very rare bibliographical item, see the review of the exhibition by G. Schäfer, "Die Ausstellung gefärbter und getönter Bildwerke in Berlin,"Centralblatt für Bauverwaltung 5 (1885), 493. This event was only the climax of a movement that was well under way by mid-century. In 1853 the archaeologist Anselm Feuerbach condemned the rampant polychromy of the time with the words "The venerable grey hair of age is covered up by a blond wig . . . or a spotted fool's cap." See The Colour of Sculpture, 1840–1910, exh. cat. ed. Andreas Blühm (Zwolle: Waanders, 1996), 29.
12 Blühm, Colour of Sculpture, 32, 45. See also William R. Johnston, "Later Ivories" in Masterpieces of Ivory from the Walters Art Gallery, ed. Richard H. Randall, Jr. (New York: Hudson Hills, 1985), 284. Again, generally, Moreau-Vauthier and his contemporaries left the fleshy areas unpainted while embellishing hair, clothing, and garments with gold, onyx, malachite, etc. See Masterpieces of Ivory, color pls. 90–93. The only discussion of 19th-century practices in Connor's book concerns the making of plaster casts.
13 "Der Wandel der Materialbewertung in der Kunsttheorie des 19. Jahrhunderts" in Beiträge zur Theorie der Künste im 19. Jahrhundert, eds. Helmut Koopman and J. Adolf Schmoll gen. Eisenwerth, (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1971), I, 132.
14 As much is true of the St. Petersburg Forty Martyrs (pl. XII). Connor makes no reference to the fact that someone (the former curator Matsulevich?) removed the paint in this area to reveal the requisite identifying inscription.
15 Connor does not explicitly say that the color is original but this is the clear implication of her text. Other examples of sleight of hand are harder to spot. Thus when she says that "current methods of cleaning ivory may continue to remove traces of their coloration, but these are fortunately being reconsidered," it is only when the reader turns to the endnote attached to this sentence that he or she realizes that the reference is to a report that argues against the use of certain solvents not on the ground that they remove color, but because they "cause changes in the composition of ivory on the top surface layers."
16 On the contrary, it is evident that certain collectors preferred their objects colored. It can scarcely be an accident that at least three ivories from the Spitzer collection (the Louvre Nativity Triptych, the Berlin Washing of the Feet, and the Dumbarton Oaks Deposition) display considerable amounts of paint. So, too, it is an interesting coincidence that the two ivories obtained by Henry Walters from Henri Daguerre both display traces of pigment. The study of collectors' preferences and dealers' "restorations" is critical to the question of polychromy on ivories; this sort of information is a serious omission from Connor's "database."
17 It is noted, for example, on newly discovered ivories and steatites. See Anthony Cutler, "A Byzantine Triptych in Medieval Germany and Its Modern Recovery," Gesta 37 (1998), 11, n. 31; Clare Brisby, "Colour and Relief on Byzantine Sculpture: The Contribution of an Icon in Steatite," Apollo no. 144 (December 1996), 54–58.
18 For the state of research, see the papers by Danielle Gaborit-Chopin in Images in Ivory. Precious Objects of the Gothic Age, exh. cat., Detroit Institute of Art, ed. Peter Barnet (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 47–61 and Paul Williamson and Leslie Webster, "The Coloured Decoration of Anglo-Saxon Ivory Carvings" in Early Medieval Wall Painting and Painted Sculpture in England, eds. Sharon Cather, David Park, and Paul Williamson (Oxford: BAR, 1990), 177–194.


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The Obama Administration is investing in our nation's defensive military forces needed to deter war and to protect the security of our country in the 21st Century.
Thanks to the extraordinary service of our men and women in uniform, we're winding down a decade of war; we're destroying the terrorist network that attacked us; we're strengthening the alliances that extend our values. And today, every American can be proud that the United States is safer and stronger and more respected in the world.President Barack Obama
Guiding Principles
The Obama Administration is investing in a strong, agile, well-trained, and well-equipped U.S. military that can fight and win the nation's wars. U.S. Armed Forces must be able to prevail in current operations and the missions they are most likely to face, while developing capabilities to deter potential adversaries and provide a hedge against other risks and contingencies. Our policies will incorporate lessons from our experience in Iraq and Afghanistan. First and foremost, we will ensure that our troops have the training, equipment and support that they need when they are deployed, and the care that they and their families need and deserve.
The National Security Strategy, released May 27, 2010, lays out a strategic approach for advancing American interests, including the security of the American people, a growing U.S. economy, support for our values, and an international order that can address 21st century challenges.
- Authorized a strike in Pakistan that resulted in the death of Osama bin Laden, the leader of al Qaeda.
- Ended the combat mission in Iraq.
- Ratified a landmark nuclear arms treaty with Russia, New START.
- Renewed talks with NATO and other allies and partners on strategic issues.
- Developed a comprehensive new strategy on Afghanistan and Pakistan and authorized deployment of more than 33,000 "surge" troops to Afghanistan.
- Announced creation of a Joint Virtual Lifetime Electronic Record for members of the U.S. Armed Forces to improve quality of medical care.
Take Care of Our Troops, Military Families, and Veterans
On August 5, 2011 President Obama announced new commitments to servicemembers and veterans that will provide a comprehensive plan to lower veteran unemployment and ensure that servicemembers leave the military career-ready through hiring tax credits, private sector commitments, and reforms that improve the way we prepare, train, and educate servicemembers for life after the military. The commitment to America's veterans includes:
- Returning Heroes and Wounded Warrior Tax Credits: A new Returning Heroes Tax Credit for firms that hire unemployed veterans (maximum credit of $2,400 for every short-term unemployed hire and $4,800 for every long-term unemployed hire) and a Wounded Warriors Tax Credit which will increase the existing tax credit for firms that hire veterans with service-connected disabilities who have been unemployed long-term (maximum credit of $9,600 per veteran) and continue the existing credit for all other veterans with a service-connected disability (maximum credit of $4,800).
- A Challenge to the Private Sector to Hire or Train 100,000 Unemployed Veterans or Their Spouses by the End of 2013: The President challenged businesses to commit to hire or provide training to unemployed veterans or their spouses. In August of 2012, First Lady Michelle Obama announced the Joining Forces initiative had blown past that goal -- 2,000 private sector businesses had already hired or trained 125,000 veterans and military spouses.
- Presidential Call for a Career-Ready Military: The Departments of Defense and Veterans Affairs, working closely with other agencies and the President's economic and domestic policy teams, will lead a new task force to develop reforms to ensure that every member of the service receives the training, education, and credentials they need to transition to the civilian workforce or to pursue higher education. These reforms will include the design of a "reverse bootcamp," which will extend the transition period to give service members more counseling and guidance and leave them career-ready.
- Transition to the Private Sector: President Obama worked with Congress to create tax credits to help put veterans back to work. New online tools are available to aid their search for jobs, and the Administration has partnered with the Chamber of Commerce and the private sector to make it easier to connect our veterans with companies that want to hire them. The President has also proposed the Veterans Jobs Corps, with a goal of putting 20,000 servicemembers to work rebuilding American infrastructure and serving as cops and firefighters.
- Expand Ground Forces to Meet Military Needs and Improve Quality of Life: Increasing end strength in the Army and Marine Corps will help units retrain and re-equip properly between deployments, reduce the strain on military families, and help put an end to stop loss. We also plan to halt end strength reductions in the Air Force and Navy.
Lighten Burdens on Our Brave Troops and Their Families: Those in uniform are not the only ones who serve; military families are a top priority for this Administration. The President has announced plans to raise military pay and continue providing quality child-care, job-training for spouses, and expanded counseling and outreach to families that have known the separation and stress of war. First Lady Michelle Obama and Dr. Jill Biden have launched the Joining Forces initiative to mobilize all sectors of society to give our service members and their families the opportunities and support they have earned.
Rebalance Defense Capabilities for the 21st Century
- Institutionalize Irregular Warfare Capabilities: We must ensure our troops have the equipment they need to prevail in current operations, including assets that provide critical information, protection, and mobility. We will increase intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) support for troops in the field and research and development. We will increase spending on helicopters and crews and grow U.S. Special Operations capabilities.
- Preserve Air Supremacy: We must preserve our unparalleled airpower capabilities to deter and defeat any conventional competitors, quickly respond to crises across the globe, and support our ground forces. We intend to make a greater investment in advanced technology and essential systems like fifth-generation F-35 fighters.
- Maintain Dominance at Sea: We must recapitalize our naval forces, replacing aging ships and modernizing existing platforms, while adapting them to the 21st century. We will focus on increasing naval capabilities that support presence, stability and counterinsurgency operations in coastal regions.
- Missile Defense: To better protect our forces and those of our allies, we intend to field more of our most capable theater missile defense systems, including the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense System and Standard Missile 3 programs, and convert additional Aegis ships to increase ballistic missile defense capabilities.
- Space: The full spectrum of U.S. military capabilities depends on our space systems. To maintain our technological edge and protect assets in this domain, we will continue to invest in next-generation capabilities such as operationally responsive space and global positioning systems. We will cooperate with our allies and the private sector to identify and protect against intentional and unintentional threats to U.S. and allied space capabilities.
- Cyberspace: U.S. national security also depends on a functioning and resilient cyber domain. The United States will lead international and domestic efforts to ensure the security of the global information infrastructures continue to invest in cyberspace, and increase collaboration with the private sector and allies to protect this critical domain.
Reform Procurement, Acquisition, and Contracting
Our economic circumstances require a change in the way we acquire military equipment and services. The Administration intends to stop programs that are not performing and significantly exceed their budget or that spend limited taxpayer dollars to buy more capability than the nation needs. We will ensure that requirements are reasonable and technology is available to affordably meet programs' cost and schedule goals. We intend to realistically estimate program costs, provide budget stability for the programs we initiate, adequately staff the government acquisition team, and provide disciplined and effective oversight.
Develop and Resource Strategies to Succeed in Current Conflicts
- Afghanistan: The President's new strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan will ensure that all elements of national power are engaged and integrated in an effort to defeat al Qaeda to prevent attacks on the homeland and on our Allies and partners. We are asking our friends and allies to join us with a renewed commitment. We also will regularly assess the progress of our efforts and those of the governments of Afghanistan and Pakistan through clear measurements to ensure ongoing informed accountability.
- Iraq: Because of the skilled efforts of our troops and commitment of the Iraqi people to building a better life through a peaceful political process, violence in Iraq has reduced substantially. Because of this, the American combat mission in Iraq has ended. Operation Iraqi Freedom is over, and the Iraqi people now have lead responsibility for the security of their country.
- Communicate the Full Costs of Our Operations: The American people deserve an honest accounting of the cost of our involvement in our ongoing military operations. We will move away from ad hoc funding of long-term commitments through supplemental and include future military costs in the regular budget so that we have an honest, more accurate, and fiscally responsible estimate of Federal spending.
Strengthen Our Alliances and Partnerships
We are committed to strengthening existing alliances and partnerships and building new ones to confront current challenges. Additionally, to boost global partnership capacity, we will support funding to allow the increased training and equipping of foreign militaries to undertake counter terrorism and stability operations. As the threat posed by al Qaeda is international in scope; the response should also be international.
Use All Elements of American Power
To meet today's challenges, the United States must harness our military, diplomatic, economic, information, legal, and moral strength in an integrated and balanced fashion. The President is committed to building our civilian national security capacity so that the burden for stability operations is not disproportionately absorbed by our military. In Afghanistan, in particular, we will employ the necessary civilian resources to build Afghan governance capacity and self-sufficiency.


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Les herbes folles
Alain Resnais
France, 2009
Review by Cullen Gallagher
Posted on 03 October 2009
Source 35mm print
Categories The 47th New York Film Festival
At the dramatic climax of Alain Resnais' Wild Grass, the central male protagonist finds himself in an awkward position that offers no easy solutions: his boxer shorts have gotten caught in his zipper. It's a far cry from the existential crises at the heart of his most famous films, Hiroshima, Mon Amour and Last Year at Marienbad, and it's emblematic of a major shift away from the esoteric that his work has taken (particularly noticeable in his films from the 1980s, such as I Want to Go Home, as well as the recent Private Fears in Public Places). This, however, is not meant to imply that Resnais' creativity has been tamed in the least; instead, as its title suggests, there's an irrepressible whimsy to Wild Grass, some mysterious force that keeps shifting the movie into unexpected territory. The ever-playful Resnais continually reinvents his movie throughout the story's progression (quite literally up until the last frame, with a truly bizarre final shot!) with red herrings, plot reversals, false endings, and other sudden tonal shifts. At age 87, and with over sixty years of directing behind him, Resnais is still one step ahead of the audience, and his filmmaking remains as vigorous and youthful as ever.
Resnais regulars André Dussollier (seven films together) and Sabine Azéma (nine films together) reunite in this screwball comedy about two strangers whom fate has thrown together, and even though they absolutely aren't meant for each other, they can't seem to stay apart, either. After Azéma's purse is stolen by a rollerblading thief, Dussollier finds her empty wallet under his car across town. While looking for identification, he comes across her pilot's license and is love-struck over her picture with aviator's goggles. Turning the wallet in to the police, he constructs an elaborate fantasy revolving around her gratitude (even though he is already married). When she merely calls to say, "Thanks,†however, he is crushed and begins sending her letters, leaving long messages on her answering machine, and even slashing her tires. Initially perturbed, Azéma informs the police, but soon finds herself similarly making late-night calls to his house, and hiding outside of movie theaters waiting for him to emerge.
Obsession is frequently a strong theme in screwball comedy, which has never been one of the safest of genres, what with its frequent pratfalls, arrests, divorces, fights, revenge fantasies, and other emotional torrents (these incidents culled from Bringing Up Baby and The Philadelphia Story). While Wild Grass does dig into the uncomfortable underpinnings of the screwball spirit - suggestions of Dussollier's homicidal impulses and fear of the police are never fully explained, nor is Azéma's nihilistic angst remedied (though her preoccupation with Dussollier seems to have distracted her for the moment) - Resnais does so only with the lightest of touches. The humor is hard to pin down, but it is irrefutably present throughout. Perhaps it lies in the characters' contradictory persistence and resistance: their parlay of intricate plans to win the affections of one another are thwarted by their stubborn refusal to give in so easily.
However, comedy's elusive complexity is rarely reducible to just one such element. There's also Resnais' swift, spirited excursions into other genres, sometimes lasting for as little as two or three rapid shots: horror, slapstick, action, romance, war, and the musical are all referenced at different points. Even the voiceover narration shows this same fractured sensibility, split between omniscient third-person and intimate first-person: much like J.P. Donleavy's groundbreaking novel The Ginger Man, the intrusion of a character's unexpected thoughts onto the everyday world can yield surprising (and sometimes shocking) results.
What do we expect of aging directors? An elegiac swansong, such as Akira Kurosawa's Madadayo, that self-consciously explores age and approaching death? Or something like Ingmar Bergman's Saraband, in which the director reunites with long-time actors to revive characters and stories begun three decades earlier? Maybe Eric Rohmer's The Romance of Astrea and Celadon, so consistent with the director's inimitable styles and themes that it could have been made at any point in his career? What these movies all share in common with Wild Grass is that their makers were all octogenarians with decades of international success behind them. At least in the case of Kurosawa and Bergman, these turned out to be their last features, and rumor has it that Rohmer's may indeed be his final film. I don't at all hope that this will be the case for Resnais (or Rohmer, for that matter). Instead, I draw this comparison to show that Resnais has diverged from his contemporaries in continuing to expand and experiment. The thematic links to his early work (obsession, complexities of love) are undeniable, as are certain visual motifs (highly artificial lighting and set designs that emphasize the theatrical dimension's of his style). Yet for the first time, Resnais is reversing a career long commitment to never direct an adaptation of a novel, this time working from Alex Reval and Laurent Herbiat's script based on Christian Gailly's novel The Incident. Just as Resnais is not content to sit still or rest on his laurels, we too must continue to refine our perceptions of him as an artist.
2009Police, Adjective
2009Wild Grass
2009Crossroads of Youth
1934The White Ribbon
2009Min Ye
2009The Art of the Steal
2009In Comparison
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Marine wired remote control.
A New Wave.
Featuring a large keypad with left and right arrow keys, the receiver is easy to control with minimal movement of a single finger. The smart layout spreads out from the center. Even in unstable conditions, the CD-ME300 convex-shaped button helps to assure smooth and easy control.
The CD-ME300 is a marine grade remote control, meeting IPX7 regulations.
IPX7This Pioneer product achieved a rating of IPX7, signifying this product is water resistant and splash resistant at a submerged depth of up to 1 meter for a duration of up to 30 minutes when installed properly.


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Mumbai (Maharashtra) [India], August 28: With the Navratri round the corner, legendary singer Osman Mir and Santvani Trivedi have collaborated for the very first time for their new groovy and catchy Garba "He Mari Ambe Maa" to uplift the spirit of the festival which is otherwise quite dull owing to the pandemic. Audiences and fellow members of the music fraternity have shown eagerness to enjoy the melody by sharing it on their social media handles.
Click on the link to watch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gTrFoIWRdjc
The gist of the track revolves around our beloved festival Navratri. The track is crafted so that it will lift up your festive spirit with its traditional backdrops and touch you swiftly by the electrifying energy that the track had been curated with Music listeners who gravitate around the genre are sure going to enjoy this mesmerizing melody.
Singer Osman Mir has to his credit super hit tracks such as "Moti Verana", "Morbani Thangat Kare", "Hai Zindagi", and many more. At the same time, singer Santvani Trivedi has won hearts with her tracks such as "Veri Varsad", "Unchi Talavdi ", "Atma Ni Odakh", "Vahal no Dariyo ", and many more. The duo is all set to swoon the audiences this Navratri with their foot-tapping melody "He Mari Ambe Maa."
Coming to the credits of the song; the track is beautifully composed and created by Rutvij Joshi. Sumeet Khanwani penned the lyrics; Jay Bhojak directed the video. The Director of photography is Nunnurajsinh Rajput. While the song is choreographed by dynamic duo MelloveSshah and Meghna Sagar Shah, who are proteges of Master Terrence Lewis.


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Some of the pleasant cows of Bréhat. |
OBVIOUSLY, read Eileen first, and donate to BABEL, please.
Nearly two years ago (!), I outlined a prospectus for my next book. You'll have noted, I hope, that book doesn't yet exist. So, here I am, two years later, solemnly swearing on everything that's holy to me (a tangle of worms, a bit of pottery, the ozone layer) that 2015 is the year of the book.
This means saying NO, no to all requests to contribute to special issues, no to all chapters in anthologies, no to book review essays, no to book reviews, no to anything not directly related to writing/assembling this second book. My apologies in advance? Or perhaps none necessary.
The latter would be worse, because everyone wants to be cared about enough to be able to disappoint someone. Also, impostor syndrome, the condition that justly and rightly afflicts us all (unless you're a total fake), is also a good way to eructate a yes where a no might be better. When you're asked, you know you exist, you know you're wanted, and you get what should be the quick hit of a publication. Writing when there's so many words already, when every new book catalog means reading about how many friends you'll fail, has a phatic quality, anyway: the underlying point may always be "Look, over here: here I am, with you."
It may be even more thoroughly phatic when, practically, there's no reason for me to write this book: I'm getting tenure/promotion (I presume!) on the basis of the one book, and, with a 21-credit load, with automatic annual salary increases (thanks union!), there's no monetary reason to write the second book, no reasonable local professional expectation. And not a lot of time. And yet.
The book is tentatively titled How Not to Make a Human: Lessons from the Medieval Archives. Is it a joke title? Does it set up an inevitable third book (How to Serve Man)?
It'll loosely be structured around food and eating. Food's a key site for thinking materialism: as we know from Bakhtin and Bynum, ingestion and digestion and nurturing have to do with care, boundaries, incorporation, violence, persistence, with the actual but temporary, vulnerable existence of things, and with the unequal exchange of any encounter. Food also of course has to do with gender (Bynum again, but also Bordo of course) and who provides food, who should be fed, whose needs are always secondary, and who is made to feed others.
It's possible too that not everything will be from the medieval archive: I should take on the temporal intermixture of REMEDIAEVAL. For more, read on:
Chapters, which are much the same as the initial proposal, again, from two freakin' years ago:
(1) Feeding Others and Pets, focusing on the prioress and the queer antisocial antifuturity of her pet feeding, and on the gender of dog women.
(2) Eating Others, and Feral Children, focusing on the wolf-child of Hesse, Bisclavret, and Melion. And perhaps Sawney Bean and story's afterlife? And perhaps Humanimal, a Project for Future Children?
(3) Not Eating, focusing on Alexander and the Brahmins, with Alexander and Gog/Magog as the pivot, thinking of the wretched, vegetable -- or oystery -- existence of these philosophers, perhaps with a conjoined study of Breatharianism. And perhaps some engagement with my vegan friends and gleaners, with some memories of my dumpster-diving days.
EXIT - Being Eaten, focusing on, of course, worms, sky burial?, and that flip side of the ethical injunction from Levinas, summarized by Derrida here:
the hostage is the one who is delivered to the other in the sacred openness of ethics, at the origin of sacredness itself. The subject is responsible for the other before being responsible for himself as 'me.' This responsibility to the other, for the other, comes to him, for example (but this is not just one example amog others) in the 'Thous shalt not kill.' Thous shalt not kill thy neighbor. Consequences follow upon one another, and must do so continuously: thou shalt not make him suffer, which is sometimes worse than death, thou shalt not do him harm, thou shalt not eat him, not even a little bit, and so forth.Because, of course, we're all hostage to others in another way, that of being organic materials available to be eaten by other organic subjects, themselves available in turn, so long as there are organic materials to be had.
Any other must write about texts you want to see here? My secondary aim's a modest 70,000 words.
My primary aim, of course, is just to keep the promise of this blog post.


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An 80-cm length closed-end air column is forced to vibrate in its fifth harmonic. Determine the locations of the nodal positions (positions where air is undisturbed). Express the locations in cm using the diagram below. Note that the closed end is at 0 cm.
Get more information on the topic of Sound and Music at The Physics Classroom Tutorial.
Return to Problem Set
Return to Overview


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Serving the educational and professional-development needs of facility decision makers, NFMT will be held March 15-17 in Baltimore, Md. Composed of four individual, co-located events—the National Facilities Management & Technology Conference & Expo, Maintenance Solutions Expo, GreenTech, and Safe Buildings Expo—NFMT is a free event that features educational sessions, an exhibit hall, and networking events.
Attendees can customize their educational experience by choosing sessions from 10 tracks, including "Automation's Impact on Benchmarking" and "BACnet Fundamentals 101" featured in the Technology track. The exhibit hall highlights the products and services of more than 500 companies and associations, such as Automated Logic Corp., BACnet International, and Reliable Controls.
Additionally, honorees of the FMXcellence Recognition Program will be celebrated during a best-practices summit hosted at the event. The program is an initiative from Building Operating Management magazine that aims to award facility-management departments that spearhead and execute stand-out projects and programs. The honorees will be chosen based on their ability to demonstrate that they added significant value to their facility by helping to achieve broader goals. A range of facility-management efforts are eligible for recognition under the program, including use of technology, metrics for facility performance, and safety and security.
For more information about NFMT or to register, visit http://www.nfmt.com/.
For more information on the FMXcellence Recognition Program, visit http://www.facilitiesnet.com/bom/fmxcellence/.


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Live the Loaf Life with this Angry Cat Loaf bag!
The sublimation printing on this bag is really vibrant and lush, I completely am in love with it! The original texture of the watercolor painting is detailed here nicely and the colors match those of the original painting which is important to me. The bag itself is really lovely, the exterior is brown canvas with a brown shoulder strap. When opening the flap, there are two silver snaps that connect by magnet. Under the flap and inside the bag are made of the same nice slick fabric with a slight diagonal stripe pattern. Throughout the bag there are lots of pockets! There are three zippered pockets including the large main pocket. There are also 6 small open top pockets that are good for storing lots of small items, including easily available pockets for pens and a phone.
This bag is: 13" wide 10" tall 3.5" deep It is an ideal size for a tablet or a small laptop, notebooks, sketchbooks, and lots of accessories! This bag should not be put through a washing machine but the printing and overall fabric will definitely hold up to spot cleaning by hand with soap!


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When I started this blog six months ago, one of the things I pondered was what I could contribute to the world that other bloggers don't. As I've spread out, reading more and interacting more, I think I can add some useful information about topics I study on my own, work with, or do as a hobby.
Over the course of the next few posts, I'm going to look at EMP from a specialist's perspective. EMP is a term that brings a lot of fear with it. While I don't specifically work on protection of electronics systems from EMP, I do work with lightning protection and EMI (electromagnetic interference) protection, both of which are very similar. I have the tools and background to do the math, and think I can improve the signal to noise ratio of the conversation. I'm going to start with the optimistic side: why I'm not afraid of EMP, and then talk about the concerns I do have about it. So let's start at the beginning.
Electromagnetic Pulse. It's widely talked about whenever people talk about potential catastrophes. There is at least one "open source" book ("Lights Out", currently offline as the author shops it for sale to movie studios, but you can probably find a copy around) and a commercial book ("One Second After") about the aftermath of an EMP, typically depicting the destruction of society - The End Of The World As We Know It. (note: again - I don't make anything off links to Amazon. It's here simply as a convenience)
To begin with, what is an Electromagnetic Pulse? Most people who are familiar with the term know it as a side effect of a nuclear detonation in the ionosphere, and that's a good way to generate one. The ionosphere is a layer of the atmosphere, from about 50 miles to 600 miles or so up, where gas atoms are turned into ions by the UV rays from the sun. The Federation of American Scientists offers this explanation (from Wikipedia).
A high-altitude nuclear detonation produces an immediate flux of gamma rays from the nuclear reactions within the device. These photons in turn produce high energy free electrons by Compton scattering at altitudes between (roughly) 20 and 40 km. These electrons are then trapped in the Earth's magnetic field, giving rise to an oscillating electric current. This current is asymmetric in general and gives rise to a rapidly rising radiated electromagnetic field called an electromagnetic pulse (EMP). Because the electrons are trapped essentially simultaneously, a very large electromagnetic source radiates coherently.
The pulse can easily span continent-sized areas, and this radiation can affect systems on land, sea, and air. The first recorded EMP incident accompanied a high-altitude nuclear test over the South Pacific and resulted in power system failures as far away as Hawaii. A large device detonated at 400-500 km (250 to 312 miles) over Kansas would affect all of the continental U.S. The signal from such an event extends to the visual horizon as seen from the burst point.
The effect seen at ground level is a very brief, very high voltage pulse. The very short duration spreads the energy out in frequency, (the universe is just put together that way). The electric field (E-field) produced is felt across the entire portion of the continent "seen" by the explosion, although the intensity does fall off with distance, as with any source of E-fields. That is, the areas farthest from the epicenter will get a lower voltage peak than the people directly under the blast.
How much voltage are we talking about? Standard models talk about a voltage pulse that reaches 50,000 volts in five nanoseconds (five billionths of a second). For comparison, lightning may reach similar voltages, but takes much longer. A lightning strike's rise time is often more than 1,000 times longer, over a microsecond. While lightning strikes are not all the same, a lightning strike that is less than 100 nanoseconds is quite unusual. Here's a mathematical simulation of what the pulse looks like. The time axis is in nanosecond s, so "1" is 1 nsec. Note that the time display is in log scale, so the pulse is really short; it's down to 1% of its peak value in just over 100 nanoseconds. If any damage is going to happen, it's going to happen in the first 50 nanoseconds.
One of the main things the EMP stories focus on is how everything electronic is blown out. Airplanes fall out of the sky. No communications at all. They say to store your radios wrapped in foil in a metal ammo can.
I don't believe that.
SurvivalBlog has recently run reports of several tests where many vehicles were exposed to a simulated EMP (generated in other ways, so they affect much less area). Almost all of the cars kept working or simply needed to be restarted. These were modern cars, not old cars without electronic ignition systems. Amateur radio magazines have carried articles where tests were done, and results calculated for typical amateur radios. Most typical installations were not damaged. Radios did not need to be in a sealed metal box. I am familiar with the ways commercial aviation electronics is tested, and I don't believe that failures would be widespread. Airplanes will not come crashing down.
Here's why radios won't be burned out:
This is a plot of the electrical field created by the 50,000 Volt EM Pulse pictured above, derived by taking the FFT of that pulse. E-fields are usually referred to in units of Volts per meter. This plot adds the bandwidth of the measurement, so Volts per meter per Hertz. The fields are small: less than .002 Volts/meter. For comparison, commercial aircraft electronics is typically tested to withstand fields of 20 V/m, often 200 V/m. Military systems are tested to higher levels.
And it gets better. If you have a narrow band antenna - and most are - the power received is just not that great. For example, pretend you have an amateur transceiver for the 20 meter band, where your group has a meeting nightly. You have a dipole antenna for that band. The power you gather is less than 1/1000 watt (-2 dBm for those curious). There is no way this power level would be dangerous to your radio. To your "2 meter" radio (146 MHz), the signal is quite a bit weaker (-16 dBm - less than 1/10 the power of the lower frequency). In both cases, your radio might well be exposed to signals of this strength without EMP.
The local broadcasters: TV, AM, and FM, all use narrowband antennas. The air traffic control systems and navigation systems at the airport use narrowband antennas. In the case of the broadcasters, their transmitters are putting out thousands of watts or tens of thousands of watts - or more. It would be an amazing feat to even find the incoming signal from an EMP in the presence of that sort of transmitter power. Transmitters won't be damaged.
Now if you have a broadband antenna and broadband receiver, the levels will get worse because of the broadband energy the pulse causes. That's where the bandwidth really becomes apparent; the broadband E-field voltages increase by 10 times the log of the bandwidth. A 14-30 MHz log periodic dipole array antenna will make the fields stronger by 72 dB, or voltages around 4000 times higher. But the average E-field values in this frequency band are around .0006 V so multiplying by 4000 still only gives you 2.4 V/m/Hz.
Calculating how strong the levels would be in the radio is a bit more complicated, because the architecture of the radio matters. The very first circuits the EMP hits will see higher powers, but they are designed to limit the bandwidth (reflecting most of that pulse back out of the radio) and you should still not have a problem. The signal on channel is still the same; the power seen at the input filter is higher. If you integrate up all the power the antenna will bring into the radio, it gets up to a full Watt. Again, the protection in the front of the radio will keep it from being damaged.
I don't want to play climate scientist here, and just believe my computer model, but it's agreeing with other things I've seen published. Always compare computer models to experiment! If that model pulse is too weak, it still lets us estimate performance. If the voltage pulse is 100 kV instead of 50, we double the voltages we derived.
I don't believe that EMP is terribly hard to handle in a radio. If your radio is VHF, for example, a simple low frequency blocking capacitor might be all you need. A UHF or microwave radio will be completely unaffected - there's no EMP energy out there. It's a mistake to think that you use the steady state ratings (that is, your capacitor is rated at 100 VDC) when handling a surge like this. It's better to look at total energy in the pulse, and since it's so short, there's less energy than in a lightning pulse.
In short, I think in the aftermath of an EMP, your radio is going to work, the broadcast AM/FM/TV stations are going to work, air traffic control is going to work, the radios on the planes are going to work, your car is going to work, and most electronics will work. That doesn't mean nothing bad will happen.
In my next post I want to talk about the things about EMP that do bother me.
(This work was derived from some industry applications notes, largely from Ansoft, a leading manufacturer of EM analysis software).


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she said:
Indie Cafe is one of my favorite restaurants on the North side of Chicago, if not my hands-down numero uno. It's certainly my favorite Thai place.
While sitting in Indie Cafe, whether it's with Guy or a group of girlfriends, I often notice a certain bustling energy. There is, for lack of a better word, a scene. It's clear that everyone in the room loves being there.
Although Indie is low key, the decor is quite stylish, with cool artwork and romantic lighting. The food is so artfully presented and delicious, it's hard to believe it's so affordable. Everything about being there says high-end dining. Everything except the prices.
Generally, I order from the Thai menu, though their sushi menu is equally large and impressive. My friends who order the sushi are addicted, but I find the Thai curries to be totally irresistible. The Panang and the Indie Signature Curries are at the top of my list. Both are nutty and intensely flavorful; the Panang is a bit spicier. Guy doesn't like curries very much. More for me, sucka!
The crab rangoon is also top notch – and this from a girl who doesn't eat much seafood – as is the Tom Ka Kai, a sweet and sour coconut broth soup. I substitute the chicken with tofu.
For dessert, try a mochi ice cream ball. My favorite is the green tea.
And, if you still need convincing, Indie is BYOB so you can stop in the nearby Dominick's or the liquor store around the corner and grab a bottle or two.
I don't have a single complaint about this gem of a restaurant. I love it so much; maybe I'll marry it.
he said:
I like when we get Indie as take-out. They serve good Thai food, but when I'm in there I feel like they're trying to play dress up.
Let me explain, because I don't want to suggest that they're food isn't good. It's excellent. I almost always get pad thai or chicken fried rice. And my preference for those two colors my experience.
Pad thai and chicken fried rice are comfort food. They're great as take out. When I eat them in a restaurant, I like it when the setting is as low key as the meal. While the ambience is nice at Indie, it's unnecessary in my mind.
Of all the Thai take out I've had in Andersonville and Edgewater, Indie has the best. Last time we ordered it through GrubHub (which is a great website that lets you order food online; but you already knew that right?) and it came quickly and was delicious as usual. And when I eat it in the comfort of my home, the ambience is just right.


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_[Editor's note: The article below is written by Eric Allen Bell, a filmmaker who was recently banned from _blogging at the "Daily Kos" because he wrote three articles that ran afoul of the mindset there, specifically naming "Loonwatch.com" as a "terrorist spin control network." Frontpage invited him to tell his story, which he does below.]__
A strange thing happened to me the other day when I was driving past the Federal Building in Los Angeles. There were a crowd of people assembled there with signs which said that Israel is an aggressive force in the Middle East and that Iran is being picked on. As I stopped at a red light I heard a man with a mega phone lead the protesters in a chant charging Obama with genocide. I saw many young people and several Muslim women with their heads covered. It was an anti-war demonstration that probably a year ago I would have supported. But although I am not in favor of military action, I know that Iran is not another Iraq, and that in fact there is more going on here than the overly-simplified picture that the protestors were painting, as cars drove by honking in support. As the light turned green another sign caught my eye – a picture of the Twin Towers burning which read "911 Was an Inside Job". As I looked at a sea of Palestinian flags and college kids banging on drums I felt a certain frustration – frustration based on a series of events that have changed my world view.
In the Summer of 2010, having recently escaped Hollywood, CA to take a much needed break from my profession as a film maker, I was driving in my car listening to a story on NPR. It seems the people in my new home of Murfreesboro, TN were up in arms over the proposed construction of a 53,000 square foot mega mosque, to be built in their small town in the middle of the American Bible Belt.
I listened carefully, to the sound bytes, of those who had shown up to a town hall meeting to voice their opposition and, as someone who was rather new to the South, I was surprised by what I was hearing. "America is a Christian nation and there is only one God and his name is not Allah and his son is Jesus Christ" and "America is a Christian Nation" and "These Muslims do not share my values and I don't want them in my backyard". Growing up in Southern California, I had never heard anything like this before in my life. And I started to follow the story with great interest.
On the outer edge of town, off a small country road, there was a large parcel of land, right next door to a Baptist church, with a big sign that read, "Future Home of the Islamic Center of Murfreesboro". Over the past 6 months that sign had been defaced twice. Once it was broken in half and another time the words "Not Welcome" were spray painted over it.
Rutherford County, which includes Murfreesboro, only has a little over 100,000 residents and yet the area boasts nearly 200 Christian churches. Having not been much of a fan of Islam or Christianity or religion in general (and that's putting it mildly) I saw this as something of a David vs. Goliath story – with fanatical Evangelicals bullying a peaceful Muslim population, which had been in the community for over 30 years without there ever being any trouble. And, after learning that in July there was to be a big parade down Main Street to the town square, protesting the construction of this new mosque, I decided someone really needed to make a documentary about this. And even though I had gone to Murfreesboro to escape the film world for a while, it seemed pretty clear that if I did not document this in a movie, no one else would. I wanted to show the world what I was seeing. So I put together a small film crew and began production on a documentary I would title, "Not Welcome".
I had never seen more American flags assembled together in one place than I had on that hot July morning as the anti-mosque crowd gathered at the base camp to prepare for the parade. Many of the marchers showed up wearing red, white and blue. I had 4 cameras covering the event with one crew embedded with the Liberal activists who were going to counter-demonstrate and the rest of the cameras with me, embedded with those who were to march against the mosque. I conducted several interviews in the school parking lot where locals and those who had driven for hours gathered, prepared to march against what they perceived to be not only a threat to their way of life, but also something of an insult given the events of September 11, 2001. Two Congressional candidates, both promising to "stop the Islamic training camp" showed up and used this opportunity to campaign, one of whom even gave a speech through a mega phone reminding folks to vote for him if they wanted to stop Sharia Law from coming to Murfreesboro. The pastor of Baptist church gathered everyone together in prayer, and the parade took off down Main Street with signs that read "Google the Koran" and "Stop Homegrown Terrorism" and someone in the crowd handed out hundreds of small Israeli flags as several hundred Southerners marched against the mosque.
About six months later I had accumulated over 300 hours of footage, interviewing the parade organizer, both Congressional candidates, the Mayor, the Imam at the mosque and several of its board members, numerous concerned residents on both sides of the issue, Muslim residents, city council members, a Christian Zionist lobbyist who was organizing the opposition to the mosque – and I had even filmed weeks of court proceedings, as a local group had filed suit against the County to stop them from issuing any construction permits to the Islamic Center. The court proceedings were truly a circus with a country lawyer in loud suit with a bow tie argued that Islam is not a religion and that he was prepared to take this matter to the Supreme Court if necessary. That legal action had failed and failed miserably. And although many of the townspeople did in fact have a number of very valid concerns, I felt that those whom they had chosen to represent them were not their best foot forward. In many ways, for the people of Murfreesboro, TN this turned out to be an international embarrassment – given the level of interest from the press.
Also, someone tried to set fire to some construction equipment at the site of the new mosque and the student activist group, calling themselves "Middle Tennesseans for Religious Freedom" put together a candle light vigil where hundreds of townspeople showed up in support of tolerance. A few young men showed up in a pickup truck and honked their horn repeatedly throughout the vigil. Their clothes seemed to indicate they had spent the work day hanging drywall. And when they put up a huge sign in the back of their truck which read "No Mosque" while misspelling the word mosque, I did not hesitate to film them but to also sort of taunt them, in order to provoke a good response on camera. And I got it. One of them said we should suspend the Constitution and went on to say that "All them Mooslums should be shipped home" even the ones who were born here.
Adding more fuel to that fire was an incident that took place when I attempted to interview Kevin Fisher at a Tea Party event on the town square. It was my opinion that in order to avoid accusations of being bigoted, the money interests (a Christian Zionist organization called Proclaiming Justice to the Nations) chose the only person of color, already involved in this issue, to lead the parade and to be a plaintiff in the lawsuit. Kevin Fisher was an African American college dropout, who worked as a prison guard and became a passionate opponent of the new mosque, after his wife divorced him and became, you guessed it, a Muslim convert. When I approached him on the square with a crew that included 4 cameras, saying only "Hi, Kevin" he dialed his cell phone and called 9-1-1 saying that he was being "racially harassed". This not only made the headlines of the local paper but the incident, including audio from the 9-1-1 call was played over and over that night on the local evening news. This became something of a running joke, when I was recognized at the grocery store in Murfreesboro for instance, people would often point at me and say, "Hey, stop racially harassing me" and then we would all have a big laugh. And Islamic blogs such as Loonwatch.com were only too happy to run an article about how an opponent of the mosque was "playing the race card" against a filmmaker who was just trying to ask questions.
CNN breezed through town and produced a quick hit piece painting all of the mosque opponents as uneducated rednecks and the Islamic community as everyday people who were being wrongly persecuted. Soledad O'Brien's producer offered to buy some of my footage from me with the explicit promise that their piece was going to be called "Islam: In America" and would not focus more than a few minutes on Murfreesboro. After an inside tip that this producer was lying to me, I confronted him and got some rather vague answers. So I declined to license him any of my material. And sure enough, the CNN documentary did in fact focus exclusively on Mufreesboro and was called "Unwelcome: The Muslims Next Door". Somehow Hollywood, with its usual backstabbing tricks, had managed to find me hiding out in Tennessee.
I had accumulated a lot of good quality footage. That, combined with the increasing number of physical threats to me personally while filming in large crowds, and death threats that had arrived via email (causing me to look over my shoulder everywhere I went and making it necessary to spend a small fortune on private security) told me it was time. The writing was on the wall. It was time for me to leave Murfreesboro, hire a professional Editor and get to work on assembling my footage to create a feature length documentary for theatrical distribution.
Before I go any further, I should mention that, while all of this was happening, I had become involved in the story itself. I took sides. I sided with the Islamic community in their legal right to build a house of worship and when I was interviewed by the local papers (it's not every day that a small town like this has someone shooting a documentary there) when I was asked where I stood on the issue I never hesitated to give my point of view. And after a time my point of view was sought out by larger newspapers and several local and syndicated radio programs – mostly Conservative and mostly taking issue with my stance. And I was also invited to write several pieces for Michael Moore's blog as well.
Although I had left town to edit, there continued to be letters to the editor on a few of the local papers saying that I should leave TN and go back to where I came from. I could not believe the cartoonish way in which those who opposed the mosque were making their case. I felt like I was on the right side of this thing – absolutely certain. But in fact, I was wrong.
Everything I have told you up until now – this version of my story – is exactly how I was seeing things up until something changed. I went home to Los Angeles, showed my 25 minute short version of the documentary to some distributors and backers, and did the usual dog and pony show that had worked so well to raise funds, for other motion picture projects I had been involved with in the past. And sure enough someone said they would back the completion of the movie. It was decided that the focus would be on "the enemy at home" that being what we were calling "Apocalyptic Christianity" (as there was concern about using the word "Zionism" in "Christian Zionism"). The Murfreesboro issue was to be used as something of a jumping off point to take a look at the expanding influence of the End Times Evangelical lobby in the United States and how they use their influence to manufacture consent for the bombing of oil rich Islamic countries and to influence policy on social issues. The theme would focus on the problems we have in America, with our own religious lunatic fringe, rather than on a peaceful group of non-Christians who just wanted to build a place of worship.
After writing a few articles for Michael Moore, I also wrote for a liberal blog called Common Dreams and I wrote over a hundred articles for the Daily Kos, a liberal blog so popular that they receive over one million visitors a day. I felt I was protecting the underdog, going after the bullies. I really believed that I was on the right side of this thing.
But something kept nagging at me on a gut level. Something about all of this didn't quite feel right. The Arab Spring, which I supported, started to degenerate into the Islamist Winter, and I grew more and more concerned. I flew back to Nashville to shoot a conference on whether or not Islam was conducive with Democratic Values and on the way to my hotel room I learned that my cab driver was from Egypt. I asked him how he felt about the fall of Mubarak, a dictator worth over $70 billion dollars while so much of his country was living in poverty and he told me he was concerned. Concerned? Wasn't this good news? The cab driver was a Coptic Christian and he told me that he feared for his family back home. "If the Muslims take control, and they will, it will be very dangerous for my parents and my sisters. I'm scared for them right now". After that conversation, I started to pay more attention to the news coming from the Islamic world in the Middle East.
Over the coming months I watched as the Muslim Brotherhood gained political power in Egypt. I saw that cab driver's worst fears come true as Coptic Christians were attacked by Islamic mobs. I saw Tunisia institute Sharia, the brutal Islamic Law. After Libya fell, the Transitional Council also instituted Islamic Law. The nuclear armed Islamic government of Pakistan arrested and punished those who cooperated with the United States in killing Osama Bin Laden. A woman under the Islamic government of Afghanistan faced execution for the crime of being raped. Similar news stories emerged from Iran. A man who typed "there is no god" as his Facebook status in Indonesia, the largest Islamic country in the world, was arrested for blasphemy.
Several Muslim men in England were arrested for handing out leaflets to Londoners demanding that homosexuals be executed by hanging for violating Islamic Law with their lifestyle.
And it struck me. Even though these angry townspeople in Mufreesboro, TN had not articulated their concerns very well, they were only half wrong. I remember meeting Frank Gaffney and interviewing him in front of the courthouse and asking him if he really thought that the peaceful Muslims here actually presented a real threat to America and he said no. That caught me off guard so I asked if he really thought it was a credible threat that a community that makes up about one percent of the United States population was just going to suddenly rise up one day and try to take over the country and force Sharia Law onto all of us. Again he said no. Then he told me I was asking the wrong questions. He suggested that I was only looking for answers that would support the conclusions I had already arrived at. He said he had, after much research, arrived at a different set of conclusions and he challenged me to look a little deeper. He gave me a report to look at and many, many months later I did look at his report.
It was at this time that I went to my backers and told them that we were not making an honest documentary. I felt that everything I had put into the 25 minute short version (the one I used to raise the completion funds) was true, but only half true. It was critical that we also show the very real threats that exist within Islam. We needed to show that what is happening to these small communities of peaceful Muslims in America are the exception to the rule. I wanted to show what happens to countries when they gain a Muslim majority, how women are treated, that homosexuals were executed, that free speech did not exist, that the forced Islamic Law was not consistent with Democratic Values – anything and everything I could think of that ought to strike a chord with the Liberal mindset. And the response I received was, "Eric you are starting to sound like an Islamophobe. We don't want to make a movie that promotes fear. Let's just stick with the existing plan, okay?"
I fought and I fought. I showed them a book called "The Truth About Mohammed" but was struck down since the author was a man named Robert Spencer and my backers pointed out that the Southern Poverty Law Center named his "Jihad Watch" site as part of a hate group. I asked them to watch a documentary called "Islam: What the West Needs to Know" and pointed out that I had researched independently and verified the truth of what was being presented there, but they would not even watch this documentary as they were sure in advance that it was "hate speech" and "propaganda designed to spread fear". It probably goes without saying that by now I was very frustrated. I showed my new backers several verses from the Koran that call for the killing of infidels and was told that these verses were probably being taken out of context. I showed them a video clip from MEMRI TV of a young Egyptian child reciting a Hadith that calls for the killing of Jews and was told that "you can't trust MEMRI because they have an agenda".
I mentioned the popular Islamophobia watchdog site "Loonwatch" and how I had noticed a pattern of deflection all criticisms of radical and violent Islam by calling anyone who publicly raises these concerns a "Loon" and how I felt this was an intentional effort to provide a smoke screen for the terrorists. I also noted that everything Loonwatch said was in lockstep with the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) and now CAIR was named an unindicted co-conspirator in the prosecution of the Holy Land Foundation – the largest Islamic charity at one time, which was found to be funneling monies to Islamic terrorist organizations. I also noted that CAIR had ties to both Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood and that Al Qeada had come out of the Muslim Brotherhood. I expressed my concerns that the Egyptian Imam of the Islamic Center of Murfreesboro might have ties to the MB, something I had failed to properly investigate. But since CAIR had the support of Glenn Greenwald and Amy Goodman's show, Democracy Now, I was told that I had my facts all wrong. It was also pointed out to me that if CAIR was allegedly some kind of terrorist front then why do they still have a special tax status and why are they still around? When I said I do not know but it was possible that the government might prefer to watch them out in the open rather than risk them going underground I was told that my judgment was sounding less and less clear and that maybe I needed to take a step back from the project for a while.
As a last attempt I showed them footage of the Imam in Murfreesboro condoning stoning, admitting that Mohammed had stoned someone to death, saying that women cannot be trusted with money because they are irrational. Then I pointed out that a board member of the Islamic Center of Murfreesboro was investigated after pictures from his MySpace page had surfaced indicating his strong sympathies for Hamas. I was reminded that Hamas was also a political party which was voted in Democratically and that I needed to make a choice – either stick with the original blueprint or else give the money back and go find myself another backer. So I did. I walked. If I can't make an honest documentary then I'm in the wrong business. I didn't want to add to more of the noise that's out there – I wanted to make something that told the truth, even if that truth is hard to swallow.
It's funny because I run a website called Global One TV, which has had about 23 million visitors so far, and the theme of this blog is that "Inward Revolution Creates Outward Revolution". And here I was having to take my own medicine. My own inward revolution – the questioning of one's conclusions in search of a deeper truth – had led me to a very strange place. I thought of the famous Nietzsche quote that says "When you look into the abyss, the abyss also looks into you". And with nothing left to lose, I used my position at Daily Kos to go about telling the truth.
In January of 2012 I wrote 3 consecutive articles for the Daily Kos. The first was entitled "Loowatch.com and Radical Islam". Here I pointed out the how Loonwatch only deflects criticism of radical Islam. I was also critical of Islamic theology while noting over and over that most Muslims were peaceful. The comments section of Daily Kos made me feel like I was attending my own funeral. It was like a public stoning. There wasn't much in the way of responding to any of the points laid out in my article but hundreds of comments accusing me of being "right wing" a "bigot" and an "lslamophobe". This was disappointing.
The next day I received an email from Loonwatch.com with an article showing my name and a photograph of my face, going out to much of the Islamic world, calling me the "Loon at Large". This article was picked up by IslamophobiaToday.com and TheAmericanMuslim.org – later being repurposed by numerous Islamic blogs around the world, including in places where we all know what happens to anyone who is perceived to be the enemy of Allah or who dares to "insult" Islam.
My next article sought to further substantiate my point with regard to these wolves in sheep's clothing calling themselves "Islamophobia Watchdog sites" and their first line of defense, that being a blogosphere of liberal lemming infidels who are pre-programmed to blurt out the word "Islamophobe" on cue. That article was called "How and Why Loonwatch is a Terrorist Spin Control Network". And as you might have guessed, this piece was met with the same mob mentality of those who, rather than read the article and criticize it on its merits, instead shot the messenger with charges of "Islamophobia". There were also 2 Daily Kos articles written in response attacking me personally, another Loonwatch article where someone suggested I must be from TN and have no education, etc. And once again, my name was put out on the street through a network of Islamic Blogs, including the landing page for CAIR, using a form of Islamic double speak which translated to any serious Jihadist means "enemy of Allah" and "insulting Islam".
Given the incredible density of the popular Liberal mind, how the readers of my articles were unable to see how the beliefs of Islam were in direct conflict with human rights, gay rights, women's rights and basic Democratic Values, I wrote a final piece called, "Are You In Favor of Human Rights?" and that one of course got me banned from Daily Kos. It should be noted that in one of the Loonwatch.com articles the author, a person simply calling himself "Danios" demanded that DKOS silence me and provided a link for its readers to email the editors of the Daily Kos, demanding that this "Islamophobe" be censored. And it worked – once again proving the oil and water relationship between Islam and tolerance for free speech.
Things got even stranger from there. Robert Spencer himself wrote me an email and we had a rather interesting dialogue. It became apparent almost immediately that there was nothing about this man that was even remotely hateful. So when Robert Spencer asked if I minded if he reprint my email in response to his on Jihad Watch, I said "sure, why not?" Once that surfaced, the friend count on my Facebook fan page dropped suddenly. Friends and acquaintances told me I had become a hatemonger, a fear monger and an Islamophobe. I pointed out that an Islamophobe is someone with an irrational fear of Islam but there was no reasoning with anyone so deeply indoctrinated into the tyranny of political correctness.
And almost right on cue the news story broke about the NYPD using as a training video a documentary narrated by a devout Muslim who opposes terrorism and jihad, someone who has advised law enforcement and served in the military and as a physician to highly placed members of the United States government. That documentary was called "The Third Jihad" and the story surfaced that CAIR was calling this film "Islamophobic" and demanding that the NYPD pull it right away, which of course they did. CAIR demanded the removal of the head of the NYPD and the liberal blogosphere sang backup – most notably with articles on Huffington Post calling "The Third Jihad" propaganda, hate speech and of course more "Islamophobia". When I posted a link to this documentary on my Facebook page I was met with more charges of being an Islamophobe by people who had only recently told me how much they had been inspired and influenced by my writings.
After Jamie Glazov of Frontpagemag.com – part of the David Horowitz Freedom Center – reached out to me to ask me to be on his radio show (which I agreed to) I surfed the web a bit trying to get a better sense of who exactly David Hororwitz was. It became clear almost immediately that we do not share the same political views, but one thing Horowitz did say that came through with stunning clarity was an assertion that there was an unholy alliance between the Left and Islam, with radical Islam using the Liberal media to create a smoke screen for it – a place where radical can appear moderate and receive Liberal support. He also went on to say that in many universities across America that students were being radicalized, indoctrinated into the far Left. And I remembered something. Nearly all of the organizers for the college aged activist group who demonstrated in favor of the new mosque in Murfreesboro were either Socialists or Communists. These were kids and they all seemed to share one Professor in particular who was something of a mentor to them, a Socialist who always seemed to be hanging around their college parties, infiltrating into their social scene, taking the smarter and more articulate ones under his wing as their campus group called simply "Solidarity" grew in numbers – in fact recruiting quite a few students while organizing in favor of the mosque. Yikes.
So here we are today, as news that Kuwait goes Islamist and the NYPD answers to CAIR, an arm of a terrorist organization, out of concern for political correctness. Have I become a Conservative out of all of this? Not really. I still oppose the invasion of Iraq. I still feel that all wars should be avoided unless absolutely necessary. I still think that George W. Bush was one of the worst things to happen to America in my lifetime. I still support marriage equality. But I'm also still pro-life. Do you see a trend here? I support human rights and oppose anything which I perceive to be in violation of human rights.
Where do I stand on Islam? Let's look at its founder – a man who raped a 9 year old girl, a slave owner, a leader who ordered people to be tortured, for adulterers to be stoned, for countless nonbelievers to be beheaded, a killer, a warmonger who spread his "religion of peace" by the sword, a man who suffered from hallucinations of voices telling him to do violent things, a tyrant, a homicidal maniac perhaps the equivalent of 100,000 Osama Bin Ladens. And this sadistic lunatic is considered to be the "ideal man" in Islam. What more needs to be said about Islam than that?
So in this climate where innocent people are killed when Korans are burned, when there are riots and bomb threats and killings over cartoons that offend Muslims, when a novelist such as Salman Rushdie is advised by Indian intelligence authorities that it is unsafe for him to enter the country to attend the world's largest literary festival, when Muslims outside the festival threaten violence such that the festival organizers decide to cancel even patching in a video of Rushdie for the conference, in a world where a man, Theo Van Gough, was shot a couple dozen times in broad daylight, then stabbed, then had a sword rammed into his heart on the sidewalk of a European street simply for making a 10 minute film about the mistreatment of Muslim women – in such a world that is constantly terrorized by Islamic militants whose insanity is co-opted by an army of Liberal bloggers who make excuses for them – who tell us that 911 was probably our fault – what will become of my documentary when I finish it?
How will "Not Welcome" be received? Will movie theaters refuse to show it, just like those many bookstores who removed the Danish cartoons from their shelves? Will film festivals be afraid to screen it? Will my life be in danger? Will some lunatic Islamic cleric issue a Fatwa ordering my death? Will CAIR gain even more political influence and work within the system to get it banned as "hate speech"? Will critics fear for their lives and thus refuse to review it?
Is the Liberal view that Stealth Jihad is just some whacky conspiracy theory really true? Who will win – free speech or the savagery of a growing mob hell bent on Jihad? I can only tell you this. I will not back down. I will not be bullied, threatened, coerced or terrorized by the "religion of peace".
We each have a responsibility to the other people on this planet, and especially to those whom we will leave this planet to after we are gone. And this sometimes means taking an unpopular stand in order to protect the rights of innocent people. Loonwatch, CAIR and the other numerous terrorist spin control networks – you've not seen the end of me. Not by a long shot. As the saying goes, "You have a right to swing your fists, but that right ends when your fist connects with my nose".
And by the way, I still believe that unless they break the law, the Islamic Center of Murfreesboro has a legal right to build their house of worship. We don't have to like it, but then again the First Amendment was designed not to protect popular ideas – as they don't need protecting – but to protect unpopular ideas as well. This is something you won't find in any Islamic country and it is also something worth protecting – even when the so-called "religion of peace" tries to shut you down.
Eric Allen Bell
Eric Allen Bell is a writer and filmmaker. His directorial debut, a short film entitled "Missing Sock" was placed on Film Threat's prestigious "Top 10 Short Films" of 2004. He went on to direct his first full length feature, "The Bondage" which premiered at the South By South West Film Festival, receiving multiple offers and securing full theatrical distribution. His current project, a documentary entitled "Not Welcome" chronicles the backlash concerning the building of a 53,000 square foot mega-mosque in the middle of America's Bible Belt. He can be reached at: [email protected].
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