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Norman Pattiz chairman of PodcastOne is pleased to announce new podcast research results concerning advertising tests across five major national consumer brands, in five different and service and product categories. This is the first study of its kind to analyze both pre- and post- campaign brand lift for podcast advertisers.
The results are from the first 6 months of 2016 and revealed positively the results of podcast advertising. Its impact on brand recall, the motivations of the consumer, as well as capacity to recollect specific messaging.
Listed are some of the top findings of the study conducted to validate Podcast one's multi-tiered approach to integrated advertising:
-Awareness was gained in pre-test automobile campaign for aftermarket product by 60%
-A dining restaurant featuring a casual dining experience gained awareness in pretests by 76%
-In the post-study, pollers reported having a "very favorable" opinion of an automobile aftermarket product. That went up by 18% from the results in the pre-study.-
-Product awareness that went largely unpromoted was reported to have received a merchandise awareness 47% increase in product recognition, for a financial service and an increase of 37% on the auto aftermarket brand. Learn more about Norman Pattiz: http://finance.yahoo.com/news/norman-pattiz-announces-hollywoods-legendary-204000537.html
– 60% of listeners reported to Podcast one that they recalled a specific grocery brand post-campaign, that percentage went up to 7% after pre-study.
Conclusive evidence of the study shows that podcast listeners were receptive to receiving specific brand advertising, as well as indicating an eagerness to purchase products both mentioned and advertised on podcasts.
Norman Pattiz is creator and CEO of PodcastOne, and PodcastOne Sales. Norman Pattiz started out as a small radio syndicator, and has risen to be known as the authority of production/distribution of audio on-demand programming. He Has a long history of excellence, both as a broadcaster and as a businessman.
He started his company Westwood One inc. over 30 years ago, and it is now known as Americas largest and most influential broadcasting network. Westwood One incorporates distribution or manages the networks CBS News, NBC radio networks, the Mutual Broadcasting System, NFL Football, March Madness and NCAA Basketball.
Norman Pattiz is a proud Californian, born and raised, and he is the creator of the Courtside Entertainment Group. He currently serves as Regent of the University of California. He is a member of the Council of Foreign Relations and the Pacific Council on International Relations.
Norman Pattiz was honored in 2009 by being inducted into the prestigious Radio Hall of Fame.


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subset: commoncrawl


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Ok, so my favorite apple is the HoneyCrisp right? These apples are just the perfect blend of sweet and tart and they have such lovely pink skin, reminiscent of a Gala or Pink Lady. And between you and me, I'm sure the nutritional value is much better than in any other apple. It has to be. They're just so good. At least that's my excuse for eating mass quantities of them. And it gets better for the locavores out there; HoneyCrisps are grown in Blackfoot. Oh yeah! Isom Fruit Farm, how I love you…
I'm at work right now, sitting on my tukas (even though I'm supposed to be working) eating my HoneyCrisp apple in thin slices with cream cheese:
I had a thought.
"You know what would be completely delicious?"
"If you were to take this apple and that cream cheese and wrap it up in a flaky, buttery pastry, like croissant dough, bake it and then eat it hot."
No extra sugars or anything else. 3 ingredients (ok, a lot more than three if you count everything in the dough…). BAM, an explosion of ambrosial awesomeness in my mouth!
You are curious now, aren't you? You want to know just what these HoneyCrisps are all about. Well come visit me and find out! I'm giving away at least 1 apple with each purchase. If you don't have anything to buy but you want to try the apple, I suppose I'll cut you a deal. I'll even give you a slice of my cream cheese 🙂 I'm sure after you taste the combination, you'll want a cream cheese to take home with your apple. Aren't I such a great sales person?
You know what to do: 208-522-6964 or 159 S. Corner Avenue, kitty corner from the YMCA
❤ Sarah
P.S. If you want your very own box of apples, call up the Isom's at 208-684-4573, 208-313-6224, or 208-313-6830 (ask for Marc or Jeanne)


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Osteoarthritis (OA) is a condition that can seriously affect your quality of life if you simply try to ignore it. Pain and stiffness caused by the breaking down and wearing away of cartilage can affect the joints of the knees, hips, hands, feet, and spine, among others, causing pain and weakness.
People who try to treat OA on their own run the risk of allowing the condition to progress faster than it should, and suffering from ill effects caused by use of drugs that may not be appropriate.
Your doctor wants you to be the most important partner in your health. You can do this by talking openly with your doctor and asking questions about your condition and your treatment. This way you can make choices based on the balance of benefits and risks associated with each type of treatment. Come prepared when you visit your doctor to speak about OA treatment. Below are some things to consider.
Does your doctor have all the information necessary for making recommendations for treatment? Write down exactly where you are experiencing your pain as well as the following important information:
- what time of day and/or after what activities it hurts most
- whether the pain is constant or comes and goes
- how long the pain lasts
- whether or not the pain wakes you up at night
- how your pain affects your ability to perform daily activities such as dressing, opening jars, and going up and down the stairs
- medications you have tried and all the medications you are taking now
Do you know all your treatment options? Ask your doctor these questions:
- Which lifestyle changes (e.g., exercise, weight loss, day to day living) will improve my OA symptoms?
- Would heat or cold application help the pain and/or inflammation associated with my OA?
- Would I benefit from knee braces or orthotics?
- Which pain-relieving medication would be best suited for my circumstances?
- Would I benefit from a medication that relieves inflammation? If so, which medication is best for me?
- Do I need to take extra medications to protect my stomach?
- Would I benefit from any of the medications that are injected into a joint?
- Would I benefit from a visit to a physiotherapist or occupational therapist?
- Do you think I might need surgery some day?
All material copyright MediResource Inc. 1996 – 2018. Terms and conditions of use. The contents herein are for informational purposes only. Always seek the advice of your physician or other qualified health provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition. Source: www.medbroadcast.com/healthfeature/gethealthfeature/OA-Treatment-Working-with-Your-Doctor


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Peter Dubitsky opened Acupuncture Health Care in New Paltz, NY in 1991. Callie Brown joined the practice in 1994. They are both highly qualified and very experienced acupuncturists dedicated to providing personalized quality acupuncture care in a private setting. Their New Paltz office specializes in the treatment of acute and chronic pain conditions.
Click on this link to learn more about Peter Dubitsky.
Click on this link to learn more about Callie Brown.
They both attended one of the premier colleges of acupuncture in the United States, the Tri-State College of Acupuncture, which is the only college offering training in Acupuncture Physical Medicine, developed by Dr. Mark Seem, the founder of Tri-State. This style of acupuncture combines classical Chinese acupuncture with trigger point acupuncture, and is highly effective in the treatment of pain conditions. It provides relief of pain, improvement in function, and it promotes healing.


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Ever had the urge to translate a website written in Corsican, Pashto or Luxembourgish? Good, because Google's now got you covered.
The latest update adds 13 languages to Google's stable: Amharic, Corsican, Frisian, Kyrgyz, Hawaiian, Kurdish (Kurmanji), Luxembourgish, Samoan, Scots Gaelic, Shona, Sindhi, Pashto and Xhosa. Just because you likely don't recognise most of them, doesn't mean the update isn't significant — according to Google, it means Translate now covers 120 million more people than it did yesterday.
Google also took the opportuntity to explain how new languages are added, and how its algorithm learns to translate:
As we scan the Web for billions of already translated texts, we use machine learning to identify statistical patterns at enormous scale, so our machines can "learn" the language. But, as already existing documents can't cover the breadth of a language, we also rely on people like you in Translate Community to help improve current Google Translate languages and add new ones, like Frisian and Kyrgyz.
Translate is one of Google's often-forgotten services, but also one that has a huge affect on its users. English accounts for approximately half of all websites on the internet, depending on whose definition you're working from; Translate provides a fantastic way to access the other 50 per cent of knowledge we're all missing out on.


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Is Italy flirting with fascism?
The right is noisier than ever. But this is not a return to the dark days of Mussolini Is Italy going fascist? Is Berlusconi like Mussolini?
Berlusconi government incites racist pogroms
By Stefan Steinberg
23 May 2008
On Wednesday, May 21, at an extraordinary sitting in the city of Naples the recently nominated cabinet of Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi passed harsh new laws directed against immigrants. The new decrees follow several weeks of state organised raids and violence directed against Italy.s immigrant community.
The special meeting of the Berlusconi cabinet had been scheduled to take place in the city of Naples in order to deal first and foremost with the city.s longstanding rubbish crisis. In the event, Berlusconi designated the garbage dumps in the region as military areas in order to stop residents from protesting against toxic waste. He combined this with playing the racist card, stressing that the .struggle against foreign criminals. was the top priority of his government and used the meeting in Naples to pass a number of extremely repressive laws.
The Berlusconi government consists of rightist and extreme-right parties, including the post-fascist National Alliance and the separatist and openly racist Northern League. In the run-up to the recent Italian federal elections, the multi-millionaire media tycoon deliberately made xenophobia the keystone of his election campaign. One of Berlusconi.s main election planks was to identify immigrants, and in particular the Roma community, as a chief source of Italy.s economic and social problems.
Immediately after the victory of the Berlusconi alliance in the parliamentary elections the Italian police and paramilitary carabinieri began a series of raids against foreigners. At the start of May the police began picking up and arresting foreign workers and their families. Hundreds of migrants from Eastern Europe, Albania, Greece, North Africa and China were detained and charged with a number of offences, including illegal entry into Italy. Fifty-three of those detained in the first weeks of the police crackdown were immediately taken to the border for expulsion in an orchestrated media operation.
Police and security forces also began moves to shut down Roma encampments in a number of locations across Italy. In a well-publicised action a few weeks ago the police launched a raid against a Roma camp located under the Milvio bridge on the banks of the Tiber River, in the Italian capital of Rome. Police have maintained a strong presence in the area since transporting away caravans as police and immigration officials undertake the deportation of those who lack proper residency papers.
The police operation was given a seal of approval by Rome.s new mayor, the former fascist Gianni Alemanno. In his own election campaign to become mayor Alemanno had vowed to dismantle the .nomad camps. where the Roma live in .third-world conditions.. In a recent visit to such a camp he declared his .horror. at what he had seen and reported: .There are no words to describe what I saw..
In fact, the horrific conditions in such camps are entirely due to the neglect of the Italian authorities. Roma encampments in Italy are regularly deprived of any access to running water or electricity.
The head of the Northern League and Berlusconi.s new minister of institutional reforms and federalism, Umberto Bossi, also weighed in to defend the police raids. .This operation against illegal immigrants is what people want,. he said recently. .They ask us for security and we have to give it to them..
The pogrom in Naples
The attacks on the Roma community then peaked with a deliberate provocation. On May 14 gangs attacked a Roma camp in the Ponticelli district of Naples and burnt it to the ground. The attack followed sensational reports in the television channels and newspapers belonging to the Berlusconi media empire in which an Italian woman claimed that a 16-year-old Roma girl had tried to abduct her child. In the wake of the often contradictory reports and testimonies over the alleged .abduction,. a crowd assembled and began shouting insults and issuing threats against the Roma living in the Ponticelli camp. Its inhabitants were then rapidly shifted out of the camp by police.
An agitated mob then used petrol bombs to burn the camp down. Witnesses reported on the flames bursting out from the buildings and caravans set ablaze. According to a number of press reports, however, the local Naples Mafia.the Camorra.played a leading role in the pogrom.
An eyewitness writes in the Corriere della Sera: .A group of youths stands nearby.... The leader is the great-nephew of [Naples suburb] Ponticelli.s .mayor,. Ciro Sarno, the Capo of a Camorra clan that has put down roots here. The youth winks to his group and off they ride on their mopeds. Ten minutes later fresh clouds of smoke rise from the nomad camps..
Both the Berlusconi government and the criminal Camorra gangs stand to benefit from the latest pogroms in Naples. Gerardo Marotta, a lawyer, told the L.Unita newspaper this week that the origin of the rubbish crisis in Naples was the use of the region by industries of the north as a cheap way to get rid of toxic waste. .For more than 40 years the industries of the north of Italy have saved the cost of cleaning up their toxic waste by entrusting the job to the Camorra, who disposed of it in illegal dumps in the south,. he said.
By instigating racist pogroms in Naples the Camorra gangs have been able to deflect attention away from their own role in the city.s rubbish scandal. At the same time the pogroms are welcome fodder for the Berlusconi government in order to divert attention from the intense social crisis in Naples and the country as a whole.
The mob violence in Naples was preceded by a systematic xenophobic campaign led by the government and media outlets and was subsequently applauded by leading members of the Berlusconi government. Prior to the latest pogroms, Northern League leader Umberto Rossi is on record declaring, .It is easier to destroy rats as wipe out the gypsies.. Following the burning down of the Roma camp on the outskirts of Naples, Rossi justified the pogrom with the words: .People are going to do what the political class cannot..
His fellow party member and the new Italian Interior Minister Roberto Maroni responded by declaring that the best way to prevent attacks on foreigners, such as that which took place in Naples, was to increase the powers of the state. This was the aim of the measures passed by the Italian cabinet on Wednesday. Provisions of the new decree stipulate:
1. For the first time unauthorised entry into Italy is designated a crime, making it possible for the authorities to immediately deport or imprison any foreigner lacking the proper residency and status papers. Deportation or imprisonment is also possible on the vaguely defined grounds that a foreign citizen is a .threat to society..
2. Local authorities are to be empowered to check on the living conditions of citizens from other EU nations before granting them right of residence. In addition to a residency permit, migrants will also be required to produce evidence that they have employment in Italy that guarantees an income sufficient to support themselves and their families.
3. The new bill, which takes immediate effect, also allows the authorities to confiscate any property let out to illegal immigrants.
In order to implement the new measures, Italian Defence Minister Ignazio La Russa has declared he is considering deploying troops to tackle urban crime and the Interior Ministry has announced plans to open up special camps for the incarceration of .criminal foreigners..
Although the new Italian law is regarded by legal experts as a violation of European Union law on the free movement of citizens across the continent, reaction by EU officials has either been muted or sought to play down the racist violence in Italy.
In the European parliament the Italian the centre-right grouping EPP-ED.European People.s Party (Christian Democrats) and European Democrats.rejected a general debate on the pogroms talking place in Italy. In November last year the chairman of the same group notably came to the defence of Franco Frattini (formerly an EU commission vice president and now foreign minister in Berlusconi.s cabinet) who for years has been urging the EU to seal its external borders against .illegal immigration..
For his part, the chair of the Socialist Group in the European Parliament, Martin Schultz, reacted to the state-sponsored racist attacks in Italy with a mealy-mouthed statement in which he declared: .The current situation in Italy is difficult. But we don.t want to conceal the fact that the issue of minority protection and integration of Roma in society is not a uniquely Italian problem in Europe..
The role of the Prodi government and Communist Refoundation
The initial government campaign against Italy.s immigrant and Roma community was instigated in 2007 by the previous .centre-left. government headed by Romano Prodi. The latest draconian laws passed by the Berlusconi cabinet also have their origin in legislation passed by the Prodi cabinet last year.with the full support of Communist Refoundation (Rifondazione Comunista.RC), a successor organisation to the Italian Communist Party.which has been presented as a role model by the petty-bourgeois left all over Europe.
Following a brutal attack on an Italian woman allegedly carried out by a Romanian citizen last autumn, the media and right-wing opposition led by Berlusconi and Bossi began a systematic campaign against foreigners in general and the Roma community in particular. At the time the newspaper Corriere della Sera ran a headline .The Invasion of Nomads..
The first to respond to the right-wing campaign was the mayor of Rome and general secretary of the newly founded Democratic Party (DP), Walter Veltroni, who went public with the comment that the Roma were guilty of 75 percent of the city.s petty crime.
At the beginning of November 2007 Veltroni then urged the Prodi government to pass a new decree Nr. 181 (decreto espulsion.deportation decree), which permits the authorities to deport European citizens who represent .a threat to public security.. The decree was directed primarily against Romanian immigrants, mainly Sinti and Roma, and permitted the police to deport entire groups of Romanians .for reasons of public security..
On November 2, decree Nr. 181 was signed by the Italian president at that time and former leader of the Italian Communist Party, Giorgio Napolitano, and the decree was then supported in public by the minister for social solidarity, Paolo Ferrero, the only member of Communist Refoundation in the Prodi cabinet.
To ensure support for his measure Prodi made the vote on the deportation decree a vote of confidence in his government. At the end of November, Communist Refoundation General Secretary Franco Giordano made an appeal for support for the decree, which was then passed by 160 votes to 158. With just one exception all of the members of RC in the Senate voted in favour of the measure.
In supporting the repressive immigration decree, RC members merely expressed their hope that it would not lead to mass deportations. On November 7, 2007, when the Romanian prime minister Calin Popescu Tariceanu met with Prodi and the Pope in Rome to discuss the repatriation of Romanian citizens, former Communist Refoundation leader Fausto Bertinotti (at the time president of the Chamber of Deputies), declared his satisfaction with the assurance given by Interior Minister Giuliano Amato (DP) that there would be no mass deportations (La Repubblica, November 7, 2007).
While Bertinotti was making his comments the police and Italian Interior Ministry were already finalising a list of approximately 5,000 .unwanted immigrants. in Rome, Milan, Naples, Turin and Florence for immediate deportation.
The list, drawn up for use by the Prodi government, has now been taken out of the back drawer for implementation by the new Berlusconi government.
The latest state-initiated racist pogroms in Italy represent a devastating indictment of the policies of Communist Refoundation, who argue that the best way to combat the right wing is to adopt their programme. It is the Prodi government and Communist Refoundation in particular which bear a large measure of responsibility for the recent attacks on Roma and other immigrants.
Rome Diary: Italy's Leap Into the Dark
Gaither Stewart
From Tom Paine's Corner
Smells, Signals and Symptoms of Fascism: Anatomy of a .Sugary Sweet Dictatorship.
.The more powerful a state and hence the more political a nation, the less inclined it is to explain the general principle governing social ills and to seek out their causes by looking at the principle of the state... (Karl Marx, Critical Notes on .The King of Prussia and Social Reform.)
(As a premise to this diary of events, notes and comments covering a period of one month following the whimsical and perverse electoral choice of this country of 60 million people, I remind readers that since the times of Machiavelli Italy has often been a political guidepost in Europe. Therefore, Italy.s peculiar preference today for an updated form of Fascism that once cost them so dearly and is furthermore headed by an accused crook is worth a close look.)
April 12-13, 2008 Silvio Berlusconi and his People of Freedom Party (PDL) in alliance with the neo-Fascist National Alliance (AN) and the autonomist and populist Northern League (Lega Nord) swept general elections this weekend with an 11-point advantage. A nightmare for many Italians and an unbelievable twist of irony for the rest of the world, the 72-year old media magnate.false hair, face lifts and lifted shoes, and besides Italy.s richest man.thus becomes the nation.s Prime Minister for the fourth time. Even before assuming office, irrepressible Berlusconi is ensconced in power where he will remain for a five-year term . and mortality permitting most likely longer.
Today Berlusconi has more powers concentrated in his hands than in any Italian political leader since Benito Mussolini. In this cool April, a full month before he is to assume office, he is making pronunciamientos right and left on domestic and foreign issues and is in contact with his favorite foreign leaders, George Bush and Vladimir Putin.
Italy.s new quasi two-party system creates a totally different scenario from the diffused power of its traditional broad coalition parliamentary governments. This time electors opted for the compact coalition led by Berlusconi. In a watertight alliance with the (post) Fascist Right, Berlusconi has a solid Parliamentary majority allowing him to establish in effect a one-man government, while at one stroke he eliminated from Parliament the Communist Left opposition he so hates.
Italy.s government-in-the-making is so far Right as to make Berlusconi.s previous governments appear leftist in comparison. Since his first government in 1994 and his two subsequent governments during the 2001-2006 legislature, Italy has in fact witnessed a steady degeneration of its representative political system.
In place of expression through the usual plethora of parties, Berlusconian populism embodies the political spirit of Italy. His Italian form of populism however already today displays symptoms of a further mutation, this time to something much uglier: to authoritarianism or worse, with tendencies toward Fascism pure and simple.
One might wonder why one of the world.s richest men wants to continue in what in chaotic Italy.s reality is a backbreaking job? As of many dictators, one says that Berlusconi above all wants to be loved. A dangerous cliché indeed. Not for a minute do I believe that being loved is the point. Not for Silvio Berlusconi. In his world, love is for sale. He wants to be admired . and envied. But above all it.s a question of power. As others of his ilk Berlusconi suffers from an insatiable need to command. In the final analysis he wants it all. Humility and measure do not exist in his character or vocabulary. In his every manifestation Berlusconi appears as an unlikely Saviour of the nation and the statesman he so wants to be. The total egoist, he recognizes no differences between what he controls politically or what he possesses. As Italian philosopher Norberto Bobbio once wrote, .Berlusconi is the classic tyrant who thinks that what common mortals only dream, for him is permitted. The characteristic of the tyrant is the belief that he can do anything..
The identity of the Italian has been shaky since the unification of Italy a century and a half ago. For that reason the Fascist state which ruled Italy from 1922-1944 remains in the dna of many Italians, the eternal puppets of unpredictable power. If one speaks of the erosion of civil liberties and a nascent police state in Great Britain, so much the more so in Italy today. In these times of uncontrollable immigration, globalization, the loss of jobs and lack of opportunities, dwindling incomes and pressures from the European Union itself to obey the rules, the images of an Italy that once counted on the world scene remain fixed in the popular memory. That fabled Italy is Berlusconi.s obsession. And a majority of Italians seem to believe he can bring it back.
No wonder the super capitalist, globalist European Union (EU) has Italy under strict observation. And well it should. For official Europe neither trusts nor understands Italy. Today, the Italy that has often marked new social-political directions for the Continent, seems ready to veer off into some uncontrollable and uncharted direction, poised to make an unpredictable leap into the dark.
In the popular imagination, Italy is still Europe.s most loved country, .the land where lemon trees bloom,. Goethe romantically wrote. But Goethe was a poet and never understood Italy either. He would be chagrined that this Italy stands on the edge of an abyss. The Alps separating Italy from the rest sometimes seems to be demonic, dooming Italy to outrageous behavior.
Yet, after the victory of the Right, Italy today is surprisingly calm.
April 28 Today Gianni Alemanno, a fiery exponent of the neo-Fascist National Alliance Party (Alleanza Nazionale), the political heir of Mussolini.s Fascist Party and Berlusconi.s chief political ally, was elected Mayor of Rome. He is the first rightwing Mayor in over 60 years. His program: security, zero tolerance toward illegal immigrants and the others of society. Alemanno comes from the ranks of the neo-Fascist Italian Social Movement (Movimento Sociale Italiano-MSI) that immediately after World War II emerged like a Phoenix from the ashes of Benito Mussolini.s German puppet state, the Italian Social Republic in north Italy. Alemanno.s upset victory reconfirms Italy.s bent for the reckless and the irrational.
April 30 Today, two days later, Gianfranco Fini, President of National Alliance, and the personal heir in a direct line from Mussolini.s Fascist Party and the neo-Fascist Italian Social Movement, was elected (actually appointed by Silvio Berlusconi) President of the incoming Chamber of Deputies. Signs of the times: On a walk through Rome while campaigning for his Fascist colleague, Alemanno, an arrogant Fini allegedly demanded to see immigrants. residence permits.
Thus, neo-Fascists now occupy two chief positions of power.the Presidency of the Chamber of Deputies, third in the state political hierarchy, and the Mayorship of Rome, in power and prestige worth more than several ministries. Again, .they. are climbing, climbing to the top.
May 5 Symptoms of the times: The victim of a beating by a Fascist-Nazi goon squad died in a Verona hospital today. On the same day at the opening of the huge Turin Book Fair.now competing with the Frankfurt Book Fair.the radical Left of the Turin Social Forum burned an Israeli flag in protest against Israel.s .guest of honor. role at this year.s book show. In the evening in the nation.s major talk show the neo-President of the Chamber of Deputies, Fini, said that the events in Turin were much more .serious. than the murder in Verona. While in Verona, he reasoned, there was no ideological reference in the young man.s murder, in Turin .the radical Left was trying to justify with anti-Zionist slogans its authentic anti-Semitism and political-religious prejudices..
In effect, the President of the Chamber is laying the groundwork for repressions of dissent like those he (Fini) commanded in Genoa in 2001 (at the infamous G-8 conference where state police under neo-Fascist control terrorized, beat and tortured anti-capitalist protesters, for which all police perpetrators have since been exonerated).
May 5 Though the new Berlusconi cabinet is not yet complete, we learned today that George Bush is scheduled to return to Rome on June 11 to visit his friend .Silvio.. Italy.s new .Sugary Sweet Dictatorship. must beef up relations with Washington and with Berlusconi.s dear friend .George. after the two-year hiatus of cool relations between the USA and Italy.s outgoing Center Left government. Bush will doubtless ask his vassal for more Italian military support in the East. And Berlusconi is always proud to send Italian ragazzi into the battlefields on American missions. At the same time, Berlusconi needs US support for upgrading Italy.s relations with Israel without offending sensibilities of the Arab world with which the Center Left government had closer relations.
May 5 The media today refer to reports of an Italian intelligence agency (AISI) according to which North-East Italy with its magnificent cities of Verona, Vicenza, Padua, and Treviso has the highest density of militant Nazi Skinheads in the country. The .Skinhead Front., originally modeled on British skinheads in the 1980s, counts several hundred activists. Their symbols are swastikas, Nazi flags and Celtic crosses. Their look is that of the .metropolitan warrior,. whose hobbies are the martial arts and weights, and their values, class-consciousness and nationalism, echoing the physical force of ancient Roman legionaries.
As a rule Nazi Skins are thugs with shaved heads and a low cultural level. Their Nazi Skinhead credo is a violent subculture typical of populist roughnecks: xenophobic, racist and anti-Semite, which they display mainly on city streets and in the soccer stadiums. Nazi Skins originate among youth of the hinterland who dedicate Saturday night to .boot parties. as they call their physical aggressions of which the violent murder in downtown Verona is an example. Theirs is a double militancy: boot parties and physical battles in the stadium. Like mercenary goon squads anywhere they are always available to be exploited politically.
Among Italy.s 80,000 organized violent soccer fans.called ultras.according to the Interior Ministry 15,000 are of the violent Right, organized in 63 groups and organizations, guided by obsessive socio-political slogans and military strategies. They constitute reservoirs of violence and embryonic political cells, as were Mussolini.s squadracci goon squads who took care of political murders. Soccer hooligans are capable of alliances with ultras of other teams in common causes and are fearless. In Rome some months ago ultras of two teams allied to attack police barracks. As every city in Italy is aware, who controls the ultras controls a potentially powerful militia.
The Nazi Skinheads also head the resurgence of anti-Semitism in Italy, profanation of Jewish cemeteries and graffiti on the walls of Italy praising the Duce, Hitler and the crematorium ovens. Intolerance and aggression against weaker parts of society, against the others of society, emerge from this subculture of violence masked under the slogan of exacting justice alone. Fascist-organized nocturnal patrols of vigilantes bearing the colorful label of .City Angels. claim they protect .honest citizens. in Bologna or Milan from vicious immigrant predators.
The same racial intolerance and anti-Semitism are not only fashionable among Nazi Skinheads and the ultras of Fascist origin. In the hinterland of big northern cities they originate also in the rural reservoir of the Northern League whose leader Umberto Bossi likes to warn in these days that if the Left wants conflicts they should be careful, for he has 300,000 men in the North ready for them . and he means armed.
The Skinheads who assassinated the man in Verona allegedly over a cigarette are members of a faction of the extreme rightist .Veneto Skinhead Front.. It is composed of a couple dozen youths and of the Verona soccer fan club. A spontaneous loose organization of like-minded youth, they spout the same Fascist ideologies and treasure the same Nazi symbols. From week to week their aggressions have mounted. Beatings because of the look of the other. Beatings to maintain control of the territory. In house searches, Verona police have found cassettes of films of their aggressions, cassettes for downloading and for sale.
Founded in 1986, the original Veneto Skinhead Front maintains relations with other Right groups in Europe. Its members have been involved in clashes with the police and Left militants and participate in neo-Nazi manifestations throughout Europe.
A film, Nazi Rock, narrates the rites and violence of the radical Right rooted in and around the beautiful city of Verona at the foot of the Alps and near Lake Garda. Its leader was a certain Piero Puschiavo, leader of rock band playing music called Nazi Rock because the song lyrics are a mix of racism, hate for immigrants, defense of roots and national identity and nostalgia for the old Fascist Republic of Salò on the western shores of Lake Garda, as well as for Adolf Hitler of whom they admire .everything except that he lost..
The former rock leader is now the coordinator in the Region of Veneto for the Tricolor Flame Social Movement, an extreme rightist splinter group headed by a long time Fascist who doubts the gas chambers ever existed. This same Luca Romagnoli was an honored guest at a Berlusconi political manifestation in December 2006 before two million spectators, when Berlusconi took Romagnoli.s hand and stroked the flag of the Flame movement. There has always been an alarming affinity and feeling between the extreme rightist organizations and Silvio Berlusconi.
When Berlusconi let Italy.s Fascists out of the closet, he also liberated the grassroots of their affiliated extremist movements who feel liberated of past Nazi-Fascist crimes. Legitimated by the national political system. They feel they were right all along. Thus they are now doubly aggressive, as if to compensate for the post-war years when they were in the closet, negated by the Italian Republic constitutionally based on anti-Fascism.
If the violence on the Right continues growing at today.s pace (and there is much supportive data ignored or underplayed by the media) then there is real cause for alarm. Especially when it happens in the Region of Veneto, in the city of Verona, famous for Romeo and Juliet and art and opera lovers. Or in nearby Treviso where a Northern League leader incited (jokingly, one says) hunters to shoot at immigrants. Local heroes in this milieu are Alessandra Mussolini, the dictator.s granddaughter, a member of Parliament and part of Berlusconi.s coalition, and Roberto Fiore, head of the extreme Right and the violent Forza Nuova organization. This violent Fascist Right is closely linked with the autonomist-separatist Northern League, in rich north Italy Berlusconi.s chief ally and his biggest vote getter. The folkloristic Northern League considers the Rome Mayor.s Celtic Cross a symbol of their ancient Celtic ancestors . not of the SS, as it was.
May 7 Today, reflections on Italy.s extreme Right are in order. For Berlusconi.s System Italy is incongruously under the fire of its own radical Right, Europe.s most powerful and aggressive Right. The Right of past golpes. The Right the rest of the European Right mistrusts. The Right to the Right of Right that has insinuated itself into public opinion, political parties, the press and into the government itself. This Right, largely concealed today, still resembles that of Central American reactionaries or the Right of Chilean and Argentinean generals. This powerful radical Right of the Right is capable of shifting the axis of public discussion and of attracting dark forces and ideas into its own field, while it goes about dismantling piece by piece the construction of the public spirit that secular, Catholic, Liberal, Communist and Socialist builders of modern Italy have realized in the 60 years since the creation of the Italian Republic.
The radical Right is a transversal force. Stealthily it also passes through Center Right parties. It insinuates itself in the Center. In Italy this Right is stronger and more rooted than the radical Right in other European countries. Powerful before the April elections and now certified and empowered by the Berlusconi-Fascist win, it is broadening its base and is capable of making an imprint on the government.
For three-quarters of a century this radical Right has been violent. It is very visible in parts of the Northern League in the hinterlands of north Italy, linked to the diffused mood of xenophobia and the demand for separatism. League people in the backcountry of Lombardy and Veneto love to speak of their ready arms and of separation from Roma ladrona (thieving Rome). They have their flags and their Parliament and call North Italy Padania for the valley of Italy.s greatest river, the Po, separating North Italy from the rest.
Nonetheless this Right is most dangerously nested in the viscera of the neo- post-Fascist National Alliance, AN. Parts of the second party of the government coalition have never digested the party.s .democratic. reforms and its move toward the Center. Therefore it is no surprise when the AN President and top leaders.members of the new government and the political establishment.assume radical Right positions, as did Chamber President Fini concerning the Turin anti-Israeli manifestations.
Here one wonders if the dog (Berlusconi) is wagging its tail, or the tail (AN), the dog.
Gullible people believe that on the way to legitimacy Fini and his ANI morphed into Democrats. In my view nothing could be more false. As writer Ignazio Silone said of Socialists (Once a Socialist, a Socialist forever!), the same goes for Fascists. Although during Stalinism many Communists reneged their faith and became ferocious anti-Communists, I have never noted that Fascists, despite Mussolini or Hitler, genuinely mutate into Communists.
May 8, 2008 The scene: the splendid Quirinal Palace, the former palace of the Popes of Rome sitting atop the Roman hill of the same name with the city of Rome sprawling at its feet, today the official seat and residency of the Italian Presidency. This evening President Giorgio Napoletano (a former Communist) swore in the new cabinet of Silvio Berlusconi in a traditional ceremony repeated with the formation of each of Italy.s new governments, for Berlusconi the fourth time.
Berlusconi had promised a cabinet of twelve ministers. Today he named 21. Pressures from his coalition allies who gave him their votes forced him to add nine ministers without portfolio, that is, ministers without budgets. Particularly conspicuous are the four ministers of the post-Fascist National Alliance and the four of the Northern League proudly wearing their folkloristic green neckties.
In the cabinets.in Italy called .governments..that I have experienced this must be the weakest and the most colorless, except its four young and glamorous women. Berlusconi boasts that the Right has the most beautiful women . and he may be right in that. Except for a few key ministries.finance, interior, justice and foreign affairs.headed by Berlusconi.s most trusted allies, the new cabinet is marked by an absence of strong personalities capable of disagreement with the Leader. For today it.s a one-man show in Italy. The very composition of this cabinet mirrors Berlusconi.s objective of one-man rule.
Berlusconi has cleared the path of all obstacles in his ascent toward the top. He controls the executive and legislative branch completely. After naming his own man Justice Minister, he has made peace with the judiciary via a closer relationship with the President of Italy who is President of Superior Council of the Magistracy, the control organ of the judiciary. Berlusconi created his own party, Popolo della Libertà (People of Freedom), changing party names, leaders and programs at will of the nation.s biggest political party. On national TV, Italians saw him sprawled over the hood of an automobile one evening on a Milan piazza, , when he casually announcd to his disciples the formation of his new party to replace his Forza Italia (Let.s Go Italy!). He preferred the name, Popolo della Libertà, which was quickly adopted. He then crushed the radical Left opposition with a tailored electoral law which obliterated the Communists he so hates and reduced the trade unions to bickering bureaucracies. After taming Parliament (which he scorns anyway) by naming personally a closed list of candidates who were promptly elected by the .sovereign people., he created a weak cabinet and a working relationship with the relatively powerless President. As chief of government he has much control over the three public television networks, in addition to his own three networks. For the realization of his neo-corporatism, he has established close relationships with the business world and named the outgoing President of the Association of Italian Industrialists as his roving Ambassador For Made In Italy. Since in his previous government he successfully resolved his conflicts with justice by passing laws ad personam and strengthened his media control, no one any longer speaks of his enormous conflict of interests as big as a New Year.s hangover.
Berlusconi.s goal is alteration of the Constitution to make of Italy a Presidential system with wide powers concentrated in the hands of the President, powers comparable to presidents of USA or Russia . if not more. That is the state he dreams of heading. Today the grim reality is that he has the parliamentary numbers and the political clout to accomplish it.
Such are the macchinations of a man of unlimited ambition whose greatest regret must be that he was not born American or Russian so that he could rule over an empire. Instead, for many, he remains the Milan businessman of jokes, songs and back-slapping bonhomie and vulgarity, albeit much more cunning than the others.
Though the label Sugary Sweet Dictatorship (Dolce Dittatura is now of common usage in the Italian press) is an oximoron of the first order, it eloquently describes Italy.s complex history and its maddening contemporary reality which few mortals comprehend. Berlusconi however does. And for a time, limited only by his mortality, Silvio Berlusconi will continue to dictate to the nation in one way or another.
Still, Italy today is strangely politically calm.
May 9 Contradictorily, Italy is in Marxian terminology a political nation. Especially so during the 20th century when it followed Mussolini.s Fascist dream. Shortly afterwards Italy then boasted of the West.s biggest Communist party, a third of the population voting Communist. Since both Fascists and Communists provided extensive political education, one believed that Italians were politically sophisticated. Reality is, they are no less gullible than .the people. everywhere. Last century in the 70s and 80s millions of frustrated and passionate people were tempted by the illusion of armed revolution. And today, ahead of most of the western world, over 80% of Italians vote in each election. Yet. their gullibility, their capricious volatile nature and frustration led them to vote again for Berlusconi and his Right dream.
The first goal of Berlusconi.s Sweet Dictatorship is to de-politicize the nation. His ready optimism in the face of grim realities reflects his efforts to erode political awareness by the constant creation of false values and false consciousness. Like Marx.s Prussian (Critical Notes on the King of Prussia and Social Reform), Berlusconi wants to make of Italy an unpolitical nation. His aim is to reduce the political system, the bourgeoisie and working classes, to uninformed and politically uneducated masses. Such is the nature of an unpolitical society.
May 9 Today, in a positive comment on my recent article about the winds of the Right blowing over Europe, a reader raises the question of equating Right and Fascism. His question is pertinent. The answer is .no., they are not always the same. There are conservative movements of the Right, that though socially unjust do not merit the term Fascism. But, I would add, they often do.
Antonio Gramsci, whom historian Eric Hobsbawm labeled Europe.s most original Communist thinker of the 20th century and who co-founded the Italian Communist Party, defined Fascism thus: a movement of the petty bourgeoisie reacting to a loss of political importance in society. It has two faces, one revolutionary, the other conservative. It starts by emphasizing its first face but it soon allies with capitalism and turns on its revolutionary wing.
Today as in Gramsci.s times, Italian Fascism is ALSO a rural phenomenon. Actually .rural. today means the densely populated areas of the small towns in north and south Italy as well as the workers suburbs of Milan and Rome where Berlusconi.s great electoral reservoir is found. That same spirit then spreads to the cities and to the nation. (This .rural. container is little different from the banlieues of Paris and of heartland America.)
Fascism is thus only partly a class phenonenon because it overflows and breaks the dikes of every organizational framework, again, as is happening in Italy today, as is happening in the USA. The phenomenon of Fascism unleashes elemental and uncontrollable social forces. Ultimately these forces underline the decay of society and the political system inherent in its low cultural level.
Sixty years have passed since Mussolinian Fascism collapsed. Yet the basic characteristics of Fascism remain unchanged everywhere, in any climate or latitude. So how can we label what is happening here? Today? In 2008? Is it a revolution, one wonders? Is .Sugary Sweet Dictatorship. enough? How will history designate it? What are its characteristics? What adjective most effectively describes the Berlusconi System-government that was officially sworn in today: authoritarian, totalitarian, corporatist, or Fascist? All four names are current in Italy.
Authoritarianism in politics is defined as a form of social control characterized by strict obedience to the authority of the state, a control enforced by oppressive measures if need be, marked by an inevitable erosion of civil liberties. The authoritarian government is undemocratic and exists quite well without the consent of the governed.
Totalitarianism is more method. It describes the workings of a state that regulates both public and private sectors. A modern totalitarian regime may maintain itself in power by propaganda disseminated through controlled mass media and the creation of false consciousness, or also by a personality cult, invasive rules, regulations and laws, the restriction of free discussion and dissent, the use of mass surveillance, terror, false-flag operations and the strategy of tension.
Fascism is a combination of the above, both total and authoritarian, characterized by a centralized, autocratic state governed by a dictatorial chief, close control of economy and society and aggressive repression of opposition. Fascism is nationalistic to the extreme, reducing the interests of the individual to the interests of the nation, promoting a kind of national rebirth by with .cults. of unity, exceptionalism and supremacy over other nations and races. Integral characteristics of Fascism include: patriotism, nationalism, militarism, populism, anti-liberalism, anti-Communism, state planning and corporatism.
What major state-government today most closely corresponds is obvious.
Corporatism as such is an integral component of the Fascist state as conceived by Italy.s Benito Mussolini. Corporatism implies the merging of state and business leadership, together with belligerent nationalism and militarism, in effect a dictatorship of the extreme Right. In practice corporatism and Fascism are one and the same.
Berlusconism: The Sugary Sweet Dictatorship
Each of the four terms.authoritariansim, totalitariansisn, Fascism and coporatism.comprise characteristics of several contemporary .democratic. governments in the USA and Europe.especially apparent in the USA and Berlusconian Italy. Berlusconi is not satisfied with even a quasi Presidential form of government, crtainly not with a parliamentary system with which he has no patience. For him decisionism and authoritarianism are synonymous, the system he believes .the people. desire.
In practice, his ideal system is a leap forward toward dictatorship, soft, sweet or sugary as it may be. In his entourage, in his party, in his Parliament and cabinet, in his Italy, the most loyal to the Chief occupy the crucial positions. While his other appointments are very young, very inexperienced, with no political back-up and no specific capabilies that qualify them for their jobs. The smell of power, the sensation of power and the extensive privileges and emoluments that go with power make Berlusconi.s men subservient to the Leader.
Berlusconi.s system has been defined as a new .corporate Right.. Despite internal differences and nuances among his allies, they all accept the indisputed Leader as the unifier of their diverse identities. In the breakdown of the new Italian Right, the particular presence of the Northern League stands out. This Northern League-Fascist imprint, populist and rich in Fascist overtones, in turn influences Berlusconi, sweeping him farther rightwards. The stamp of this anomalous majority is destined to influence today.s Italian political system so out of tune with the rest of the European Right.
It is a trusim that the smell of Power is a strong cement. Whatever internal conflicts might arise in this Right, they will have little effect on the endurance of Berlusconi.s regime ... and regime it will be. Populism and soft dictatorship are here to stay. Berlusconi wants no battle with anyone. Not even with the almost tame opposition. As he repeats to all his people, he wants to avoid mistakes, as if they were pulling off the great train robbery of the century. A quiet legislature with no scrapes, no errors, no internecine warfare. Much more than the .saviour of the nation. and the .statesman of the century., his aim is to push through constitutional changes for a genuine Presidential system . with him at the helm. His .magnificent obsession. remains the Quirinal Palace, the Presidential Palace on the hill.
Far in advance of the swing to the Right in the bigger countries of West Europe.Germany, Great Britain and France.events in these days dramatize Italy.s vigorous leap to the extreme Right, marked by a drift toward authoritarianism, a leap accompanied by a squeeze on mass organizations and the crushing of dissent. Some observers wonder if the elimination of the (radical) Left from the Rome Parliament.a Left still present in all other European parliaments.was a decision of the Right, or of the bourgeoisie, or of capitalism . or of all three together. Or was it the Trilateral or the Bilderbergers? However that may be, it smacks suspiciously of a top-level plan.
Today I received disturbing information from an old friend concerning a plot: In 2006 after the Center Left was elected in Italy, a highly placed DC operative told this friend, .Wait a little longer. After Chirac leaves in France, we will have our man at the Elysée Palace. Then Italy will see good old Silvio telling his jokes again ... and they will all sing the chorus to the neocon song.. This brings to mind earlier years in post-war Europe when the Company was running rampant and paying off anyone on the way! And decades later when one of them said to me in an off-the-cuff interview about Italy: .We run things here..
The Italian Left was in fact severely punished by an electoral law which neither Center Right nor Center Left bothered to touch. It is also true that the Americanized Center Left Democratic Party which lost the elections, has renounced Social Democracy, becoming more Center than Left. It now seems that all parties to the Right of the radical Left intended simplifying the political spectrum by expelling that Left and eliminating opposition to Italy.s market-driven society.
The authoritarian temptation is a system modeled on the USA. A system without opposition is the dream of aspirant regimes. Perhaps Berlusconi.s Italy is not yet identifiable as Fascism, which was something with different historic roots and characteristics.albeit something terrible with its corporatism, militarism, nationalism and racist laws.something that perhaps cannot be repeated today.Nonetheless, Italy has fallen headlong into the snakepit of a still unpredictable authoritarianism.
Today a certain Italy is only dangerously calm.
May 9 While Berlusconi reflects on the nomination of Under Secretaries I want to recall the history of Fascism which still fascinates Italians as if it happened yesterday. Both culturally or politically, Italy.s present is intertwined and permeated with the idea of Fascism.
Flashback: Benito Mussolini (1883-1945), the Fascist dictator from 1922-1943, centralized all power in himself as the leader, il Duce. In his thirst for grandeur and his attempt to create a new Italian empire, he allied with Nazi Germany and led Italy into disaster and to his own downfall. After Italy.s military defeat by the Allies, Mussolini.s colleagues turned on him and held him under arrest until German paratroopers rescued him and took him to German-occupied north Italy. Like a modern Napoleon on Elba, Mussolini established a tiny German-dependent puppet state, the Italian Social Republic or Repubblica Sociale Italiana-RSI, called also the Republic of Salò for the charming town of Salò on the western shores of Lake Garda where it was headquartered.
Germany supported the little Fascist state, which had no economy nor government, in order to maintain order, combat Italian partisans and persecute Jews. Italians loyal to Mussolini and rural youth recruited in north Italy around Lake Garda and the Veneto Region then engaged in a civil war against Italian partisans, a war in which Mussolini promised to turn Milan into the Stalingrad of Italy. To re-gain popular support he made many promises.to remove the monarchy and pursue the real ideology of Fascism depicted as progressive and social. Still, he maintained close personal relations with Hitler, urging him to destroy Great Britain, a prerequisite for peace in Europe, he believed. As the war drew to an end, both Germany and victorious Allies raped and devastated Italy, the fault of Fascism and Mussolini.s grandeur complexes. After a humiliated Mussolini lost the support of his people and his German masters, he was captured by Italians partisans, summarily executed and his body hung by his feet on a Milan piazza.
In this atmosphere supporters of Mussolini in 1946 created the neo-Fascist Italian Social Movement (Movimento Sociale Italiano, or MSI). For 25 years the MSI existed as a paralegal movement until in a tactical move during the Cold War it removed some of its Fascist symbols and recognized Italian democracy. But it still included extremist organizations infiltrated by rogue Italian and American intelligence engaged in false flag operations such as the masscre at the Bologna train station in 1980 that killed 80 people: the aim was to terrorize people into voting for authoritarian government and to cast the blame on the Communist Party.
I had the personal testimony of Fascists associated with Gladio, NATO.s top secret stay-behind paramilitary Cold War organization. Gladio, intelligence agencies and the extreme Right operating with CIA assistance have been accused for the 1978 abduction and murder of the Christian Democratic leader, Aldo Moro, guilty of attempting to bring the Italian Communist Party into the national government. Though Red Brigadists executed the Moro crime, I have long believed that that second edition of the Red Brigades.by then most of the original organizers were in jail.was maneuvered by the CIA and Italian intelligence. MSI organizations were implicated in rightwing coup d.états attempts in the 1970s and 80s and were engaged in violence during the lead years of terrorism, gli anni di piombo. Finally, in 1995 the MSI changed its name to the National Alliance Party (AN) and became Berlusconi.s chief and most loyal ally and coalition partner.
AN President and the neo-President of the Chamber of Deputies, Gianfranco Fini, is thus the direct heir of Mussolinian Fascism. He personally fostered the transformation of MSI to Alleanaza Nazionale, which he describes as neo-liberal rightwing and centrist-oriented. Unconvinced neo-Fascist hardliners instead founded parallel movements such as that of the Duce.s granddaughter Alessandra Mussolini.s Alternativa Sociale (Social Alternative). She is on Berlusconi.s team and was elected to Parliament in his ranks.
For 50 years the MSI stood for intransigent anti-Communism, a strong executive, aggressive government, opposition to the superpowers in international politics, and a third way between liberal capitalism and socialism. The MSI-AN dna remains the same though Fini and its leaders are subservient to Berlusconi who has incorporated all those themes as his own. Berlusconi.s Peoples Freedom Party is absorbing also the MSI-AN organization, a two-way process by which it too becomes the heir of Mussolinian Fascism.
One doubt remains in my mind. Considering the complex history of the Fascist MSI-AN, who, I wonder, is absorbing whom? Berlusconi, Fini? Or is Fini, surreptitiously, bit by bit perhaps assimilating Berlusconi?
May 11 Speaking to the national assembly of Alleanza Nazionale in Rome to mark the 20th anniversary of the death of Giorgio Almirante, the founder of the neo-Fascist MSI, Gianfranco Fini proclaimed: .We won!. The AN President meant the final victory of the Right and in effect he summed up of the iedological battles of the 20th century for the souls and allegiance of the European working man ... and perhaps he meant too the vindication of Benito Mussolini. .The radical Left no longer exists,. Fini added triumphantly, .but we are here and we have carried Right thought to the nation. Therefore we must assume in its stead the defense of workers and social themes.. (Mussolini.s program!)
In an irresistable return to the Fascist-Nazi prediliction for ritual, Fini then read out one by one the names of Italy.s Fascist heroes-saints, including that of Almirante, the spiritual father of Italian neo-Fascism. .We are not the sons of a minor god,. Fini said to the notables of Italy.s political world. Though no one present asked, I had the thought that many must have remembered just whose sons they are.
In harmony with Fini.s script, the neo-Interior Minister, Roberto Maroni of the Northern League, in another part of Rome announced stringent new measures against illegal immigrants, declaring them criminals to be arrested and deported. In effect, the Left press noted, new racial laws! Italy.s borders are to be closed to Roma gypsies and to the .perfidious. Romanians, widely considered the Mexicans of Italy. The latter caused the Bucarest govrnment, now part of the EU, to remind Rome that blocing borders is a flagrant violation of the EU.s Schengen accords permitting the free movement of the Union.s peoples from one country to the other.
May 12 Today Berlusconi filled in the last empty slots in his political power network with the nomination of 37 Under Secretaries attached to the various ministries, including eight for himself and eight more to his neo-Fascist allies. While in Bologna in the north the political battle over the use of neo-Fascist vigilantes raged, in the Rome Viminal Palace the Interior Minister prepared a government decree making illegal immigration a crime.
May 13 Les jeux sont faits! The Berlusconi government system, the Sugary Dictatorship, is in place. The wheels of state can now begin to turn. Where it will stop, well, no one really knows. But we can speculate on what all this means.
May 14 Racial laws are returning. TV newscasts show eerie scenes of flames rising against nighttime skies in the suburbs of Rome and Milan and Naples. Dangerous old words are again fashionable.tight police control, armed traffic police, special commissars, oppression, deportation, revolt, ghettos, camps. Nightmare alley images of fires rising in the night do not lie. Away with the Roma gypsies is the mood! Gypsy camps are burning in the night. Incited by the mood of intolerance from above, citizen vigilantes armed with clubs and organized criminals of the Camorra are invading makeshift Roma camps around the big cities. Molotov coctails ignite the shacks and tents and ramshackled cars and vans. It.s Krystal Nacht for Italy.s gypsies who have been here forever, many Italian citizens. Hitler, one recalls, began with the expulsion of the gypsies, the perfidious Zigeuner.
May 15 As the the new government of Silvio Berlusconi inaugurates Italy.s Third Republic, the attempt to quantify the Fascist role is pertinent. For the number of neo-Fascists installed in key positions in the Sweet Dictatorship is staggering. Here, from the top down, are those who trace their political geneaology straight back to Mussolini,: Fianfranco Fini occupies the third power position in Italy, the Presidency of the Chamber of Deputies, while Gianni Alemanno is solidly entrenched as the Mayor of Rome. Alleanza Nazionale occupies four major ministries, and has another eight Under Secretaries infilrating other ministries. The web of power then extends downwards, down into city, provincial, and regional administrations, into the media world, the world of business and finance, and the enormous bureaucratic network of commissions and committees and consultants and lobbies that ultimately influence the direction of a nation. Especially in the rich north the fascistoid Northern League occupies a like number of positions. And over all the power structure, Berlusconi.s falange! the corporatist authoritarian People of Freedom Party, Italy.s biggest political organization today.
The longterm significance of the march to power of System Berlusconi (the person Silvio Berlusconi and his People of Freedom Party, the neo-Fascist AN and the populist Northern League, their cabinet, their Parliament, their media and public and private organizations) is the defeat of even the century-old idea of a working class movement in Italy. It seems to extinguish the faintest glimmer of hope for even a mild form of modern Socialism. A sad spectacle, the caged Left, trapped in a dark corner of extra-parliamentary opposition, today adrift and deprived of feasible ideas for its rebirth.
Instead, basking in the limelight, Berlusconi.s People of Freedom prance around the political stage, unbridled arrogance surging from their very pores while their electoral promises begin to dissipate. And freedom for whom? One asks. From whom? The freedom for longer work days, proclaims the Right. Freedom for more productivity, advise the new state ministers. Freedom for longer work hours at Europe.s lowest pay, complains the Left. Freedom of precarious six-month work contracts so as not to be bound to a lifetime of toil, proclaim hypocrites. Freedom for wives and mothers to work longer hours exactly as their husbands . at lower pay. Freedom to labor and work instead of long and dreary university study. Freedom to serve people and nation in the armed forces in Afghanistan in support of Berlusconi.s precious friend, President George Bush.
May 15 official Italy seems calm today.
An eerie political calm seems to reign over the riotous, unruly, anarchic peninsula state of Italy which, according to Giovanni Giolitti, five time Prime Minister early last century, was not at all difficult to govern. Though, as he said, it was useless.
As in Cold War years, so in the Berlusconi era the fear of leftist Communists and the desire of many Italians to be a normal nation has led to today.s unconscious toleration of the rise of a nascent form of authoritarian government with many characteristics of Fascism.
May 23, 2008 GAITHER STEWART is a Senior Special Contributing Editor and European Correspondent at Cyrano's Journal, a novelist and journalist. His stories, essays and dispatches are read widely on many leading venues. His fiction, Icy Current Compulsive Course, To Be A Stranger and Once In Berlin are published by Wind River Press


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This is a tasty rub that is easy to make with common ingredients around the house. It goes great on pork, but would also go well with chicken. This is a fabulous rub that is a dervitive of a couple of recipies I found on allrecipies.com.
- 1 tsp black pepper, ground
- 1 tsp garlic, minced , dried
- 1 tsp sea salt
- 1 tsp rosemary leaves, dried
- olive oil
- Combine and mix all dry ingredients in a small bowl or mortar
- If some of the bits are on the bigger side, you may want to grind them up in to smaller bits in a mortal and pestal.
- Slowly add in olive oil and mix until mixture becomes a paste.
- Apply to meat. Add a heavier coat if you wish to make it spicier.
- Grill normally.


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All items > Shop by Brand > TOPS Knives
- Overall Length:36.00"
- Head Width:5.50"
- Head Material:1095
- Finish:Black
- Cutting Edge:2.00"
- Handle Material:Stainless Steel
- Color:Black
- Weight:1 lb. 4.00 oz.
- Sheath:Leather
- Brand:TOPS Knives
- Model:Hoffman Hawkin' Walking Cane
- Model Number:HSTIK-01
- Country of Origin:USA
- Best Use:Camp/Hike
- Product Type:Axe
The Hawkin' Stick pulls double-duty as a sturdy walking stick that can also be used as an axe for small wood while hiking/camping or as a self-defense implement in a bad situation. The 1095 steel hawk head measures 5-1/2" across and has a 2" cutting edge. The stick is made from 1" diameter chrome moly 4130 tube. The head is protected with a black leather sheath and the bottom of the tube is capped with a rubber boot. Designed by Terrill Hoffman.


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Admitted students can use this entry to talk. I imagine you might also want to join the UVA Class of 2021 Facebook group to chat with your future classmates. That group is just for students. Parents, you can check out the UVA Parents Page and the UVA Parents Facebook page.
I'll have post about admission statistics in the coming days and you'll be getting an email with your personalized RSVP link for Days on the Lawn (admitted student open houses) soon. Below your letter are buttons to accept or decline your offer. If you accept, you will see a button to let you pay your tuition deposit online*. Orientation registration will open after April 1st and you'll get more information about that in the future.
You have until May 1st to decide whether you'll be joining us in Charlottesville. If you decide to go elsewhere at some point in the coming weeks, I hope you'll decline the offer via your self-service page.
|Image by Jen Fariello Photography
*We have an e-check system for deposits. You'll type in the numbers on the bottom of a check. The system will take certain kinds of credit cards, but it's primarily an e-check system. Be sure to turn off your pop-up blocker when you go to pay the deposit!


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Here's a collection of 34 Hubble images for mappers to use in their maps!Textures are generated from the higest rez pics on hubblesite.org so they should enlarge with no visual problems in-game. Almost all textures are 2048x2048 in size with the occasional one being 1024x1024!JPG instructions included in each pack so you can easily get the material setup!
All you need to do is import them, create the material as specified by my instructions. Then apply them to a fogsheet (EngineVolumetrics package) and make the fogsheet of a size of probably 60-100+
Grab the pack here: FileFactoryPack contains!(as seen ingame);
Instructions look like this; Big credits to hubblesite.org for the original images! Don't forget to credit them if you use'em!
I like playing with stuff!
Stevie's cornerA blog dedicated to UE4, UDK, UT99 / 2004 / III / 4.All UT4 CTF custom maps. All UT4 remakes. UE4 links (guide, tut). UE4 resources, Software tools & resources.
AMD RYZEN 7 1800x@ 4.0ghz-MSI X370 PRO CARBON-2xMSI GTX780Lightning-Corsair Vengeance DDR4 16GB-SAMSUNG 850Evo-LOGITECH G19-CORSAIR VengeanceM65 & HX1200i-COOLERMASTER HAF Stacker915R/935/915F-Custom Loop
Hi mate, I just downloaded this pack and it does contain some really nice textures Just 2 notes,First of all the download link is not working anymore. On epic forums there is a working one.Secondly I noticed that moste .tga files have an unused alpha channel. This additional channel have a significant impact on the file size, if you them you can save -25% MB per texture :)
Nichts wäret ewiglich, nur die Natur bleibt bestehen.


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Search NC LIVE Health & Wellness sources:
Browse Health Topics
Providers & Services
Managing a health condition can be complicated. NC Health Info's new Providers & Services section helps you learn about providers as well as services, programs, and support groups.
Browse Health & Wellness Sources
- CINAHL Plus with Full Text
- Family Health Database
- Ebooks on EBSCOhost
- NC Health Info
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Liz Ametsbichler
Refer to graduation requirements listed previously in the course catalog.
Major and Minor Worksheet [doc]
Major and Minor Worksheet [pdf]
All majors must register in the department and be assigned a departmental major advisor. A student is not considered a major in the Department of Modern and Classical Languages and Literatures until he or she has registered with the department.
Russian Major Requirements
- Russian 101 to 202 or equivalent.
- RUSS/MCLG 105HY: Intro to Russian Culture
- At least 27 credits of upper division work in Russian, 15 of which must be in the target language and must include 301 and 302. The remainder must include one semester of Russian history and two of the following: 308, 312L and 313L.
- Students are required to maintain a minimum overall GPA of 2.5 in all upper-division courses presented in fulfillment of requirements for the Russian major.
- The Upper-division Writing Expectation must be met by successfully completing RUSS 494: Seminar in Russian Studies.
Russian Minor Requirements
Russian 101, 102, 201, 202, and 12 upper-division credits.


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New for North Shore real estate searches
Today, BetsyBullock.com launched a new real estate website for the North Shore of Massachusetts. This Cape Ann agent specializes in Manchester real estate, Beverly real estate, Beverly Farms real estate, Prides Crossing real estate, Gloucester real estate, Rockport real estate, Essex real estate and more (phew! I am out of breath.) Her new site offers mapped searches with Zillow info, Yelp info and Education.com info about school systems. She also has community profiles for many of the North Shore communities. You can create your own customized searches with up-to-the-minute from MLSpin.
Congratulations to Betsy and thank you to the folks at Boston Logic who produce great real estate websites.


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Cake Decorating Kits and Baking Ideas for the Beginner Wilton Starter Kits
Cake Decorating Kits
Cake decorating kits can make it easy for the non-professional baker to bake birthday and other cakes for kids, parties, weddings and more.
Kits typically contains all of the directions, supplies and guidelines a beginner needs to start a project. From making a first birthday cake all the way to making a cake for a friend's wedding.
Most decorating kits come with a variety of tips, stencils, icing bags, icing knife, instructions and some kits you can buy with the pan including. Some of the fun pans available range from teddy bears, fire engines, favorite cartoon characters and more.
Most kits will let you either make your cake and icing from scratch. Better yet, purchase a store bought cake mix and icing and use fondants and other items to bake your cake.
Kits to Decorate Cakes
Shaped Cake Pans
Making a Cake Using a Shaped Cake Pan
Cakes can also be make using an shaped cake baking pan. This is fairly easy to do. Once you have purchased a cake pan, follow the instructions that come with the pan on how much cake mix to use. Prepare your cake batter as required and bake.
Once your cake has been removed from the oven and cooled it is time to decorate. Look for ideas from the cake pan photo. Purchase or make icing in the color that coordinates with your cakes theme. Buy or prepare different colors of icing to decorate your cake with. You can also use embellishments to go along with the cake.
Baking Cakes Books and Information
Learning from Instructions and Books
Another source to learn how to make cakes is to have someone teach you or take a professional course.
There are several resources and instruction ideas online all you have to do is goggle them. Look for free cake recipes, free cake ideas, cake baking instructions or something specific to what you want to make. (easy first birthday cake ideas, ideas on making a wedding cake, free cake decorating ideas).
If you are a good learner there are several great cake baking and instructions books available. Books range from everything to easy wedding cake ideas to baking cakes and cookies.


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The secret ingredient behind WGBH's extraordinary impact and nearly 65 years of success? Our talented employees make it happen. Working at WGBH puts you front and center at one of the nation's most vibrant media production centers. What WGBH employees all have in common—across the wide spectrum of careers—is their commitment to our educational mission. Join the dedicated employees who bring their best to WGBH, day after day.
Open WCRB positions:
Radio Announcer
At WCRB, we are always looking for fill-in hosts who are engaging speakers, are knowledgeable about classical music, and have flexible schedules. This is a great opportunity for a classical music fan with a passion for expanding the audience for classical music and an appreciation for radio. This is a fill-in, as-needed position, with the possibility of up to 25 hours per week. We're seeking all ranges of experience, from the newcomer to the seasoned professional.
The Radio Announcer must be an appealing on-air presenter of classical music with a friendly, conversational delivery. S/he should execute station-generated programming or make music selections in accordance with station policy. Must be able to learn and use broadcast software. Familiarity with classical music and radio broadcast knowledge preferred, but not required.
Intrigued? Send your audition, resume, and cover letter to:
Human Resources
attn: WCRB Radio
1 Guest Street
Boston, MA 02135
For more WGBH employment opportunities, visit the WGBH careers page.


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The Selene punch bowl set from Libbey features a rounded, modern styling that resembles a fish bowl (a pretty elegant one, at that). Sure to make a beautiful presentation for serving punch at weddings, holiday parties, and more, this punch bowl set includes eight cups and one clear plastic ladle.
Standard Features:
- 10 Piece Selene Punch Bowl Set
- Modern styling
- (1) 13.5 qt. Punch Bowl
- (8) 11.75 oz. Punch Cups
- (1) Plastic Ladle
10 Piece Selene Punch Bowl set includes (1) 13.5 qt. Punch Bowl, (8) 11.75 oz. Punch Cups & (1) Plastic Ladle
Libbey 55466 Specifications
|Punch Bowl Set


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Homespun Acoustic Guitar Method with CD and 2-DVD Set
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This mega-pack features the book/CD pack written by David Hamburger combined with the 2-DVD set, also featuring David Hamburger.The Acoustic Guitar M...Click To Read More About This Product
6-Month* financing available.
This mega-pack features the book/CD pack written by David Hamburger combined with the 2-DVD set, also featuring David Hamburger.
The Acoustic Guitar Method, Book 1
The first in a series of beginning method books that uses traditional American music to teach authentic techniques and songs. From the folk, blues and old-time music of yesterday have come the rock, country and jazz of today. Now you can begin understanding, playing and enjoying these essential traditions and styles on the instrument that truly represents American music: the acoustic guitar. Working in both tablature and standard notation, you'll learn how to find notes on the fingerboard, a variety of basic chords and strums, country backup basics, waltz time, and melodies with half notes and rests. When you're done with this method series, you'll know dozens of the tunes that form the backbone of American music and be able to play them using a variety of flatpicking and fingerpicking techniques.
Songs include "Man of Constant Sorrow," "Columbus Stockade Blues," "Careless Love," "Get Along Home, Cindy," "Sally Goodin," "Ida Red," "Darling Corey," "Hot Corn, Cold Corn," "East Virginia Blues," "In the Pines," "Banks of the Ohio," "Scarborough Fair," and "Shady Grove."
The Acoustic Guitar Method DVD
These carefully graded starter lessons are based on David Hamburger's best-selling books, issued by the publishers of Acoustic Guitar magazine. Total beginners will learn how to use a pick and form all the most important chords, while those with some guitar experience will learn fingerpicking styles and other essential techniques. More than two-dozen classic songs are taught, drawn from blues, folk, country, and bluegrass traditions. Includes music and tab.
- Book Size: 9"W x 12"L
- 46 pages
- DVD size: 6"W x 8"L
- Running time: 230 minutes


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Perdomo Mini Sungrown 5/20View details
Few can match the rich flavor and pleasing aroma of Perdomo Mini Sun Grown cigarillos. These little puros are rolled in a Jalapa wrapper brimming with sweet sunshiny flavor for a savory medium-bodied smoke that satisfies anytime a short smoke is called for. Order this box with 5 tins of 20 now.


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At AutoRevo we pride ourselves on having the very best car dealer websites in the automotive industry. Our new website platform is built with selling more cars in mind. You'll have very clear calls to action, sleek graphics, smooth navigation, and host of templates and options to choose from. Fully customer dealer websites are available as well! You can select from dozens of our car dealer website templates or go choose to make the site your own and go with our fully custom dealer websites, the choice is yours. One of our highly skilled and trained Account Managers will walk you through the entire process and make everything easy for you.
Impress your potential customers with your new super-fast, fully secure and responsive used car dealer website. They will find the sites a pleasure to navigate and supremely visually appealing. We take great pride in our work and can't wait for you to see our magnificent sites.
Your site isn't just an online placeholder for your dealership, it is the foundation of your digital marketing strategy. Our sites are the most advanced on the market today and have been proven, over and over, to convert more leads and sell more cars. In addition to all of our robust, advanced features, our car dealer websites are unique and well-designed. You will be proud to direct potential customers to your website or to know that the person who just called in about that car came from your site. If you're looking for other tools to help sell more cars, AutoRevo has you covered. Head over and check out the wealth of Inventory Management tools that we offer. From our fantastic inLine Pricing Tool to our new and improved Craigslist Automation system. You'll be selling more cars in no time! But first, check out our options below and schedule your very own personal demo today!
Responsive Car Dealer Websites
Mobile devices now play a very large role in the car-buying process. Your car dealer website and your brand need to be represented, consistently, across every device possible. With a responsive car dealer website from AutoRevo, you'll give every user an optimal experience for their device.
Learn more about Responsive Dealer Websites.
Custom Dealer Websites
Your website is a customer's first impression of your business. So what impression are you making? Stand out from the competition with an AutoRevo Secure & Responsive Website. Our Design Team will create a truly amazing custom website for your dealership, and our Vehicle Management System makes it incredibly easy to manage your inventory.
Learn more about Custom Dealer Websites.
Inventory List Pages
Showing your inventory in the best possible light is the name of the game and AutoRevo's Inventory List Pages are the industry leaders with their SEO-friendly URL structure, which makes sure your vehicles show up at the top of all relevant searches, to their superior search filters, making it super easy for your potential customers to find that perfect vehicle as quickly as possible.
Learn more about Inventory List Pages.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
You want a website that will rank high on the Search Engine Results Page (SERP). AutoRevo's car dealer websites feature out-of-the-box optimization to help your dealership get found online. AutoRevo complies with Google's standards for usability and search engine visibility. Our "white hat" and ethical Search Engine Optimization strategies help your website rank higher without any extra effort.
Learn more about Search Engine Optimization.
Dealer Website Gallery
Our responsive and secure websites are some of the most cutting-edge and visually appealing in the automotive industry. But more than that, they are structured to use those aesthetics to help convert more leads than ever before. But don't take our word for it.
Click here to check out some examples of our custom dealer websites.
Quick Desk
Our new Quick Desk feature is a fantastic marketing tool that helps you compile a document with the total "out the door" price for your customers. You can then print or email the document to your customers and sell more cars!
Click here for more information about our new Quick Desk feature.