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Category Archives: Double Standards
Kuwait National Assembly
I write this with a disturbingly vivid recollection of approximately 250 pairs of eyes bordered with bushy eyebrows fixed on me in a peculiar mix of fascination and loathing. In a room of almost 250-300 men, roughly 15 of the people in this hall were women, at most, all from my private American school, all uncovered, one blond. The queasiness that came over me quickly disappeared in mere moments when I reminded myself that I, along with the female classmates and teachers with me, had as much of a right to be in that hall as they did. Even if the security expressed their displeasure at our presence by asking girls to "uncross [their] legs when [they] sit", they couldn't exactly ask us to leave. I then remembered a scene from Meryl Streep's new film The Iron Lady based on Margaret Thatcher's life, where she is first elected into Parliament and she is the only woman there. She's momentarily overwhelmed by the amount of men in suits, ties, pants, polished black shoes – and she feels so feminine standing amongst them, in her baby-blue skirt and blouse, in her flowery hat, in her high heels, with her blond hair. Still, this is the Iron Lady we're talking about. She holds her head up and takes firm steps as confidently as their own, for she knows that she had earned that position and worked hard for it. She was not about to give it up because of a few condescending, misogynistic/intimidated eyes.
The Main Hall of the Kuwait National Assembly was insanely packed with men, and even though I had decided against wearing a skirt because I had expected this, I felt 'uncomfortably' feminine nonetheless. I wore the lowest heels I could find, long pants, and a formal blouse. I do have to point out that I even if I got looks for being a girl, I didn't get comments of ridicule for the way I was dressed like my classmates who showed up in skirts and dresses did – for that I'm strangely grateful. Put politely, they were considered to be dressed 'unconservatively' and were 'perfect examples of why there needs to be a law that requires women to cover up'. I couldn't help but come to the conclusion that it made sense, when you have a male-dominated Parliament, it's only natural that you'll have a male-dominated society. Or is it the other way around? Does it matter which way it is?
As you may have heard, today's jalsa was cancelled due to black flags being raised in protest of the title of الاربعاء الاسود. We were dismissed from the hall 10 minutes into the session, but that was all it took to absorb in the patriarchy-saturated atmosphere that soaked the hall. I'm happy to say that although we received critical looks and comments, the 'tour' made up for it. Waleed Al Dhefiri kind enough to show us around and tell us the history of the Parliament both from the architectural aspect and the political one. A very down-to-earth and critical-thinking man, he gave us the opportunity to ask about anything that we were wondering about. Speaking for myself, I was very reassured with his answers that, mainly, this Parliament won't be able to impose all the things that they want to impose on the citizens. I also voiced my concerns to him as a female, and he gave me a great piece of advice that I've vowed to always carry with me: "Sheikh Jaber الله يرحمه has given you a right that no one can take away without your permission." Those words alone revitalized the determination and the hope that I have for a better future, and for being a part of that process of betterment – not despite being a woman, but because of being a woman.
Write for Rights
I watched this video, and it made me think of the infinite power that writers possess. What really shook me the most is Adnan Ibrahim saying that the average Arab reads of his own free will for approximately three minutes a year – an utmost tragedy. Yet, I can't help but wonder who is to blame. The Arab himself for not trying to find the tools to his own liberation, or the government for making the tools seem unappealing? I know people who HATE reading. Even more who actually can't read. 18 year old full-blooded Arab students who stutter over their words in Arabic class, and use terms like "imaginating" in English class. It would be one thing if they compensated for their lack of Arabic fluency with their English skills, but it's a total embarrassment when they can't speak either of the two. Then again, I do have to say that schools, in this case, are partially to blame. When the material presented is deathly-boring and dry as a dead man's bones, the student won't show any interest and won't feel encouraged to learn the material. But if you present him or her with poetry, or stories, or articles, or literature that they can relate to and will grab their attention, it's almost guaranteed that he'll want to take part in the class – and there you have it, he's learning! I sometimes sit in my Arabic class while the teacher is talking about grammar, and I hide my poetry book under my desk and read. And to be honest, it feels like I'm learning more while I'm reading that book than while I'm listening to my teacher – my appreciation of language is deepened, my understanding of certain concepts expands, my own writing develops. How else can you be a better writer if you don't read?
Almost every intellectual will tell you that he only managed to liberate himself through reading. And the ones in Kuwait will tell you they did it by reading many, many banned books. Adnan Ibrahim also mentioned self-critiquing; I along with several other writers I know have made this a habit through our writing. Keeping a journal to keep yourself in check is the best way to see how much you've grown from day to day. It gives you easy access to the person you were last night, or last month, or last year. That way, you can compare the 'two people'. You can also compare yourself to the characters you read about, whether in fictional or in non fictional books. Read books that insult you, read books that provoke you, read books that make you squirm and feel uncomfortable and queasy. Those are the only books that challenge your frame of thought; if by the time you reach the last page, you still don't agree, then your beliefs are firm. If not, then you've acquired new, better beliefs that would make you more comfortable with yourself. Read books that tell you to question everything, to doubt, to inquire, to aspire, to love, to fight, to rebel. Rebelling does not necessarily have to be violent. Simply by carrying a set of values and beliefs that opposes your society's, you are rebelling. Simply by reading books that your society has deemed to be inappropriate, you are rebelling. And most importantly, by writing, you are rebelling.
In 1984 by George Orwell the main character keeps a journal. He's afraid of keeping a journal, because he's not allowed to – the 'Thought Police' arrest anyone who keeps track of his own thoughts or feelings or memories. Yet he writes, with a trembling hand and a quivering pen, he writes to remember. He writes so he can later assert the truth. He writes of his dreams, his secret desires, his childhood memories, the country he knew before it turned into a totalitarian state. Of course, later he is arrested – but it takes so much to break him after he had liberated himself. Books were also banned in this state, so when his new-found lover gives him books that discuss liberty and freedom and innate rights, he's introduced to a completely new world. All of a sudden he's awestruck with intimacy being an expression of love rather than a duty, with education being enlightening rather than evil, with family being sacred rather than a group of people put together to worship Big Brother. Of course, because he's so enlightened, he's caught. Intellectuals are always outcasts in these societies, and rejected because they think differently.
People of Kuwait, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, the Arab world altogether – write. Write about the injustices you experience, the disrespect you're forced to tolerate, the discrimination you witness, the hopes you dream of for our future, your ambitions, your goals, your disappointments, your expectations, your demands, your sadness, your happiness – whatever that may be. You'll be surprised to find that you'll experience your own epiphanies while you are writing. Do it through poetry, fiction, non-fiction, articles, books, editorials, blog posts, anything. Write for you, write for your people, write for freedom, write for rights. Bring back the true power of the pen. Pour your heart and soul on paper and then share it. I've finally realized that the only reason the radical religious figures are more influential than the liberals is because they are organized and the liberals are dispersed and afraid of speaking out, for more often than not, they are already social outcasts.
But yesterday with the Paint to Freedom incident, I was surprised to see how many people seemed to share the same thoughts. Once you get your ideas and concerns out, I guarantee you will find at least one more person who feels the same way you do. And it's always good to find someone who's on the same side as you are.
Paint to Freedom
Shurooq Amin had her gallery "It's A Man's World" at Al Salhiya tonight, and was surprised to find that someone had reported her artworks to be 'inappropriate'. Police received complaints of people feeling 'insulted' by her artworks, and around 10 PM headed there to notify Shurooq that her gallery would be shut down, and if she didn't comply she would have to pay a fine. They referred to her artwork as "pornographic" and مخلة. They took photos of her artworks, saying that they would be sending them to the ministry.
This is exactly why we're always either stuck in limbo or in a constant state of regression rather than progress. We can't find proper books in our own country anymore, now with Virgin being shut down and all the good writers banned in the other bookstores. Our movies are censored, and instead we're fed a bunch of media advertisements to turn us into consumerist robots during those 15 minutes that the cinema had cut out. Our writings are censored, it's inappropriate to write about love and inappropriate to address the endless issues our society is facing. How does denial help anyone? Why is it believed that if we pretend a problem doesn't exist, it'll go away? It only gets worse the more it's ignored. Shurooq addressed those issues in her paintings and I for one am glad she did, someone needed to speak up. As a writer I relate to her, because I know how frustrating it is to constantly be forced to bite my tongue and mute my voice when I know that what I'm seeing is wrong – yet, pointing out the wrongs of society is apparently wrong in itself.
I say it needs to end. The intellectuals of the Arab society need to unite to fight censorship and ignorance and regression. I really wouldn't be surprised if this regression was planned. Why would higher powers want 'the public' to enlighten and liberate themselves from their own shackles? Better to make them love those shackles and brainwash them well enough to have them enforce your ideologies on others too. That way, it won't just be your security forces imposing your beliefs on others. It'll be the monsters you created too.
Please hashtag #painttofreedom with any tweets regarding Shurooq Amin's gallery or art/writing censorship in the Gulf.
The Cruel Society
My friend Arie wrote an article called The Cruel Sea about Bas Ya Bahar (an old Kuwaiti film) and an upcoming Egyptian author, Yahia Lababidi. It can be read here. I'm ashamed to admit that I haven't watched the movie, even though it's one of the only Kuwaiti films to be considered top-notch. In my defense, however, it's very difficult to find lately. But I will try my best to find a copy at any of the old video stores in Salmiya.
I asked some older people about it, and they told me that it depicts the pearl-diving history of Kuwait before the discovery of oil. I asked, "That's it?" and they said yes, mostly. I didn't understand because Arie had mentioned something about rape victims in the Middle East, and here they were telling me it was about pearl diving. After Arie finished writing his article, though, I saw the very critical element that my elders seemed to have found irrelevant: two of the characters are in love with each other, but their families don't approve of the relationship. So the girl is married off to a rich, old man. The girl is raped by her husband on their wedding night.
Of course, many people would argue that a woman can't be raped by her husband, when in truth it's more common than people think. If she's not giving him her consent and he does it anyway, it's rape. I got a reply on Twitter also mentioning a crucial occurrence that's equally neglected: prostitutes being raped. Although that's a separate issue on its own (I think this gives a good portrayal of the truth), women can be and are forced into sexual acts under all sorts of different circumstances. 1,000 women are raped per minute, according to UN statistics. That's not even counting the ones that go unreported.
But what I think should be discussed, is how rape victims are looked at. Generally, they carry *at least* partial blame. Most societies all over the world tend to blame the victim in some way. In the Middle East, they carry most of the blame. It's usually said that she asked for it by dressing or acting in a certain way, or by being out 'too late'. Other times, she's very badly beaten up by her own family, sometimes even killed, simply because her 'honor' has been violated – i.e. her virginity. I read about a sixteen year old Kuwaiti girl who was raped in 1991 by an Iraqi soldier. A case was filed a while later, but not because the girl was raped. A case was filed because the sixteen year old was murdered by her father and two brothers who thought they were preserving their family's 'honor'. The girl's mother was also investigated with, but she apparently showed no objection to their act – she was ashamed of her daughter and proud of her sons and husband. The degree of monstrous inhumanity to which brainwash can lead to is just stunning. When a brother can kill his own sister, a father can kill his own daughter, and a mother can look on and say 'good riddens', that's when you know society has reached a terrifying definition of priorities. 'Honor' – a figment of Middle Eastern mentality – topples over love. Over family, over justice, over protecting your loved ones.
I also remember watching a Kuwaiti TV show back in 2004 or 2003, where a woman is raped, and her brother finds out and decides to kill her. He takes her out to the desert, holds a gun to her temple, and you hear the girl's thoughts being narrated, you hear her blaming herself and saying that she doesn't blame her "maskeen" brother because she brought عار to her family. Then you see the brother having flashbacks of all their childhood memories, and suddenly she isn't the cause of "shame" to his family, but his little sister. I can't remember what happened later, I just remember that he couldn't bring himself to do it and he cries because of what a "coward" he is. This was shown on TV! Even the media advocates honor killing! Heck, in Jordan, it's legal! TODAY IN 20-FREAKING-12!!!
I wonder how Arab men today would react to their sister or future-fiance or wife getting raped. Would they blame her or support her and help her through the healing process? Someone was offended that I asked, saying that I was implying that they were savages. It really isn't what I think, but from what I've seen and heard, most Arab men do tend to blame the victim, saying that she asked for it by doing something, as I said before. I have to point out that rape is never asked for, and that if they insist on going with that logic, then they're also saying that men are animalistic savages who can't control their sexual urges if they see something that appeals to them.
A friend of mine told me about a married 19-year-old girl in Saudi who became widely known across the media as Qatif Girl, and was sentenced to 90 lashes for being in a car with her ex, and another 110 for trying to 'distort' Saudi's reputation through the media by reporting her case to a Human Rights organization. She was gang-raped by 8 men, who got varied sentences ranging from 2-15 years. That's it. So half of them will be released in two years, go back to society, and probably repeat their crime. Very few of the victims will have the courage to report the crime. Not even Qatif Girl did; her husband found out because the gang kept gossiping about what they did in an attempt to 'ruin her reputation'. They were hoping that her husband would find out and kill her. Her brother tried to, apparently, when he found out; he beat her up until she was unconscious, but she didn't die. She did, however, try to kill herself twice since then. Her life has been an absolute hell from what she's said. If we were to apply the "she asked for it" logic in this case, it doesn't apply. She was wearing an abaya and a niqab.
Why do they pretend to be 'open minded' and say that they would never blame the girl, but all of a sudden change their opinions when it's a relative or someone close to them? All of a sudden it involves their honor. All of a sudden the first question that comes to mind isn't, "How will I help her overcome this?" but rather, "What will people say?" and then there's the sub-questions of "Who will marry her now that she's lost her virginity?" "How will I deal with the shame?" "What do I do with her?"
What do you think? Guys – honestly, if it was your sister/mother/wife/fiance/steady girlfriend, what do you do? Do you ever blame the victim?
Girls – "there's a special place in hell for women who don't help other women" 😉 keep that in mind next time you judge a girl who was harmed by a man.
Arab Spring in Kuwait?
For a while now, many foreigners have been asking us Kuwaitis why the Arab Spring has not reached Kuwait – and doesn't look like it's going to. The answer has been one and the same: because we're living the dream. We have malls with all the clothes we could desire, restaurants to fill our mouths with food to keep us fat and quiet, jobs that pay us to do nothing, universities that accept and nurture students with zero ambition, public schools that only require you to do well on exams, and extravagant cars that don't get stolen or vandalized when we park them outside our homes – something very rare, since this hardly EVER happens in other countries. Many of my teachers still express their surprise over how secure our cars are.
But, the dream is going to die very soon, when Kuwait will have to find an alternative for oil. And from the looks of things, no one has a back up plan yet. No one is even considering a back up plan. No one is thinking long term. Not even the Kuwaiti men and women running for Parliament right now. Everyone is thinking short term instead.
If we were to come up with a long-term plan to improve Kuwait's future rather than sustain this materialistic, meaningless abyss everyone loves so much, then the key parts are social development and education. Socially speaking, our society is still living in the stone age, where you're judged according to who your ancestors are. You don't defy the 'alpha male' of your family. MP's beat each other up at the parliament and disgrace the entire nation. Human rights are violated on a daily basis, citizens robbed of their right to freedom of speech, religion, sexuality, political views, and marriage.
I think that for the Arab Spring to reach Kuwait, it's the youth that needs to make it happen. The hard part is actually getting them to wake up and realize that the dream they're living in isn't what reality is actually like. It's a world that was created to keep them quiet and away from 'trouble' – i.e. freedom. It still baffles me that this is enough for them, that they're satisfied with shopping and eating and tanning their lives away. It's no coincidence that that's all there is to do in Kuwait. Dumbing an entire nation down is a process that requires careful thought and precision. First you start with the education. You make sure that all the modern, revolutionary ideas of the evil West are not incorporated into their academic studies. Then you make sure that the language of those evil ideas isn't taught well enough for the students to be able to go out and explore those ideas; that way, they won't pick up a book that tells them all about oppressive regimes and their cunning ways. 😉 They won't do that because, 1) they don't understand the language well enough. 2) they don't like reading. If you create an entire generation of people who hate books and who groaned their way through English class, a class that was supposed to teach them to be fluent speakers, writers, and readers of a universal language that could be their gateway to knowledge and enlightenment, then you are essentially creating slaves who will submit to your laws and rules without complaint.
Then you show them what their boundaries are by making examples of other people. You use the media to your advantage. You arrest writers. You censor magazines, newspapers, and movies. You ban books. You make TV shows that encourage the mistreatment of domestic workers, that demean the importance of treating your partner properly, that glorify disrespecting women, and tell girls that the only way to 'be beautiful' is to objectify yourself – by Kuwaiti media standards, that means dress in really tight clothes, rub your face in a ton of make up, and make your voice about ten pitches higher than what it naturally is.
Then you create laws that tell them there's no escape, but you don't make it obvious. You make it seem like a good thing. You tell the women that they're never allowed to marry a man without daddy's approval, even if they're 40 year old well-known professors. Then you narrow it down even more. You try to avoid intercultural marriages by telling those women that if they marry a non-Kuwaiti, you will guarantee them and their children a crappy future. Then you move on to the Kuwaiti marriages. In that case, it's the family who instills those values within their children's minds. They're taught not to fall in love with someone who's from a different religious sect – because you don't need to worry about them falling in love with someone who's from a different religion. Then you emphasize the glory of your own ethnic background, so that way they look down on other backgrounds enough to find them unappealing, thus ensuring that they won't fall in love with an 'outsider'. Of course, this is all if they fall in love.
If they're allowed to fall in love, I should say. This is all assuming that the family in question is one that's not a big fan of arranged marriages, of hooking up strangers and hoping for the best. It drives me insane because I've heard too many stories of couples who genuinely loved each other and couldn't get married because their families didn't approve – and, legally, that's exactly what was supposed to happen. A 'bad' marriage was prevented because the parents were an obstacle that the couple could not overcome.
There's the question of whether or not you're allowed to fall in love, and there's the bigger question of whether or not you're allowed to learn. University is one of the biggest 'decisions' a person is supposed to make. But when your options are narrowed down to AUK, KU, and GUST, you don't have much to look forward to. If you talk to high school Kuwaiti students who are considering one of those three universities, most of them will tell you they're having a hard time deciding because "they all have such nice campuses". The education level is hardly ever taken into consideration if we're talking about a typical Kuwaiti high school student. The other day I was actually surprised to hear one of my peers saying that she had ruled out one of those three universities because "girls smoke in public there!" so the princess felt like she wouldn't be comfortable there.
Too many girls aren't given the option of studying abroad, at a prestigious university that can provide them with the opportunity of an eye-opening academic and personal experience. And, once again, without daddy's approval, there's no way in hell that can happen for them. Let's also not forget, a certain university in K-Town has different GPA requirements for both genders 😉 that way, 18 year old girls who didn't do well enough to get into university can simply find a husband and make more Kuwaitis for the country. It also encourages young men to aim for a minimum GPA – what incentive would they have to do any better?
It makes no sense to me. The youth is robbed of so many basic rights, yet they're also the biggest fans of this clever system. So long as they're paid, fed, and given pretty clothes and cars, no one complains. I can only hope that soon enough their eyes will be opened, because when we're no longer 'living the dream', it's the youth who's going to have to save the country.
What Makes a Girl Less of a Girl?
I read a short non-fictional memoir by Eli Clare called "Stones in My Pockets, Stones in My Heart" from a book called The Disability Studies Reader given to me by my sister Shahd, who has taken several Gender Studies courses and is opening my eyes to an assortment of topics that relate to my womanhood and humanity. It was a powerful literary piece discussing how Eli coped with her gender identity struggles, beginning with how her father and his friends regularly raped her so early on in her life that she does not remember a point where she was not raped, into her teenage years and how quietly she ignored the pressure to wear skirts, paint her face with make-up, kiss boys, date in high school, shave her legs, strut in heels. She went through high school as an outcast, a reject, someone who always felt like she didn't belong, someone who always asked her mother, "Mama, am I feminine?". As she entered university she began exploring the possibility of her being a lesbian, and came to terms with it later on. Eli not only struggled with gender-labels, but also suffered from a chronic condition which made her hands shake consistently. She was labeled a 'freak' in every way. It was a long, bitter struggle, one that she described very powerfully and had a great emotional impact on me.
Last year I took a Psychology class as an elective, and I now remember studying gender roles at one point. My teacher was a 50-something-year old traditionalist, and once very boldly said "Girls feel that their hair is a part of their identity as females." Because there's nothing I hate more than a man telling us what girls are like, I told him that was not true. The old creep laughed and said, "Is that so? Well, would you cut off all of your hair?" And I told him I would. And I would've. He actually promised me an A in his class if I showed up the next class with a boy haircut. I kid you not, I was dead serious when I told him I would go through with it. The extent to which I am always determined to prove someone wrong never fails to surprise me. But – at the end of that day, my teacher hunted me down and told me he was only joking, and that he didn't want my parents calling him yelling at him for getting their daughter to cut off her hair. I finished his old-fashioned course with an A anyway, with my hair in tact.
But I still stand by my point. My hair does not determine my identity as a girl or as a female. In fact, not even my body determines my identity as a female. Breast cancer is hereditary in my family – if someday I lose my breasts, and I lose my hair, then will I be stripped of the term 'woman' just because I don't possess "womanly traits"? Do I not have a say in it?
One of my classmates decided to get a Rihanna-like haircut during our Junior year of high school, a bold move on her part. At the time, this meant a boy haircut, but it also meant that both sides of her head would be shaved. It was different, but she liked it, and that should be enough, right?
Wrong. Not in this world. Not in this country. Not in our high school.
Besides the bad treatment she received, my friend went through an incident that should never have occurred. A classmate known for his sexism and poor treatment and perception of females decided it would be funny to 'playfully' slap her, because he didn't like her hair. Our teacher, a woman, was outraged and asked him how he would ever dare lay his hand on a girl. The jerk's idiotic response was "she is not a girl".
Now, put aside the fact that he assaulted a female classmate. What on earth made this guy think he had the right to determine what did or didn't make a girl a girl? This is someone who honestly thought that "imaginating" was a word. So it's not like he's gotten an A in a Gender Studies course, or attained a Masters Degree in some form of criticism. Perhaps he was merely reciting what society tells him – but what does that tell us? That half of our society consists of mindless sheep who follow and recite whatever the rest of the herd is doing and saying?
Our society, according to most of the local male perceptions, believes that a girl with a boy hair cut is less of a girl. A girl that smokes is less of a girl. A girl that is not a virgin is less of a girl. A girl that is 'too' interested in sports is less of a girl. I know girls that have had their sexualities and gender-identity questioned because the people labeling them were genuinely jealous of what good athletes these girls were – girls that can beat any guy at any time.
We know that labeling stems from insecurity. But does that mean that our entire society is insecure? I would consider that possibility, but it's difficult in our case. The people throwing labels around are too egotistical to be insecure.
Too egotistical to be insecure, and confident enough to believe they have the power and the right to decide not only what is right and what is wrong, but also what defines a man and what defines a woman. Though both standards are unrealistic, my personal point of view is that the standards set for a woman are much harsher.
The funny thing about smoking is, the idiots whose sole purpose in life is to put stickers on people, tend to use words that don't really apply to the female smoker in question. There is no correlation whatsoever between smoking and sexuality, yet, these people attack her by calling her 'promiscuous', because that's the only way they believe is a valid way of insulting a female's womanhood. I can't help but point out that it does nothing but prove their ignorance and stupidity, that they actually believe smoking is relevant to sexuality.
Smoking? Hair? Clothes (or lack thereof)? Is that all that defines what we are in society's eyes?


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Saturday, October 11, 2003
Talking Points Memo follows up a point made in the NYT by Nicholas Kristof: Plame's identity may already have been compromised by Aldrich Ames. I wonder if this connects to the parsing issue? But, again, I can't really see a way in which it does.
Friday, October 10, 2003
It's close to becoming conventional wisdom that there is something fishy going on with the White House spokesman, Scott McClellan, repeating that various White House officials were definitely not involved with "the release of classified information": Needlenose; Talking Points Memo; Atrios; Orcinus.
These people are so smart that it worries me that I don't get this. TPM quotes, for example, today's WH press briefing:
QUESTION: Scott, earlier this week you told us that neither Karl Rove, Elliot Abrams nor Lewis Libby disclosed any classified information with regard to the leak. I wondered if you could tell us more specifically whether any of them told any reporter that Valerie Plame worked for the CIA?
MCCLELLAN: Those individuals -- I talked -- I spoke with those individuals, as I pointed out, and those individuals assured me they were not involved in this. And that's where it stands.
QUESTION: So none of them told any reporter that Valerie Plame worked for the CIA?
MCCLELLAN: They assured me that they were not involved in this.
QUESTION: Can I follow up on that?
QUESTION: They were not involved in what?
MCCLELLAN: The leaking of classified information.
QUESTION: Did you undertake that of your own volition, or were you
instructed to go to these --
MCCLELLAN: I spoke to those individuals myself.
Now, I do see that McClellan is talking here about clearing people of "the leaking of classified information", not the "outing of Valerie Plame", and he clearly avoids using the latter sort of language. But he has been hanging on grimly to the former sort of language since the WaPo article came out, so as far as I can see that means nothing special as far as the Rove/Abrams/Libby trio goes.
The only argument I have seen which attempts to parse the distinction such that McClellan is saying that these individuals are innocent of "the leaking of classified information" without making a statement on Plame is Orcinus'. He relies on the Isikoff/Newsweek article to say that the difference in language is because the White House is going to go on to argue that the individuals concerned did not know that Plame was covert. Thus, Orcinus argues, McClellan can say they did not "leak classified information" because they did not know the information was classified.
But this is a bizarre reading of what McClellan is saying, and he surely couldn't get away with this. If he was saying "They did not leak information they knew to be classified" then fine. But everyone now knows Plame was covert. So if they released her identity, then they did leak classified information.
Suppose I were lost in a strange town and were to be asked: "Did you walk down Silver Street?" Well, being lost and generally mistaken I might at that time say "No." But if I later discovered that Silver Street was somewhere I did walk down, it just, right then, ceases to be [amended: possible for me truthfully to say] that I did not walk down Silver Street.
I can't see any ambiguity in the McClellan phrasing, to be blunt, that would give him the wiggle room if Rove et al are guilty to get away with this. So I don't, yet, buy the argument the above stars of blogworld are making: it still seems likely to me that the McClellan phrasing has more to do with wanting to influence the presentation of the story in the media as "just Washington games", as part of a larger phenomenon rather than a specific crime, ect ect.
Various people in a hilarious comment thread on Eschaton are having naughty fun with the latest from Krugman-stalker Donald Luskin.
Let it simply be said that it is not maximally convincing to argue that one is on the side of civility when
- one's schtick (apart from setting up a company with a name that would be implausible in airport fiction) is to accuse the various other people of trying to keep the masses poor and stupid
- one's most recent activity of note has been to use 1700 words, summarisable thus: looked evil in the face ... dread and revulsion .. dangerous ... weapon of mass-media destruction, to describe a brief meeting with an economics professor with whom one has some sort of, supposedly intellectual, disagreement
It says rather a lot for Krugman's own dignity and civility that he appears to have given up trying to respond to the vast mountains of shit produced by Luskin; to do more would be to draw attention to someone else's embarrassing personal problem, and what could be more uncivil than that?
Greatness II
Paul Krugman, too.
An unanswered question in Plamegate, as far as I can see:
Most people seem to think that someone familiar with the thinking of George Tenet was the source for the original WaPo story, including the information that two senior White House officials called at least six journalists with the news. Just as there is a potential is-this-a-conspiracy question involving how exactly the White House officials got to know that Amb. Wilson's wife was a CIA operative, it occurs to me that I can't see how George Tenet, or someone like him, could come to know exactly what two senior White House officials had said to at least six journalists. Without going all Parallax View about this question, was he part of discussions on the punish-Wilson strategy, or what?
(this thought inspired by the recently revived Calpundit's latest on the topic).
Oxblogger Patrick Belton points to a rather odd article in the Torygraph, in which Michael Barone attempts to connect Gray Davis' troubles in California with contemporary problems for Tony Blair. The defence of the claim that there are lessons for Blair to learn here, above and beyond those which might be learned from the study of any election anywhere, is ... well, Barone is clearly trading on his comparative advantage in writing about US politics and has managed to sell this to the Telegraph, so good luck to him, however unconvincing his theme.
What struck me in the article, though, was the way Barone (who I guess is right of centre) appears to have solved the medieval problem of the uncaused cause, the primum mobile if I remember my hack medieval Latin properly. It turns out that the uncaused cause is in fact the California energy crisis:
But in 2001, prices on the spot market spiked, the utilities went bankrupt and rates had to be increased much more.
You see, the prices just "spiked". No gaming the system by energy companies or anything like that - it just happened, uncaused. St Thomas would be so proud.
Thursday, October 09, 2003
Ronald Dworkin is a great man.
Wednesday, October 08, 2003
Progressive blogger Atrios is bored on (or perhaps during?) his/her Eschaton.
In other, apparently unexciting, news, the biggest scandal since Watergate, the weirdest election since the last weird election, WWIII imminent, etc etc.
(Personally I can entertain myself just by watching the flashes of light that happen with the stress headache I get every time I think about North Korea.)
What I think is the first de novo post at Mark A. R. Kleiman's new site is, in the circumstances, rather restrained and lacking in jubilation. The left-blogger who did more than more or less all of American journalism put together to keep the Plame flame (sorry) going points to the latest evidence that even eager Bushites, like Daniel W. Drezner, might be pretty unhappy with Bush's answer yesterday to a question about l'affaire Plame.
The White House's handling of the matter is very little improved, I think, even in basic PR terms, over the earliest period of the story - they still don't really seem to have a handle on what they ought to be saying. Various hypothetical defenses have collapsed like wet cardboard, and they have little to show to back up the claim that they are keen to catch the criminals. The credibility of this claim is, I think, crucial.
What really matters is how fast the DoJ investigation can keep moving. If they can make progress in the medium term - say within a month or two - I think the DoJ can keep control and the WH can look serious about investigating felonies among its senior officials. If the DoJ investigation is clearly not making progress by some point after that - say, by the New Year - then, surely, the appointment of a Special Counsel will be unavoidable if the administration is not to appear to be sitting on evidence of a serious crime in the White House.
The thing I'm less sure about is this. The White House would not, other things being equal, want to run into election year as the pro-treason administration. So what exactly is it that prevents them from taking positive action to identify the felons - the sort of thing that Kleiman's readers have suggested, for example, which would give them a little short-term pain but a lot of credit thereafter? There seem to be two possible answers. The first is that the administration is committed to loyalty as an organising principle: as such, if so-and-so says he had nothing to do with the leak then, as far as the administration is concerned, that's an end to the matter. No-one is going to be thrown to the wolves by this administration. There is, of course, some power to this argument. The second possible answer is that the identification would be so damaging that it needs to be avoided or at least postponed. It's difficult to imagine why that would be, but it feels like there has to be at least an element of it in the explanation of why the White House is being so passive.
The Fiscal Crisis of the States
Are there any US state governors out there who are actually popular right now? Any time any of them goes near an election they seem to get chopped in two - thinking of not just the gropinator, but also the Riley tax referendum in Alabama, the 2002 gubernatorial elections, and so on.
So, is there, somewhere, a state which is actually doing ok?
The NYT has a half-sensible story - this is happening elsewhere - with the somewhat odd line:
But more than a measure of the strength of each political party, the unseating of a sitting governor 11 months after he was re-elected was the latest sign of the power of the anti-establishment wave that has been roiling American politics since at least the emergence of Ross Perot in 1992.
1992-2003 would, of course, be the same "anti-establishment wave" that saw Republicans keeping control of the Senate and House in five successive elections from 1994, and the comfortable re-election of a sitting President in 1996.
Tuesday, October 07, 2003
'Shall take care that the laws be faithfully executed'
Quoth CNN:
"I want to know the truth," the president told reporters after a meeting with his Cabinet. "I want to see to it that the truth prevails."
But, he added, "This is a town full of people who like to leak information. And I don't know if we're going to find out the 'senior administration official.' "
Isn't it the, singular, 'senior administration official' who told the world about the felony, but the two, plural, lots of, more than one, 'top White House officials' who committed it, in the original WaPo story? Has Bush just revealed what the White House is really trying to get out of the investigation?
Where did it all go wrong?
A confession of selfishness in response to world events.
In 2000-1, I was teaching US politics in Cambridge - the best class I've ever taught, by a long way, and a really fulfilling professional experience. I worked as hard as I could to get non-Americans to read American politics properly, to understand that it's not evil just (a bit) different.
And at exactly that point, halfway through my lectures, it (the US, subject of my fond thoughts since my teenage years) all went totally pearshaped and started smelling like a durian. I still can't quite bring myself to believe that all that many people voted for Bush; I couldn't, working on the Supreme Court as I do, quite bring myself to think the Js would (i) take Bush v. Gore on ; (ii) do anything non-unanimous; (iii) interfere with state electoral mechanics. And I still can't quite bring myself to believe that it didn't provoke a sustained outcry. And then every time I have been in the US post-911 I have wanted to get out as quickly as possible, and when I was in the US during the Iraq war I could hardly bear to watch or read the news despite being a total news junkie *and* thinking that on the whole the war was justifiable.
All that Americophilia I used to have now hangs by the thread that GWB might, just might, be rejected in 04. I don't know what I'll do if he isn't - probably start working on Canada or Australia or wherever. But I wish I had known this would happen when I decided to become an Americanist.
UPDATE: I talked to a colleague earlier today to whom it had not really occurred that GWB might be re-elected. From this anecdote I conclude, magisterially, that the rest of the world is in denial about this.
Tech Central Station does its thang on Open Source:
Maybe my business school coursework rendered me blind to the glorious vision of a "gift culture" in which people contribute their work to a decentralized development project like Linux for honor instead of money. Or possibly I'm just too thick to understand how cutting off a multi-billion dollar revenue stream from software sales, without putting anything else in its place, could be good for the software business.
Y'know, I'm given to believe the invention of the automobile was pretty darn bracing for the carriage-making business. Also that there are companies with an actual revenue stream from Open Source.
i) Four words of the TCS piece are accurate;
ii) Business school is an oxymoron;
iii) Folk anthropology can be hazardous for your intellectual health.
Eugene Volokh says:
I think it's quite proper for country A that's under attack by terrorists headquartered in country B to attack those terrorists, if country B won't do it for them (it may sometimes not be prudent, though it's also not prudent to get a reputation as being the sort of country that lets others get away with it)
I wonder if this is really true that it's not prudent to get a reputation as being the sort of country that doesn't pursue terrorists across borders. At various points in the 1970s it was clearly the case that the UK was being constrained from overtly pursuing IRA members across the border into the Republic where at least some of them were based and many successfully sought shelter. It was also pretty clear that this caused some serious difficulty. I think Peter Taylor's excellent book "Brits: the war against the IRA" talks about this a bit.
But caution won out, and the IRA were clearly pursued across borders only in the most covert ways, and... well, I think that turns out to have been darned prudent. Even if the IRA were to return to violence in a systemic way, I think the political advances made in part because of that care over borders have been worth it, and would significantly reduce its legitimacy. Moreover, the reputation does not seem to have encouraged further attacks by other organisations to any great degree. So, really: no. The reputational effect is minimal compared to the direct political effect. Country A is soaking the ground with petrol and waving a match. There are scary people in charge.
(This last bit is a bit of a theme of mine right now.)
Monday, October 06, 2003
Tories urge 'British roads first'
An aide to Mr Collins later insisted that he was not calling for a cut in the reconstruction budgets to Iraq and Afghanistan - merely "pointing out that for the first time since tarmac was invented we didn't have any road building last year, and maybe we should be doing something at home first".
Yup, let's screw Afghanistan and Iraq and spend the savings on screwing up the last remaining couple of acres of countryside. Oh, and while we're at it, we could make fun of the handicapped:
Mr Collins, a former Downing Street aide to John Major, also raised eyebrows with a joke at the expense of dyslexics: "I'm not saying this lot [Labour] get things wrong - but they do sometimes remind me of the dyslexic devil-worshipper who sold his soul to Santa."
because that's always good for a laugh.
This is just horrible, and ever after something to point my students at when we do the race topic. I'm not sure, though, whether "obscenely patronising" is the New South or the Old South.
OK, so this doomed attempt to get even a single comment or two starts with a big question I don't know the answer to but am about to pretend to for public consumption:
what exactly has the US lost out on, just in military terms, by getting bogged down for a year or so in Iraq? Can they, for example, credibly claim they will defend South Korea? Can they threaten any state at all?
globalsecurity.org have a helpful webpage or two in this regard,
which implies the answer is "not much". The US Army is pretty much totally engaged, and quite a chunk of the reserves are too. There seem to be a couple of free carrier groups as far as the US Navy goes. It doesn't mention the Air Force and one has to expect that anything world emergencies that do turn up are going to be resolved by being flown at and perhaps bombed. Whatever those emergencies turn out to be.
The thing is, what to think about this?
On the one hand, this is cause for celebration: it turns out that even the hyperpower can't actually threaten multiple countries at once without good reason - it can just about take on one small-to-medium sized country for a short period, on its own. That may not be ideal, but it should be a source of relief: Iran, Syria and so on have a pretty substantial breathing space, in all probability, before the US can begin to make threats of invasion - and in that time this administration should be out of office.
On the other hand, consider those supposedly intelligent grown-ups in charge after those supposedly childish Clinton years. I don't care, for these purposes, whether they're evil or not. But what are they playing at? What is the point of talking loudly about pre-emption and prevention revolutions in military affairs and what have you, and the need to invade any country one chooses at the drop of a hat, only to reveal that what you really need is lots and lots of military police and you can't actually do all that much on your own?
There are moments when you wonder (well, I wonder) whether the people in charge are just frightened rootless children too. John Dunn says in "The Cunning of Unreason" something like: "Just what did John Major think he was doing as Prime Minister?". It is a clever question: Major had a spectacular habit of setting up his own defeats with some aggressive language in advance, just to raise expectations. The question might be applied, amplified, to the White House, to the Pentagon, and elsewhere.

subset: commoncrawl


text:
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The Bachelorette
The Bachelorette Season 9 Episode 3: Hey La Hey La His Girlfriend's Back
In next week's episode of The Bachelorette 2013, Desiree Hartsock has her hands full with balls, ropes, and gags for days. Why's that? Because she'll be traipsing through the wild with men in chaps for a western date (yes, we're sure visions of warm goat milk are dancing in her head). But that's not the only gaggle of guys she's galavanting around with on the June 10 episode. For the first time, there will be not one, but two group dates.
With 16 guys to entertain, Des decides to make it a death match when she and 10 foxy fellas slap on some tiny shorts and show they're men the best way we know: by competing in children's playground games. Specifically, dodgeball. And though it all sounds a little like an opportunity for Des to wear her Lululemons on a date, there will be plenty of thigh all around — guy thigh, that is.
Meanwhile, Kasey Stewart will hashtag his way into her heart on a terrifying date where the two will dance on a building. Uh, no thanks. What else is happening? Disaster. Disaster, guys. Read on for more info:
Desiree ups the ante on a winner-takes-all game of dodgeball with a group of the men, but things turn ugly quickly when a massive pileup ends with someone making a trip to the ER. Kate Earl serenades the Bachelorette and one the men with some touching love songs in a special performance. A death-defying individual date with Kasey goes awry, morphing from a fantasy into a nightmare. Roping and riding take center stage as the stunt coordinator for Disney's "The Lone Ranger" shows some of the guys the ins and outs of being a cowboy. However, it is Chris Harrison's surprise call to Desiree that starts a wild chain reaction: It's revealed that one deceptive man not only has ulterior motives for being there, but has a girl friend to boot! Desiree's firestorm of emotion makes her question all the remaining men. Is her Cinderella story about to crash and burn? "The Bachelorette airs MONDAY, JUNE 10 (8:00-10:01p.m., ET) on the ABC Television Network.
Desiree pulls out all the stops and brings in the pros from the National Dodgeball League to teach the guys how to take their game to the next level. After a spirited practice session, the blue team of bachelors takes on the red team at the Americana in Los Angeles. The clash of titans ends up in an enormous heap, sending one person to the ER with a broken bone. How will this affect that night's after-party? Chris [Siegfried] sweeps Desiree off her feet and sparks begin to fly. The two escape for a private concert under the stars by soul/pop/gospel singer Kate Earl.
Desiree is blown away when Chris Harrison informs her that one of the men is definitely not there for "the right reasons" and that, in fact, he left a girlfriend back at home to participate on the series. A total shocker follows when the guy's girlfriend shows up unannounced. All hell breaks loose and a very visceral confrontation ensues. Can Desiree trust any of the other bachelors? How will she decide who is sincere?
Then it's time for a one-on-one date with Kasey who is determined to show the Bachelorette what love should be about. Their time together begins with the unusual dance troupe, "Bandaloop." These artists dance on the side of skyscrapers using a special trapeze rigging. They teach Desiree and Kasey tricks they'll need in preparation for their guest star appearance. But it is not as easy as it seems and things quickly go south, making it one of the most calamitous dates in "Bachelorette" history.
A sudden windstorm later ruins what is supposed to be a romantic rooftop dinner. Will Kasey recover to get a rose?
Five lucky, rugged guys are schooled in the fine art of cowboy stunts and tricks by the stunt coordinator on Disney's eagerly awaited upcoming release, "The Lone Ranger," starring Johnny Depp and Armie Hammer. They'll be competing for a chance to win a seat next to Desiree in an advanced VIP screening of the movie, in theaters on July 3. One hero-in-training steals Desiree's heart with his fancy roping and stuntman skills. Who will be the Bachelorette's "Lone Ranger?" But a group date rose is still at stake at the after-party, and one of the men will impress Desiree enough to lasso it.
Desiree throws a curve at her guys and decides that the cocktail party is cancelled, so it becomes a pool party instead. Tempers flare and there's a confrontation between the men when one overzealous suitor is caught stealing time with the Bachelorette. The two guys leading the charge would like the sneaky bachelor out of the mansion and far away from Desiree.At the dramatic rose ceremony, Desiree shows up in a glamorous gown she designed herself - a "Bachelorette" first! She struggles with whom to send home, and one unlucky guy is completely devastated when he doesn't receive a rose and breaks down. At the end of the night, 13 men will be left in the race to make Desiree theirs.
Source: ABC


text:
You know that Verizon commercial where Susie turns her lemonade stand into an empire. Well meet the real life little Susie. Her name is Gabrielle Williams and she's from Prince George's County. This girl will wow you. She started her own jewelry line at age 7, has already written a book and is also a motivational speaker. Oh and she's 12! Gabrielle Williams joins me and Aaron Gilchrist on set to talk about following your dream and what she has planned next.
View more videos at: http://nbcwashington.com.


text:
For me – the random sample is just another check that I do after I have checked everything useful such as landing pages, processes etc (Steps 3a, 3b, 3c and 3d in our section 3.3 of the methodology). In practice I use the random test just to check that I have not missed something. My structured testing (e.g. steps 3a-d) tells me if the site performs its function/s in an accessible way so I am only looking to see if I can find odd items such as bits left over from a previous version of the site or perhaps something that has been added by way of experiment. Most times my random sample just confirms my conclusions from the structured testing, occasionally it throws up a better example of a barrier that I can use in my report. Sometimes (rarely) it throws up a completely new section such as a blog or video gallery that the owner had forgotten about. Thus I do not see the random sample as critical to the evaluation – but I do see it as a "nice to have" extra that adds value and confidence. I would support including random sampling as step 3e. As for the method – I simple run a robot to make a list of the URLs. If that works I use a random table to find the pages to look at. Regards Richard From: Kathy Wahlbin Sent: Friday, September 14, 2012 1:21 PM To: Alistair Garrison ; Eval TF Subject: RE: Randomly choosing pages Hi Alistair – I agree with you that looking at Google search results could be some help in determining what should be reviewed. I think this should not be the only thing we rely on however because of the limitations I noted. All of this is very complex and I think will need much discussion. The point of the random sample is to determine if the site is accessible and if the level of accessibility found on the pages reviewed are also accessible. If you limit this to pages that are most frequently used, you will not be able to gauge the level of accessibility on the site. I do agree that these pages are very important and should be fully accessible. These pages should be included in the random sample but it should not be limited to these types of pages. Best, Kathy T (978) 443-0798 F (978) 560-1251 C (978) 760-0682 E email@example.com www.InteractiveAccessibility.com NOTICE: This communication may contain privileged or other confidential information. If you are not the intended recipient, please reply to the sender indicating that fact and delete the copy you received. Thank you. From: Alistair Garrison [mailto:email@example.com] Sent: Friday, September 14, 2012 7:56 AM To: Kathy Wahlbin; Eval TF Subject: Re: Randomly choosing pages Hi, Random sounds very complex - and quite possibly pointless. Let's say you spend an age using tools to collect random pages - if the pages surrounding the random pages are inaccessible these pages will never actually be reached by real life users. A more useful approach (which was what I was trying with the Google entry pages) was to suggest we look at the most common direct entry pages to the site, in addition to the others in our sample - whatever it does not do the google list does represent the most common pages returned in searches - and as such the most common direct entry pages. And, direct entry pages are very worthwhile checking for accessibility. Just my thoughts. All the best Alistair On 14 Sep 2012, at 13:38, Kathy Wahlbin wrote: Hi - I like that approach Kerstin. Identifying the clusters within the site would be a good starting place but we would still need to decide how to pick the pages within that cluster. I would not use Google search for a couple of reasons: 1. Will not work for applications. An application is usually behind a login and so it is blocked by Google search and will not be indexed. 2. Pages can be block Google search bot and these pages will not be indexed. So there could be some pages or sections of sites would be missed. 3. The pages that show up in Google are just pages that have been optimized well for SEO and do not necessarily reflect the traffic or popularity of the page. Here are some things that I have been thinking about regarding random sampling: Any approach is going to use multiple tools to help identify pages, clusters, most frequently used pages, size of sample etc. To determine which pages to review in the random sample, we can use these type of tools to determine the "pages" and frequency of use. 1. Using a website analytics program to identify the most frequently used pages 2. Use website crawler to identify all the pages in the site (this will work for websites but not applications). The tools that create the sitemap.xml may be a good tools for this. With applications, we will need to thing about the core application or platform vs. data that goes into it. We will also need to think about how to determine the size of an application that could have pages with dynamic content or pages that change with different data. Another thing we need to think about is how many pages to include in a random sample. This should be determined based on the number of pages in the website / application. Here is a link to a calculator for statistical sampling for surveys. This kind of tool could be used (http://www.macorr.com/sample-size-calculator.htm) to calculate the number of pages that should be reviewed for websites/applications. For example, if we chose a 90% confidence level and a 5% confidence interval which means that you have a 85% - 95% confidence that the other pages would conform to the guidelines (if the random sample conforms). This would mean that in a website or application we would have to have a "random" sample of the following size: Number of Pages in the Website Sample Size 5 5 10 10 25 23 50 42 100 73 125 86 150 97 200 116 250 131 350 153 500 176 750 200 1000 214 Of course we would need to decide what confidence level and confidence interval is right. For those who are not familiar with statistical sampling, here are a few definitions (with my interpretation to websites): Confidence Level This number represents how sure you can be of the results. It is expressed as a percentage and represents how often the webpages would be expected to conform to the accessibility guidelines. A 90% confidence level means that you can be 90% certain that the website conforms to the accessibility guidelines. Confidence Interval This is the plus-or-minus figure for the confidence level. For example, a 5% confidence interval and a 90% confidence level means that you can have a 85% (90-5) to 95% (90+5) confidence that the page would conform to the guidelines. Population This is the total number of HTML pages or versions of the pages included in the website or application being reviewed. One last thing that I feel we need to consider here is how automated accessibility checkers could play a role in determining the level of accessibility in addition to the "random" sample. We have a lot to think about regarding random sampling and a lot of discussion. Best, Kathy T (978) 443-0798 F (978) 560-1251 C (978) 760-0682 E email@example.com www.InteractiveAccessibility.com NOTICE: This communication may contain privileged or other confidential information. If you are not the intended recipient, please reply to the sender indicating that fact and delete the copy you received. Thank you. -----Original Message----- From: Kerstin Probiesch [mailto:email@example.com] Sent: Friday, September 14, 2012 3:48 AM To: 'Vivienne CONWAY' Cc: 'Eval TF' Subject: AW: Randomly choosing pages Hi Vivienne, all, I think the importance of random sampling is much clearer when we don't think in "pages". Especially when we think about very huge sections (for example subdomains) and different groups of editors or different editors a proper random sample can make sure that an evaluator tests not only the accessibility of content which was edited by the same editor/s. There are different possibilities of random sampling. One of course is having all pages in the same sample space and choose randomly (with a script) X pages and check the edited content of those X pages. Another sampling procedure is cluster sampling. Cluster sampling could be the following: 1. Identify the clusters of a website (for example: subdomains, sections according to the main points in a navigation bar) 2. Choose X pages out of every cluster and make sure that all relevant SCs are checked on the randomly selected pages of every identified cluster. This could for example mean: Check 1.1.1, 1.3.1, ... in the content of X pages of every cluster. I think that it is not necessary to check all on every page of the random sample. The evaluator has already checked for example the navigation bars or other global elements like the footer. So the random sample is more for the edited content and not for the page in whole. What random sampling should avoid is oversampling and undersampling in different contexts of the evaluation process. oversampling as well as undersampling are relevant sampling errors. Thinking about a script which chooses 5 pages (just for saying a number) out of the sample space (the whole website) every content of every page has the same probability to be selected. But: in the same time this procedure would be undersampling if a website has for example 10 subdomains. Just some ideas about random sampling Cheers Kerstin > -----Ursprüngliche Nachricht----- > Von: Vivienne CONWAY [mailto:firstname.lastname@example.com] > Gesendet: Freitag, 14. September 2012 08:37 > An: Detlev Fischer > Cc: Eval TF > Betreff: RE: Randomly choosing pages > > Hi Detlev and TF > > I'm with you on this one. I'm just about to start a large audit and > thought I'd put this into practice, but for the life of me I can't see > an easy way to find 6 or 7 truly random pages. I've suggested to one > of the automated tool companies that they build this feature into > their crawling options so that the tool would randomly choose a number > of pages stipulated by the evaluator, and then that evaluator could > also manually assess those same pages. Until then however, I have no > idea how it would be truly 'random'. I don't think 'random' is > supposed to mean me just saying 'I think this one will do'. We're > already selectively targeting pages that we've identified as critical > to the operation of the website, use cases, complete paths etc. I > have no idea what we will be able to do with this requirement. > > > Regards > > Vivienne L. Conway, B.IT(Hons), MACS CT, AALIA(cs) PhD Candidate & > Sessional Lecturer, Edith Cowan University, Perth, W.A. > Director, Web Key IT Pty Ltd. > firstname.lastname@example.com > email@example.com > Mob: 0415 383 673 > > This email is confidential and intended only for the use of the > individual or entity named above. If you are not the intended > recipient, you are notified that any dissemination, distribution or > copying of this email is strictly prohibited. If you have received > this email in error, please notify me immediately by return email or > telephone and destroy the original message. > ________________________________________ > From: Detlev Fischer [email@example.com] > Sent: Friday, 14 September 2012 2:33 PM > To: Vivienne CONWAY > Cc: Eval TF > Subject: Re: Randomly choosing pages > > Hi Vivienne, > > I remember we have discussed this already at length without ever > coming to a sound conclusion. I suggest a practical perspective: If it > is to be mandatory that a part of the sample is found in a true random > process, this imposes quite a hard requirement on the evaluator: > > 1) He/she has to judiciously apply some crawling tool to ensure that > the applicable scope is fully crawled and all pages are included in > the set (excluding those that are chosen by other means) - and the > scope pf evaluation may include not just one simple hierarchical tree > but several sub-domains, generated pages that even don't exist without > user input, etc, so it is rarely an easy task, and quite hard for > complex sites; > > 2) Then he/she has to apply a random procedure to the complete set of > pages/ states within the scope by applying some random choice tool > > I remember some of these tools were said to exist and might be put to > practice, but the overhead of work seems inordinate for the added > benefit of having a few truly random pages included. And all this > hinges on the ability and means to verify that a truly random > procedure has indeed be applied. Who is going to check this, from the > outside? To enagle independent verification would mean that the > crawing and selection stages and tools will have to be documented for > the process to be potentially 'replicable' (with different results of > course, otherwise it would not be truly random). And if (more than > likely) *now one* will be willing and able to ever check, we are just > left to *believe* that the 'random pages' were indeed chosen by true > random sampling. The concencious ones will go to a lot of trouble for > something unverifiable, the less conscientious ones will just take an > informal 'random pick' and claim the pages were chosen 'at random' > (which might even be true in the colloquial sense of the word). > > I still don"t see the added benefit of making additional random > sampling a mandatory (methodology) requirement... > > Just my 2 cents, as they say - Detlev > > > > On 14 Sep 2012, at 05:11, Vivienne CONWAY wrote: > > > Hi all > > > > As we're giving some thought to the inclusion of randomly selected > > pages for part of the sample, I'm wondering how people propose the > > evaluator would generate the randomly chosen pages. > > > > Any thoughts? > > > > > > Regards > > > > Vivienne L. Conway, B.IT(Hons), MACS CT, AALIA(cs) PhD Candidate & > > Sessional Lecturer, Edith Cowan University, Perth, W.A. > > Director, Web Key IT Pty Ltd. > > firstname.lastname@example.com > > firstname.lastname@example.com > > Mob: 0415 383 673 > > > > This email is confidential and intended only for the use of the > > individual or entity named above. If you are not the intended > > recipient, you are notified that any dissemination, distribution or > > copying of this email is strictly prohibited. If you have received > > this email in error, please notify me immediately by return email or > > telephone and destroy the original message. > > ________________________________________ > > From: Shadi Abou-Zahra [email@example.com] > > Sent: Friday, 14 September 2012 5:07 AM > > To: Eval TF > > Subject: Minutes for Teleconference on 13 September 2012 > > > > Eval TF, > > > > Please find the minutes for the teleconference on 13 September 2012: > > - <http://www.w3.org/2012/09/13-eval-minutes> > > > > Next meeting: Thursday 20 September 2012. > > > > > > Regards, > > Shadi > > > > -- > > Shadi Abou-Zahra - http://www.w3.org/People/shadi/ Activity Lead, > > W3C/WAI International Program Office Evaluation and Repair Tools > > Working Group (ERT WG) Research and Development Working Group (RDWG) > > > > This e-mail is confidential. If you are not the intended recipient > > you must not disclose or use the information contained within. If > > you have received it in error please return it to the sender via > > reply e-mail and delete any record of it from your system. The > > information contained within is not the opinion of Edith Cowan > > University in general and the University accepts no liability for > > the accuracy of the information provided. > > > > CRICOS IPC 00279B > > > > -- > Detlev Fischer > testkreis - das Accessibility-Team von feld.wald.wiese c/o > feld.wald.wiese Thedestraße 2 > 22767 Hamburg > > Tel +49 (0)40 439 10 68-3 > Mobil +49 (0)1577 170 73 84 > Fax +49 (0)40 439 10 68-5 > > http://www.testkreis.de > Beratung, Tests und Schulungen für barrierefreie Websites > > This e-mail is confidential. If you are not the intended recipient you > must not disclose or use the information contained within. If you have > received it in error please return it to the sender via reply e-mail > and delete any record of it from your system. The information > contained within is not the opinion of Edith Cowan University in > general and the University accepts no liability for the accuracy of > the information provided. > > CRICOS IPC 00279BReceived on Friday, 14 September 2012 13:20:57 UTC
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.3.1 : Tuesday, 6 January 2015 20:40:22 UTC


text:
LSC-Tomball Surgical Technology Department
Please continue to return here for the latest news regarding our program.
The application period for fall 2019 closed on April 30. Applications for fall 2020 will be accepted starting in January.
Applications to the program are currently being accepted for the fall semester. Prior to submitting the application, students should speak with an advisor. Please contact Cynthia Walton (phone 281-826-5356) with advising questions related to the program.
Only students who have been accepted into the program by the Director of Surgical Technology are allowed to register for the Surgical Technology classes.
Attention Certified Surgical Technologists
If you are currently certified as a CST© and would like to obtain an AAS, we have a track designed specifically for you. Gather your CST© number and your transcripts from your surgical tech program and schedule an appointment with the Program Director. Candidates must also be able to secure employer verification that you have been employed for the equivalent of at least six (6) months full time as a CST©. Please contact the Program Director for more information.
About the Program
The Surgical Technology Program at Lone Star College-Tomball is accredited by the Commission on Accreditation of Allied Health Education Programs, or CAAHEP, located at 25400 U.S. Highway 19 North, Suite 158, Clearwater, FL 33763, phone: 727-210-2350, or by visiting their website at www.caahep.org. Accreditation is achieved upon the recommendations by the Accreditation Review Council on Education in Surgical Technology and Surgical Assisting, or ARC-STSA, located at 6 West Dry Creek Circle, Suite 110, Littleton, CO, 80120, phone: 303-694-9262. You may also visit them on the web at www.arcstsa.org.
To comply with CAAHEP Standard V.A.4, Publications and Disclosures, the following board certification exam pass rates information is provided:
|Graduation Year
|Students Entering/Graduating
|Pass Rate
|No cohort - AAS transition
Physical and Psychosocial Performance Requirements
As a surgical technology student and practitioner, you will be required to be able to perform/demonstrate the following physical and psychosocial skills:
- Exhibit positive interpersonal skills in patient, staff, and faculty interactions.
- Demonstrate calm and effective responses in emergency situations.
- Make appropriate judgment decisions.
- Hear and understand muffled communication without visualization of the communicator's mouth/lips.
- Demonstrate emotional stability.
- Manipulate instruments and supplies with speed, dexterity, and good eye-hand coordination.
- Communicate and understand fluent English both verbally and in writing.
- Be free of communicable diseases and chemical abuse.
- Demonstrate immunity to rubella, tuberculosis, and hepatitis B, or be vaccinated against these diseases, or willing to sign a waiver of release of liability in regards to these diseases.
- Must be able to meet the following physical demands: bending, walking, standing, lifting, carrying, pushing, and handling equipment, supplies or patients exceeding 25 pounds.
- Must be able to lift 25 to 35 pounds without restrictions.
- Must be able to stand for extended periods of time.
- Must be able to tolerate environmental temperatures in the 60 degree Fahrenheit range.
- Must not have any open lesions on hands or arms, such as psoriasis or dermatitis.
- Will not be permitted to scrub in the clinical practicum if open cuts, sores, or any break in the skin of the hands and arms exist.
Thank you for your interest in the Surgical Technology Program.
Remember: Eligibility for the program includes passing a criminal background check. State licensing and affiliated facilities require passed criminal background checks.
Additional requirements of the program and all forms may be found on the Surgical Technology Program Requirements page.
Highlights of LSC-Tomball's Surgical Technology Program
- Trains students to work as a vital member of an operating room health care team.
- Courses are held on-campus and clinicals conducted at off-campus local hospital sites to enable students to have training in functional operating rooms.
"Studying Surgical Technology at Lone Star College in Tomball has made a positive impact in my life, emotionally, financially and academically. Becoming a Surgical Technologist has helped me realize that helping people is my passion, it has given me the financial stability to do things that I could not have done before and academically it has helped me grow to a higher level of education. The Program Director, Clinical Director and Preceptors are all very helpful and understanding of every student's needs. This program has definitely changed my life in a very positive way."
Sae Alin Hunt, CST
Class of 2014
LBJ Medical Center
Degree Plan
Review the schedule of Surgical Technology Degree Plan .
Division Contact Information
To communicate with our department by email, please send questions and queries to email@example.com
Diane Montagna
Phone: 281.826.5401
Office HSB 111B
LaShunda Fowlks
Clinical Coordinator
Phone: 281.826.5396
Office HSB 111C
Dr. Shelley Diviney
Dean - Health and Sciences
Phone: 281.351.3339
Office HSB 301F


text:
If I were Prime Minister of Israel, which of course I'm not, this is what I would write to Mahmoud Abbas, President of the Palestinian Authority.
Dear President Abbas:
Next week, we will hold Yom HaZikaron, Memorial Day for our Dead of all these wars, and the day after, we will celebrate Yom HaAtzmanut, Independence Day. You call it the Nakba, the Catastrophe. There is no need to hash out all the rights and wrongs. Suffice it to say, we Jewish Palestinians accepted partition, and even partition of Jerusalem. You Muslim Palestinians did not. And then you waited for your Arab brethren to do your fighting for you. Had they won, the Syrians, the Jordanians, the Egyptians, the Iraqis and the Lebanese would all have taken their share. We fought for what we considered ours, and thus the modern state of Israel was born.
But we are cousins. After a series of disastrous wars with the Romans, many Jews converted. Perhaps your family was amongst them. A few remained and remained Jewish, while others fled or were dispersed abroad by the Romans, and yet also did not convert.
We are never going to agree about the borders of Israel and Palestine. As a modern great power, most Israelis are not prepared to base their future on Bible stories. Therefore, Israel has decided to resolve the Palestinian issue once and for all, the more so given that we have already handed over Gaza to you and we are out of most of the West Bank settlements.
Accordingly, Israel unilaterally recognizes the West Bank as the Independent State of Palestine, a sovereign nation. No Palestinian, from anywhere in the world, or their descendents, has the right of return to Israel, no more than the hundreds of thousands of Jews fled and expelled from the Arab world, do to Syria, or Iraq, Yemen, Morocco, Ethiopia… The list is long. Or for that matter to Europe. If the Independent State of Palestine wishes to grant those Palestinians and their descendents a right of return, of course it may do so. Nor may you have a single centimeter of Jerusalem. It is the Jewish capital and Palestinians are not Jews any more than Mecca and Medina are sacred to us. But more than the fact that Jerusalem is ours, with all its history of heartbreak and slaughter, madness and horror, you are mad to want the dust of its streets. Build your own capitol. Found it on your hopes and your dreams.
Any Israeli Arab who wishes to leave Israel to live in and help build Palestine, we will pay a fee to, equivalent to the absorption basket we pay to new immigrants, while the Jewish Agency will buy their homes and other property at fair market value. Or they may sell to any Israeli citizen they wish at a mutually agreeable price. By that standard, every Israeli Arab who stays, we will understand as staying because they wish to remain Israeli citizens, rather than merely to enjoy the social services. They will have all the rights, responsibilities and privileges of any Israeli citizen, including national service and military service. Accordingly, those who break faith with their country of Israel will be regarded as traitors, not as a conquered native population with loyalties of their own. In the past, the Israeli security services have had real sympathy for those Palestinians who fought as soldiers—not mere butchers and murders, but irregular soldiers—for their homeland. After today, that will change. As for the relationship between Israel and Palestine, that depends upon you. Hot war, cold peace, cold war, warm peace, you may have whatever you choose.
Because today, you have a country. We give it to you for this simple reason. Everyone should have a home. We needed a home and for it, we took part of our historic homeland. Yours and ours. Your fellow Arabs took the vast majority of what should have been Palestine, then washed their hands of you. Well, we're tired of living like this. And we're tired of seeing you live like this. It's been nothing but a curse for both of us, so we're ending it.
I don't know what country you will build. I do not know if you will take in any Palestinian, anywhere in the world, who can prove ethnicity. I do not know if people of good will all over the world will help you. I do not know if your Palestine will be a country people want to visit, even live in. I do not know if you will create an astonishingly rich and vibrant country even while struggling to live.
There are many other things I do not know about what kind of country you will build. I don't know if you know the answers, just now. We all do know that the history of the Arab world since Israeli Independence in 1948 has been one long, dreadful, boring story of oppression and ignorance, murder and torture, and the existence of Israel was used to justify this behavior, even within families. Well, after today, the Arab world will still be the Arab world. But you will have a country. And it will be the kind of country you want it to be: it can be like Denmark or North Korea or anything in between. Your choice.
The only thing I know about your new country is that all Israelis of any decency wish you well.
Happy Independence Day.
Erin Solaro
Prime Minister of Israel (not that I am)


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DAYTON, Ohio — Josh Richardson apologized to his team at halftime.
DAYTON, Ohio — Josh Richardson apologized to his team at halftime.
"I just wasn't hitting shots," he said. "I was oh-for-something. I didn't even have a point. Coming out I told them I wasn't playing well. I wasn't even playing good defense. I was trying to pick it up a little bit. I hit a couple, and my hand started feeling good. So I kept shooting."
After missing five shots in the first half, Richardson scored 17 points in the second. He also limited an opponent, Iowa's Roy Devyn Marble, who averages 17.3 points per game, to seven.
The Tennessee men's basketball team followed his lead.
In their biggest game of the season, the Vols, who could never seem to win a close game, well, did. It was the first time they had trailed at halftime and won since they beat USC Upstate. It was also the first time since that game they overcame a deficit that was more than 10 points. The Vols will dance on in March Madness as a result.
UT beat Iowa 78-65 in overtime in the NCAA tournament's First Four at Dayton Arena on Wednesday. Iowa (20-13) watched its season end. But the Vols (22-12) are now the No. 11 seed in the Midwest region. They have a date with No. 6 seed UMass in Raleigh, N.C. on Friday at 1:45 p.m.)
"In order to get where you are trying to go, you have to go through something," said UT coach Cuonzo Martin, who claimed his first NCAA tournament win in his first NCAA tournament appearance. "Our guys have been in those games, been in those situations. We are a better team in the last eight games we have played. A much better team. Guys stepped up and made plays."
Jarnell Stokes made a basket and the free throw that followed to start overtime. UT then went on to outscore Iowa in the extra period 14-1.
"It just shows how tough this team is," Jordan McRae said. "We fought throughout the whole game. They punched us. And we just kept throwing it back.'
Getting to overtime was the hard part.
"It was one of those games we felt like if we can just get stops, we can get a couple of shots to fall," Martin said.
UT finally did it late in the first half, after they weathered an 8-0 Hawkeyes run and cut a lead that had grown as large as 12 to three (29-26) by intermission. A Richardson 3-pointer with 14:31 to play in the second half briefly knotted the score (37-37) before the Hawkeyes answered. UT didn't lead until Antonio Barton's 3-pointer put the Vols ahead (59-57) with 3:05 to play. But Marble, who finished with just seven points, hit the shot that extended the game. He made it over Richardson.
"I was ticked," Richardson said. "But I felt like I played good defense. He's a DI basketball player. He's probably sometimes going to hit shots like that."
But UT was tied, and had new life. It wilted instead of faltered.
"We knew it was going to be a tough, grind-it-out game," Jeronne Maymon said. "We played well down the stretch. We had a little more focus. The stakes were higher. We were a little more locked in. We showed a lot of resiliency in the end."
Iowa's Adam Woodbury surprised Stokes by scoring 16 points. Jok Peter added 10. But Marble's 3-of-15 shooting hurt the Hawkeyes.
McRae led with 20 points. Stokes had 18 and 13 rebounds. But Richardson's surge sparked his team.
"That was definitely something to watch," McRae said. "If it wasn't for Josh, I don't know if we would be in the position we are in now."
Richardson laughed when asked if UT can rebound in time for UMass.
"We're good," Richardson said. "We are ready to play. We're here. How can you not get up for a game in the NCAA tournament? We'll be ready."
(c)2014 the Knoxville News-Sentinel (Knoxville, Tenn.)
Visit the Knoxville News-Sentinel (Knoxville, Tenn.) at www.knoxnews.com
Distributed by MCT Information Services


text:
have you missed any logs being archived to TSM user exit because of some problem in TSM server or User exit itself.
here is how you do it manually:-
db2uext2 -OS<os> -RL<release> -RQ<request> -DB<dbname> -NN<nodenumber> -LP<logpath> -LN<logname> [-AP<adsmpasswd>]
to set all this option best way is to look at userexit ARCHIVE.LOG . you will have entry as below.
Time Started: Fri Aug 22 18:01:55 2008
Parameter Count: 8
Parameters Passed:
Database name: TST_PROD
Logfile name: S0024899.LOG
Logfile path: /transaction_logs/NODE0000/
Node number: NODE0000
Operating system: Linux/Z64
Release: SQL08029
Request: ARCHIVE
System Action: ARCHIVE from /transaction_logs/NODE0000/ file S0024899.LOG to TSM for database NDB_PROD
Media Type: TSM
User Exit RC: 0
Time Completed: Fri Aug 22 18:01:56 2008
now you have all the option parameters required.
#db2uext2 -OSLinux/Z64 -RLSQL08029 -RQARCHIVE -DBTST_PROD -NNNODE0000 -LP/transaction_logs/NODE0000/ -LNS0039440.LOG
after you archive the logs you can cross verify using db2adutl command.
#db2adutl query logs db TST_prod


text:
Zombie Master is a multiplayer Source modification, centred around a zombie-apocalypse, which throws all but one player in the shoes of human survivors. Pitched against a relentless tide of rotting flesh, they must scavenge for weaponry and equipment just to stay alive. But that one player, chosen randomly at the beginning of the round, is not bound by mortal restraints. To speak his name is to invite the wrath of hell - but most call him the 'Zombie Master'. He is nigh omnipotent. His invisible hand controls the legions of undead like puppets on strings; slowly closing the net on the humans while they run to and fro like rats in a maze.
Amazing mod, very original and fresh!
this mod is ******* awesome!! Its perfectly done! I would definately shake the hands of the developers of this!
this mod need more weapons!!!
Pros: Best Zombie Multiplayer mod ever! I have been playing this since 2008 and have collected over 240 maps! Fun and addictive.
Cons: Animations are just bellow average. Gameplay is unbalanced in vanilla gameplay as most of the time the survivor always wins before the Zombie Master even gets to the limit of zombies.
You need plug-ins to enhance the resource system as zombie master in order to balance out the gameplay. When this is done then the game is really awesome and is always fun!
A very fun mod.
Great to play with friends (especially with open mics).
Install this mod. Play as the ZM. Use Immolators to scare your friends shitless. Laugh at their screams of fear. Enjoy.
This is the BEST AWSOMEST Half life 2 zombie mod EVER!!!!!!!! Anyone who hasent tried it. Please go try it. You will probably like it unless... You HATE Npc's!.
A great game!
It was an awesome, immersive experience back then when the servers were still having players but it died shortly after zm2 release.
And it was hard as **** :D i loved it and i still do.
best game
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text:
Q: Where did Heroes For My Daughter come from?
Six years ago, on the night my daughter was born, I began writing this book for her. I did the same for my sons when I wrote "Heroes For My Son." And yes, for two years now, my daughter's been asking, "Where the heck's my book?" But as for where this book actually came from, in these past few years, my mother died after losing her battle with breast cancer. And in the past year, I also lost my Dad and my grandmother (who's one of the heroes in here). It's been a heck of a year. And as I wrote this book, I was forced to look to the world for women (and men) who, like my own parents, could serve as ideals for my daughter.
Q: What are some of the attributes you wanted to emphasize for your daughter over those you did for your son?
To be honest, I really thought both books would be the same — as a dad, I wanted to treat my daughter and sons exactly the same. But when I handed in the manuscript for my daughter's book, the editor came back with a surprising reply. She noticed that I kept overusing one word throughout the manuscript. That word? Fighter. By my editor's count, fourteen of the fifty profiles had the word "fight" or "fighter" in it.
As she pointed out, "Some of them, like Abigail Adams, Winston Churchill, Hannah Senesh, Thurgood Marshall, were literally fighters, so of course the term should stay there." But I also used it with Audrey Hepburn, Helen Keller, Teddy Roosevelt, Nancy Brinker—even with Lisa Simpson and the Dalai Lama. The Dalai Lama! Even in the pacifist, I sought a fighter. And yes, that probably highlights my lack of descriptive ability. And how overprotective I am. But it also shows that — and I'm just being honest here — I do want my daughter to learn how to fight.
It's the dream that links every single hero I picked for her. As I now often tell my daughter Lila, no matter what stage of life you're in, when you want something — no matter how impossible it seems — you need to fight for it. When you believe in something, fight for it. And when you see injustice, fight harder than you've ever fought before.
Q: Was there anything that you found out from talking to readers of Heroes For My Son on book tours or over the web that you've applied to this book?
My readers know the best heroes. So many of the ones they sent me — through Facebook, or Twitter, via email or on book tour — so many of those heroes made it into the book. Alexandra Scott…Wangari Maathai…I'd never have heard of them if it weren't for my readers.
Q: Who was the most unlikely hero that you included in the book, and why were they included?
The Three Stooges. Oh yes — I put them in there. My wife hates them. But what people don't know is they were the very first ones to take on Adolf Hitler in film. These three subversives. Gotta share that with my daughter. (Though my wife still thinks they're not funny).
Q: A point was made to not only include women in this book, but to also include men. Why was this so important for you?
I included women like Mother Teresa and Anne Sullivan in the book for my son. Would I really be doing any justice for my daughter if I told her only women could be heroes? Plus, I gave her really good ones. Like Ben Franklin. Few men are as cool as Ben Franklin.
Q: Were there any heroes that your wife (or daughter) specifically wanted in the book?
I did 50 brand new heroes for my daughter. But there were six heroes that I felt were worth repeating from Heroes For My Son — a sort of hall of fame that I felt needed to be there for my daughter: Rosa Parks, Amelia Earhart, Abraham Lincoln, Gandhi, Eleanor Roosevelt and Lucille Ball. Plus I again included my Mom. C'mon. It's my Mom.
Q: There's a great deal of care given to the selection of the images used for both Heroes books, can you talk about that process?
For me, the stories we tell about the heroes isn't about just their accomplishments. It's also about how ordinary their beginnings were. Indeed, no one is born a hero. So when it came to pictures, I always look for ones that aren't the "usual" ones. I like the ones that remind us they're just like us. And thanks to the research for my novels — and for Decoded — we have great friends at the National Archives and the Library of Congress who were willing to dig for ones few people have seen before.
Q: If the book was one page longer, who would have made it in?
My wife's grandmother, Sara Flam, who my daughter is named after. But I already had my own grandmother and mother in there — plus my wife. I couldn't make it a family album.
Q: Any heroes you're particularly proud of?
Sheila Spicer — my ninth grade English teacher. The first person who told me I could write. I owe her forever for that.


text:
Careers talk: Become a Chartered Legal Executive
This presentation will explain how you can become a Chartered Legal Executive as an alternative to solicitor training. Why should you consider this fantastic alternative to becoming a lawyer? There are two very good reasons: The cost of training is about a quarter of the solicitor pathway and you do not need a training contract to qualify.Read more