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Liberia provides one of the best opportunities for investments in Africa today. The country is laying all the necessary groundwork in terms of its corporate tax regime, ease of setting up a business and the repatriation of capital to attract investors.
Apart from local incentives, the country is a springboard into the sub-regional Mano River Union market (40 million people) and the regional ECOWAS market (over 335 million people). A virgin territory with vast unexploited sectors make up an eager, easy to train and affordable workforce. Liberia's development corridors present investment prospects in infrastructure development, agriculture and tourism, among others, that are unparalleled in the region.
Our climate is favourable to farming. Vast forests and an abundance of water provide a basis for increased agricultural development in our value chain products: aquaculture, marine fisheries, horticulture, oil palm, cocoa, rubber, cassava and much more. Manufacturing and processing of our own producepresent vast opportunities for investors.
The current high imports provide proof for the viability of the markets. Agriculture is a major sector of Liberia's economy, worth 38.8% of GDP and employing 67% of the population, providing a valuable export. Excluding other food supply, Liberia spends upward of US$80 million annually importing its key staple food, rice. Liberia wants to reverse this trend, as the country is endowed with vast stretches of swamps and other fertile lands to grow rice and most of what we consume.
A knowledgeable farming workforce is available, and investments in technology, specifically mechanized farming, will maximize outputs.


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Mindtree Has Been Unanimously Chosen for Its Consistent Business Growth and Strong Corporate Governance
BANGALORE, INDIA and WARREN, NJ--(Marketwired - Jan 14, 2014) - Mindtree, a global technology solutions company, has been named as the "Most Promising Company of the Year" by CNBC TV 18 in its India Business Leadership Awards, 2013. A jury of globally respected management strategists, academics and corporate personalities has unanimously selected Mindtree for this award. Krishnakumar Natarajan, CEO & Managing Director, Mindtree, was presented with the award at a ceremony yesterday at the Trident Hotel in Mumbai.
Development Dimensions International (DDI) and The CNBC-TV18 research team assess candidates across a wide range of criteria, including financial performance, leadership, creativity, innovation and social responsibility. The selection of winners across categories showcases those demonstrating vision, consistent progress and clear global aspirations.
"Being recognized by this esteemed panel is an extremely high honor for Mindtree," said Krishnakumar Natarajan, CEO and Managing Director, Mindtree. "I'd like to thank our clients, investors and the Board who have put their trust in our expertise to help us get to this point, and most of all I thank the all the 13,000+ Mindtree Minds for their unrelenting dedication that made this possible."
Anil Uniyal, CEO of CNBC-TV18 and CNBC AWAAZ, said, "Currently in its 9th year, CNBC TV18's IBLA has set a benchmark in valuing business leaders of India. IBLA commenced with the sole purpose of honoring India's most exceptional corporate houses and individuals for their contribution to India Inc. in times of global economic mayhem. Keeping this in mind, the selection of Mindtree as the Most Promising Company was a unanimous decision. We at CNBC TV18 hope to continue this initiative and reward the stalwarts of the industry who have uncompromisingly led their organizations in times of turmoil."
The CNBC-TV18 India Business Leader Awards celebrates the spirit of excellence in business leadership in India. The selection and judging process is carried out under stringent, objective and transparent criteria, covering critical areas, such as financial performance, leadership, creativity, innovation and social responsibility. Other evaluation factors include the ability of candidates to create short-term advantage, long-term value, a competitive edge, and the demonstration of leadership in the business community. The recipients of the CNBC-TV18 Business Leadership Awards are visionaries of India's business landscape; who exemplify the spirit of invention, ingenuity, inspiration, knowledge, and foresight, and lead their businesses with vision and inspiration.
The selection of winners of the CNBC-TV18 India Business Leader Awards showcases the men and women who have the ability, the vision and the capacity to see the long term goal -- to put India on the world map.
About CNBC-TV18
CNBC-TV18 is a pay channel targeted at English speaking consumers, investors, business people and other professionals and provides 24-hour coverage of corporate news, financial markets, industry news and expert perspectives on investing and management. CNBC-TV18 also airs programs that focus on the economic, governmental and cultural drivers that shape business in India. We operate this channel through an agreement with CNBC that gives us non-exclusive rights to distribute, re-transmit and exhibit, whether directly or through third party distributors, CNBC content within India.
About Mindtree
Mindtree is a global information technology solutions company with revenues of over USD 435 million. Our experts are driven to engineer meaningful technology solutions to help businesses and societies flourish.
Mindtree's consulting-driven approach makes us a strategic partner to many Fortune 500 enterprises. Our domain expertise, unique culture and technical excellence help businesses thrive and be future-ready. We enable our clients to achieve competitive advantage through flexible and next generation global delivery models, Agile methodologies and expert frameworks.
Mindtree's ability to devise solutions is equally matched by our ability to execute them. Our differentiation stems from a unique balance of human perspective with deep strategic thinking.
Our values -- collaborative spirit, unrelenting dedication and expert thinking -- help us see possibilities where others see a full stop.
Welcome to possible.
Visit us at www.mindtree.com.
Contact Information:
For more information, contact:
Sweta Mohanty
+91 98865 20141
Joanne Hogue
Smart Connections PR

subset: commoncrawl


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Art lovers should fill their collection with pieces that move them personally, but there are a few sage tips to keep in mind when investing, and caring for, Nunavut art. Learn about buying and caring for art, and find out where you can buy art online.
Buyers Tips | Caring for Art | Buying Art
Finding Art Online | Auctions | Art Crossing Borders


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This website will be closed down during 2014.
You are now being redirected to the new Engaging with the world site.
Living in an overheated world
Otherness as a universal condition
Thomas Hylland Eriksen
A version of this text has been published in Rethink in 2009
On his 100th birthday on 28 November 2008, Claude Lévi-Strauss was paid a visit by President Nicolas Sarkozy, France being a country where politicians can still build prestige by associating with intellectuals. In the press reports from the meeting, the centenarian, whose seminal book on kinship was published more than sixty years ago, said that he did not really count himself among the living any more. By saying this he referred, I believe, not just to his very advanced age and diminishing faculties, but also to the acknowledgement of the fact that the world he cherished was gone. Lévi-Strauss has devoted his life to the study of humanity under the most varying cultural circumstances imaginable, in order to develop his theory of human universals. Throughout his life – he was a cultural pessimist already in the 1930s – he has witnessed the accelerating disappearance of that world, that is the world of radical cultural difference.
Elaborating briefly on his own comment to Sarkozy, Lévi-Strauss added that the world was now too full. Le monde est trop plein. Presumably he meant that it was overfilled by humans and the products of their activities. At the time of his birth in 1908, the planet was inhabited by a grand total of 1.7 billion persons; global population now stands at more than 6.5 billion, and the percentage with their own Internet accounts and mobile telephones increases every year. No matter how one goes about measuring degrees of connectedness in the contemporary world, the only possible conclusion is that many more people today are much more connected than ever before in history. There are more of us, and each of us has, on average, more links to the outside world than our predecessors, through business travel, information, communication, migration, vacations, political engagement, trade, development assistance, exchange programmes and so on. The number of transatlantic telephone lines has grown phenomenally in the last few decades; so has the number of Websites and international NGOs. And one could easily go on and on.
It can indeed be argued that this is a new world, one which in significant ways differs from all epochs that preceded it. Most of us now live under the bright light of the powerful headlights of modernity, as genuine contemporaries, aware, however dimly, of one another, divided by the same destiny.
Among social theorists, a flurry of books, journals, articles and conferences have since around 1990 sought to re-define the human world – the post-cold war world, the postcolonial world, the world of global modernity or the world of a deterritorialised information society – sometimes inventing new theoretical concepts, sometimes giving new tasks to old vocabulary (see Eriksen 2007 for an overview). A number of themes recur throughout this vivid and sometimes cacophonic discourse; let me just mention a few initially.
The concept of the network. Established as a staple in studies of globalisation by at least two of the most prominent theorists in the field (Castells 1996 and Hannerz 1992, 1996), the concept of the network implies that stable hierarchies and structures are giving way to nodal, multicentred and fluid systems, and that this change takes place in numerous fields of interaction. (This concept should not be confused with the ANT idea of the network developed by Bruno Latour, to which it is related: ANT networks include both human and non-human agents.) In Hardt and Negri's Empire (2000), a book which famously argues the fading away of territorial powers to the benefit of a jellyfish-like, omnipresent force that they call 'empire', the influence from Deleuze and Guattari's contrasting of rhizomes and treelike structures (rhizomes et racines) in Mille plateaux (1980) is crucial, and Hardt and Negri's description of the world of global capitalism is also reminiscent of Castells' account of global networks based on the 'space of flows' rather than the 'space of places'.
The glocal. Although the term itself is relatively uncommon in academic writings (it seems to have caught on in the business world though), glocalisation (Robertson 1992) is a standard theme in nearly all anthropological writing about globalisation as well as most of the sociological and geographical literature. The argument goes like this. In real life, there exists no abstract, huge, global level of affairs on the one hand and local, lived realities on the other. The local level is in fact infused with influences from outside, be it culinary novelties or structural adjustment programmes; but these 'influences', on their part, have no autonomous existence outside their tangible manifestations. 'Microsoft' thus exists as a company based in Seattle, and also as the computer software used to run most personal computers in the world, but it does not exist as a global entity except as an abstraction of debatable value. It has numerous concrete manifestations, all of them local, and it offers a shared language which makes transnational communication (and file exchange) possible, but as a global entity it exists only at the level of thought. Moreover, concepts describing impurity or mixing – hybridity, creolisation and so on – are specific instances of this general approach stressing the primacy of the local. The local–global dichotomy is, in other words, misleading.
Reflexivity and fluidity. Bauman's (2000) term 'liquid modernity' sums up this theoretical focus, which emphasises the uncertainty, risk and negotiability associated with phenomena as distinct as personal identification, economies and world climate in the 'global era'. That identities are not fixed and given once and for all is not exactly news any more, but it is widely held that the current 'post-traditional' (Giddens 1991) era is characterised by an unprecedented breadth of individual repertoires, forcing people to choose between alternatives and to define themselves in ways which were not necessary in earlier, less unstable and more clearly delineated social formations. Ambivalence and fundamentalism in the politics of identity are seen to stem simultaneously from this fundamental uncertainty.
Rights issues. While it has become unfashionable to defend cultural relativism as an ethical stance, opinion remains divided as to the legitimacy of group rights and, more generally, the relationship between group and individual in the contemporary world. Since the mere existence of groups cannot be taken for granted, the individual is often foregrounded. The debates may concern intellectual property rights, cultural and linguistic rights, as well as multicultural dilemmas such as the conflict between individualist agency and arranged marriages among non-European immigrants in North Atlantic societies.
The globalisation discourse tends to privilege flows over structures, rhizomes over roots, reflexivity over doxa, individual over group, flexibility over fixity, rights over duties, and freedom over security in its bid to highlight globalisation as something qualitatively new. While this kind of exercise is often necessary, it tends to become one-sided. Many anthropologists talk disparagingly about the jargon of 'globalbabble' or 'globalitarism' (Trouillot 2001), and tend to react against simplistic generalisations by reinserting (and reasserting) the uniqueness of the local, or glocal, as the case might be.
There is doubtless something qualitatively new about the compass, speed and reach of current transnational networks. Now, some globalisation theorists argue that the shrinking of the world will almost inevitably lead to a new value orientation, some indeed heralding the coming of a new, postmodern kind of person (e.g. Sennett 1998). These writers, who predict the emergence of a new set of uprooted, deterritorialised values and fragmented identities, are often accused of generalising from their own European middle-class habitus, the 'class consciousness of frequent travellers' (Calhoun 2002). The sociologist John Urry, lending himself easily to this criticism, argues in the final chapter of his Global Complexity (2003) that globalisation has the potential of stimulating widespread cosmopolitanism (however, he does not say among whom). But, as he readily admits in an earlier chapter in the same book, the principles of closeness and distance still hold, for example in viewing patterns on television, where a global trend consists in viewers' preferences for locally produced programmes.
The newness of the contemporary world was described concisely by Castells already in 1998, in a lengthy footnote to the final volume of his trilogy The Information Society:
Why is this a new world? ... Chips and computers are new; ubiquitous, mobile telecommunications are new, genetic engineering is new; electronically integrated, global financial markets working in real time are new; an inter-linked capitalist economy embracing the whole planet, and not only some of its segments, is new; a majority of the urban labor force in knowledge and information processing in advanced economies is new; a majority of urban population in the planet is new; the demise of the Soviet Empire, the fading away of communism, and the end of the Cold War are new; the rise of the Asian Pacific as an equal partner in the global economy is new; the widespread challenge to patriarchalism is new; the universal consciousness on ecological preservation is new; and the emergence of a network society, based on a space of flows, and on timeless time, is historically new. (Castells 1998: 336)A few years later, he could have added the advent of deterritorialized warfare and political battles involving the question of humanly induced climate change to the list. He might also well have spoken of post-Fordist flexible accumulation (Harvey 1989) and mass migration (Castles and Davidson 2000). Be this as it may; Castells adds at the end of his lengthy footnote that it does not really matter whether all this is new or not; his point is that this is our world, and therefore we should study it. I disagree. It does matter what is new and what isn't, if we are going to make sense of the contemporary world.
This world began in 1991 ...
There is simultaneously something very new and something very old about the contemporary world. John Gray, towards the end of his essay on the al-Qaeda and what it means to be modern (Gray 2003: 119), argues that 'it is the interaction of expanding scientific knowledge with unchanging human needs that will determine the future of our species'.
Put differently, shifting circumstances influence any narrative trying to make sense of the world. The growth of science and technology creates new frameworks for the enactment of human projects, which nevertheless remain rooted in the fundamental human experiences of community and alienation, security and individuality. Perhaps nowhere is this tension more evident than in the politics of culture and identity in the world of the early 21st century, to which I shall. The beginning of the 21st century, incidentally, may be dated to 11 September 2001 or to 1991. I am inclined to put my money on 1991, for the following reasons.
First of all, 1991 was the year when the Cold War was called off once and for all. The two-bloc system that had defined the postwar era, was suddenly gone. The ideological conflict between socialism and capitalism seemed to have been replaced with the triumphant sound of one hand clapping. By 1991, it was also clear that apartheid was about to go; Mandela had been released from prison the year before, and negotiations between the Nationalist Party and the ANC had begun in earnest.
... and it is an overheated world ...
This could be a main reason why the notion of global warming has caught on in such a powerful way in the North Atlantic middle classes. The risk of global warming may be real, but that is not the point: By focusing on literal heat as an unintentional consequence of modernity, the narratives about global warming fit perfectly with, enrich and supplement, the other narratives about the contemporary age. It functions as a natural-science corollary of stories about terrorism and imperialism, roughly in the same way as chaos theory, in the 1980s, seemed the perfect natural-science companion for postmodernism in the humanities. All these narratives, and their relations, depict the contemporary world as one 'out of control', fraught with alienation, powerlessness, global forces and injustices brought about, and reproduced, by the rich and powerful – yet they are, without knowing it, digging their own grave. Above all, the notion of global warming feeds into larger and more enduring story about acceleration, which, in a sense, is the story about modernity as such.
• Globalisation versus alterglobalisation – the new social movements looking for viable, locally based alternatives to the TINA doctrine ('There Is No Alternative');
• Cosmopolitanism versus identity politics (including xenophobia and religious fundamentalism) – a main dimension of politics almost everywhere in the world now, frequently supplanting the left/right divide;
• Uniformity versus diversity – shared templates of modernity articulating with local specificity; and finally
It is clear that the heightened speed with which encounters take place implies an unprecedented need for traffic rules. Movement has to be channeled. Laws regulating immigration and citizenship are obvious examples, but so are attempts – in some countries – to keep the language free of contamination from foreign (often English) influence and purification attempts taking place in some religious groups, such as the Deobandi movement in Pakistan seeking to purge Pakistani Islam of Hindu elements. Purity is pitted against filth, order against chaos. A desperate need of tidiness in a messy world is making itself felt everywhere, albeit in different ways.
... where identities are uncertain ...
Henrik Ibsen's plays from the latter half of the nineteenth century are widely admired for their psychological depth and their accurate depiction of profound contradictions in the bourgeois family of pre-First World War Europe. However, in some important ways, his earlier plays Brand and Peer Gynt (Ibsen 1972 [1867–8]) speak more directly to the sensibilities of the early 21st century than the dramas dealing with late-19th century bourgeois society. Brand, Ibsen's first masterpiece, was a play about a Christian fundamentalist despairing at the moral decay and confusion he saw all around him, and his attempts to bracket off his own existence and that of his flock of faithful, from the surrounding turmoil. His attempt to escape from modernity can be described as a project intended to create a controlled space where all questions could be answered, a community which was predictable and morally consistent.
Brand is a puritan in the literal sense of the term; he seeks purity and simplicity. By contrast, the protagonist of Ibsen's next play, Peer Gynt, is an entrepreneur and an adventurer who lies and cheats his way across the world, who makes a small fortune in the, by then illicit, slave trade, who poses as a prophet in North Africa and as a cosmopolitan gentleman on a Mediterranean coast, before returning to his native mountain valley only to discover that his personality lacks a core. The struggles involving collective identification in the contemporary era, with which much of my research for nearly twenty years has incidentally been concerned, revolve around the questions raised by Ibsen in the 1860s. 'Be who you are fully and wholly/not piecemeal and partially,' proclaims Brand, a prophet not only of evangelical Christianity but also of the integrity of the person. Peer Gynt, for his part, boasts of having received impulses from all over the world, introducing himself in the fourth act as a 'citizen of the world in spirit' (Verdensborger af gemyt).
Whereas Brand can be said to inhabit a closed universe, Peer Gynt's universe lacks boundaries. The two characters cover, between them, the span between fundamentalism and collectivism on the one hand, and voluntarism and individualism on the other. Brand stands for destiny and security, while Peer stands for freedom and insecurity. The contrast between the two, and attempts to stake out third ways, are part and parcel of the experience of the children of immigrants in Western Europe, to mention just one contemporary parallel.
In order to begin to understand social belonging and identity, we first have to consider personhood. I realised this, belatedly, when some years ago I was writing a book about identity politics (Eriksen 2004), discovering one day that I had not done the groundwork of studying the foundations of any kind of social identity, that is the person (cf. also Cohen 1994). This led me, among other things, in the direction of developmental psychology and evolutionary theory, but that is another story. For now, we shall restrict ourselves to the person and his or her forms of attachment, seen as the basis for security.
The Latin term persona originally meant mask, which indicates that personal identity is shifting and can be treacherous (cf. Mauss 1960). Life is a stage (Shakespeare), and personality is like an onion – layer upon layer, but with no core (Ibsen). When all the layers of makeup and make-believe are peeled away, do we then encounter the real person – or do we instead meet a faceless monster? The answer from social science is: neither. Even 'real persons' have to play out their realness through an identity which is recognisable to others. He or she must, for example, possess a linguistic identity. The phantasmagoric point zero, where the 'real person' coalesces with the faceless one, is tantamount to autism. There is no 'other person' behind the social person.
Personal identity is shaped through social experiences. Some of them are easily forgotten, some can be interpreted to fit a present state one wants to belong to (it is never too late to obtain a tragic history or a happy childhood if one needs it), some may be more or less fictional, and yet others cannot be modified at all. In this sense, personal biographies are reminiscent of national historiography and religious myths of origin. Personal experiences are as malleable as national histories, neither more nor less. They can attach us to a great number of different communities based on gender, class, place, political persuasion, literary taste, sexual orientation, national identity, religion and so on. Yet they cannot be bent indefinitely; certain facts about ourselves are unchangeable. One can deny them, but they keep returning – as the ageing Peer Gynt discovers in the final act. As Bob Marley once put it: 'You can't run away from yourself'.
Peer tries to to just this, and he thus sacrifices security for the sake of freedom; Brand does the opposite. A parallel to the contrast between Peer Gynt and Brand is found in a metaphor used among some West African peoples. In describing what a person is they compare it with a tortoise. It may stick its head out, making itself visible and vulnerable, but it then retracts its head into the shell, rendering itself hidden and invincible. This metaphor seems to travel well into the world of mass media and reality TV. Some of our contemporary tortoises prefer to stay inside their shells most of the time, while others live almost continuously with their heads stuck out for all to see.
What the tortoise metaphor does not claim, is that there exists an insulated, pure self in the inner recesses of the individual, a self which is independent of its surroundings. Such a creature is, besides, difficult to envision. For example, we depend on thinking through linguistic categories, and if we should usually keep our thoughts to ourselves, at least we share them with a few confidantes. The metaphor of the tortoise, transposed to contemporary modern societies, is best understood as stating that human beings switch between being socially extroverted and directed towards the open, uncertain external world, and being socially introverted, limited to that which is secure and familiar. It deals not so much with the internal life of the individual as with two forms of sociality; the secure and the insecure, the closed and the open.
.. and nobody knows the precise meaning of 'we' ...
Secure sociality moves in a sphere of undisputed we-feeling. In this realm one may be backstage; one can speak one's dialect, laugh at in-jokes, savour the smells of one's childhood and know that one has an intuitive, embodied cultural competence which one succeeds in performing without even trying. In a field of secure sociality, everyone is predictable to each other, and if they are not, there are ways of demarcating displeasure which are immediately understood by others. A relaxed intimacy engulfs secure sociality. It is related to the late 19th century sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies' concept of Wesenswille, which in his view characterised life in the Gemeinschaft, that traditional community where everybody knew each other and had a limited horizon of opportunities. the Wesenswille recommends itself, it makes us behave along certain lines without asking critical questions. Insecure sociality is to a much greater extent characterised by improvisation and negotiations over situational definitions. Whoever meet in this kind of field are much less secure as to whom they are dealing with, and as a result, they are less certain as to who they are looking at in the mirror. The opportunities are more varied and more open to a person in a state of insecure sociality than to someone who rests contented in a condition of predictable routines of secure sociality, but the risks are also much greater.
Insecure sociality appears, typically, in cosmopolitan cities, along trade routes and – especially after the industrial revolution – in societies undergoing rapid change. Suddenly, something new happens, and one finds oneself in a setting with no preordained script to be followed. One is faced with the task of rebuilding the ship at sea.
A typical reaction to this kind of insecurity is withdrawal, but it is equally common to try to redefine the situation to make it resemble something familiar. When Columbus became the first European to set foot in the Caribbean, he was convinced that he had reached India. Later conquistadors were aware that they had arrived in a country which was not described in the Bible, that is an entirely new land with unknown and undescribed inhabitants. Many of them still tried to interpret their experiences through biblical interpretations. In The Conquest of America, Tzvetan Todorov (1989) shows that the Azteks and the Spaniards interpreted each other into their respective pre-existent world-views. Neither group was ready to acknowledge that something entirely new had entered their world, which required new cognitive maps or even an intellectual revolution. In a word, they were not yet modern.
The work amounting to making insecure situations secure takes many shapes. Imperialist powers may try to reshape their new lands to make them less threateningly different, or they erect physical boundaries against the aliens, as the architects of apartheid did in South Africa and Israel is doing presently. Dominated peoples either may try to imitate their rulers to mitigate the sense of insecurity on both sides, or by establishing their own boundaries – separatism, revolution or independence.
Is insecurity a good or a bad thing? That depends. In social anthropological theory, different terms are being used, which provide different answers to the question. Mary Douglas (1966), who belongs to a tradition focusing on the study of social integration and assuming it to be a good thing, regards departures from the existing order as anomalies. They are cumbersome since they do not fit in. Many person who appear as anomalies, besides, become anomic, that is normless; alienated, confused and unhappy. In Douglas' great intellectual mentor Durkheim's view, anomie was an important cause of suicide.
An opposite approach is found in the early work of Fredrik Barth (1963), who, in the early 1960s, directed a research programme about the entrepreneur in Northern Norway. According to Barth's definition, the entrepreneur was someone who bridged formerly discrete spheres; who found new commodities to sell in new locations, new ways of running a business, new niches and so on. He thrived on uncertainty and change, building his empire in the interstices. In his purest form, Barth's entrepreneur was a Peer Gynt; poorly integrated into the moral community, but hardly a candidate for suicide. It may perhaps be said that the entrepreneur fares like everybody else in the age of neoliberalism, which values freedom so highly but neglects security: Whenever one has success, the range of options and the scope of personal freedom feel fantastic, but the moment one hits the wall, freedom is reinterpreted as insecurity and the choices as a kind of coercive compulsion. The entrepreneur becomes an anomaly the moment he fails to succeed.
It has been well documented that identification in our day and age can be an insecure kind of task with many difficulties and poor predictability. People who formerly had no mutual contact are brought together, new cultural forms arise, and the dominant ideology dictating that life should consist in free choices puts pressure on everyone. Good old recipes for the good life may not have been lost, but they are conventionally discarded as reactionary and inhibiting. The result may just as well be frustrated confusion as positive self-realisation.
Even without the aid of this kind of freedom ideology, capitalism is capable of creating insecurity and new social dynamics. It has been a massive force, uprooting people from their conventional ways of doing things, moving them physically, giving them new tasks and bringing them into contact with new others. When mining began in the copper-rich areas of the eastern parts of present-day Zambia, just after the First World War, workers were recruited from all over the colony. They spoke many languages and had many different customs and kinship systems, but very soon, the workers began to sort each other, in a rough and ready way, on the basis of ideas about social distance. The people hailing from the western regions were seen as a category apart, likewise the Lozi speakers, the matrilineal peoples and so on. Some of the groups had experienced regular contact before urbanisation, and had conventionalised ways of dealing with each other. Some even enjoyed an institutionalised joking relationship with each other. (This wonderful African institution deserves being exported elsewhere. Perhaps Jews and Palestinians, or Christians and Muslims, might want to give it a try?)
... where recognition is a scarce resource ...Tzvetan Todorov, in his memoir from the 20th century (Todorov 2001), describes three dangers facing the post-totalitarian world. One is instrumentalisation of social relations – typically expressed as unfettered market liberalism, or rather, a loss of the social principles of solidarity and decency, which prevented markets from expanding outside the economy strictly speaking, and which also curtailed the power of state bureaucracies in liberal societies. In passing, it may be mentioned that these anxieties are neither uncommon nor new. Similar concerns with bureaucracies were expressed by the inventor of the theory of modern bureaucracy, Max Weber, and worries about the expansion of the market principle were voiced by Habermas in the 1960s, Lukács in the 1920s, and Marx in the 1850s. The second danger is moral correctness – sanctimonious and authoritarian conformism, in Europe typically expressed through the recently implemented bans on smoking in public places. The third danger identified by Todorov is the topic of the present discussion: Fragmenting identity politics, where universal values are bracketed in the name of group self-determination, where commitment to shared societal projects is weakened, and where open conflict between identity based groups may easily flare up – not so much because they are culturally different, but because they have few interests in common. This is a vision of a classic plural society without a colonial ruling class.
I share all his anxieties, although I might have wanted to add one or two of my own. Yet there can be no easy way out. The only credible responses to the challenges facing humanity have to be ambivalent, doubtful, cautious, with instincts favouring pluralism and a multiplicity of voices rather than universal recipes for happiness. It is, in other words, the openmindedness of the Renaissance and the optimistic view of human nature of the Enlightenment we need to carry with us in this new, old world. It is an ironic fact – given that neither the USA of the Bush II era (2001–2008) nor its adversaries, real as well as imagined, are easily given to ambivalence – that the perhaps two most influential ideological thinkers of the American right are both partly correct, although they are wrong in crucial respects.
Both are authors of widely distributed books about the 'new world order', and both are keenly listened to in circles near the White House. However, they seem to be saying opposite things. Francis Fukuyama (1992) has argued that Western democracy is the only game in town worthy of the name, and that global politics nowadays simply consists in attempts, by the less unfortunate nations, to achieve the same levels of consumption and liberal rights as those enjoyed by Americans. In this context, he also argues that the quest for recognition is fundamental and accounts for various forms of identity politics. The late Samuel Huntington (1996), on the other hand, has argued that current and future conflicts will take place not between ideologies, but between 'civilizations', that is related clusters of cultures, such as the West, Islam, Hinduism and Eastern Christianity. Both Fukuyama and Huntington have been severely criticised by academics and other intellectuals, and this is not the place to repeat all the criticisms. On the contrary, I would argue that they are both partly right. Fukuyama is right to assume that recognition by others is a notoriously scarce resource in the contemporary world, but he is wrong in believing that recognition can only be achieved through the successful adoption of Western values and ways of life. Huntington is correct in saying that cultural differences are important, but he is hopelessly off the mark when he tries to map out those differences – his concept of civilizations is theoretically inconsistent and empirically misleading – and there is also no reason to assume that such differences necessarily lead to conflict. In fact, it has been argued that none of the armed conflicts of the 1990s were in line with Huntington's predictions (Fox 2000).
We must nonetheless concede that these conservative American thinkers correctly claim that recognition and respect are important, and that cultural differences matter in politics. Now, where does this lead us?
The above reasoning seems to lead us in the general direction of postcolonial theory. According to writers like Frantz Fanon, Ngugi wa Thiong'o and Edward Said, the most difficult form of decolonisation consists in purging the mind of imperial categories and prejudices (Ngugi 1985); in developing a self, and an identity, and a self-consciousness which is not confined to the frame of mind imposed by the colonisers. In giving the people of the world the choice of being either with the US or with the terrorists, Bush II refused to acknowledge any position which is developed out of other concerns than the US–al-Qaeda axis. This attitude is the opposite of a cosmopolitan vision based on trust and the laws of gift exchange, and this way of thinking has had repercussions in many parts of our societies, from the idiotic and humiliating security checks in airports to earnest debates about the possible incompatibility of Islam and democracy. The postcolonial view, by contrast, insists on equality and mutual respect across differences.In the context of the 21st century global security crisis involving US global military hegemony and violent reactions often based on the politics of identity (a situation which has deep structural dimensions and will therefore not end with the election of Barack Husain Obama in 2008), this starting-point implies certain preliminary conclusions: Effective human rights activism requires at least a minimal knowledge about local contexts and, particularly, about local conflicts. For poor countries to give wholehearted support to notions of the inalienable rights of the individual, more is required than decisions to cut aid to countries which are not yet committed to a free press and multi-party parliamentary democracy. What is needed are social reforms which give people increased control over their own existence – land reforms, job opportunities, accountable state institutions and so on, in order to be able to engage in symmetrical relationships with others in situations of work as well as play. As an implication, a global policy is needed where both big power (state, geopolitics) and small power (family, community) are more equitably distributed. This struggle, moreover, is as much about the means of communication as about the means of production. As the Algerian author Rachid Mimouni put it, what ought to be required of the Europeans is 'an attempt to understand rather than material aid. What can democracy mean in a country like Ethiopia, where dozens die of starvation every day?' (Mimouni 1992: 156). There are, in other words, serious problems which are not solved by a formulaic introduction of human rights, and there are people who for perfectly understandable reasons see talk about the freedom of expression as a diversion from the real issues. One may by all means argue that Muslim men should give their wives the same rights and opportunities as, say, Scandinavian women have, but it would be silly to assume that they think in the same way as we do. If one does so – promoting human rights with the subtlety of a bulldozer – one implicitly says, as missionaries and foreign aid aristocrats have done for years, that the experiences of others have no value, and that the others had better become like ourselves before we bother to listen to them. They are obliged to accepting our gift, but there is no reciprocal obligation applying to ourselves. In effect, one says that they do not exist until they have become similar to ourselves. Respecting other life-worlds is, it must be emphasised, not the same as ethical relativism, but on the contrary a recognition of the need for a dialogue to go both ways, since the alternative is monologue or worse: the sound from one hand clapping.
The very conceptual pair 'The West' and 'Islam' is deeply problematic. 'The West' is a vague relational, pseudo-geographic term, which includes the EU, the USA and their richest satellites (Canada, Norway etc.), as well as two of the easternmost countries in the world, Australia and New Zealand. Islam is a universalistic religion with adherents in every country, including all the Western ones. Could 'The West and the East' have been used instead, as a more consistent dichotomy; or perhaps 'Christianity and Islam' as in the old days? Hardly. All such dichotomies are Trojan horses concealing the hidden agenda of overstating the importance of one particular boundary at the expense of neglecting all the others.There is little to indicate that religion as such can be a source of conflict. A Christian fundamentalist has more in common with a Muslim fundamentalist, at the level of basic values, than each of them has with non-religious persons. The forms of religiosity and the expressions of respect for al-Lah (or God, as we say in English), are similar in both cases. Some European Muslims have discovered this and have joined Christian Democratic parties. Moreover, there are important ecumenical dialogues taking place across 'religious divides' in many places, including a major Islamic conference in Cairo in 1995, where central Muslim leaders condemned all forms of terrorism on Islamic grounds, calling for extensive dialogue with the other monotheistic religions from West Asia. At a more everyday level, it is easy to see that folk religiosity on either side of the Mediterranean, for example, has many similarities – saints, prayers, beliefs in the evil eye, and so on. Following the attacks of 11 September, one should also keep in mind, all Muslim heads of state except Saddam Hussain and the Taliban condemned the mass murder. Already on the same evening that the towers fell to the ground, the Tehran Times stated that Islam forbids suicide and that a murder of an innocent, according to the Koran, is tantamount to a murder of all humanity.
Malaysia's prime minister Mahathir offered to negotiate between the USA and its adversaries in the autumn of 2001, and this might have been a fruitful move: Malaysia is Muslim-dominated country, but it is also committed to Western notions of modernity. The USA did not take the offer up, and during a visit a month after the bombing had begun, I heard of no Malays who defended the terrorist attacks, but a lot of them seemed to admire Osama for his courage.
If Malaysia's 'moderate Islam' had been granted its place in the sun, fewer Malays would have looked up to Osama bin Laden, and more Westerners would have discovered the similarities between the three great West Asian religions. Seen from a Hindu or East Asian point of view, the three religions appear as virtually identical. Even from the inside, the parallels are striking. The Muslims who have joined Christian Democratic parties in European countries have done so because Christians and Muslims have shared interests in fighting phenomena such as religious slackness, secularisation, birth control and divorces. During another Cairo conference, in the autumn of 1994, the Catholic Church and Muslim clerics joined forces to make a joint statement condemning abortion. Moreover, many – anthropologists, journalists and others – relentlessly show the absurdity of lumping together Indonesian rice farmers with Turkish merchants under the umbrella of 'Islam'; just as intellectuals in Muslim countries are perfectly well aware that 'the West' contains something close to a billion individuals with a variety of values, societies and ways of life.
... and boundaries become fuzzy frontiers.
In the misty dawn of time, when the world was still young and fathomable for the common people – say, 20 to 25 years ago – not only was it seemingly possible to understand global politics, one could also easily divide the world into discrete cultural regions –the world simply seemed to be a composite of cultures. Thus, in Denmark they spoke Danish, and the Danes were liberal Protestants with characteristic Danish features, a characteristic body language, and a love for red sausages and pilsner beer; in Bangladesh the Bengali Muslims had their own customs and traditions; all the tribes in Kenya had their particular, unique cultures and languages, and so on. According to the prevailing worldview at that time there was not much contact between these cultures, although there was some exchange and mutual influence going on between them. Cultural contact, which developed through missionary work, aid, migration and the diffusion of modern institutions such as the modern nation state and the capitalist labour market, gave rise to a set of problems related to the encounter of separate cultures, each with its own special, internal logic. Often the results were misunderstandings and conflicts, and fairly often the stronger culture came to dominate the weaker. This was often referred to as cultural imperialism – a term which is today rarely used, though it was common in intellectual discourse a surprisingly short time ago.
This understanding of culture and cultural differences, which has been fundamental to European thinking ever since Romanticism and crucial both in nationalist ideologies as well as in cultural anthropological method, today, all of a sudden, appears old-fashioned and dated. This sudden change partly relates to a change in our way of thinking; however, far more important is the fact that the world has changed. Although cultures never have been completely isolated and without contact with other cultures, and despite the fact that cultural isolation often has been exaggerated both by scholars and others, the possibility of cultural isolation shrinks day by day. Both economy and politics have become globalised – that is, to an increasing extent processes affect people in different places at the same time as they cannot necessarily be traced back to one specific place. Because of advancements in communication technology, money, goods, people, ideas, and power travel across the world with little friction and at a high speed. There has been an enormous growth in air traffic during the past 60 years, and airline fares continue to drop. Satellite television, the Internet and related technologies have accelerated the development of a world without delays, where certain events can take place in all places at the same time and where distances are shrinking rapidly.
At the same time the huge contrasts in life opportunities across countries and regions create an unstable situation and make it advantageous for some people from poorer countries to move permanently or temporarily to rich countries. This is visible even in geographically peripheral regions such as Scandinavia, and questions concerning immigrants and integration are a recurrent issue in Scandinavian public debate.
Needless to say, changes of this magnitude will have consequences on a cultural level and consequently demand new ways of approaching culture and cultural differences. Some people believe that the processes of globalisation will lead to the annihilation of cultural differences and that human beings throughout the world are becoming more and more alike. This view is shared by both optimists such as the historian of ideas Francis Fukuyama, who hopes that the entire world will become politically and economically similar to the usa, and by pessimists such as Lévi-Strauss, who has for seventy years been convinced that the great cultural diversity of the planet is about to be lost. A different perspective, which for obvious reasons is common among intellectuals in poor countries, focuses on the neo-colonial aspects of globalisation; how economic differences are sustained, and how the seemingly boundless openness that has characterised the era of globalisation also has delimiting and marginalising effects.
A third approach involves the new forms of cultural variation that are evolving in the context of global modernity, because modernity does not equal cultural homogeneity. As pointed out by Hannerz many times, the globalisation of culture does not create global people. But globalisation creates 'cultural creoles', people who live at the intersection of different cultural traditions, constantly bombarded with impulses, expectations, demands, and opportunities from several different angles, and who continuously create themselves, not from ready-made prescriptions but by crafting their own unique, complex cultural fabric (Hannerz 1990, see also Stewart 2007).
Let us take a random example of a country with an undisputed, bounded and rich national identity in a recent past, and ask: Is Sweden still Swedish? To some extent, the answer naturally is yes. The country is a sovereign nation, with a number of common public institutions, a rich and diverse public life that includes everything from voluntary organisations to national newspapers, and certain customs and traditions that are perceived of as typically Swedish. However, the notion of cultural 'Swedishness' is under considerable pressure these days, and the content of the national cultural identity is as controversial, variable, ambiguous, and fuzzy in Sweden, as it is in many other countries. The primary reason is that cultural creolisation creates a discrepancy between theory and practice; the map and the territory no longer fit together, as it were.
The old map reveals a world of cultural islands. On each island, people have their special way of living, with their own traditions and so forth, but there is relatively little contact between the islands. It is extremely difficult to navigate the world of today using such a map. That is a main reason that a significant part of the intellectual community has been at work revising that map for some time. (Naturally, it is also possible to change the territory so that it matches the old map – a solution which might take the form of ethnic cleansing.) This revision process is evident in the bifurcation of history into different narratives – stories or histories; new nuances and a new diversity are incorporated into the conception of Swedishness, and new groups of people attain a sense of subjective and objective belonging to Swedish society. The same work is being undertaken in other countries as well – as mentioned, the Swedish example was chosen more or less at random. Rebuilding the ship at sea has become a necessary task.
In this kind of world, which is an irreducibly diverse, overheated world, we are all strangers in a strange land. At the same time, we are all in the same boat, divided by a shared destiny.
There is some overlap between the middle part of this article and my 'Introduction' to T. H. Eriksen, E. Bal and O. Salemink, eds., A World of Insecurity, Pluto 2009.
Barth, Fredrik, ed. (1963) The role of the entrepreneur in social change in northern Norway. Bergen: Universitetsforlaget.
Bauman, Zygmunt (2000) Liquid Modernity. Cambridge: Polity.
Calhoun, Craig (2002) 'The class consciousness of frequent travellers: Towards a critique of actually existing cosmopolitanism'. In Conceiving Cosmopolitanism: Theory, Context and Practice, eds. S. Vertovec and R. Cohen, pp. 86-109. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Castells, Manuel (1996) The Rise of the Network Society. Oxford: Blackwell.
— (1998) End of Millennium. Oxford: Blackwell.
Castles, Stephen and Alasdair Davidson (2000) Citizenship and Migration: Globalization and the Politics of Belonging. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Cohen, A. P. (1994) Self Consciousness. London: Routledge.
Douglas, Mary (1966) Purity and danger: An analysis of concepts of pollution and taboo. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Eriksen, Thomas Hylland (2001) Bak fiendebildet: Politisk islam og verden etter 11. september (Behind the enemy image: Political Islam and the world after 9-11). Oslo: Cappelen.
— (2004) Røtter og føtter: Identitet i en omskiftelig tid (Roots and boots: Identity at a crossroads). Oslo: Aschehoug.
— (2007) Globalization: The Key Concepts. Oxford: Berg.
Fox, Jonathan (2000) Clash of Civilizations or Clash of Religions: Which is a More Important Determinant of Ethnic Conflict? Ethnicities, 1(3): 295-366
Fukuyama, Francis (1992) The End of History and the Last Man. New York: Avon.
Giddens, Anthony (1991) Modernity and Self-Identity. Cambridge: Polity.
Hannerz, Ulf (1990) 'Cosmopolitans and locals in world culture'. In Global Culture. Nationalism, Globalization and Modernity, ed. Mike Featherstone, pp. 237–52. London: Sage.
— (1992) Cultural Complexity. New York: Columbia University Press.
— (1996) Transnational Connections. London: Routledge.
— (2010, in press) Anthropology's World: Life in a Twenty-First Century Discipline. London: Pluto.
Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri (2000) Empire. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Harvey, David (1989) The condition of postmodernity. Oxford: Blackwell.
Huntington, Samuel (1996) The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of a World Order. New York: Simon and Schuster.
Ibsen, Henrik (1972) Oxford Ibsen: 'Brand' and 'Peer Gynt'. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Maalouf, Amin (2001) Les identités meurtrières. Paris: Livres de poche.
Mauss, Marcel (1960) Sociologie et anthropologie. Paris: PUF.
Mimouni, Rachid (1992) De la barbarie en général et de l'intégrisme en particulier. Paris: Le pré aux clercs.
Robertson, Roland (1992) Globalization. London: Sage.
Stewart, Charles, ed. (2007) Creolization: History, Ethnography, Theory. Walnut Creek, Calif.: Left Coast Press.
Todorov, Tzvetan (1989) The conquest of America: The question of the Other. Oklahoma: Oklahoma University Press.
— (2000) Mémoire du mal, tentation du bien. Paris: Robert Laffont.
Trouillot, Michel-Rolph (2001) 'Close encounters of the deceptive kind'. Current Anthropology 42: 125-138.
Urry, John (2003) Global Complexity. Cambridge: Polity.
Waters, Malcolm (2001) Globalization, 2nd edition. London: Routledge.
Zizek, Slavoj (2003) Organs without Bodies: On Deleuze and Consequences. London: Routledge.


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In the immortal words of the great Yankee sage, Yogi Berra: "It ain't over till it's over."
In the immortal words of the great Yankee sage Yogi Berra: "It ain't over till it's over."
Wait a minute, didn't I just say that? It just goes to prove something else the great Yankee sage said: "It's déjà vu all over again!" In both cases, he could have been talking about the 2000 presidential election.
Another illustrious philosopher George Santayana surely understood what Yogi meant when he wrote: "Those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it." Over the past three weeks, I have not been able to shake the feeling that we've been through this nightmare before and are doomed to keep repeating it. The last three weeks have felt like a cross between a wooly roller coaster ride and the movie Groundhog Day. Each day brings a stunning development in the race; each night, a 180-degree reversal of fortune. Just when we think we finally see the light at the end of the tunnel, the floor drops out from under us and we endure another free fall. The term for what we are experiencing is cognitive dissonance, a weird sense that something is not quite right. In other words, a feeling of déjà vu all over again.
The man who coined the phrase "It's déjà vu all over again", Lawrence Peter "Yogi" Berra was one of my favorite players growing up in New York City. Perhaps because he was such an improbable hero on such an elite team. Even Yogi's nickname did not measure up to the nicknames given to immortal Yankee Legends like the Sultan of Swat, the Iron Horse, the Yankee Clipper, and the Chairman of the Board.
Opposing players, managers and general managers underestimated Yogi. In 1942, Yogi was playing minor league ball and was approached by Cardinals General Manager, Branch Rickey. Rickey had just signed another catcher, Joe Garagiola, for $500, but he didn't think Yogi was worth $500. So Rickey offered Yogi $250 and Yogi turned him down. Rickey reportedly said of Yogi, "He'll never make anything more than a Triple A ballplayer at best." It proved to be a fairly accurate assessment . . . of Joe Garagiola, not Yogi. But Yankees scout Leo Browne saw something in Yogi that every other scout missed. Browne convinced the Yankees that Yogi was worth the $500, so the Yankees signed him. Over the next dozen years, Yogi proved himself the best investment the Yankees made since they bought Babe Ruth's contract from the Boston Red Sox for $125,000.
With his loveable goofy grin, teeth spaced too far apart, and squat pudgy body, Yogi looked like he didn't belong in a New York Yankee uniform. He looked like a nobody standing next to his idol Joe DiMaggio, the Yankee Clipper. So graceful on the field, so dignified off the field, Joltin' Joe was the antithesis of the squat slow-footed catcher. By every definable, tangible, quantifiable predictor of talent, Yogi simply didn't measure up. But there exists no tool to measure the size of a man's heart, in baseball or in life.
Overshadowed by superstar teammates like Joe DiMaggio and Mickey Mantle, Yogi was not graceful in the field, nor swift of foot, nor blessed with raw power or a picture perfect swing. In the batter's box, he was a notorious hacker who chased pitches way out of the strike zone. And yet, despite his seeming lack of discipline, Yogi rarely struck out. In 1950, he fanned only 12 times in 597 at bats, an amazing accomplishment considering his wild swing.
Off the field too, Yogi was overshadowed by the notorious antics of hard drinking and barroom brawling teammates like Billy Martin and Mickey Mantle. Yogi eschewed the nightlife to spend time at home with his beloved wife Carmen or giving generously of his time to numerous youth organizations and other charitable causes. A modest man who made the most of his modest gifts, Yogi quietly led a remarkable life on and off the field. During World War II, he participated in the D-Day invasion at Omaha Beach. He played on ten World Championship Yankee teams and won three Most Valuable Player awards (no one else won more). He managed both the New York Yankees and the New York Mets to pennants, and was inducted to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1972.
When Yogi joined the Yankees in 1947, his roommate was Dr. Bobby Brown. Doctor Brown, then studying to become a medical doctor, was easily the smartest player in baseball at the time. The introverted intellectual Brown and the extroverted common man Yogi were the quintessential baseball Odd Couple. Yogi and Brown would sit next to each other on the bench, Brown poring over a medical textbook while Yogi read comic books. Once after finishing his comic book, Yogi turned to his roommate and naively asked: "Will you let me know how yours turns out?" When Yogi was given the rare tribute of a Yogi Berra Day, he was terrified at the prospect of having to deliver a speech in front of 60,000 people. His roommate Brown scripted a short speech for Yogi. In his stage fright, Yogi had trouble delivering his scripted remarks. He began by thanking his teammates and fans "for making this night necessary". Yogi's speech was an unintentional comedy hit, and a distinctly American oratorical device was born that night — the Yogi-ism.
Yogi's unique genius consists of his ability to mangle the most commonplace of baseball cliches into wondrous paradoxes. The best Yogi-isms are not literally malapropisms, but a unique type of verbal faux pas that are on the surface nonsensical, but sometimes capture elusive truths. Some of my favorite Yogi-isms:
"I always go to other people's funerals. Otherwise, when I die, they won't go to mine."
"When you come to a fork in the road, take it."
"That place used to be really popular before it got so crowded."
"If people don't want to come out to the ballpark, nobody's gonna stop them."
Even Yogi's effort to explain that many of the anecdotes about his misstatements were apocryphal somehow came out as yet another Yogi-ism: "I really didn't say everything I said."
But underneath the superficial nonsense of the classic Yogi-isms, there is wisdom in his mangled simplicities that transcends the pompous pronouncements of the chattering classes. "You can observe a lot by just watching," Yogi once said. Surely, the Republican observers watching the hand count of ballots in Palm Beach County can attest to the wisdom of Yogi's observation about the value of observation. "It ain't over till it's over." The events of the last three weeks clearly testify to the profound truth contained in the most famous Yogi-ism of all. Certainly nothing Yogi ever said can surpass in foolishness some of the preposterous things we've been told repeatedly over the past eight years: "Character doesn't matter," "Everybody does it," "It depends on what the meaning of 'is' is." and "There is no controlling legal authority."
There is a world of difference between simple truths and clever lies. There is a world of difference between simple honest men and cunning, gifted charlatans. In a way that cannot be explained to people who do not appreciate those differences, Yogi Berra reminds me of George W. Bush. Both men received insults and wisecracks with grace and dignity and let their deeds speak louder than words.
Throughout campaign 2000, the mainstream media painted Bush as an empty suit and a simpleton, who just wasn't smart enough to be President. Of course they did that to Dan Quayle and Ronald Reagan. As Yogi himself said, "it's déjà vu all over again." Of course the media failed to point out that Bush's SAT scores and college grades were higher than Gore's or that he earned an MBA from Harvard Business School while Al flunked out of divinity school and Vanderbilt Law School. In the media's eyes, strict conformity to liberal orthodoxy is definitive proof of intellect and compassion. Just ask Ted Kennedy.
In the media's and liberal intelligentsia's eyes, George W. doesn't look like a President any more than Yogi looked the part of a New York Yankee. Bush's success in business and politics are dismissed by pundits who never ran a business or successfully ran for public office as unearned spoils handed on a silver platter to the spoiled frat boy son of a wealthy and politically powerful ex-President. They see no irony or double standard when they attribute Al Gore's achievements to a brilliant intellect and diligent work habits. The media belittles George W.'s record of service as a fighter pilot in the National Guard while praising Al Gore's record of service as a reporter in Vietnam, far removed from the front lines. The media never tires of laughing at every George W.'s verbal faux pas with the same condescending air of know-it-alls who see only foolishness in Yogi-isms.
George W.'s intelligence, political savvy and talent have been continually underestimated by people who achieved less but think they know more. Governor Ann Richards badly underestimated him. It was sweet revenge for the Bush family as the spoiled son of the man with the silver foot in his mouth avenged her insulting comments at the 1992 Democratic Convention. John McCain, the media darling (at least when he was running against other Republicans) thought Bush a lightweight. But Bush surprised him by not folding as McCain and the media predicted when the going got tough. Somehow McCain's experience and popularity with the pundit classes failed to earn the Senator victory in even one state that did not allow Democrats to vote in the Republican primary. And the self-proclaimed master debater Al Gore somehow managed to lose all three presidential debates to a man who simply showed up and was comfortable being himself while Al Gore preened and postured with histrionic theatrics and multiple borrowed personalities.
Three weeks ago, in a contest for the presidency of the United States, the American people were almost evenly divided between George W. Bush and Al Gore. Bush won the election by the narrowest of margins, but he won. After the required recount of the ballots in Florida, once again Bush won. In politics as in sports, the margin of victory does not matter as much as who won. Ask the Super Bowl Champion St. Louis Rams or the Tennessee Titans, whose last gasp drive was stopped less than a yard shy of the goal. With a few more seconds or an extra yard on that final drive, the Titans would have won the Super Bowl. When the final gun sounded, the Titans did not send an army of lawyers onto the field to challenge the outcome. Instead, as real heroes do, they walked proudly off the field. They earned more honor in defeat than Al Gore will ever know even if he persuades enough sympathetic judges and partisan canvassing officials to interpret enough dimpled chads as votes for himself or has thousands of unmistakably clear Republican absentee ballots thrown out on a technicality. Whatever the final outcome of this unprecedented assault on the electoral process, Al Gore will always be remembered for what he is — a liar, a loser and a cheat.
Perhaps some unforeseen good is coming out of the nightmare of the past three weeks. Perhaps it takes something as brazen as the attempted theft of a presidential election to rouse the American people out of its long slumber. Perhaps now Americans are beginning to see liberal Democrats for what they really are now that the masks have finally dropped. Three weeks ago, it would have been foolish to suggest that the President-elect had any kind of mandate. Today, by sheer arrogance, brazenness and dishonesty, Al Gore has managed to unite 60 to 70% of the country — against Al Gore.
To borrow a phrase from the great Yankee sage: "Thank you Al Gore and the Democrats for making these past three weeks necessary."
© November 30, 2000


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Events: 5000m, 10,000m, marathon
Height: 5-6
Weight: 108
PRs: 5000m - 15:23.71 (2000); 10,000m - 31:37:26 (1993); marathon - 2:30:19 (1994)
Born: March 7, 1969 in Rochester, N.Y.
Current Residence: Hampton, N.J.
High School: North Hunterdon (Annandale, NJ) '87
College: Wake Forest '88; Rutgers '92 (dnc)
Coach: Dick Brown
Agent: Derek Froude
Club: Nike
Career Highlights: Two-Time Olympian ('96, '00); 10th in 1996 Olympic marathon; 2000 Olympian (did not make 5000m final); 3rd in 1994 New York City marathon; 5th in 10,000 at 1992 World Cup; 8th in 10,000 at 1993 World Champs...16th in 10,000 at 1999 World championships; 1991 World University gold medalist.
In 2000 Lauck turned in one of the most impressive all-around distance performances at the Olympic Trials, trying to make the team in three different events. She ultimately succeeded. Though Lauck placed third at the 2000 U.S. Women's Olympic Marathon Trials in February, she did not qualify for the team for lack of an Olympic 'A' standard qualifying time. At the Olympic Track & Field Trials in July, she was fourth in the 10,000, again just missing a spot. She then placed 5th in the 5000 meters with a PR time of 15:23.71 and was named to U.S. roster for Sydney when 5000m 1st placer Regina Jacobs and 2nd placer Deena Drossin decided to run the 1500m and 10,000 meters, respectively, at the Olympics. Finished 11th (15:47.78) in the opening heat of the 2000 Olympics 5000m. Competed in the 10,000m at the 1999 and 1993 World Championships, during the outdoor season. Lauck in 1996 was the top U.S. finisher in the Olympic marathon, placing 10th... maiden name is Letko.
2000: 11th in 1st round 5000m heat at Olympics (15:47.78)... 3rd in
Olympic Marathon Trials (2:36:06) but did not qualify for team due to lack of
'A' standard qualifier... 5th in 5,000 (15:23.71) and 4th in 10,000 (32:01.86)
at Olympic Track Trials, both times being season bests...ranked #6 in 5000, #4
in 10,000 and #4 in marathon in U.S. by T&FN... bests of 15:23.71 and
1999: 2nd at USA Outdoors at 10,000m ... 16th at World Champs (32:57.07)...ranked #2 in U.S. in 10,000 by T&FN...bests of 31:43.50 and 2:37:59.
1998: 13th at New York marathon...bests of 15:47.65 and 2:42:52.
1997: Did not compete.
1996: 3rd at Olympic Marathon Trials... 10th in marathon at Olympic Games...ranked #5 in marathon in U.S. by T&FN...bests of 32:05.64 and 2:31:18.
1995: 3rd at USA Outdoors in 10,000...ranked #2 in U.S. by T&FN. best of 32:07.43.
1994: 3rd in 10,000 at USA Outdoors...3rd at New York Marathon... ranked #5 in U.S. by T&FN. bests of 15:43.37, 32:41.67 and 2:30:19.
1993: 2nd in 10,000 at USA Outdoors...8th at World Champs... ranked #8 in world (# 2 U.S.) by T&FN...bests of 15:54.31 and 31:37.26.
1992: 6th at Olympic Trials...5th at World Cup...ranked #6 in U.S. by T&FN...best of 33:47.20.
1991: 3rd at USA Outdoors 10k...gold at World University Games...dnf World Champs... ranked #3 in U.S. by T&FN...best of 32:26.65.
1990: 6th at USA Outdoors...2nd at Olympic Festival...ranked #7 in U.S. by T&FN...best of 33:06.21.
1989: Did not compete.
1988: 19th at NCAA Outdoors...3rd at USA Juniors...best of 34:21.30.


text:
This is our second Islamic theme for Nokia C3 & X2-01. Previously I have made same Islamic Months Name theme for Nokia 240×320 devices, as well as [intlink id="14″ type="category"]SonyEricsson Theme[/intlink]. This is animated theme, this theme have Islamic Months Name on home screen, and all months name comes one-by-one on home screen.
This is Islamic Months Name theme for [intlink id="182″ type="category"]Nokia C3 & X2-01[/intlink] with beautiful and stylish analog clock. The main reason creation of this that to teach people the Islamic months name. Personally I don't know Islamic months name correctly, we just know Shahban and Ramada then Eid, even some people don't know what is actual name of Eid month. I know lots of people have well knowledge about Islam and Islamic Months Name, but this theme is those people who don't know correctly Islamic Months Name.
My main reason is that I make theme like education. Educate the people via mobile themes and applications, mostly our new and old generation using the cell phone around 24 hours, so mobile is the best way to teach the people about religions, national, culture etc. I hope you like this theme and more educated theme is coming soon.
Please send your comments and suggestions, and also share your ideas with us. And to keep updating yourself, please follow us on Twitter, Facebook and subscribe to the RSS feed, if you would like to be informed for the latest themes.
Downloaded: 11028 times
File size = 443 kb
Format = .nth
Right Click on the Download button and select "Save Target As" or "Save Link As" Option. Save the .nth file on your computer Now you can transfer this file to your mobile phone using the file transfer option available in your mobile device.
If you file download in .zip format then follow the following step to rename it with .nth
Goto > Control Panel > Folder Options > View (tab) > un-check "Hide extensions for known file types" > click OK.
When you check the downloaded theme file it showing .zip, now rename it .nth. I hope this matter is easily worked.


text:
|Does Robertson have the guts to get the last three outs? (AP)
The other day, I heard an announcer call the ninth inning "The toughest three outs to get in baseball." I will not name the announcer for a variety of reasons, the main one being that I could probably turn on the television tonight, scan the DirecTV baseball package and within a few minutes hear another announcer say the same thing, almost word for word. This "toughest three outs to get are the last three outs" is pretty well engrained into the grand baseball conversation.
Before I get into this, though — and, yes, we are going to go pretty deep into this — I would like to say a few words about how baseball's immenseness and complications seem to lead people to just say stuff that sounds right in their minds. I thought I might have mentioned this a couple of weeks ago, but maybe I didn't: I was watching a game on television and Yankees second baseman Robinson Cano struck out looking. Tim McCarver was doing the game, and he immediately said something like: "We just saw an extremely rare thing. Robinson Cano almost never strikes out looking."
I thought: How could he possibly know that? Did McCarver happen to have a list of batters who rarely strike out looking right in front of him? Did one of his fine statisticians happen to scan that list the second it happened and whisper it in his ear? Did he recall the statistic from some previous conversation? Not impossible, I suppose. But not likely. I think it's much more likely that McCarver simply deduced that Cano probably doesn't strike out looking much. He probably could not remember seeing him strike out looking. And, hey, it does SOUND right. Cano doesn't strike out all that much looking OR swinging (he has never whiffed 100 times in a year) and he's a hacker, so it just figures that he probably wouldn't strike out looking very often.
But the point is not whether he was right or wrong.* The point is, I'm guessing that McCarver had absolutely no idea if it was true beyond what his gut was telling him. I'm sure it just SOUNDED right. So he said it.
*It took a while, but I did look it up: Cano does not strike out looking very often, but it's not exactly a Royal wedding kind of occurrence. Last year, he struck out looking 2.2% of the time, which is a fairly low percentage, but wasn't in the Top 25 among hitters with 400-plus at-bats. The year before that it was 1.3% of the time, which did put him in the Top 10, but still well behind guys like Miguel Tejada and Jason Kendall. The year before that it was 1.6%, which put him about 20th. Like I say, Cano doesn't strike out looking a lot, but it's hardly noteworthy. Vlad Guerrero, now THERE'S a guy who hardly ever strikes out looking.
This is no great crime, of course. I think this tendency for people to say what just sort of sounds right to them — without actually checking to see if it is true — is an immutable part of the human psyche. I would guess that we all fall for it. I would also guess that in the last three days at least one person, and probably more than one — from an array of friends, relatives, neighbors, co-workers — has told you something directly in your field of expertise or line of interest that is undeniably and unquestionably wrong. But it SOUNDS right, at least to them, so they say it. And say it. And say it. And, often, they say it with conviction. I can only imagine how many times someone went up to Albert Einstein to tell him some right-sounding point about the theory of relativity.
This tendency is especially strong in baseball. I think it's something about the game. The marvelous thing about baseball is that because the season is so long, you will see just about anything you want to see over 162 games. You will see hitters get a bunch of hits at one time ("The ball looks like a BEACH BALL to him right now") and also go hitless for a long time ("He's hit the ball hard a few times but the hits are just not falling for him right now"). You will see great plays and dreadful blunders, You will see games won and lost in every imaginable way.
And you can get carried away by any of those things. If you see a team steal seven bases, drive the pitcher and defense mad by taking extra bases, and score a couple of runs on errors, you can came away convinced that speed is how you win baseball games. If you see a team make seven diving catches and an outfielder take away a home run, you can come away convinced that defense is the only sure path to victory. If you see a plodding and patient team take 11 walks, knock the starting pitcher out in the fourth inning because of pitch count, foul off so many pitches that the other team begins to lose its mind, you might buy into plate discipline being the secret. Baseball's ubiquity fills the mind with certainties that aren't certainties at all.
The ninth inning idea — that the ninth inning features the toughest three outs in baseball — is like that too. We've all seen enough good and bad things happen in the ninth inning to come away thinking that it's just DIFFERENT from all the other innings. This is why teams pay huge amounts of money for closers whose jobs (almost entirely) is to protect one-, two- and three-runs leads in the ninth inning. The latest talk in New York, as the city shakily tries to recover from the Mariano Rivera injury, is about David Robertson and whether he has the stuff, the guts, the pluck, the spirit, the moxie, the cojones, the courage, the bravery, the backbone, the grit, the fire, the fearlessness, the toughness, the determination, the audacity, the boldness, the spine, the mettle, the heroism and the nerve to actually get batters out in the ninth inning.
You know. The toughest three outs in all of baseball.
Except …
* * *
Hitting by inning since 1970 (batting average/on-base percentage/slugging percentage):
1st inning: .270/.342/.413
2nd inning: .254/.318/.389
3rd inning: .263/.327/.402
4th inning: .267/.330/.419
5th inning: .265/.328/.408
6th inning: .267/.333/.418
7th inning: .261/.331/.399
8th inning: .256/.327/.389
9th inning: .247/.316/.372
* * *
Now, before we get into this, let's acknowledge that ninth inning statistics are wildly skewed. The home team does not bat in the ninth when it has the lead, so ninth inning statistics lean heavily toward road teams — ninth-inning stats are about 2/3 road teams. And road teams do not hit as well as home teams. Also, the ninth inning has been handled so many different ways over the years — there was an era where starters were expected to finish their games, an era of multi-inning firemen, an era of the closer, an era of the high-priced, one-inning closer — that you can't really directly compare the ninth inning to any other.
That said, I didn't make up the cliche. The cliche is that the ninth inning has the three toughest outs in baseball.
And when you look at the numbers you see it: The cliche is absolutely, undeniably, absurdly wrong. They are the easiest three outs.
Well, you can see it in almost any number breakdown. Since 1970 — this is through many different kinds of relief strategies — batters in the ninth inning have the lowest batting average, the lowest on-base percentage and the lowest slugging percentage for any inning. Pitchers have their lowest ERAs in the ninth inning. Fewer runs are scored per ninth inning than any other inning, and this goes back decades:
Average runs per inning (1-8) .47
Ninth inning: .43
Average runs per inning: .49
Ninth inning: .42
Average runs per inning: .53
Ninth inning: .45
Average runs per inning: .53
Ninth inning: .45
By the way, I don't believe hitters are WORSE in the ninth inning than any other inning. I tend to think ninth-inning hitting and scoring is largely suppressed by those factors mentioned earlier — that winning home teams don't bat in the ninth and that good pitchers/closers are used for one inning to finish games. My point is not that hitters are worse in the ninth, but they are certainly not any BETTER in the ninth.
But what interests me more than why those hitting numbers are so low is why this absurdly inaccurate cliche began in the first place. The toughest outs? Really? I mean, if you think about it: Why would those outs in the ninth inning be harder to get than outs in any other inning? What could have inspired such spurious thinking in the first place? I suspect the reasons why people ever believed this is because:
1. Late-inning pressure changes the dynamic for the pitchers (a.k.a., only certain pitchers can handle the tension of the ninth inning).
2. The hitters' latent ability to hit in the clutch emerges at the end, with the game on the line, when it's for all the marbles, when backs are against the wall, when it's gut-check time and so on.
3. Managers will dig into their voodoo bag of pinch-hitters and base-running sorcery to score runs in the ninth inning, and such go-for-broke maneuvers make it harder to get those three outs.
But even if you believe these kind of nonsensical things, does it make sense even on the gut level? Wouldn't pressure change the dynamic for both sides equally? Wouldn't the hitter's clutchability be matched by the pitcher's? Wouldn't the other manager be able to dig into HIS voodoo bag?
All of it seems kind of like pointless thrashing about to me. We have a remarkable ability to believe what feels plausible. And every one of us have seen our teams, many times, struggle against ninth-inning comebacks or put together valiant comebacks of their own. And such things stand out in the mind much more than valiant sixth-inning comebacks or busted rallies in the third inning. The ninth inning feels particularly in focus because the game is almost over, and all the other outs have already been exhausted, and this is the last chance. So when someone says, "You know, the ninth inning are the three toughest outs in the game," it's tempting to just nod because they are the only outs left. The cliche perfectly fits the mental picture. And then someone else says it. And someone else. And before long you find yourself saying it too.
But no matter how many times you say it or hear it, well, it just ain't so.
ERA by inning since 2000:
1st inning: 4.81
2nd inning: 3.93
3rd inning: 4.44
4th inning: 4.54
5th inning: 4.49
6th inning: 4.66
7th inning: 4.27
8th inning: 4.14
9th inning: 3.71
* * *
You know what the three hardest outs are in baseball? Yep: The first three outs. This too has been consistent going back 50 years. I think it's probably obvious why: It's the one time in the game when the manager gets to determine EXACTLY who will come to the plate. Every other inning is a mishmash of lineup-orders … only in the first inning are you guaranteed to have the 1-2-3 hitters bat. Since 1960, about 10,000 more runs have been scored in the first inning than in any other inning.
I've heard from a couple of radical thinkers inside the game that teams might be better off to have official game STARTERS rather than CLOSERS, that is to say, one- or two-innings specialists who start two or three games a week and whose job is to get you off to a good start. Obviously stuff like this might work better in theory than in practice*, but in theory this is a very interesting concept.
*I've got a post coming up revolving around the poll in which Brilliant Readers voted on whether teams would win more, lose more or stay about the same if managers NEVER sac bunted or used the intentional walk. Obviously, this is also a skewed sample, but only 12% of you thought that a team might lose more games.
Beyond these sorts of theories, it's helpful to think a little bit about how baseball works. Runs, as has been written before, are scored by a chain of events. Sometimes it's a short chain — Raul Ibanez hits a home run. But more often, it's a longer chain of events — a guy walks, the next guy singles, there's a double steal, a sacrifice fly — and your best shot for a longer chain good of events is to have a series of your best hitters come to the plate. You would rather not have a pitcher hit in the middle of the chain, or a light-hitting middle infielder. Obviously, if a manager gets it right, the best hitters come up in the first inning, three of them at least. That gives teams their best shot at starting the chain. The second inning has always been a very low-scoring inning because (I suspect) the lower part of the lineup is likely to come up.
Whatever the reasons for this phenomenon — and I'm sure I'm missing some reasons — I'd love to create a cliche. I'd love for this cliche to be: The toughest three outs in baseball are the first three outs. It may not sound true. And it doesn't really fill our irresistible need for clarity and finality — after all, getting the first three outs without giving up a run doesn't mean you're going to win, or even that you're likely to win. You could get the first three outs without giving up a run and still lose the game 48-1.
Still, based on the numbers, it's a generalization but also something close to a fact. The toughest three outs are the first three outs. Sometimes the true story isn't as much fun or as emotional as the myth. That doesn't make it any less true.


text:
Leeds United began their controversial postseason tour of Myanmar with a 2-1 defeat to a National League All-Stars side.
United's plans for the trip were met by a storm of protest when announced at the end of last month.
The UK's shadow sports minister Rosena Allin-Khan and large numbers of Leeds fans urged the club to cancel the trip amid concerns over Myanmar's human rights record, while Amnesty International were highly critical.
But Championship side Leeds pressed ahead with the tour and arrived in Myanmar on Tuesday with a young squad.
A penalty from playmaker Samuel Saiz cancelled out Joseph Mpande's 22nd-minute opener before Christopher Chizoba netted a second-half winner for the hosts.
Paul Heckingbottom's team face the Myanmar national side on Friday in their final match.


text:
Hello from Rebecca and David Marcus. On May 16, 2015 we will be called to the Torah in celebration of our B'nai Mitzvah.
We have been asked by our synagogue, Temple Israel of Lawrence in Lawrence, NY to each choose a project that would be considered our Mitzvah Project. The word Mitzvah translates in English to mean a moral deed performed as a religious duty. As such, the term mitzvah has also come to express an act of human kindness.
Based on this definition we knew that we wanted to do projects that have a strong personal meaning to us.
As a lifelong food allergy (and seasonal allergy) sufferer, for David the choice was clear: to do something that could help other kids live their life with ease and safety with this "disability."
For Rebecca, who loves dogs, she very much wanted to include animals in her quest to help kids.
We remembered that about 5 years ago our cousin Alyssa chose her Mitzvah project that combined both of our interests by supporting Angel Service Dogs as they train dogs to detect allergens for kids with life-threatening food allergies. The more we learned about Angel Service Dogs the more we knew this was the perfect Mitzvah Project for us! As we are twins, we have decided to divide and conquer with two separate goals. We want to deeply thank you in advance for taking the time to donate to each of our two different projects. Large or small, every single penny helps this wonderful organization!
Updated on this date: 5-5-2015, together they have raised: $1968
|Fundraiser Details:
You can donate with a check, made out to Angel Service Dogs, Inc, please put David's Mitzvah in the memo.
Mail to:
Or you can donate online:Please make sure to put David's Mitzvah in the comment of your PayPal donation!
|Fundraiser Details:
You can donate with a check, made out to Angel Service Dogs, Inc, please put Rebecca's Mitzvah in the memo.
Mail to:
Or you can donate online:Please make sure to put Rebecca's Mitzvah in the comment of your PayPal donation!
↑ Return to OUR FAMILIES
David and Rebecca
Permanent link to this article: http://angelservicedogs.org/our-families/david-rebecca/


text:
AM: Yeah, the first time I heard it, I loved it, but I didn't recognize it as Immaculate Machine. How would you describe the change?
BG: I mainly think of it as just more laid back. There's a little bit more space in the songs. Instead of everyone trying to fit as many hooks into as many seconds of the song as possible, we just relaxed a little bit more. The recording process was like that too so that is influencing my view of the album but we just had fun with every song and goofed around and tried what we wanted to try instead of trying to get it perfect. So for me, it was a lot more fun to do it that way.
AM: So you're on tour promoting your new album now?
BG: Yeah, it's been out for a little while now and we've been touring for quite awhile now but this is our first time promoting it in the Maritimes.
AM: How is your tour going so far?
BG: Well it's been busy. We've been on tour all fall and we will continue for the rest of the year. We've been in Europe, New York, and western Canada and we'll be heading to China in December and that will be a new one for us.
AM: At your merchandise table, I noticed the comic book that you made. It's full of stories from your last tour. Do you have any good stories from this tour?
BG: Yeah, we've become kind of shameless about our being tourists and sightseeing. While we were in Hamburg, this woman named Julia came up to us and told us that she lived in the apartment that the Beatles lived in when they got their start playing in the seedy underground bars of Hamburg. She said she knew that it was really the Beatles' apartment because someone had come in a few years before to make a documentary film about it so she gave us the address and told us that she thought someone named Karl might be living there that she sort of knew.
AM: So she didn't even live there anymore?
BG: No and in fact her connection to Karl was a lot more distant than she made it out to be too. So we went first thing the next morning, because we had a long drive that day, and buzzed Karl's apartment and asked him in what can't properly be described as German, but I was doing my best to learn German, something like "we Canadians come seeking Beatles" and even though the guy said he didn't know Julia, he let us into the apartment. Once we were up there he was like. "So, you're Canadians…what are you doing in my apartment?" Once again we were like "uh…your friend Julia told us…" and he said "I don't know a Julia but anyway…did you know the Beatles used to live here." So we took some pictures in the house and he was like "This is great. Do you feel the Beatles' vibrations?" and we were like "yeah, we feel them" and that was it. The shocking thing to me was that no one really does that to him. Apparently we were the first people since the guitarist from Iron Maiden to go knocking at his door.
JM: What are you listening to these days?
BG: Well, I've been doing all of the driving in Europe because no one else could handle the stress of narrow roads, and the wrong side of the streets, so I've given up all of my DJ privileges but there's been a lot of just about everything actually. We spent a long rainy night drive listening to Black Sabbath, which was pretty exhilarating in a certain way, but we also listen to obscure 60s folk like there's a great artist that the bassist, my sister, is really obsessed with right now called Judee Sill. Check it out. It's really pretty, beautiful folk from the 60s.
JM: Since the Olympics are coming to Vancouver, we are curious about what your thoughts are on the Olympics and some of the controversies that are surrounding that event.
BG: Well everyday, there is no limit to the amount of fodder that there is for anti-Olympics stuff. The government has been going absolutely crazy and they deny that it has anything to do with the Olympics of course but they have cut arts funding, and they have made these new, questionable policies on homeless people and where they can and cannot sleep. My day job has been really affected. I work in this fantastic program that retrofits peoples' houses to make them more energy efficient and they have cut all of the funding for that as well. They've also introduced this HST that nullifies a lot of these exemptions that used to happen on environmentally proactive products. So, just as everyone expected, we're all suffering for no apparent reason. I mean no Olympics has ever made a city a profit or had a lasting positive impact as far as I can see.
JM: I heard something the other day that I found pretty shocking. They're giving the police a warrant to go into people's houses and remove any signs that citizens have in their windows that are protesting the Olympics.
BG: Yeah and they are spinning that as a copyright issue like it has nothing to do with squashing the naysayers or any kind of dissent its just purely a merchandising issue. "You just can't use that word", like as if it has anything to do with merchandising.
JM: It all sounds like a lot of great inspiration for future songs.
BG: Yeah maybe some day, down the line.


text:
On Thu, 1 Nov 2001, Martin Gudgin wrote: > ----- Original Message ----- > From: "Dan Brickley" <email@example.com> > To: "Christopher Ferris" <email@example.com> > Cc: "Jacek Kopecky" <email@example.com>; <email@example.com>; > <firstname.lastname@example.com> > Sent: Thursday, November 01, 2001 3:16 PM > Subject: Re: RSVP: Resolution to issue #29 satisfactory? (fwd) > > > <SNIP>Long version</SNIP> > > > Short version: "what is SOAP-encoding for? what is it *not* for?" > > Dan, > > There are many people, myself included, that do not think that an encoding > schema is necessary for many iteractions. Two parties just need to agree on > what the XML is going to look like for a given exchange. > This will probably be defined in a schema of some sort. There is no need for > any 'standard' data encoding in many of these cases. In fact, I would go so > far as to say we only need a 'standard' encoding for cases where two parties > cannot agree by defining a schema. > > Martin So would you go so far as to say that SOAP Encoding is basically just used for RPC? I've heard this from others offlist, but the 1.2 spec and WG charter had given me the impression that it might be intended for wider use. DanReceived on Wednesday, 7 November 2001 11:17:24 UTC
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.3.1 : Tuesday, 6 January 2015 22:01:16 UTC


text:
During a news conference this week, Wyoming Governor Matt Mead addressed several key issues including one of his priorities, which is to get more funding to local governments to use on infrastructure projects.
Mead offered this reaction to the news that the Legislature's Joint Appropriations Committee voted to support local funding for local governments and highway construction.
When asked he he had received a response to the letter he'd sent to the Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar to rescind the "Wild Lands" order, the Governor replied.
Mead says that he is very concerned about this order and the impacts it could have on the State as well as our counties.
Secretarial Order 3310 directs the Bureau of Land Management to inventory and identify "Wild Lands" and protect them for their wilderness values.