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Appellant, a New York corporation that manufactures and sells copying machines, shipped machine parts manufactured in this country to Mexico City, Mexico, for assembly by its affiliate there. After assembly, the copiers were transported by a customs bonded trucking company to a customs bonded warehouse in Houston, Tex., where they were segregated from other merchandise and stored while awaiting sale and shipment to appellant's affiliates in Latin America. None of these copiers were ever sold to customers for domestic use, but remained under the continuous control and supervision of the United States Customs Service from the time they entered the warehouse until they cleared United States Customs at their export ports. In 1977, both the city of Houston and Harris County (appellees) assessed ad valorem personal property taxes on the copiers stored in the Houston warehouse. Appellant sought declaratory and injunctive relief in state court, claiming that the taxes were unconstitutional. Appellees counterclaimed for the taxes assessed. The trial court entered judgment for appellant, holding that the taxes violated the Import-Export and Commerce Clauses of the Constitution. The Texas Court of Civil Appeals reversed and granted judgment to appellees on their counterclaims, holding that the taxes violated neither Clause of the Constitution and, alternatively, that the trial court had violated state law in granting injunctive relief.
BURGER, C. J., delivered the opinion of the Court, in which BRENNAN, WHITE, MARSHALL, BLACKMUN, REHNQUIST, STEVENS, and O'CONNOR, JJ., joined. POWELL, J., filed a dissenting opinion, post, p. 155.
Alfred H. Hoddinott, Jr., argued the cause and filed briefs for appellant.
Cheryl Helena Chapman argued the cause for appellees. With her on the brief for appellee City of Houston was Jay D. Howell, Jr. John J. Greene filed a brief for appellee County of Harris. *
[ Footnote * ] James F. Gossett filed a brief for the International Association of Assessing Officers as amicus curiae.
CHIEF JUSTICE BURGER delivered the opinion of the Court.
We noted probable jurisdiction to decide whether a state may impose nondiscriminatory ad valorem personal property taxes on imported goods stored under bond in a customs warehouse and destined for foreign markets. The Texas Court of Civil Appeals held such taxes constitutional.
Appellant Xerox Corp. is a New York corporation engaged in the business of manufacturing and selling business machines. Its operations span the globe, and it has established [459 U.S. 145, 147] affiliates in foreign countries to facilitate foreign sales. It has assembly plants and production facilities in Mexico.
Xerox manufactured parts for copying machines in Colorado and New York which were shipped to Mexico City, Mexico, for assembly by its affiliate there. The copiers assembled in Mexico were designed for sale in the Latin American market, and all printing on the machines and instructions accompanying them were in Spanish or Portuguese. Most of the copiers operated on electric current of 50 cycles per second, rather than the 60 cycles per second that is standard in the United States. Many of the copiers assembled by appellant's affiliate in Mexico City were not approved by either United Laboratories or the Canadian Standards Association, as required for sale in the United States. To convert the copiers for domestic sale would have cost approximately $100 per copier.
After assembly in Mexico, the copiers were transported by a customs bonded trucking company to the Houston Terminal Warehouse in Houston, Tex., 1 a Class 3 customs bonded warehouse. There they were stored for periods ranging from a few days to three years while awaiting sale and shipment to Xerox affiliates in Latin America. The copiers remained in the warehouse, segregated from other merchandise, until a shipment order was received. When Xerox received an order, it would transport the copiers under bond to either the Port of Houston or the Port of Miami, where they were loaded on board vessels for shipment to Latin America. The copiers remained under the continuous control and supervision of the United States Customs Service from the time they entered the bonded warehouse until they cleared [459 U.S. 145, 148] United States Customs at the Port of Houston or the Port of Miami for export. 2
None of the copiers assembled in Mexico and stored in Houston were ever sold to customers for domestic use; all were ultimately sold abroad. Consequently, Xerox paid no import duties on them. 3
The local authorities did not assess any taxes on the copiers stored under customs bond in 1974 and 1975. In 1977, the city of Houston 4 assessed ad valorem personal property taxes of $156,728 on the copiers stored in the Houston warehouse during 1977. 5 The County of Harris 6 followed suit, assessing $55,969 in taxes for 1977 and also assessing $48,426 in back taxes for 1976, for a total of $104,395.
As soon as Xerox learned that the local authorities intended to tax its Mexican-assembled copiers, it shipped all the machines to a foreign trade zone in Buffalo, N. Y., from which it continued to fill orders for shipment to Latin America. [459 U.S. 145, 149]
Declaratory and injunctive relief was sought in state court both from the taxes already assessed and such taxes as appellees might impose in the future. Xerox claimed that the taxes in question were unconstitutional because they violated the Import-Export Clause and the Commerce Clause of the Constitution. Art. I., 10, cl. 2; Art. I, 8, cl. 3. Appellees counterclaimed for the taxes assessed.
The trial court held that the taxes assessed by appellees violated both the Import-Export and Commerce Clauses, and it granted judgment to Xerox. The Texas Court of Civil Appeals, First District, reversed, holding that the taxes violated neither the Import-Export Clause nor the Commerce Clause. 619 S. W. 2d 402 (1981). Alternatively, it held that the trial court had violated Texas Rule of Civil Procedure 683 in granting injunctive relief. Finally, it granted judgment to appellees on their counterclaims in the amount of $131,311 plus penalties and interest to Harris County and $156,728 plus penalties and interest to the city of Houston. The Texas Supreme Court denied Xerox's application for a writ of error and this appeal followed. We noted probable jurisdiction, 456 U.S. 913 (1982), and we reverse.
A preliminary question is whether this Court has jurisdiction over the appeal. Appellees argue that this Court lacks jurisdiction since the decision of the Texas court reversing the grant of an injunction rested on an independent and adequate state ground. However, an indispensable predicate to an award of judgment to the appellees on their counterclaims was a determination that the taxes at issue were permissible under the United States Constitution; the Texas Court of Civil Appeals so held. It is not claimed that any independent and adequate state-law ground supports that holding. We therefore have jurisdiction to review that judgment. 28 U.S.C. 1257(2). [459 U.S. 145, 150]
Pursuant to its powers under the Commerce Clause, Congress established a comprehensive customs system which includes provisions for Government-supervised bonded warehouses houses where imports may be stored duty free for prescribed periods. At any time during that period the goods may be withdrawn and reexported without payment of duty. Only if the goods are withdrawn for domestic sale or stored beyond the prescribed period does any duty become due. 19 U.S.C. 1557(a) (1976 ed., Supp. V). While the goods are in bonded warehouses they are in the joint custody of the United States Customs Service and the warehouse proprietor and under the continuous control and supervision of the local customs officers. 19 U.S.C. 1555. Detailed regulations control every aspect of the manner in which the warehouses are to be operated. 19 CFR 19.1-19.6 (1982).
Government-regulated, bonded warehouses have been a link in the chain of foreign commerce since "a very early period in our history." Fabbri v. Murphy, 95 U.S. 191, 197 (1877). A forerunner of the present statute was the Warehousing Act of 1846, 9 Stat. 53. A major objective of the warehousing system was to allow importers to defer payment of duty until the goods entered the domestic market or were exported. The legislative history explains that Congress sought to reinstate.
In short, Congress created secure and duty-free enclaves under federal control in order to encourage merchants here and abroad to make use of American ports. The question is whether it would be compatible with the comprehensive scheme Congress enacted to effect these goals if the states were free to tax such goods while they were lodged temporarily in Government-regulated bonded storage in this country.
In McGoldrick v. Gulf Oil Corp., 309 U.S. 414 (1940), the City of New York sought to impose a sales tax on imported petroleum that was refined into fuel oil in New York and sold as ships' stores to vessels bound abroad. The crude oil was [459 U.S. 145, 152] imported under bond and refined in a customs bonded manufacturing warehouse and was free from all duties. We struck down the state tax, finding it pre-empted by the congressional scheme. Id., at 429.
The Court determined that the purpose of the exemption from the tax normally laid upon importation of crude petroleum was "to encourage importation of the crude oil for [refinement into ships' stores] and thus to enable American refiners to meet foreign competition and to recover trade which had been lost by the imposition of the tax." Id., at 427; see also id., at 428. The Court went on to note that, in furtherance of this purpose,
The analysis in McGoldrick applies with full force here. First, Congress sought, in the statutory scheme reviewed in McGoldrick, to benefit American industry by remitting duties otherwise due. The import tax on crude oil was remitted to benefit oil refiners employing labor at refineries within the United States, whose products would not be sold in domestic commerce. Here, the remission of duties benefited those shippers using American ports as transshipment centers. Second, the system of customs regulation is as pervasive for the stored goods in the present case as it was in McGoldrick for the refined petroleum. In both cases, the imported goods were segregated in warehouses under continual federal custody and supervision. Finally, the state tax was large enough in each case to offset substantially the very benefits Congress intended to confer by remitting the duty. 9 In short, freedom from state taxation is as necessary to the congressional scheme here as it was in McGoldrick.
Although there are factual distinctions between this case and McGoldrick, they are distinctions without a legal difference. We can discern no relevance to the issue of congressional intent in the fact that the fuel oil in McGoldrick could be sold only as ships' stores whereas Xerox had the option to pay the duty and withdraw the copiers for domestic sale, or that in McGoldrick the city sought to impose a sales tax and here appellees assessed a property tax.
A similar conclusion was reached in District of Columbia v. International Distributing Corp., 118 U.S. App. D.C. 71, 331 F.2d 817 (1964). There, the Court of Appeals held that a wholesaler of imported alcoholic beverages was not liable [459 U.S. 145, 154] for District of Columbia excise taxes on the sale of such beverages to foreign embassies while the beverages were stored in a customs bonded warehouse. The court reasoned that Congress intended to make customs bonded warehouses federal enclaves free of state taxation and that although the imported goods were physically within the District of Columbia, they were not subject to its taxing jurisdiction until they were removed from the warehouse. Since the sales took place prior to removal, the District could not tax those sales. The Court of Appeals quoted with approval the following language of the Tax Court:
Accordingly, we hold that state property taxes on goods stored under bond in a customs warehouse are pre-empted by Congress' comprehensive regulation of customs duties.
It is unnecessary for us to consider whether, absent congressional regulation, the taxes here would pass muster under the Import-Export Clause or the Commerce Clause. [459 U.S. 145, 155]
The judgment of the Texas Court of Civil Appeals is reversed, and the case is remanded for proceedings not inconsistent with this opinion.
[ Footnote 2 ] Goods stored in customs bonded warehouses are under the "joint custody" of the warehouse proprietor and the United States Customs Service. The United States Customs Service is "in charge" of the warehouse and all work performed there is under its "supervision." 19 U.S.C. 1555.
[ Footnote 3 ] At the time in question, 19 U.S.C. 1557(a) permitted the storage of imported goods for up to three years in a customs bonded warehouse without payment of an import duty. The importer was required to post a bond for the value of the duty. At the end of the three years, the goods could be withdrawn for domestic sale upon payment of the duty owed, or could be withdrawn for reexport without payment of any duty. In 1978, the time limit on the storage period was extended from three years to five years. Customs Procedural Reform and Simplification Act of 1978, Pub. L. 95-410, 108(b)(1), 92 Stat. 892, 19 U.S.C. 1557(a) (1976 ed., Supp. V).
[ Footnote 4 ] Houston assesses and collects taxes for itself and the Houston Independent School District.
[ Footnote 5 ] In 1976 and 1977, Xerox paid a total of approximately $1,817,000 in ad valorem taxes to appellees for copiers located in Texas for domestic use.
[ Footnote 6 ] Harris County assesses and collects taxes for itself, the State of Texas, and other local taxing authorities.
[ Footnote 7 ] In 1846, approximately 90% of all federal revenues were derived from customs duties. U.S. Bureau of Census, Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1970, Part 2, p. 1106 (Bicentennial ed. 1975) (customs accounted for $26,713,000 out of total federal revenues of $29,700,000).
[ Footnote 8 ] Here, a footnote in the regulations governing customs bonded warehouses specifically provided that "[i]mported goods in bonded warehouses are exempt from taxation or judicial process of any State or subdivision thereof." 19 CFR 19.6(c), n. 11 (1982). A recent amendment to the regulations deleted this footnote on November 1, 1982, effective December [459 U.S. 145, 153] 1, 1982. 47 Fed. Reg. 49370. The Treasury Department offered no explanation for the amendment. The deletion of footnote 11 without explanation does not alter our conclusion that the ad valorem taxes here are pre-empted by the statutory scheme.
[ Footnote 9 ] The fair market value of the copiers located in the Houston warehouse on January 1, 1977, was $9,015,690. The duty remitted by the United States on these copiers amounted to $540,000. By comparison, the appellees here sought to impose taxes on the copiers for the year 1977 amounting to $211,112. App. 12a-15a, 25a.
JUSTICE POWELL, dissenting.
Since 1799 the United States has permitted importers to post a customs bond in lieu of immediate payment of customs duties on imported goods. Today the Court holds that these goods stored in customs-bonded warehouses also are exempt from state property taxation. This holding would be unremarkable were it based on any evidence of congressional intent, but such support is lacking. The Court instead finds that state taxation is incompatible with the purposes of the federal customs-bonded warehousing system.
Customs-bonded storage enables importers to defer paying customs duties until the goods are ready for domestic sale or to avoid paying duties altogether if the goods are reexported. The Court correctly observes that Congress' ultimate purpose has been to encourage imports and enhance the position of the United States as a center of international trade. I am not persuaded, however, that nondiscriminatory state taxation of customs-bonded goods is incompatible with this purpose.
The Court attributes significance to the "pervasive" system of customs regulation of stored goods, ante, at 153, but fails to explain how this affects a State's power to tax. The purpose of the regulation is to guarantee the security of federal revenues. The owner of customs-bonded goods eventually must pay the customs duties or reexport the goods. The warehousing system enables the Federal Government to monitor the removal of bonded goods for sale or export and ensure that duties are paid when due. A State's imposition of an ad valorem tax does not impair this function. The "pervasive" regulation of the manner in which customs-bonded goods are stored and withdrawn, therefore, is simply immaterial to the validity of state taxation of those goods. [459 U.S. 145, 156]
The Court also argues that state taxation of customs-bonded goods would frustrate the congressional purpose of encouraging foreign trade with the United States. It asserts that appellees' taxes are large enough "to offset substantially the very benefits Congress intended to confer by remitting the duty." Ibid. It seems to me that the word "offset" in this context is misused. If a State were to impose a special tax on property stored in customs-bonded warehouses, perhaps such a tax could be viewed as "offsetting" the benefits of storage. An importer deciding whether to use the warehouses would weigh the amount saved through remission of duties against the amount expended to pay the property tax. In this case, however, the county and city, acting pursuant to state law, impose the same ad valorem taxes no matter where the property is stored. An importer deciding whether to bring imported goods into Texas therefore knows that while the goods are in storage he will have to pay the property tax whether or not he uses a customs-bonded warehouse. The value to him of using customs-bonded storage is the full amount of the savings from deferral or avoidance of duties - precisely the benefit Congress expressly has provided in order to encourage merchants to bring business to the United States.
The Court accepts appellant's argument that a tax exemption for goods in customs-bonded warehouses reduces importers' costs and thereby furthers the federal interest in encouraging trade. But the Court itself acknowledges that state legislation should be pre-empted only where "necessary" to achieve a congressional purpose. Ibid. No showing has been made that this standard is met here. Duty-free storage and exemption from state property taxation are independent policies for promoting foreign trade. Congress quite reasonably may choose one policy, as it has done, without choosing the other.
The Court relies primarily on McGoldrick v. Gulf Oil Corp., 309 U.S. 414 (1940), in which the Court invalidated a [459 U.S. 145, 157] city tax on the sale of fuel oil from a customs-bonded manufacturing warehouse to foreign-bound vessels. McGoldrick does not control this case. As the Court concedes, see ante, at 152, McGoldrick did not hold that the warehousing system and customs regulations alone mandated pre-emption of state taxation. Rather, a key factor was that Congress expressly had exempted from federal taxation the imported petroleum that was refined in the bonded warehouses for sale to foreign-bound vessels as ships' stores. The explicit congressional purpose "to enable American refiners to meet foreign competition," 309 U.S., at 427 , provided a basis on which to infer congressional intent to pre-empt state taxation. There is no analogous federal tax exemption here, nor any evidence of congressional intent to encourage meeting of foreign competition. All that exists is the warehousing system itself, and for the reasons stated above I find this insufficient.
Nor do I find merit in appellant's constitutional arguments. Appellees' taxes do not violate the Commerce Clause, as they are "applied to an activity with a substantial nexus with the taxing State, [are] fairly apportioned, [do] not discriminate against interstate commerce, and [are] fairly related to the services provided by the State." Complete Auto Transit, Inc. v. Brady, 430 U.S. 274, 279 (1977). Nor do these non-discriminatory ad valorem taxes violate the Import-Export Clause, Art. I, 10, cl. 2. See Michelin Tire Corp. v. Wages, 423 U.S. 276 (1976).
Appellant notes that Michelin Tire left open the possibility that even nondiscriminatory property taxes may not be imposed on goods that still are in transit. But appellant's copiers were stored for up to three years, and under current law they could have been stored for up to five years. 19 U.S.C. 1557(a) (1976 ed., Supp. V). The only conceivable basis for the view that these goods remain "in transit" is that Congress has so provided. I cannot agree that Congress has endowed customs-bonded goods with indefinite immunity from nondiscriminatory state-authorized local property taxation. [459 U.S. 145, 158] During their prolonged period of storage, appellant's goods benefited from police and fire protection and the various other services provided by the county and city. "[T]he State is simply making the imported goods pay their own way, as opposed to exacting a fee merely for `the privilege of moving through a State.'" Washington Revenue Dept. v. Association of Washington Stevedoring Cos., 435 U.S. 734, 764 (1978) (POWELL, J., concurring in part and concurring in result) (quoting Michelin Tire Corp. v. Wages, supra, at 290). The Import-Export Clause never was intended to exempt imported goods in these circumstances.
I would affirm the judgment of the Texas Court of Civil Appeals. [459 U.S. 145, 159]
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Reprinted with permission from High Country News. Not for republication by Wyoming media.
On a brisk October day, Paul Christensen is helping harvest sugar beets on his southern Idaho farm. His work as a Cassia County commissioner keeps him busy, he says, but he still enjoys "playing in the dirt." He's not the only one: Cassia is among Idaho's most productive agricultural counties. That's partly why it has resisted Gateway West, a power line that would hook like a jack-o-lantern's grin across about 1,100 miles of southern Wyoming and Idaho. Two utilities proposed it in 2007 to deliver up to 3,000 additional megawatts of power, including wind energy. Roughly half of the original route would pass through public land, but in Cassia, Christensen says, 75 percent would march across private, mostly agricultural property, where transmission towers can disrupt center-pivot irrigation and crop-dusting flights.
So Cassia County proposed routes away from irrigated fields and more concentrated on public land. In fact, the Bureau of Land Management — which oversees most of the public acres the project would cross — took an extra nine months to work with state and multiple local governments to develop alternate routes before starting a draft environmental review. Meanwhile, the utilities revised their application four times. Then came inconsistencies between how different BLM field offices handled the project, uncertainty over federal policy on the dwindling greater sage grouse (the line's path crosses through the bird's range), and disagreement between Congress and Interior Secretary Ken Salazar over his short-lived wildlands policy, which required the BLM to take stock of its wilderness-quality lands and protect appropriate areas from development. These and other factors have delayed the project's already gigantic and complex federal permitting process by two years so far.
Gateway West's tale is hardly unique. Because they cross through so many jurisdictions, transmission lines have to navigate the varying requirements of everything from federal, state and tribal agencies to local governments and private landowners who may not benefit from the line's power. (Gateway West alone is subject to at least 34 different agencies, some of which require multiple permits.) On average, the process can take around five years, says Lloyd Drain, executive director of the Wyoming Infrastructure Authority, not including the two or so additional years needed to negotiate rights of way with private landowners and actually build the lines. But even as people wrangle over where projects should go, the electrical transmission grid is aging, with no significant buildout in the West in decades. Experts say it needs updating to increase reliability and capacity to meet growing consumer demand. Not only that, but large-scale development of renewable energy in places like Wyoming's windy high plains and the Southwest's unrelentingly sunny deserts has been stymied in part by a lack of transmission to population centers.
Seeking solutions, the Obama administration announced Oct. 5 that it had selected seven proposed power lines — including Gateway West and four others in the West — to serve as pilot projects for its new Rapid Response Team for Transmission. It's the latest in a series of steps this administration has taken to address the grid-lock, mostly through encouraging cooperation among agencies and electricity planners. The goal, says Steve Black, counselor to the Interior secretary, is to "transform the way transmission is built in this country."
The Rapid Response projects are essentially a more focused version of an interagency collaboration on transmission issues created in 2009. The effort taps nine federal departments, including Interior and Energy and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, and will reach out to state and local authorities, all to better coordinate permitting processes and set tighter, more ambitious schedules, moving lines forward without neglecting environmental reviews. "We're trying to not just do what we did before, faster, but to actually figure out whether the federal evaluation can happen in a different way," says Lauren Azar, senior advisor to the Energy secretary,
All the Western lines chosen as pilot projects "are strategic backbones for unlocking wind, solar and geothermal," adds Black, and each presents a unique set of challenges, from endangered species issues to conflicts with military facilities, that the team hopes to learn from.
Walt George, Gateway West's BLM project manager, says that lessons from the line's delays have already been successfully applied to other projects. After taking extra time to accommodate late-coming local governments' routing proposals for Gateway West, the agency decided that it could save time in the future by sending individual notices to all property owners who might be affected before the scoping process even starts, tedious as that sounds. This spring, the BLM tried the approach with Transwest Express, another pilot project that would carry wind power from Wyoming to southern Nevada and California, and was able to avoid similar delays.
Other administration efforts are more sweeping. This summer, FERC adopted Order 1000. Among other things, the rule ensures that only power customers who benefit from new lines pay for them in their electrical bills. It also requires transmission owners — who have historically proposed lines based only on their own needs — to collaborate with each other on regional plans.
"A more integrated grid is really part of what we're after from an environmental perspective," says Carl Zichella, Natural Resources Defense Council director for Western transmission. There are 38 grid operators in the West; better planning among them could reduce overall requirements for new infrastructure, lessening the environmental footprint of grid updates and ensuring important work is completed more quickly, he says. It will also make it easier to balance intermittent renewable power sources — wind power from California supplementing wind power from Wyoming, for example — enabling much more renewable energy to enter the grid.
"I'm impressed with the things I've seen out of D.C. with respect to permitting and siting this past year," says Drain. If improved agency coordination through the pilot projects speeds up the review process even by multiple months, he says, "that's going to do wonders." It would certainly be good news for Gateway West, which Idaho Power and Rocky Mountain Power hope to build between 2015 and 2018.
"If there are ways we can make these processes go any more smoothly, we need to try to do that," agrees BLM's George. On the other hand, Gateway West has inevitable and significant impacts, and "we've got people with really exact expectations of what this process should produce. That means more time and larger volumes of information." A truly thorough review of a project so big will never be that speedy, he says, even if it becomes more efficient: "You don't rush the public if they don't want to be rushed."
(Banner photo by Rebecca Stanek)

subset: commoncrawl


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Via the WFB, I missed this a few days back, but regular readers will know and understand that Obama's Department of Energy holds just such a particularly special place in my heart that I couldn't let it pass by without at least a little comment.
Special agents tasked with protecting the Department of Energy (DOE) have blown the whistle on what they describe as a dangerous culture of "fraud, waste, and abuse" that includes drinking on the job, mismanagement of weapons, falsification of security reports, and "wasteful spending" that reaches all the way to the deputy secretary of energy.
Current and former agents in the DOE's Office of Special Operations (OSO), which is tasked with protecting the secretary and other senior officials, allege a stunning lapse in security guidelines and procedures intended to deal with a catastrophic situation, according to a recent letter sent to lawmakers and obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.
The agents' letter exposes a dysfunctional security office marred by corruption.
From wasteful spending habits to agents consuming alcohol on the job, the security officers decry a culture of "mismanagement" and cronyism that has led at least 14 "highly qualified and experienced line agents" to quit their posts in protest over the past several years. …
Read on for more lovely alleged examples of the DOE's egregious "business culture" (for lack of a better term), and while these still fall into the category of "alleged," it shouldn't come as any shock that — gasp — big-government bureaucracies tend to engender this type of corruption and inefficiency on the regular. Public-sector workers enjoy the benefits of more comfy, protective, and sluggish mechanisms than you often find in the private sector, not to mention the seemingly limitless backing of the faceless taxpayer. These types of episodes become more and more rampant as bureaucracies grow, as the tangled webs of bureaucratic inefficiencies pile one atop another without the pesky intrusion of free-market competition to spur them along — and it's even less surprising in a department that is as immune from economic reality in practice as it is in principle. Too much of the DOE's daily business consists of trying to distort free-market signals, and now we find that the department itself may be as faulty as the ends it spends our money trying to achieve. Bravo, guys.
President Obama has only added to the rolls of federal employees, and with his incoming avalanche of new environmental regulations, taxes, ObamaCare, and etcetera, we're slated to just keep right on adding more, our gaping national deficit be damned. It's stuff like this that really makes you optimistic about the government increasingly trumping the private sector's role in our lives, doesn't it?


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– Stylish, High-Performance and Affordable New Turntable Joins Marantz' Full Line of Leading-Edge Analog Audio Components –
Mahwah, NJ, October 26, 2011 – Marantz America, a world leader of advanced home entertainment solutions, today announced the introduction of its TT42 High-Performance Turntable (SRP: $399) (http://us.marantz.com/TT42). The meticulously engineered DC Servo belt-driven TT42 is designed as an entry-level turntable ideally suited for the growing numbers of music lovers who are discovering – or rediscovering – the benefits of an analog vinyl listening experience. Notably, for music lovers with amplifiers or receivers that do not include a dedicated phono stage input, the TT42 is also available with a built-in phono preamplifier that boosts volume and equalizes sound, for a suggested retail price of $429.
Advanced, Entry Level Source Component for Analog Listening
The Marantz TT42 offers total user convenience and musical superiority, with a specially designed Moving Magnet cartridge for stellar performance right out of the box. Its low-noise DC servo motor is smooth and quiet running, with a fully floating chassis for uninterrupted LP play. The automatic tone-arm return and stop functions deliver trouble-free operation, while the metal bearing and rubber belt drive add to the response, musicality and overall performance of the component. The result is a vinyl listening solution superbly suited for the modern age, one that will allow everyone to enjoy their old and new record collections in style.
Noted Jim Ludoviconi, Brand and Product Manager for Marantz America: "Recent figures from the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) show that vinyl LP sales grew 26% in 2010. The resurgence of interest in vinyl music comes as a welcome development for Marantz, which has always understood and appreciated the rich, pure and warm musicality provided by analog gear. That's why we have continued to offer analog music lovers a full range of the world's most sophisticated, easy-to-use, high-performance analog componentry. With the introduction of the TT42, we are giving more people the opportunity to enjoy the elevated vinyl listening experience at a new accessible price.â€
About Marantz
Marantz America, LLC is committed to upholding the tradition of technological superiority initiated by founder Saul Marantz. In keeping with this emphasis on quality, Marantz audio and video components are carried only by the nation's premier audio/video specialty retailers. Additional information is available at www.us.marantz.com and www.facebook.com/
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D&M Holdings Inc. is a global operating company providing worldwide management and distribution platforms for premium consumer, automotive, commercial and professional audio and video businesses including Denon®, Marantz®, McIntosh® Laboratory, Boston Acoustics®, Snell Acoustics, Escient?, Calrec Audio, Denon DJ, Allen & Heath, D&M Professional and D&M Premium Sound Solutions. Our technologies improve the quality of any audio and visual experience. iPod is a registered trademark of Apple Inc. All other product and brand names with a trademark symbol are trademarks or registered trademarks of D&M Holdings, Inc. or its subsidiaries. For more information visit www.dm-holdings.com.
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As the Texas bull in the Senate china shop, he has been making a majority of his Republican colleagues cringe with his bare-knuckle antics and language. His 21-hour talkathon on the Senate floor demanding the defunding of Obamacare made his Republican colleagues cringe. His Nazi appeasement analogies and threats to shut down were especially embarrassing.
After listening to his lengthy rant on the Senate Floor on Tuesday and Wednesday, one comes away with two distinct impressions. Ted Cruz cannot resist inserting himself here, there and everywhere. And nothing is too trivial for Senator Talkathon. He likes White Castle hamburgers, he loves pancakes; he talked about what he liked to read as a little boy, where he's traveled, what clothes he wears and other trivia.
You'd think he would have used his time to talk specifically about the suffering that uninsured people and their children are going through, especially in the Lone Star State. Or about what could replace Obamacare other than his repeated "free market" solution, which is to say the "pay or die" profiteering, tax-subsidized corporate system.
It was puzzling why he never mentioned that during his two days of talking, over 200 Americans died, on average, because they couldn't afford health insurance to get diagnoses and timely treatment. (A peer reviewed study by Harvard Medical School researchers estimated about 45,000 die annually for lack of affordable health insurance every year.)
The other reaction to Senator Cruz was that many of his more specific objections to Obamacare -- its mind-numbing complexity, opposition by formerly supportive labor unions, and employers reacting by reducing worker hours below 30 hours a week to escape some of the law's requirements -- are well-taken and completely correctible by single-payer health insurance, as provided in Canada. Single-payer, or full Medicare for all, with free choice of physician and hospital has been the majority choice of Americans for decades. Even a majority of doctors and nurses favor it.
Single-payer's advantage is that everybody is in, nobody is out. It is far more efficient, allows for better outcomes, saves lives, prevents injuries and illnesses, relieves people of severe anxieties and wasted time spent figuring out often fraud-ridden, inscrutable computerized bills and allows for the collection of pattern-detecting data to spot harmful trends.
For example, in Canada, full Medicare covers everyone at half the per capita cost that Americans pay even though 50 million Americans are still not covered. The U.S. per capita figure is almost $9,000 a year and over 17% of our total GDP. In Canada, administrative costs are much lower.
Symbolically, the single-payer legislation that passed in Canada over four decades ago was 13 pages long, compared to over 2,000 pages for Obamacare.
Critics of Canada's system charge it with delays for patients. For some elective procedures, provinces that were under-investing have experienced some delays until Ottawa raised its contributions. Canada spends just over 10% of its GDP on healthcare, by comparison.
But in the U.S. not being able to pay for treatment is the biggest problem. And in the U.S., who hasn't heard of delays in various areas of the country due to lack of primary care physicians or other specialties? I have many friends and relatives in Canada who have not complained of delays for routine, essential or emergency treatments.
For those who prefer to believe hard-bitten businesspeople, Matt Miller, writing yesterday in The Washington Post, interviewed big business executives -- David Beatty who ran the giant Weston Foods and Roger Martin long-time consultant to large U.S. companies in Canada. They were highly approving of the Canadian system and are baffled at the way the U.S. has twisted itself in such a wasteful, harmful and discriminatory system.
Mr. Beatty wondered why U.S. companies "'want to be in the business of providing health care anyway' ("that's a government function,' he says simply)."
Mr. Martin, an avowed capitalist, who has experienced healthcare in the U.S. and Canada, according to Mr. Miller, called Canadian Medicare "incredibly hassle-free," by comparison. (In Canada, single-payer means government insurance and private delivery of healthcare under cost controls). Now Dean of the business school at the University of Toronto, Mr. Martin told reporter Miller: "I literally have a hard time thinking of what would be better than a single-payer system."
So why the U.S. is the only Western country without some version of a single-payer system?
Most concessionary Democrats, including Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, have said in the past that they prefer single-payer, but that the corporate forces against it cannot be overcome. (They use phrases like "single-payer is not practical.")
But with the Cruz crew in Congress going berserk against Obamacare, now is the time to press again for the far superior single-payer model. Or at least get single-payer into the public discussion. Unfortunately, even some of the major citizen groups organized for single-payer, behind H.R. 676, are keeping quiet, not wanting to undercut Obama and the Congressional Democrats.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).


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We are addicted to shortcuts. Regardless of the structure and rules of the contest at hand, some among us will stretch the boundaries seeking an edge over our opponent. Perhaps this is just human nature, or maybe it's more prevalent in America where we cherish our opportunity to have a strong role in our personal success. This insatiable desire to do more, to do better, to just do, is the psychological scaffolding thats supports hedge fund melt-downs, cyclists' doping, and websites that sell college term papers.
Marketing is not immune.
Throughout history, in a quest to accrue more visibility in a competitive marketplace certain marketing professionals have sought an edge by exploiting loopholes. We don't just want our fair share, we want more than our fair share, which creates a marketing and business culture that tolerates – rewards, even – the gamification of attention. Whether you view these activities as creative or nefarious is based on your own sense of situational ethics, but either way I find that when you remove them from the context of the battle in which they were waged, then often look silly in arrears. My friend Tom Webster, the brilliant market researcher and blogger and I were talking about this phenomenon recently when he pointed out how the platform changes, but the darting through loopholes remains.
Old Skool Gamification of Attention
A quick glance of my local phone book (yes, I still have one but I had to scour the house to find it) shows the gamification of attention in action. Evidently, the "all CAPS" bail bonds guys (shown above) get listed before the one CAP, then lower-case a's bail bonds guys. This is the type of "at the margins of decency" tactic that probably has the all CAPS guys high-fiving in the conference room (or whatever bail bonds companies use as a company meeting space – courthouse steps?), but when you pull it out of its competitive context, seems pretty stupid.
(for content strategy help, please see my new site AAAAAAAAAaContentStrategy.com)
On the front page of today's local newspaper (yes, I still get one because I am a cranky, middle-aged man that has read a newspaper every day for the past 30 years) I found this sticker plastered across the masthead. This is the dead trees version of a pop-up ad, and like the AAAAAAAa routine, is used to divert attention away from whatever the victim was trying to do, funneling it instead toward yourself. I'm certain the successful purchase and placement of this sticker spurred high-fives in the conference room of whatever this sticker is actually promoting, which is manifestly unclear.
New Skool Gamification of Attention
The gamification of attention of course extends to search and inbound marketing, where the entire discipline boils down to a game of three-dimensional geek chess pitting your crafty and craven team against Google's team of similarly wired savants. (Spoiler alert: Google always wins). Whether it's keyword inclusions, garnering back links, or driving link bait with pointless infographics that are a crime against both data and visuals, many companies will do whatever they can to generate a disproportionate share of attention. Even a venerable brand like JC Penney will color outside the lines to stay relevant, as proven when their pyramid of black-hat SEO tactics were exposed last year. (I wonder if they called the AAAAAAAa bail bonds guys?)
Are You Aggressive or Out of Bounds?
Seemingly, the technology of marketing has changed more in the last three years than in the prior thirty, the byproduct of which is more opportunities to try to best your competitors through any possible means. Remove your social media efforts from their present competitive context and ask yourself whether purchasing Facebook fans (either directly, or indirectly through advertising) is creating business value or is a new version of AAAAAAAa bail bonds in the phone book? Is following people on Twitter just so some of them will follow back a sound tactic, or an attempt to gamify attention? Is artificially inflating your YouTube views a smart way to outfox your competitors, or is it cheating? Is finding a potential customer talking to one of your competitors on Twitter, and then jumping into that conversation to try to win them over an aggressive marketing outreach program, or something less noble?
What you're willing to do and how much of this you're willing to embrace as a marketer is based on a lot of factors both personal and professional. But one thing I know for sure is that every single one of these tactics, from the phone book, to the newspaper, to SEO, to social media gamification, may be a positive for you and your brand but are ALWAYS a negative for customers and consumers because it creates artificial awareness that has neither been earned, nor granted.
Mike D'Antoni is the new coach of the NBA's Los Angeles Lakers, and has a thesis for how and why his up-tempo offensive style works:
The ball finds energy.
When players work hard to get open, and move without the ball they receive shot opportunities in favorable on-court situations. This benefits each player because they get more easy shots, and consequently benefits the collective. This is the way marketing is supposed to work, at least in a market-driven economy. Attention should accrue to hard-working, smart companies with disproportionately good products and services, and winners should be dictated by customers voting with their clicks and dollars.
Marketing should be a meritocracy, like the high speed, motion offense D'Antoni employs. But often, it's not. Sometimes it's the gamification of attention. And sometimes it's the new trend of big technology companies buying out social media software businesses and forcing corporate customers to use them as part of "the stack" – a theoretically holistic solution that rarely offers best-of-breed options across-the-board. Every time marketing strays from a meritocracy, certain companies win, and customers and consumers lose.
Converged Media Assists Gamification
This is the scary outgrowth of the rise of Converged Media, where attention that's earned and attention that's purchased is combined in seamless, unprecedented ways. Altimeter Group analysts Jeremiah Owyang and Rebecca Lieb wrote an excellent study on this phenomenon a few months back, and we talked to them at length about it on the Social Pros podcast. One of the most common examples of Converged Media is the Facebook promoted posts feature (see my rant about it here) that enables/requires companies to pay to reach a larger share of their Facebook fans. This is buying attention frosting to apply to your organically created attention cupcake. In fact, you can even promote your own personal posts on Facebook now, so if I want to be sure that all 100,000+ subscribers to my Facebook feed know what wine I'm drinking, I can pay for the privilege of doing so.
Converged Media may create exciting new opportunities for companies, but by combining objective reality and purchased reality it muddies the water of attention. Wasn't the whole point of social media that the power was shifting back toward the consumers, who could shape perception through product reviews, and recommendations and chatter? Two years ago, respected marketers were saying that "brands are simply a collection of what people think and say about them." If that's true, then where does AAAAAAa Bail Bonds and social media gamification fit into that scenario?
Maybe brands are simply a collection of what people think and say about them, unless you're behind on your quarterly goals or the CEO can't handle competitors having more followers on Twitter, in which case it's gamification and converged media to the rescue. Everyone reading this will be faced with these decisions. You're probably already faced with them. My appeal to you is to try to resist the easy "win" offered by these shortcuts, and always keep the customer in mind. If the tactic you're thinking about employing truly benefits the end consumer, by all means give it a try. If instead it truly benefits your company at the expense of the consumer and marketing meritocracy, maybe there's a better way?


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|P is for Practical
Re^2: Are debuggers good?by osunderdog (Deacon)
|on Jul 27, 2005 at 12:22 UTC ( #478570=note: print w/replies, xml )
|Need Help??
I occasionally use the debugger for verifying small programs. However in large systems, rather than printing program information to stdout, I use a log file framework to capture diagnostic information. By using a log, you can capture information over time. Of course like print statements, there is an art to adding log statements at appropriate times.
I remember having a heated discussion with a 3rd party equipment vendor that started with me asking why they didn't produce logs. It finally came out that he didn't think that logging was a legitimate diagnostic tool because the technique is never taught in school. He encouraged his developers to use the debugger whenever possible to diagnose problems. I can tell you for a fact that their code was extremely buggy. It would take several hours of runtime before the bugs would propagate enough to affect the overall performance of the system.
The problem with debugging is that it can only give you information on how a program is running at an instant. That may be acceptable for a CGI that gets restarted every few minutes, however it won't help you find a creeping memory leak that appears over the course of 200 hours. Printing or logging, if done correctly, can give you information on how a program is running over days, months or years.
Holy cr@p I'm still Unemployed!
In Section Seekers of Perl Wisdom


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This much is clear: frogs are dying.
One third of the world's 6,260 amphibian species are globally threatened or extinct. The primary threat to their survival is still habitat destruction, which impacts 61 percent of known amphibian species. But climate change and the deadly chytrid fungus could potentially take the lead over the next century—or at least make things much, much worse for frogs, salamanders and their legless, subterranean cousins known as caecilians.
How much worse? It depends, in part, on whether climate change has the potential to spur—or slow—the growth of the chytrid fungus, which probably originated in South Africa and spread in the 1930s as clawed frogs were exported for frog-based pregnancy tests. Although more than 200 species have been diagnosed with the pathogen, 1,034 have been deemed "susceptible," according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN). And that's where things get tricky.
Some scientists, like Alan Pounds of the Tropical Science Center's Monteverde Cloud Forest Reserve in Costa Rica, believe that warming temperatures have single-handedly triggered the spread of the fungus. Others, like Karen Lips of the University of Maryland (U.M.), College Park, say that climate has played practically no part in its expansion. Still others, like Ross Alford at James Cook University in Australia, contend that hot, dry weather is directly driving most extinctions, and the fungus has had only a tangential role.
In 2008 disease ecologist Jason Rohr of the University of South Florida in Tampa, published a paper saying, in effect, that none of the amphibian extinction theories were quite right—and the parts that were correct were correct for the wrong reasons. To illustrate his point, he showed that frog extinctions were more closely correlated to beer and banana production than to air temperature.
Last week, Rohr traveled to the Ecological Society of America conference in Albuquerque, and presented results from a new analysis and a laboratory study that he hopes will bring the bickering scientists closer to a resolution—his resolution, that is.
First, he took a close look at the timeline of extinctions in Atelopus, the New World frog genus hardest hit by the chytrid: 71 of the 113 species are now presumed extinct. The extinctions have clearly been spreading geographically since 1979, but there's a great deal of year-to-year variation in their numbers.
In the early 1990s, for instance, about 8 percent of Atelopus species were winking out each year. But a closer look shows that just under 3 percent of Atelopus extinctions happened in 1991, whereas 18 percent occur the following year. These peaks and troughs correlate with the El Niño climate cycle, which creates warmer, wetter summers in Central and South America every three to eight years, due to shifts in trade winds and ocean currents. Rohr contends that the frog extinctions occur during cool swings in the midst of warm El Niño years, a hypothesis that goes against Pounds's theory that the fungus grows best at warmer temperatures.
To parse out this complex phenomenon, Rohr and his colleagues decided to bring the frogs and the fungus into the lab. Cuban tree frogs were raised in Styrofoam tanks at either 15 or 25 degrees C for four weeks and then were infected with chytrid fungus. The fungus grew better and killed more frogs at the cooler temperature.
More importantly, Rohr looked at how climate fluctuations would affect the frogs' ability to fight the fungus. If frogs were suddenly moved from the hot temperature to the cooler temperature, they ended up with 25 percent more fungus than if they were kept at the cooler temperature. Rohr suspects that the frogs' ability to secrete fungus-fighting skin secretions is temperature-sensitive.
The bottom line, he explained, is that climate change does matter for the fungus—but probably not as much, or as little, as some would like. Although El Niño events have become more frequent and intense in recent years, scientists are still undecided about their connection to climate change. "Temperature variability has increased in the region," Rohr said, "but I don't think climate is going to account for nearly as much variation as epidemic spread."
Amphibian experts say the new results seem promising. "On a month scale, temperature fluctuations could have strong effects on the immune system," explains immunologist Jacques Robert at the University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry. "When you start to change temperature, going up or down, there is some suppression in the animals."
And chytrid expert Joyce Longcore of the University of Maine, Orono, also agrees that the theory seems reasonable. "I'm primarily on the side of not needing to have climate change to have these infections," she says. "That doesn't mean that in some instances it doesn't slow its spread or make it worse."
Of course, it is still too early to know whether the rest of the amphibian decline community will embrace—or dispute—the new results. Although U.M.'s Karen Lips saw Rohr present the new data, she declined to comment until she sees a paper in print.
Is the Frog-Killing Chytrid Fungus Fueled by Climate Fluctuations?
Laboratory research reexamines the controversial link between climate change and the chytrid fungus that has been killing frogs around the world
This much is clear: frogs are dying.


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Jean-Francois Millet, Peasant Spreading Manure (detail), 1855, oil on canvas.
John Brandon: I did my best for a while at a lumber mill that fashioned blunt-tip wooden arrows. The only use for the product, as far as I know, is in schools that teach archery as part of their PE program. This may have been the only wooden-arrow producer in the country. I was the new man, as I always was in those days, so I had to drag the colossal hunks of raw cedar around to the head saw. If one were to design a task for the specific purpose of causing hernias, this would be that task. Perilously awkward, perilously heavy lifting. Another thing left to the new guy was rolling the arrows to see which were warped. You had to lean over a wide table for hours on end, knotting your shoulders and neck. I also shoveled out the sawdust room. All the sawdust from the mill was sucked up and blown into this stifling shed that leaned against the main building, and once a week I had to put on a mask and wedge myself in there and shovel it all into canvas bags. It took most of a day. Once in a while a circus would come and purchase all the sawdust—I'm not sure why. Anyway, the place was in the middle of nowhere, so on breaks there was nothing to do but lean against the outside wall and pick sawdust out of your nose and ears.
I worked Monday to Thursday, ten hours a day, with a forty-five-minute drive at each end. Thursday nights, my work week over, my girlfriend would drag me to a beach bonfire where I'd dull my aches with Alaskan Amber and eat hamburgers, tugboats belching in the distance. The wee hours of one of those nights was the only time, as an adult, that I pissed the bed. Being thoroughly drunk and sort of tired had never caused this. Being thoroughly tired and sort of drunk did. Not to mention our studio apartment hung out over the sound, so we slumbered each night to the lapping of gentle waves.
Brian Evenson: In 1987, as a young college student, I had the pleasure of working four abysmally bad jobs, all of them at hours when no human should be awake. First I worked the graveyard shift in a sweeper truck, sweeping parking lots. I was the guy who would get out with a leaf blower in freezing cold weather and blow all the debris away from the curbs so the truck could get it. My partner's job seemed to involve sitting in the heated cab getting high. When that job collapsed, I moved on to working the graveyard shift at a twenty-four-hour fast-food Mexican restaurant. It was just me and a very fat manager with peroxide hair who spent the time from one A.M. to two A.M. smoking, and two A.M. to four A.M. sleeping. When I finally couldn't take that any more, I took a job as a part-time bread processor for the university, working from three A.M. to seven A.M. putting dough in an automatic proofer and then into an oven. I quit this job because my hands broke out in a rash. Simultaneously, I was washing pans in the backroom of another bakery from seven A.M. to nine A.M. I was fired from that because I couldn't make it over quickly enough from my bread-processing job. There was, later, ditch-digging, working as a labor subforeman for a construction crew, working as an assistant manager at Hamburger World, and a job trying to program in a computer language that I didn't know. But, in 1987, I didn't have a single bearable job.
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101 In the third year of Cyrus king of Persia, a revelation was given to Daniel (who was called Belteshazzar). Its message was true and it concerned a great war.[1] The understanding of the message came to him in a vision. 2 At that time I, Daniel, mourned for three weeks. 3 I ate no choice food; no meat or wine touched my lips; and I used no lotions at all until the three weeks were over. 4 On the twenty-fourth day of the first month, as I was standing on the bank of the great river, the Tigris, 5 I looked up and there before me was a man dressed in linen, with a belt of fine gold from Uphaz around his waist. 6 His body was like topaz, his face like lightning, his eyes like flaming torches, his arms and legs like the gleam of burnished bronze, and his voice like the sound of a multitude. 7 I, Daniel, was the only one who saw the vision; those who were with me did not see it, but such terror overwhelmed them that they fled and hid themselves. 8 So I was left alone, gazing at this great vision; I had no strength left, my face turned deathly pale and I was helpless. 9 Then I heard him speaking, and as I listened to him, I fell into a deep sleep, my face to the ground.
10 A hand touched me and set me trembling on my hands and knees. 11 He said, "Daniel, you who are highly esteemed, consider carefully the words I am about to speak to you, and stand up, for I have now been sent to you." And when he said this to me, I stood up trembling. 12 Then he continued, "Do not be afraid, Daniel. Since the first day that you set your mind to gain understanding and to humble yourself before your God, your words were heard, and I have come in response to them. 13 But the prince of the Persian kingdom resisted me twenty-one days. Then Michael, one of the chief princes, came to help me, because I was detained there with the king of Persia. 14 Now I have come to explain to you what will happen to your people in the future, for the vision concerns a time yet to come." 15 While he was saying this to me, I bowed with my face toward the ground and was speechless. 16 Then one who looked like a man[2] touched my lips, and I opened my mouth and began to speak. I said to the one standing before me, "I am overcome with anguish because of the vision, my lord, and I feel very weak. 17 How can I, your servant, talk with you, my lord? My strength is gone and I can hardly breathe." 18 Again the one who looked like a man touched me and gave me strength. 19 "Do not be afraid, you who are highly esteemed," he said. "Peace! Be strong now; be strong." When he spoke to me, I was strengthened and said, "Speak, my lord, since you have given me strength." 20 So he said, "Do you know why I have come to you? Soon I will return to fight against the prince of Persia, and when I go, the prince of Greece will come; 21 but first I will tell you what is written in the Book of Truth. (No one supports me against them except Michael, your prince.
111 And in the first year of Darius the Mede, I took my stand to support and protect him.)
2 "Now then, I tell you the truth: Three more kings will arise in Persia, and then a fourth, who will be far richer than all the others. When he has gained power by his wealth, he will stir up everyone against the kingdom of Greece. 3 Then a mighty king will arise, who will rule with great power and do as he pleases. 4 After he has arisen, his empire will be broken up and parceled out toward the four winds of heaven. It will not go to his descendants, nor will it have the power he exercised, because his empire will be uprooted and given to others.
5 "The king of the South will become strong, but one of his commanders will become even stronger than he and will rule his own kingdom with great power. 6 After some years, they will become allies. The daughter of the king of the South will go to the king of the North to make an alliance, but she will not retain her power, and he and his power[3] will not last. In those days she will be betrayed, together with her royal escort and her father[4] and the one who supported her. 7 "One from her family line will arise to take her place. He will attack the forces of the king of the North and enter his fortress; he will fight against them and be victorious. 8 He will also seize their gods, their metal images and their valuable articles of silver and gold and carry them off to Egypt. For some years he will leave the king of the North alone. 9 Then the king of the North will invade the realm of the king of the South but will retreat to his own country. 10 His sons will prepare for war and assemble a great army, which will sweep on like an irresistible flood and carry the battle as far as his fortress. 11 "Then the king of the South will march out in a rage and fight against the king of the North, who will raise a large army, but it will be defeated. 12 When the army is carried off, the king of the South will be filled with pride and will slaughter many thousands, yet he will not remain triumphant. 13 For the king of the North will muster another army, larger than the first; and after several years, he will advance with a huge army fully equipped. 14 "In those times many will rise against the king of the South. Those who are violent among your own people will rebel in fulfillment of the vision, but without success. 15 Then the king of the North will come and build up siege ramps and will capture a fortified city. The forces of the South will be powerless to resist; even their best troops will not have the strength to stand. 16 The invader will do as he pleases; no one will be able to stand against him. He will establish himself in the Beautiful Land and will have the power to destroy it. 17 He will determine to come with the might of his entire kingdom and will make an alliance with the king of the South. And he will give him a daughter in marriage in order to overthrow the kingdom, but his plans[5] will not succeed or help him. 18 Then he will turn his attention to the coastlands and will take many of them, but a commander will put an end to his insolence and will turn his insolence back on him. 19 After this, he will turn back toward the fortresses of his own country but will stumble and fall, to be seen no more. 20 "His successor will send out a tax collector to maintain the royal splendor. In a few years, however, he will be destroyed, yet not in anger or in battle.
21 "He will be succeeded by a contemptible person who has not been given the honor of royalty. He will invade the kingdom when its people feel secure, and he will seize it through intrigue. 22 Then an overwhelming army will be swept away before him; both it and a prince of the covenant will be destroyed. 23 After coming to an agreement with him, he will act deceitfully, and with only a few people he will rise to power. 24 When the richest provinces feel secure, he will invade them and will achieve what neither his fathers nor his forefathers did. He will distribute plunder, loot and wealth among his followers. He will plot the overthrow of fortresses-but only for a time. 25 "With a large army he will stir up his strength and courage against the king of the South. The king of the South will wage war with a large and very powerful army, but he will not be able to stand because of the plots devised against him. 26 Those who eat from the king's provisions will try to destroy him; his army will be swept away, and many will fall in battle. 27 The two kings, with their hearts bent on evil, will sit at the same table and lie to each other, but to no avail, because an end will still come at the appointed time. 28 The king of the North will return to his own country with great wealth, but his heart will be set against the holy covenant. He will take action against it and then return to his own country. 29 "At the appointed time he will invade the South again, but this time the outcome will be different from what it was before. 30 Ships of the western coastlands will oppose him, and he will lose heart. Then he will turn back and vent his fury against the holy covenant. He will return and show favor to those who forsake the holy covenant. 31 "His armed forces will rise up to desecrate the temple fortress and will abolish the daily sacrifice. Then they will set up the abomination that causes desolation. 32 With flattery he will corrupt those who have violated the covenant, but the people who know their God will firmly resist him. 33 "Those who are wise will instruct many, though for a time they will fall by the sword or be burned or captured or plundered. 34 When they fall, they will receive a little help, and many who are not sincere will join them. 35 Some of the wise will stumble, so that they may be refined, purified and made spotless until the time of the end, for it will still come at the appointed time. 36 "The king will do as he pleases. He will exalt and magnify himself above every god and will say unheard-of things against the God of gods. He will be successful until the time of wrath is completed, for what has been determined must take place. 37 He will show no regard for the gods of his ancestors or for the one desired by women, nor will he regard any god, but will exalt himself above them all. 38 Instead of them, he will honor a god of fortresses; a god unknown to his ancestors he will honor with gold and silver, with precious stones and costly gifts. 39 He will attack the mightiest fortresses with the help of a foreign god and will greatly honor those who acknowledge him. He will make them rulers over many people and will distribute the land at a price.[6] 40 "At the time of the end the king of the South will engage him in battle, and the king of the North will storm out against him with chariots and cavalry and a great fleet of ships. He will invade many countries and sweep through them like a flood. 41 He will also invade the Beautiful Land. Many countries will fall, but Edom, Moab and the leaders of Ammon will be delivered from his hand. 42 He will extend his power over many countries; Egypt will not escape. 43 He will gain control of the treasures of gold and silver and all the riches of Egypt, with the Libyans and Cushites[7] in submission. 44 But reports from the east and the north will alarm him, and he will set out in a great rage to destroy and annihilate many. 45 He will pitch his royal tents between the seas at[8] the beautiful holy mountain. Yet he will come to his end, and no one will help him.
121 "At that time Michael, the great prince who protects your people, will arise. There will be a time of distress such as has not happened from the beginning of nations until then. But at that time your people-everyone whose name is found written in the book-will be delivered. 2 Multitudes who sleep in the dust of the earth will awake: some to everlasting life, others to shame and everlasting contempt. 3 Those who are wise[9] will shine like the brightness of the heavens, and those who lead many to righteousness, like the stars for ever and ever. 4 But you, Daniel, roll up and seal the words of the scroll until the time of the end. Many will go here and there to increase knowledge."
5 Then I, Daniel, looked, and there before me stood two others, one on this bank of the river and one on the opposite bank. 6 One of them said to the man clothed in linen, who was above the waters of the river, "How long will it be before these astonishing things are fulfilled?" 7 The man clothed in linen, who was above the waters of the river, lifted his right hand and his left hand toward heaven, and I heard him swear by him who lives forever, saying, "It will be for a time, times and half a time.[10] When the power of the holy people has been finally broken, all these things will be completed." 8 I heard, but I did not understand. So I asked, "My lord, what will the outcome of all this be?" 9 He replied, "Go your way, Daniel, because the words are rolled up and sealed until the time of the end. 10 Many will be purified, made spotless and refined, but the wicked will continue to be wicked. None of the wicked will understand, but those who are wise will understand. 11 "From the time that the daily sacrifice is abolished and the abomination that causes desolation is set up, there will be 1,290 days. 12 Blessed is the one who waits for and reaches the end of the 1,335 days. 13 "As for you, go your way till the end. You will rest, and then at the end of the days you will rise to receive your allotted inheritance."


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Bernie Madoff's Pants Recycled Into iPad Cases
Back in June, possessions belonging to the notorious Ponzi-schemer Bernie Madoff were auctioned off, with the proceeds going towards his victims. Among the books, chairs, and Rolex watches were his pricey clothes, many of which were purchased by entrepreneur John Vaccaro, who has turned Madoff's cashmere sweaters and designer pants into iPad cases.
Selling under the Frederick James label, the covers go for $250 to $500. He's already sold several cases made of the sweaters, but you can still get those recycled from Madoff's Ralph Lauren, J. Crew, and Banana Republic pants.
Vaccaro says he wouldn't have done this with the clothes of, say, Marilyn Monroe, but when it came to Bernie Madoff, "people were pleased to see his designer clothing cut up in shreds."
[via Gizmodo]


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Making Cents of Fashion
The public launch of Sense of Fashion, an online community centered on fashion expression and commerce, has been ably covered by my good friend Kfir Pravda and by TechCrunch. The company is still in early days, but I believe it has the potential to turn into something big. I've been following the company for a [...]Tagged eCommerce, Internet, Sense of Fashion


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Vice President
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For Immediate Release
Office of the Press Secretary
May 29, 2002
President's Statement on Preserving Florida's Environment
Florida is known worldwide for its beautiful coastal waters and the Everglades. Today we are acting to preserve both. Florida is also known for its strong commitment to preserving these extraordinary natural resources, and the federal government is a strong partner in those efforts.
Today, I am extremely pleased to announce two historic actions in the state of Florida that exemplify personal stewardship and conservation partnerships. The United States government will buy back the rights for natural gas and oil development in Destin Dome, and in critical parts of the Everglades.
These are important steps in preserving some of our Nation's most beautiful natural treasures, including Big Cypress National Preserve, the Florida Panther National Wildlife Refuge, and the Ten Thousand Islands National Wildlife Refuge. Today's action once again demonstrates that my Administration will take seriously the views of local communities. The federal government should continue to work closely with states and local communities in solving issues that affect energy security, the economy, and the environment.
I appreciate the good work of Secretary Norton and the staff of the Department of the Interior, Governor Bush and his team, the Collier family, and the private sector companies whose hard work has made these agreements possible. They have contributed greatly to our shared mission of sustained stewardship of these extraordinary natural areas.
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text: (PHILADELPHIA) -- In a cancer treatment breakthrough 20 years in the making, researchers from the University of Pennsylvania's Abramson Cancer Center and Perelman School of Medicine have shown sustained remissions of up to a year among a small group of advanced chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL) patients treated with genetically engineered versions of their own T cells. The protocol, which involves removing patients' cells and modifying them in Penn's vaccine production facility, then infusing the new cells back into the patient's body following chemotherapy, provides a tumor-attack roadmap for the treatment of other cancers including those of the lung and ovaries and myeloma and melanoma. The findings, published simultaneously today in the New England Journal of Medicine and Science Translational Medicine, are the first demonstration of the use of gene transfer therapy to create "serial killer" T cells aimed at cancerous tumors. "Within three weeks, the tumors had been blown away, in a way that was much more violent than we ever expected," said senior author Carl June, MD, director of Translational Research and a professor of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine in the Abramson Cancer Center, who led the work. "It worked much better than we thought it would." The results of the pilot trial of three patients are a stark contrast to existing therapies for CLL. The patients involved in the new study had few other treatment options. The only potential curative therapy would have involved a bone marrow transplant, a procedure which requires a lengthy hospitalization and carries at least a 20 percent mortality risk -- and even then offers only about a 50 percent chance of a cure, at best. "Most of what I do is treat patients with no other options, with a very, very risky therapy with the intent to cure them," says co-principal investigator David Porter, MD, professor of Medicine and director of Blood and Marrow Transplantation. "This approach has the potential to do the same thing, but in a safer manner." Secret Ingredients June thinks there were several "secret ingredients" that made the difference between the lackluster results that have been seen in previous trials with modified T cells and the remarkable responses seen in the current trial. The details of the new cancer immunotherapy are detailed in Science Translational Medicine. After removing the patients' cells, the team reprogrammed them to attack tumor cells by genetically modifying them using a lentivirus vector. The vector encodes an antibody-like protein, called a chimeric antigen receptor (CAR), which is expressed on the surface of the T cells and designed to bind to a protein called CD19. Once the T cells start expressing the CAR, they focus all of their killing activity on cells that express CD19, which includes CLL tumor cells and normal B cells. All of the other cells in the patient that do not express CD19 are ignored by the modified T cells, which limits side effects typically experienced during standard therapies. The team engineered a signaling molecule into the part of the CAR that resides inside the cell. When it binds to CD19, initiating the cancer-cell death, it also tells the cell to produce cytokines that trigger other T cells to multiply -- building a bigger and bigger army until all the target cells in the tumor are destroyed. Serial Killers "We saw at least a 1000-fold increase in the number of modified T cells in each of the patients. Drugs don't do that," June says. "In addition to an extensive capacity for self-replication, the infused T cells are serial killers. On average, each infused T cell led to the killing of thousands of tumor cells "" and overall, destroyed at least two pounds of tumor in each patient." The importance of the T cell self-replication is illustrated in the New England Journal of Medicine paper, which describes the response of one patient, a 64-year old man. Prior to his T cell treatment, his blood and marrow were replete with tumor cells. For the first two weeks after treatment, nothing seemed to change. Then on day 14, the patient began experiencing chills, nausea, and increasing fever, among other symptoms. Tests during that time showed an enormous increase in the number of T cells in his blood that led to a tumor lysis syndrome, which occurs when a large number of cancer cells die all at once. By day 28, the patient had recovered from the tumor lysis syndrome """" and his blood and marrow showed no evidence of leukemia. "This massive killing of tumor is a direct proof of principle of the concept," Porter says. The Penn team pioneered the use of the HIV-derived vector in a clinical trial in 2003 in which they treated HIV patients with an antisense version of the virus. That trial demonstrated the safety of the lentiviral vector used in the present work. The cell culture methods used in this trial reawaken T cells that have been suppressed by the leukemia and stimulate the generation of so-called "memory" T cells, which the team hopes will provide ongoing protection against recurrence. Although long-term viability of the treatment is unknown, the doctors have found evidence that months after infusion, the new cells had multiplied and were capable of continuing their seek-and-destroy mission against cancerous cells throughout the patients' bodies. Moving forward, the team plans to test the same CD19 CAR construct in patients with other types of CD19-positive tumors, including non-Hodgkin's lymphoma and acute lymphocytic leukemia. They also plan to study the approach in pediatric leukemia patients who have failed standard therapy. Additionally, the team has engineered a CAR vector that binds to mesothelin, a protein expressed on the surface of mesothelioma cancer cells, as well as on ovarian and pancreatic cancer cells. In addition to June and Porter, co-authors on the NEJM paper include Bruce Levine, Michael Kalos, and Adam Bagg, all from Penn Medicine. Michael Kalos and Bruce Levine are co-first authors on the Science Translational Medicine paper. Other co-authors include June, Porter, Sharyn Katz and Adam Bagg from Penn and Stephan Grupp the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. The work was supported by the Alliance for Cancer Gene Therapy, a foundation started by Penn graduates Barbara and Edward Netter, to promote gene therapy research to treat cancer, and the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society. Sourceenn Medicine


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List maker
Max Cantrell has never been a big fan of the truth, so when the opportunity arises to sell forged permission slips and cover stories to his classmates, it sounds like a good way to make a little money and liven up a boring senior year. With the help of his friends Preston and Parvati, Max starts Liars, Inc. Suddenly everybody needs something and the cash starts pouring in. Who knew lying could be so lucrative?
When Preston wants his own cover story to go visit a girl he met online, Max doesn't think twice about hooking him up. Until Preston never comes home. Then the evidence starts to pile up—terrifying clues that lead the cops to Preston's body. Terrifying clues that point to Max as the murderer.
Can Max find the real killer before he goes to prison for a crime he didn't commit? In a story that Kirkus Reviews called "Captivating to the very end," Paula Stokes starts with one single white lie and weaves a twisted tale that will have readers guessing until the explosive final chapters.


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Absolutely nobody can exceed the championship legacy of Kawasaki and the KX™ motorcycle. KX owns more combined professional 250 cc and 450 cc AMA National Motocross and Supercross titles than any other manufacturer. Explore the tabs below to experience what KX is all about.
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GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. (RNS) Mitt Romney's position on the Detroit auto bailout and health care plan have been blasted, but a pollster suggests one issue not often discussed on the campaign trail this year could end up costing him Tuesday's Michigan primary victory: his Mormon faith.
EPIC-MRA pollster Bernie Porn said the former Massachusetts governor's faith hasn't been as big of a topic as it was when he sought the nomination in 2008.
But Porn said on WGVU's "West Michigan Week" that his polls show that 7 percent of the Republicans tallied said they wouldn't vote for Romney because he is a Mormon – and the actual number might be higher.
With a race that could be decided by less than 5 percent, that could be a problem for Romney, he said.
While former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum has not discussed Romney's faith, he's made plenty of references to his own, talking about his devout Catholicism. And he's discussed President Obama's beliefs, saying the president's agenda "is based on "some phony theology. Not a theology based on the Bible. A different theology."
Rockford resident Heidi Pohl attended Romney's Monday rally at Byrne Electric and said she's on the fence about whether to vote for him or Texas Rep. Ron Paul. Like Santorum, she's Catholic.
"I want to say that Romney being a Mormon isn't an issue for me," she said. "But it is a little, I think."
Calvin College political science professor Doug Koopman said he didn't think Romney's faith would cost him votes.
"But there was someone in my church this week asking about the election, and that's all he wanted to talk about," he said. "So for people in some denominations, it might be a problem. If a race is going to be decided by 2 or 3 percent, it could make a difference."
But Koopman said evangelical Christians would likely vote for Romney despite his faith in the general election against Obama, should he be nominated. "It's strictly a primary issue," he said.
Gayla Pratt of Lakeview is not a Mormon, but said Romney's affiliation doesn't matter to her. "The United States is supposed to be open to all religious views," she said.
State Rep. Lisa Posthumus Lyons, R-Alto, supports Romney and said his Mormon faith isn't troubling for her.
"We don't have exactly the same faith, but I look at him as a man of values," she said. "He's pro-life, he's been committed to his wife for more than 30 years. He's a strong family man. Those are qualities I think people want to see in a president."
(Dave Murray writes for The Grand Rapids Press in Grand Rapids, Mich.)


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Go for this sublime magazines and papers rack - an absolute must for your office organisation and design. Made by our finest artisans, this magazine rack is basically a finely carved wooden box expertly covered in full grain leather. Practical and classy, you now have the perfect accessory to keep your magazines, newspapers, files and other documents at home or at the office.
Dimensions : 3.1 x 10.2 x 12.6 inches


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1REQUIREMENT – Back to top
At the basic level, this module will require the following conditions:
- Support Magento 1.7.x; 1.8.x and 1.9.x
2INSTALLATION – Back to top
2.1 Extension Installation
There are two ways to install extension:
- Step 1: Download and unzip extension contents on your computer and navigate inside the extracted folder.
- Step 2: Upload folders skin and app from our download package to your Web server's document root (from here on, referenced as {docroot}). You should see a directory layout like this:
{docroot} /magento/app/
- Step 3: Login your Magento Admin
- Step 4: Navigate to System => Configuration => find SM Product Gallerry module (in the left of column) to configure module
- Step 5: You will see installed extension, click extension's name tab to go to extension configuration page.
OR you also install the steps as following:
Step 1: In the Administrator page, Navigate to System >> Magento Connect >> Magento Connect Management
Step 2: Click Browse and Upload package file
Important Note:
- After installing extension, you should logout first and then login Admin Panel to ensure all functions work normally.
- You should disable all caches in cache management in the installation and configuration process.
2.2 Page Configuration
- If you want to display this module on any page that you want, Please go to CMS > Page > Edit SM Product Gallerry > Tab Content and add this code:
{{block type="productgallerry/list" name="imageslider.list.default" template="sm/productgallerry/default.phtml" theme_display="theme1"}}
3EXTENSION CONFIGURATION – Back to top
3.1 Below is module layout
3.2 Module Configuration
Note:We used the images of module's installtion on Magento 1.9.x to illustrate
After installing, go to System -> Configuration and find SM Product Gallerry (in the left of column) to configure.
The parameters are divided into the following groups:
- General settings
- Config number cols and rows for decives
- Source Options
- Product Options
- Image Options
- Effect Options
- Advanced Options
Let's look at the parameters in detail:
4SUPPORT – Back to top
Thank you so much for purchasing this module. If you have any questions that are beyond the scope of this help file, please send us via: Support Tickets System
Thanks so much!


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For some, the thought of abandoning antiperspirants gives them the cold sweats. For others, it's the thought of using them. Underarm antiperspirants guard against odor and wetness, but could the aluminum-based compounds that reduce sweat actually cause Alzheimer's disease and breast cancer?
The antiperspirant finger-pointing began more than 40 years ago with new discoveries about Alzheimer's, a progressive dementia that affects more than five million Americans. Antiperspirants use compounds—such as aluminum chloride, aluminum chlorohydrate and aluminum zirconium—to form a temporary sweat duct plug. Researchers back then found that exposure to aluminum caused rabbits' brains to develop nerve cell damage—thought to be a precursor to Alzheimer's at the time—and long-term dialysis patients with high levels of the metal developed dementia.
Critics charge that rabbits are not good animal models for human brain diseases and note that the dialysis patients suffered from dialysis encephalopathy, or "dialysis dementia," not Alzheimer's disease. But neuropathologist Daniel P. Perl at Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York City has found evidence of aluminum in the neurofibrillary tangles that characterize Alzheimer's disease.
"Just because the rabbit is not a good model doesn't mean that there is not a problem," he says. "There are a zillion examples of things that are clearly toxic to humans, but when exposed to rats—even monkeys—show no problem."
On average, most people take in approximately 30 to 50 milligrams per day of aluminum from food; those using over-the-counter medications such as antacids and buffered aspirins ingest larger amounts, roughly five grams a day. At that level, there is little evidence of harm, most experts say.
Skeptics cite such a lack of epidemiologic evidence in the decades since the concern was first raised and say avoiding the third most common element in Earth's crust is impossible. Even if people were to ban aluminum pots and pans, chuck soda cans or cap antiperspirants, the ubiquitous metal would still be in the food they eat, the water they drink and, sometimes, even in the air they breathe.
"Everyone's been exposed, which makes it very difficult to study," says epidemiologist Amy Borenstein of the College of Public Health at the University of South Florida in Tampa. Her 1990 case-control study, reported in the Journal of Clinical Epidemiology, found no association between aluminum-containing products and Alzheimer's disease. "If it even plays a role at all," she says, "it's negligible."
William Thies, vice president of medical and scientific relations at the Alzheimer's Association in Chicago, calls the notion that antiperspirants could cause Alzheimer's disease an old legend. "One of the things that happens in Alzheimer's brains is that they shrink," he says. "So, you have accumulated a certain amount of aluminum in your brain, and as your brain shrinks, the concentration is going to appear high."
Cancer has also been a source of concern for some, which may have originated with instructions that women avoid antiperspirants, deodorants, powders and lotions before mammograms in order to avoid confusing shadows on X-rays. This may have led to confusion about a potential link between cancer and personal care products.
Adding to uncertainty, in the 1990s an anonymous e-mail chain letter warned that antiperspirants caused breast cancer. Ted Gansler, director of medical content at the American Cancer Society in Atlanta, says that in the past seven years, his organization has received thousands of e-mails and phone calls in response to this chain letter.
The letter claims that inhibiting perspiration causes harmful substances to be trapped in the body where they form cancer. But sweat is mostly electrolytes and water, Gansler says, and sweating is not a significant mechanism for expelling unwanted compounds, more commonly eliminated in urine and feces. "It would be nice if as many people as [those who] forwarded the e-mail about antiperspirants, urged their friends and relatives to get a mammogram every year starting at age 40," he says. "We would have saved a lot more lives."
The idea that toxics would enter the body through the underarm, migrate to the lymph nodes and then travel to the breast may have more to do with geography than biology. "Why you would think that antiperspirant would somehow go upstream and get into your lymph nodes and then somehow get into the breast is unclear," says Timothy Moynihan, education chair and consultant for the division of medical oncology at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn. "It doesn't make sense other than the fact that it's in the neighborhood."
Ultimately, lifestyle changes like exercising are more important than whether or not your underarms are sweaty while you are walking around or working out. "Everyone worries about underarm antiperspirants," Moynihan adds, "but nobody quits smoking."


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UPDATE 07-30-10: The entire Wired article on Stanford neurobiologist Robert Sapolsky's research on the science of stress is now available.
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Stress has been linked to everything from the common cold to Alzheimer's disease. But the connection between physical health and emotional state hasn't always been widely recognized.
An article in the latest issue of Wired examines the affliction of stress and how research by Stanford neurobiologist Robert Sapolsky, PhD, is illuminating just how big an effect it has on our health.
The story isn't yet available online. But author Jonah Lehrer has posted an excerpt on Wired Science:
The effects of chronic stress directly counteract improvements in medical care and public health. Antibiotics, for instance, are far less effective when our immune system is suppressed by stress; that fancy heart surgery will work only if the patient can learn to shed stress. As Sapolsky notes, "You can give a guy a drug-coated stent, but if you don't fix the stress problem, it won't really matter. For so many conditions, stress is the major long-term risk factor. Everything else is a short-term fix."
The emergence of stress as a major risk factor is largely a testament to scientific progress: The deadliest diseases of the 21st century are those in which damage accumulates steadily over time. (Sapolsky refers to this as the "luxury of slowly falling apart.") Unfortunately, this is precisely the sort of damage that's exacerbated by emotional stress. While modern medicine has made astonishing progress in treating the fleshy machine of the body, it is only beginning to grapple with those misfortunes of the mind that undo our treatments.
In 2008, Stanford partnered with National Geographic to produce a documentary titled "Stress: Portrait of a Killer," which featured Sapolsky's work. Footage from the documentary and a video Q&A with Sapolsky can be viewed here.
Previously: Summer stress, Stressed out and not sleeping and David Spiegel on stress and the economic crisis
Photo by BLW Photography