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When a person acclimates to something they get accustomed to aRead more
Adrenal Care Shakti
Adrenal Care Shakti arrives when you accept yourRead more
After Care
Level 1: At this level After Care is only forRead more
Agrimony Shakti
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Angels of the Earth – Animal Healing
Angels of the Earth – Animal Healing combines the Divine EarthRead more
Animal Energetic Care
Animal Energetic Care was channeled and created to enhance the qualityRead more
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The Goddess Artemis protects animals, both wild and domesticated. She alsoRead more
Animal Soul Aggression & Fear Calming Reiki
Animal Soul Aggression & Fear Calming Reiki connects you and anyRead more
Animal Soul Communication Reiki
Animal Soul Communication Reiki works to connect you deeply with aRead more
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Animal Soul Connection Reiki
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Animal Soul Healing Reiki
Animal Soul Healing Reiki gives you a very strong and powerfulRead more
Ascension Symptom Flush
Ascension Symptom Flush eases the transition and pressure often felt asRead more
Blockages Removal Vibration
Blockages Removal Vibration is a higher vibrational energy that removes frequencyRead more
Brighid's Healing Waters Empowerment
Brighid's Healing Waters Empowerment connects you to the Goddess Brighid andRead more
Cloak Of Mary Essence
The Cloak of Mary Activation assists with any inconsolable anguish, distressRead more
Cone of Light Energy Work
Cone of Light Energy Work connects you to spirit source energyRead more
Crazy Horse Medicine Way
Crazy Horse was an Oglala Sioux Indian Chief. This energyRead more
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Your iPhone isn't necessarily going to be connected to the Internet at all times. There may be certain situations like long plane rides or car trips through areas with no service where Apple's mobile phone just can't seem to pick up a signal. When those situations arise, however, it's important to realize that you won't be stuck without things to read. Recent updates to the Apple iOS mobile browser have brought an "Offline Reading" mode to the device. You can select any Web page you'd like and access its contents while offline on your iPhone. All you have to do is make sure that those pages are bookmarked in the Safari browser in the proper manner.
Step 1
Tap the icon labeled "Safari" on your iPhone to open the device's mobile Web browser. Note that while you will eventually access a particular Web page while offline, to add a page to the "Offline Browsing" mode you must do so while your iPhone is connected to the Internet via either a data or Wi-Fi connection.
Step 2
Tap the box labeled "Go to this Address" and enter the URL of the page you want to browse while offline. You can also tap the "Search" box and search for a particular page using keywords and your iPhone's default search engine. Allow the page in question to fully load in the Safari mobile browser before continuing.
Step 3
Tap the "Bookmarks" button at the bottom of the Safari browser window. The "Bookmarks" button is towards the right side of the screen and is just to the left of the "New Tab" button. A list of all folders that the Safari browser recognizes will appear on screen. The entry at the top of the list will be labeled "Reading List." The icon for the "Reading List" category features a pair of glasses.
Step 4
Tap "Reading List" to add the selected page to the browser's feature of the same name. The "Reading List" is the feature used to access pages while offline. Continue to open new pages and add additional sites to the offline browsing mode until you are finished.
Step 5
When your iPhone no longer has an Internet connection, return to the Safari mobile browser and open the "Bookmarks" screen again. Tap the "Reading List" icon to see a listing of all the pages that you can access while offline. Tap on the name of a particular page to open it on your iPhone, despite the fact that your mobile browser isn't currently connected to the Internet.
Featured images:
- License: Creative Commons image source
Laura scoured the web for iPhone deals before finally settling on an iPhone 5 with T-Mobile. She loves her phone and is always happy to help others to use it to its full capacity.

subset: commoncrawl


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Project Description
2780 State Rt. 14
Montour Falls, NY 14865
Located just outside the town of Glen Falls, NY.
Serving breakfast lunch and dinner. A wide variety of choices from sandwiches, steaks, seafood, and Italian dishes.
We had breakfast for lunch when we stopped, great pancakes and very good patty sausage. Great job folks!!!!


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The onset of the coronavirus pandemic resulted in extensive societal changes to curb the spread of the virus. These changes included temporarily closing schools and decreasing access to daycare centres, both of which place greater demands on parents. Media headlines have variously asserted that women are 'bearing the brunt of' and 'being squeezed by' the additional caring duties the current pandemic has created. As a result, some have argued that 'the coronavirus is a disaster for feminism.'
However, the coronavirus is not the origin of this disaster for feminism; it simply highlighted the limitations of liberal, now neoliberal, feminist advancements towards gender equality. Traditional gender roles did not disappear upon women's entrance into the paid workforce. The achievement of greater equality requires that we go beyond simple reforms. First, we must critically examine how patriarchal gender roles, built into capitalism, have been accepted in the past. Second, we must then collectively envision a path forward that leaves the capitalist-patriarchal gender norms behind.
From Liberal to Neoliberal Feminism: The Establishment and Widening of Gaps in Gender Equality
Mainstream liberal feminism in the 1960s-1990s was primarily concerned with promoting the rights of women through minor reforms to established institutions. Equality, for liberal feminists, was defined in terms of equal access to every component of the public sphere (i.e. government, education, medicine and law). At least in part, this effort was to combat 'the problem that has no name' (that, as described by Betty Friedan in 1963, was truly a boredom with domesticity resulting in anxiety and depression experienced by predominantly middle-class women).
With this push for equality in the public sphere, however, liberal feminist efforts have legitimated capitalist advancements that run contrary to feminist goals. Governance models shifted from state-managed to neoliberal, financialized, capitalism at the height of liberal feminist efforts. By the 1990s, there was a desire among government leaders for policies promoting greater individualism through a reduction of social benefits. This has resulted in gaps in gender equality.
Gaps in gender equality can be seen both horizontally (between men and women of similar classes) and vertically (between women of different classes). Horizontally, women continue to struggle to achieve the same employment outcomes and levels of self-sufficiency as men. On average, women in Canada now have greater levels of education than men. According to Statistics Canada, in 2016, 10 percent of women in Canada had no certificate, diploma or degree as compared to 12.9 percent of men. Furthermore, 30.9 percent of women had a university certificate, diploma or degree at bachelor level or above as compared to 26.1 percent of men. Despite the trend in higher education, women continue to be overrepresented in part-time employment and continue to experience a gender pay gap. While all women continue to experience barriers and limitations in the public sphere, the severity varies on the basis of profession. With traditionally female-dominated jobs valued lower than traditionally male-dominated jobs, the gender pay gap and level of part-time employment are larger in the former.
Hence, vertical inequality between different classes of women is growing in significance. Individual women have been able to make great strides in advancing their careers largely at the expense of racialized and lower-class women. Harriet Taylor in 1868 argued that men and women should be competitive equals in the public sphere but failed to theorize what the private sphere might look like with women entering into the public sphere. In reality, higher income women have become the employers of racialized and lower-income women as domestic servants, live-in caregivers, and child care takers (regulated and unregulated). This ultimately perpetuates women's over-representation in lower paying, and more precarious, traditionally female-dominated jobs without efforts to raise the value of this type of work.
Despite these gaps in equality left by liberal feminism, there has been a turn to ever greater individualism with the shift to neoliberal feminism. The goal of neoliberal feminists now is to achieve higher employment positions: to 'lean in' and break through glass ceilings. Neoliberal feminists believe that women can have it all if they simply work hard enough and the government's failure to provide the necessary programs to change a male-breadwinner system to a dual breadwinner system (or the single-parent system) is not identified as a problem. Failure to have it all is seen as a personal problem rather than a policy problem. Turning the focus to the private sphere in times of pandemic, conversely, suggests that the reality of having it all does not come from an embrace of individualism.
Social Reproduction and Pandemics
There are three key elements of what is termed social reproduction: biological reproduction, reproduction of the labour force, and practices connected to emotional, care work. The latter encompasses a large portion of unpaid work done within the private sphere of the home. Women, in the pursuit to have it all, continue to perform higher levels of unpaid care work, lower levels of paid work, and slightly higher overall levels of work as compared to men (See Figure 1). What this data suggests is that women were 'being squeezed' and 'bearing the brunt' long before the current pandemic.
Figure 1: Time Spent on Work by Gender (Minutes/Day)
Critical feminist scholars have long discussed the 'crisis of care' where the emotional care work of social reproduction has been put out of reach for many. Within a capitalist system, women can reach higher economic positions so long as they are able to appear man-like in their dedication to work without needing to attend to care work.
This appearance ultimately breaks down when hired help is no longer an option to keep care work hidden. As a result, while great advancements have been made since the 1960s, 'the problem that has no name' identified by Betty Friedan could be making a return among middle-class women in Canada. In a recent survey, Oxfam Canada found that 71 percent of Canadian women are feeling more anxious, depressed, isolated, and overworked during the current pandemic. With symptoms reminiscent of 'the problem that has no name', a cause of women's problems can be found in the rapid shift in responsibilities.
Overall, according to Statistics Canada data, men's employment levels have been less negatively impacted by the pandemic than women's employment levels. These statistics have led to the declaration of a 'she-cession'. The Royal Bank of Canada has reported that women's labour force participation rate is at its lowest in three decades, falling from an all-time high before the pandemic. All women with children, given social norms, are likely to now face even greater levels of unpaid work.
However, not all women experience equal financial repercussions. Research shows that women with children and the lowest incomes have seen substantial job losses whereas women with children and high incomes have only experienced marginal job losses. The Canada Emergency Response Benefit (CERB), set to end on August 29th, will leave low-income women who have lost work increasingly vulnerable. Many of these women do not qualify for Employment Insurance (EI) under existing rules that frequently exclude part-time and precarious workers. Thus, while middle and upper-income women experience a return of 'the problem that has no name', lower-income women who previously alleviated 'the problem' will experience greater levels of poverty.
Where Do We Go from Here?
(Neo)liberal feminism is not revolutionary; it works within patriarchal structures and institutions. To avoid upper and middle-class women developing "the problem that has no name" as well as lower-class women falling deeper into poverty (further increasing vertical inequality) when crises occur, we need to abandon small reform tactics. We must recognize that the liberation of women and the achievement of equality between the sexes goes well beyond participation in the public sphere. In reality, 'having it all' does not come from rapid individualism. Rather, it does in fact require substantial transformation that corrects the imbalances such as those illustrated by figure 1.
To do this, we can look to more revolution-oriented Marxist / socialist feminist ideas and initiatives. In the 1970s, the Wages for Housework campaign supplied a Marxist argument for understanding unpaid social reproductive care work as a highly exploitive job that required women to form an inclusive union to fight for wages and better support systems (i.e. establishing socialized and collectivized housework schemes and disengaging from the unpaid feminine role supporting capitalist accumulation). More recently, socialist feminists have advocated for greater use of women's strikes and the establishment of a movement representing feminism for the 99%.
The current neoliberal model of feminism is not creating true equality for any women, regardless of class. If women are able to unite – across class, race, and ethnicity – to move the feminist agenda away from individualism and towards collectivism, as some feminists have long tried to do, the current gaps that exist in gender equality can be filled and leave no woman behind.
The views, thoughts, and opinions expressed in this article belong solely to the author, and do not reflect the views of Conversationally Speaking Magazine.
Lori Oliver
Lori Oliver is a doctoral student in the Department of Political Studies at Queen's University and a SSHRC Joseph-Armand Bombardier Doctoral Scholar. Her research interests include gendered welfare state politics, poverty, housing/homelessness policies, and intersectional inequalities. Lori previously worked on community-based research projects with ACORN Canada, Adsum for Women & Children, and the IWK Health Centre. Her current PhD research is critically assessing gaps in social safety nets and homelessness initiatives that contribute to increasing levels of family homelessness.


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This unique sticker was inspired by an incredible painting by Luna Lark. Profits from this sticker go towards Helix Wheels Foundation, who's mission is "A child in need of mobility, deserves mobility." HWF helps buy wheel chairs, their parts and repairs, for children who can not afford them. Every time you look at this sticker, you will be reminded that you have played a part in changing a child's life, just the way Helix's life changed when he got his wheels.
Size 3 inches (76mm) x 2.3 inches (59mm).
Please visit the Luna Lark's website to see more great paintings. Luna Lark Studio
Luna Lark uses watercolors, acrylics, and dry media to create colorful paintings of humans and animals. She strives to find a balance between realism and impressionism to best analyze the essence of animals and the ways in which they connect humans to the natural world.
Luna studied fine arts and vocal music at New Mexico Highlands University. She is most influenced by the color studies of Monet and ethereal Rococo portraits. She is based on the coast of California.
Luna is on Instagram, Facebook, and Etsy @lunalarkstudio


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Tuesday, June 1, 2010
Book 43: Of Mice and Men and Book Stats.
Author: John Steinbeck (1902-1968)
First Published: 1937
My Edition: Penguin Literature Series
Pages: 107
Other Works Include: The Red Pony (1933), Tortilla Flat (1935), The Grapes of Wrath (1939), The Moon is Down (1942), Cannery Row (1945), The Pearl (1947), East of Eden (1952), Sweet Thursday (1954), The Winter of our Discontent (1961), Travels with Charley (1962)
I have read one other Steinbeck in this process so far. Book 15 was Travels with Charley in Search of America and I really fell in love with it. I will also be reading The Grapes of Wrath and The Winter of our Discontent. These four titles are my first exposure to Steinbeck. I somehow made it through high school and college without reading any of his large pieces of work. I have read snippets before, but never a complete novel.
This novel(la) is commonly taught in schools, and was taught in my own high school. For some reason, I was never in a class that was required to read it. We were given the option in tenth grade to pick the books we were going to read off of a list of required reading. Then in eleventh and twelfth grade, I picked some of the lesser-taken English electives (mystery/sci-fi, Shakespeare, Creative Writing), rather than go for American or British literature.
It is funny how things work out that way.
In any case, I am looking forward to my second go with Mr. Steinbeck, and I am hoping I love it just as much as I loved Travels with Charley. I am also reading this to fulfill the rest of the LOST books challenge, so seeing correlations there with also be a highlight.
6 comments:
I just thought I would let you know that I was studying for my English teaching certification exam today and I came across a question that I could only answer because of reading your blog. It made me smile. It was about Crime and Punishment, something I knew very little about beforehand.ReplyDelete
I wanted to say thank you, because I think you're going to play a significant role in my score on this test :D
Will have to read this next year.ReplyDelete
Am very afraid.
I should read this at some point too. So far, my only book of his read is East of Eden, but I own Grapes of Wrath to read.ReplyDelete
I have to mention that the cover on your "Currently Reading" of Gone With the Wind is GORGEOUS! I hope that is the version you own :)
It was taught at my school in cambridge (UK) - but I think that my class did something else, and I read it later. Really enjoyed as I remember!ReplyDelete
thanks for sharing
I have an award for you at my blog, please stop by and pick it up!ReplyDelete
Travel with Charley is still my absolute favorite Steinbeck book. I've read most of his big ones (East of Eden, Grapes of Wrath, Of Mice and Men, The Pearl, Cannery Row, etc.) but nothing has come close to how much I loved Charley.ReplyDelete


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Suresh, AK and Chanda, M (1982) A new kinetic model for bulk polymerization of vinyl chloride based on two-phase hypothesis. In: European Polymer Journal, 18 (7). pp. 607-616.
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A kinetic model has been developed for the bulk polymerization of vinyl chloride using Talamini's hypothesis of two-phase polymerization and a new concept of kinetic solubility which assumes that rapidly growing polymer chains have considerably greater solubility than the thermodynamic solubility of preformed polymer molecules of the same size and so can remain in solution even under thermodynamically unfavourable conditions. It is further assumed that this kinetic solubility is a function of chain length. The model yields a rate expression consistent with the experimental data for vinyl chloride bulk polymerization and moreover is able to explain several characteristic kinetic features of this system. Application of the model rate expression to the available rate data has yielded 2.36 × 108l mol−1 sec−1 for the termination rate constant in the polymer-rich phase; as expected, this value is smaller than that reported for homogenous polymerization by a factor of 10–30.
|Item Type:
|Journal Article
|European Polymer Journal
|Elsevier Science
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|Copyright of this article belongs to Elsevier Science.
|Division of Mechanical Sciences > Chemical Engineering
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|24 Dec 2009 10:37
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|19 Sep 2010 05:43
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Copyright ©Beijing Rongzhi Enterprise Social Responsibility Research Institute 京ICP备09054173号-2
Dynamics and perspectives
Our school holds an academic report on "The Experience, Research Direction and Content of thesis Writing"
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On the afternoon of December 16th, the academic activities of the school-level trade union jointly organized by the Trade Union College of Business Administration and the School of Key Discipline Offices of Enterprise Management--《Ph.D. Forum (3)》 series of academic reports were held in the conference room of the School of Business Administration. Dr. Su Zhixiong, a member of the Discipline Office, was presided over by Dr. Hu Yangcheng. Vice President Hu Min, Dean of the School of Business Administration, Deng Liming, and more than 30 teachers from the college attended the report.
Based on his years of research and writing, he has shared his own experiences from the five purposes of writing thesis, thinking, innovation, packaging and writing. I also exchanged my research direction and content with the teachers, combined with the research direction of the Jiangxi Provincial Water Safety and Sustainable Development Soft Science Research Base, and constantly communicated and exchanged ideas and opinions.
President Hu listened carefully to Dr. Su's report, emphasizing that scientific research should have clear objectives, encourage and mobilize teachers to actively enter the enterprise, understand the needs and conditions of enterprises, and have a foothold in scientific research to make sense. The participants discussed the questions in the course of the report and discussed with Dr. Su, and exchanged opinions widely and achieved good results.
(Text / Wei Hanying Tu / Hu Linchun)
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Thursday night, the People's Organization for Progress, a New Jersey progressive activist group, will commemorate the 20th anniversary of the police killing of a Black man named Earl Faison. He was killed on April 11, 1999 by a revenge-hungry, white-majority police force in Orange, New Jersey, because the police were angry by the killing of a fellow Orange police officer–ironically, one who was also Black and beloved by many in the local community.
Lawrence Hamm, a longtime activist in Newark who is POP's chairperson, went both to the officer's wake and to POP's protests of the Faison killing. POP was one of many activist groups who protested the Faison building until the white officers–who, while Faison was in police custody, sprayed pepper spray in the face and mouth of the asthmatic suspect until he suffocated and died, restrained and gagging, inside the police station–went to jail. And thanks to the protests of many and the strength of the victim's family, they did.
The following is the story of how that happened. It is an excerpt about the Faison case from his forthcoming book, "Progress: The Autobiography of Lawrence Hamm, As Told To Annette M. Alston." She is the author of "Harriet Tubman For Beginners."
By Lawrence Hamm
By the late 1990s, everything had settled into a groove. I was an administrator in the public service industry. My two daughters were growing up too fast. I was in my second marriage. We had moved out of Newark and were homeowners in Montclair. And the People's Organization for Progress had become established in Newark and in the parts of Essex County surrounding it.
The year was 1999. All around the world, people were contemplating the future. Were the United States and the West now at, as historians had begun to write in those pre-911, pre-ISIS days, the end of history?
The collapse of the Soviet Union had forced many in the Movement to chart new directions for social justice without the Cold War. The worldwide revolt against capitalism and the Third World bloc against Western imperialism didn't turn out the way that any of us thought.
Many of the Baby Boomer activists, those who thought and knew worldwide revolution was near two decades ago, were now well into middle age. Suddenly, I was 44. Amiri Baraka had given me the name Adhimu Changa, meaning in Kiswhahili "Important Youth." However, my youth was long gone. I was recuperating from a torn ligament in my leg, so I was no longer running marathons or running at all. I had been a vegetarian for nine years, so I was still trying to be health conscious. Time had begun to stretch out, become slower.
But there was always something to do, particularly when it came to POP. The group's cohesion, hard-won after 16 years of organizing, had dividends. We began to understand each other, and we began to operate as much as a family as a close-knit group of activists. Our community teach-ins and commemorations of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King–just to name two–became established, anticipated community events. Getting our press releases and pictures in the newspapers was no longer a struggle. We had significant access to Rutgers-Newark, churches and other city institutions. In short, everything had begun to work like clockwork, the year 2000 and its threatening zeroes be damned. We had the serenity of purpose.
Then, in April of 1999, a Black policewoman, Joyce Carnegie, was shot in the head and stomach by an armed robbery suspect in Orange, one of the many townships that surround Newark. In response, police departments in the county went on a blue rampage, looking specifically for bald-headed Black men. The rumor on the street was that the police wanted Carnegie's killer's head on a platter. Authorities picked up three Black men for the crime—Terrance Everett, James "Malik" Coker and Earl Faison.
Everett and Earl Faison were beaten by police. Faison, a 27-year-old father of four who had ambitions to be a hip hop music producer, died in a hospital after only 45 minutes in police custody on April 11, 1999, three days after Carnegie's death. He fled from the taxi he was a passenger in when police asked for identification. Faison, who was not bald but had a record, was innocent of the Carnegie murder. Another man, Condell Woodson, would eventually confess. Police said Faison also had a 9 mm handgun. The severe asthmatic—the police took his inhaler from him–was handcuffed, beaten, robbed and then pepper-sprayed in the nose and mouth at point-blank range, triggering a seizure caused by his suffocation.
The Orange Police Department, no different from any other police department confronted with the issue of police brutality, denied any wrongdoing, and tried to keep it business-as-usual. One of the at least nine officers involved in Faison's arrest was up for promotion.
The People's Organization for Progress was about to change in permanent and powerful ways because of Faison. History, as it turned out, showed no sign of disappearing.
It's not like POP had never been part of police-brutality demonstrations before. We had constantly crossed the river over the New York police-brutality cases of Amadou Diallo, Abner Louima and others. We and other activist organizations in New Jersey had been having demonstrations as far back as 1990, when Phillip Pannell, a Black 15-year-old youth, had been shot by the Teaneck police. Then in 1997, Danette "Strawberry" Daniels, a thirty-one-year-old young Black woman, was killed by the Newark police—shot in the head. An activist group named Black Nia Force, led by a young Newark activist-schoolteacher named Ras Baraka, was in the forefront there. In Northern New Jersey, we are bombarded with New York City's news. So much so, that what happens in New York City feels like a local event. In fact, we publicly mourned the Diallo-official acquittal while struggling for Faison.
POP was founded as an organization to organize and mobilize the community, but our actual activities in the initial years were forums. We would have a forum almost every month. What would put us in the street in those early days was the apartheid South African government and America's complicity in attempting to destroy the democratic movements there. So by 1983, the anti-apartheid movement in the United States was really going strong. It was oscillating between a lot of campus actions and community actions, because on campuses students were trying to get their universities to divest from companies doing business with South Africa. Meanwhile in the community, union groups and other organizations were trying to get this state and local governments to divest their pension funds from those same corporations. So it was like waves of activity: you would have a wave of students, then you'd have a wave of labor and community–all anti-apartheid, Free Mandela, Free Sisulu, Free Winnie. So although POP was still in a community education mode, New York's police brutality cases in the 1990s began to draw us outside, into the street, to make more local stands.
History was beginning to loop back on us, and Faison was tipping POP's scale from education to activism. DeLacey Davis was head of a group called Black Cops Against Police Brutality. Davis told me he had been inspired to be an activist when Adhimu Changa, that flamethrower of the Newark Board of Education, spoke at Arts High in the early 1970s. Davis had risen to the sergeant level in East Orange, and formed his activist group to be a community check against police aggression and to give officers a voice to talk to the community. It was he who introduced us to Faison's family.
And I want to say this about Davis. As difficult as it is to talk about police brutality in 2019, it was much harder in the 1980s and 1990s. I have a great deal of respect for him, because his outspokenness affected his police career. After many years on the force, he lost his rank, even after the community appealed to the East Orange mayor and city council.
Davis gave me the phone number for Faison's father, Earl Williams. He and the family met with POP and talked about how Earl had been beaten and how an excessive amount of tear gas had been used on his asthmatic son. In that first conversation, he was saying how they had seen the body and there was a footprint on his head. This was the beginning of a years-long association between the Faison family and POP.
Faison was killed on April 11. Three days later, POP organized its first Faison demonstration with about 200 people outside of Orange Police Headquarters.
We were careful about this, because we didn't want to be accused of ambulance chasing. I remember before Faison, when a Black woman in Newton, New Jersey, was assaulted by a white racist. Because we didn't make contact with the family, we didn't go. I had regrets about that, but we as an organization decided that we would be involved only if invited by a grieving family.
Even with the family's permission, we had some debate over whether to have the protest that day, because it was the same day as the Carnegie wake. She was a Black female police officer—still an anomaly back then. She was a person who had roots in Essex County. When she was killed, many were outraged–and it wasn't just police. There was a lot of sympathy for Carnegie, but when somebody in that POP meeting said that "a life not in a police uniform is worth just as much as a life in a blue uniform," that ended the debate. Those who wanted the demonstration on April 14th won by a very slim margin. And the way it worked out was that the wake was early enough for me to personally go. I went to the Carnegie wake before the demonstration, personally balancing the community's various feelings.
So we're demonstrating at the police station, and the police director, Richard Conte, called me upstairs to speak to him. He was talking to me in a very causal way.
He said, "Mr. Hamm, this kid was not a victim of police brutality."
Earl Faison was 27-years-old and had two children at the time. He was far from a kid. This was the mentality in which we were dealing. If he was not a victim of police brutality, then, what was he a victim of? Crickets could be heard.
So I went downstairs and the demonstration continued.
R.D. Strong, then POP's Vice-chair, was on the front stairs, holding the POP banner saying, "Stop Police Brutality." He was joined by many others including Joe Fortunato, an activist-attorney. Earl Williams was speaking on the bullhorn. Williams told us then that there was going to be an independent investigation and autopsy into his son's death: "The truth will come out and hopefully, justice will be served." By November of that year, Conte turned in his resignation supposedly over a dispute between then-Mayor Mims Hackett and him over officer promotions.
That demonstration was very important. But it was the next one—on May 1st—that was most profound. Because, for the first time in POP history, we demonstrated in police crosshairs, openly under the barrels of guns.
So there we were, in all of our predominantly Black power with some very conscious white friends of the struggle. POP, The New Jersey Coalition Against Police Brutality. Black Cops Against Police Brutality. The Newark Coalition for Neighborhoods. The Black Ministers Council of New Jersey. Women in Support of the Million Man March. The Nation of Islam's Muhammad's Mosque No. 25.
We marched from the police headquarters to the Board of Education building on Main Street in Orange. I can never forget how when we turned onto Main Street, the police had sharp shooters on all the roofs of the buildings, especially and including the U.S. Post Office. I was just thinking, How they got their guns pointed on innocent people trying to get justice for an innocent person killed by them. Shouldn't they be arresting and training their guns on the people that killed Carnegie and Faison?
In those early demonstrations, we had support from WBAI-FM, the Pacifica station in New York City. WBAI-FM would announce our actions. So this time, it was New Yorkers who crossed the river to join us. Even Reverend Al Sharpton came to speak at one of our demonstrations.
I remember two things about those rallies. First, there were a lot of young people at those early demonstrations because Faison's family, and its circle of friends, was quite large. Second, POP had begun to make the large police brutality victim banners it's now known for; the Faison banner R.D. held is one of our oldest.
It's now commonplace everywhere for people to demonstrate against police brutality. But in those days, even though we had those notorious cases like Louima and like Diallo, keep in mind that a lot of that was in New York City. (Of course, the Rodney King case in Los Angeles was a huge and historic exception.) There really wasn't an organization that was doing a lot of anti-police brutality work in New Jersey the way POP had begun doing it in 1999.
There were as many tensions as opinions. The murder of Strawberry Daniels had hundreds of South Ward residents, led by Black Nia Force, march out of the ward to downtown. Saalam Ishmial had his group, the National United Youth Council, based in Elizabeth. Wilbert Kornegay was a stalwart activist with his own group from the South Ward, and he seemed to be at every demonstration we joined.
POP members used their long-term mobilization skills well during this period. Marion Pitts. Brother Nello. Brother Hobbs. Debbie Brown. Gladys "Ayo" McMillan and Jan Cheema, who would call 125 people in one night if I asked her to do so.
Part of the reason that there had been such a debate about how to respond to the Carnegie murder within POP was because of the anti-violence sentiment in the community at the time. POP had our first rally against drugs, crime and violence in 1993. This was the other violence in the community: the civilian-on-civilian violence. We had our first rally on those topics at Deliverance Church on Springfield Avenue in Irvington in 1993. This anti-violence sentiment was strong. And probably in places like Newark, it was probably stronger than the anti-police brutality sentiment, because the notorious police-brutality cases were happening in New York. They were happening in New Jersey, but were not blasted across the New York tri-state area by television and radio. For example, New Jersey 12, the state's 24-hour cable news station, was still in its infant stages during much of the 1990s.
But I have to be honest here. Another conflict was the fact that, in the early stages of the Faison case, very few ministers and elected officials wanted to publicly criticize the police. There were not a lot of elected officials on our side. Sixty letters would go out asking for their involvement, and three would come back. Sharpe James, the mayor who had ousted Kenneth Gibson in 1986, even once tried to stop POP from having a march for Rodney King. When Mayor James couldn't stop it, he joined it. As he went along, James even came close to creating a civil police review board after the Strawberry Daniels shooting. So, as the 1990s progressed into Faison, there was much room for growth.
Murder is a state statute. Essex County did not bring any indictments against the officers that killed Faison. The county prosecutor, a representative of the state attorney general, was not going to pursue the case. We continued to press. We never let the state go. We wrote letters. We made phone calls. We even had meetings in Trenton with the assistant state attorney general. The state never brought any charges against the officers that killed Earl Faison, and it said it wasn't going to bring any charges.
We communicated with the family. We joined the family and demanded that the federal government come in and investigate this case. The feds responded affirmatively on the investigation. We were pleased, but we knew that federal involvement was going to null a murder charge; With the state refusing to file murder charges, the feds were left investigating for civil rights violations. The feds carried out an investigation that lasted more than a year. U.S. Attorney for the state of New Jersey Robert J. Cleary announced the resulting indictment of five officers on June 22, 2000–the same week that would have been Earl Faison's 29th birthday.
It was the regional medical examiner for the federal government that announced the results of his autopsy. Three autopsies done, and the third got it right. That examiner said that Earl Faison died in a "stairwell of torture." (Later, Dr. Mark Flomanbaum, an assistant medical examiner in New York City, would testify, "Mr. Faison would still be alive today if it had not been for the catastrophic event and I say this within a reasonable degree of medical certainty.") The state didn't even convene a grand jury.
The news and its public aftermath carried serious consequences. People were fired (like Patricia Hurt, the first Black woman to be Essex County Prosecutor), and resigning, like Conte, but justice was slow in coming. Only five people were indicted. (A Black reporter for The Star-Ledger, Kevin Dilworth, was the first to ask me why only five when so many more were involved. Why only five when there were so many other hands doing things? Like the night that Faison was killed, they came in and cleaned up the car, removing the seat from the car he was beat in, and wiped up the blood. That's called tampering with evidence. What about the arresting officers that covered up for the officers that brutally beat and kicked Faison before and after he was in the car handcuffed? Later, one of the Black cops would testify that his supervising officer was beating Faison so bad that he had to pull him off Faison by the belt, and the force of that pull threw both of them on the ground.
It was clear that the new acting police director, Don Wactor, was pretty sure that most of his department would be indicted in some way when he approached the Orange City Council requesting additional appropriations to hire more officers because of "imminent manpower shortages." Wactor anticipated federal indictments of up to 12 officers in his department. But we were not letting this get swept under the rug. What happened in Jersey would not stay in Jersey. The state's Attorney's Office got involved. The criminal case was argued by U.S. Attorneys Patty Schwartz and Rafael Valentin.
The Faison family had two attorneys, while the police officers—Lt. Thomas Smith, his brother, Brian Smith, Andrew Garth, Tyrone Payton and Paul Carpinteri Jr.—had five attorneys. Each of the five charged had an attorney—a total of five white attorneys. It looked like a damn football team sitting over there. And guess who the lead attorney was for the five? Michael Chertoff, who becomes the first U.S. Director of Homeland Security after 9-11.
We believed the fix was in already. The all-white jury was sworn in on Halloween, so we sighed, knowing it was all tricks and no treats. Then one of the jurors became sick and was replaced by a Black alternate. We prayed, but we didn't hold our breaths.
I attended the trial almost every day. Not all day long, but I came in on my lunch breaks during work as well as after work. I took several vacation days to be in that courtroom, particularly on days that witnesses were called. Fred Wright, who updated POP about the trial, was retired, so he came every day.
For most all of the key testimonies I was there. Every time I entered the courtroom I was struck by the stark racial segregation. All Black on one side, mostly white on the other, with the judge seated in the middle of history.
Calm ruled. No protests in the courtroom during the entire trial. Or outside, because we thought it was too important for us not to witness. The bottom line: family had confidence in the US attorney, and we had confidence in the family. I think the families' respect for the attorneys and for the process shaped how the community–those non-family people who came out in support of them—responded. Because there could have been times when the police were testifying, or other people were testifying about how the police were acting, when people could have jumped up and screamed out. The family set the standard for everyone else. For instance, family members walked out of the courtroom when they were overcome with emotion.
Carmen Espichan may have been
difference between guilt and innocence. She was Latina and a resident on the street where the police stopped and beat Faison. The police did not know she was
watching them at the
scene. Espichan turned out to be a
late-nineties version of a smartphone video.
She had been contacted
twice by the FBI. The first time she was contacted by the Bureau, she said
she wouldn't testify, didn't want anything
to do
with it. But the second time, they convinced her to testify. She came in the courtroom nine months
pregnant. She was so large, there had to be concerns that she would give birth right there in the
courtroom. Her painful detail
of how Earl was beat down, thrown on the ground, validated all our work. Her next words caused a big gasp in the courtroom.
Espichan said one of the officers backed up to the fence–he was about maybe 20 or 30 feet from it– and he ran and kicked his head like he was kicking a soccer ball. My God. She said he kicked him in the head so hard that his whole body came up off the ground. That's before they took him to the police station, before they put him in the car. That was the first of three collective courtroom gasps I will never forget. The second gasp was when the judge asked her why she didn't testify after the FBI had asked her several times. She said, "I didn't want to get involved in it. I had a daughter. I didn't want what happened to him to happen to us."
The jury tended not to show emotion. I certainly didn't hear any sounds from its racial majority. That's why we thought—we knew—the verdict would be not guilty.
The verdict: guilty on all counts. Third gasp. The officers' lawyers were so stunned they asked for each jurors' individual verdict, and it was unanimous. A victory in a nation that couldn't convict the police who murdered Diallo. This was something out of Perry Mason or Law and Order—in fact, it was wilder than both.
The newspapers, including and especially The Star-Ledger, had to take what we had been saying all along seriously. I remember us being in front of the courthouse, answering reporters' questions. My only regret is that we didn't have POP's "Justice for Earl Faison" banner.
We felt vindicated, but we still didn't feel like it was complete justice because they were convicted on civil rights violations and conspiracy, not murder.
They were convicted in December. So I'm driving down Route 280 in May of 2001. I got a call from a reporter asking me, "What do you think of what U.S. District Judge Lifland did?"
"What did he do?" I asked. "He overturned the verdict."
Lifland decided to throw out the conspiracy charges against the five. I didn't even know at that time that you could do that. I thought that what a jury decided was it. And the first word we got was that the U.S. Attorney's Office was not going to appeal.
The officers didn't come to the sentencing. The verdicts were overturned before they could get to the sentencing, and he used some technicality to overcome the jury verdict. Bullshit. Not only were they not going to get jail time, but a couple of them thought they might get their jobs back.
We brought out our marching shoes. The appeal was happening, but the case was moved to the Third Circuit Court in Philadelphia. Philadelphia! Almost two hours away from Newark.
We were not thwarted. We rented buses and marched in Philadelphia, banners held tight, in front. Almost another year passed. We took two busloads of people to fill up the courtroom every day. The judges knew what was going on, because I know it's not every trial where they look out in the courtroom and view a sea of Black faces. Even though we weren't at the moment of justice, that was one of our proudest moments.
One of the people there with me was Nello. He was a member of POP and one of my closest friends. I think he carried the red- black-and-green flag when we marched over the Ben Franklin bridge into Philly because we didn't go straight to Philly. We went to Camden and told the buses to meet us at the courthouse. Then we marched over the Ben Franklin Bridge.
Our ability to put people in that courtroom really made us feel effective. The fact that they tried to move this outside of our sphere of influence to somewhere outside of our grassroots did not work; we would not be denied. We filled that courtroom on work days. It wasn't just us, but it made me know we had a strong organization.
The 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reinstated the guilty verdicts in June of 2002 citing that Lifland had erred when he threw out the convictions. We certainly were jubilant, even though there wasn't a lot of fanfare about it. We had won at the district court level and we won the appeals level. It had taken more than three years to get to this point. It would take two more years for the actual sentencing and an addition year before any of the officers would be behind bars. Now that the ball was kicked back to Lifland's court for sentencing, he wasn't hearing it: no more shenanigans.
One of the things I remember most about that day was what Lifland said specifically about Orange Detective Keith Jackson, the Black officer who broke ranks to give his version of what happened the night Faison died. Jackson was the first of several officers to come forward after initially lying to the federal investigators. His reward was constant death threats. Lifland felt the need to publicly warn everyone that if anything happened to any of the witnesses, the perpetrators would be found and persecuted to the full extent of the law. Of course, Jackson was subsequently fired from the police department along with Detective Anthony Tortorella, the second to speak out. I used to see Jackson in downtown Newark, near where I worked. He had to be surrounded by FBI officers who were providing round-the-clock protection. Jackson had quoted a conversation with a defendant, in which Jackson was told, "I'm so hooked on this lie, I don't know what the truth is."
True over Blue.
The short life and tragic killing of Earl Faison changed the People's Organization for Progress permanently. Two months after Faison was killed, the family of Stanton Crew came to a POP meeting. Crew was shot 27 times on the New Jersey Turnpike by state troopers. By January of 2000 we were marching for Max Antoine, a victim of police brutality in Irvington. POP had become a lightning rod for New Jersey police brutality cases. Some might think the organization peaked with Faison, but our demonstration for Trayvon Martin was larger than any of our Faison demonstrations. And then, after 9-11 and our anti-Iraq invasion protests. Coalition forces expanded to groups like the Frontline Artists, The New Black Panther Party, Million Man: Montclair, Communications Workers of America(CWA) and Service Employees International Union (SEIU).
But there's just something about the Faison tragedy. Though it wasn't the biggest campaign, its impact was deeper. It's like the difference between a topical application on your arm and an intramuscular injection phase. Faison was like an intramuscular injection: it didn't cover as much area topically, but the impact was greater. We went with less trepidation into other police brutality cases because of our Faison experience.
In the last 20 years, there have been at least 25 cases POP has been involved in, post-Faison. Every Monday for more than two years, a vigil/protest is held in front of the Newark Federal Building to remember Jerome Reid, Jahqui Graham, Kashad Ashford and Abdul Wakil M. Kamal–all New Jersey victims of police brutality and lack of justice. Shelia Reid and Muneer Muhammad are there with banners and posters in hand consistently and through all kinds of weather, remembering their son Jerome. We've worked with other groups in New Jersey like the National Awareness Alliance. The founder and chair, Walter Hudson, has supported the Reid family while fighting for the family of Darryl DeRose Laqua Fuqua, unarmed and gunned down by Bridgeton police.
Earl Faison taught us. We learned how difficult it is to get justice within the criminal justice system. It is very difficult to convict police. There are all kinds of ways to subvert the system. Money. Having the state on their side—police are officers of the state—means they can, and do, routinely escape the same punishments that regular citizens would get. Every once in a blue moon, somebody in blue is convicted. This is why, credited or not, struggle is imperative.
We were overwhelmed by the evidence of criminal guilt, and so we were upset that this substitute- for-a-criminal trial stopped short of saying that Earl Faison was murdered by state-sponsored thugs in a dim back police stairwell. Those officers did not go to jail for murder. They went to jail for civil rights violations and conspiracy. And the difference was apparent. Four of them, Tyrone Payton, Andrew Garth, newly retired Lt. Thomas Smith and Paul Carpinteri, got only 33 months. Brian Smith, the younger brother of Thomas Smith who sprayed the pepper spray into Faison's face, jump-starting his seizure and subsequent death from it, was sentenced to nine years—before Lifland cut it to seven. I remember telling the news media that the now-former officers "were afforded considerations that the average citizen never would have received." So to this day, we consider Faison to be a cold case, like Emmett Till, another young Black man murdered without anybody paying the price.
The "new" POP—now being referred to in the news media as a "human rights watchdog group," now getting calls from media about our activities, instead of us always doing the calling—started doing multi-day protests. Forty-one days straight, one demonstration went in 2000, to highlight the 41 bullets shot into Amadou Diallo. We extended that demonstration to 45 days for the 45 minutes Faison was in the police station before being killed. In 2013, we demonstrated for 381 days for jobs, peace, equality and justice. This was the symbolic protest in which we were now invested. The 381 days were a way of memorializing the days that the Montgomery Bus Boycott lasted. More than 173 organizations signed on during given weeks to join us. Organizations that came out regularly were the NAACP's Newark, Irvington and Oranges and Maplewood branches, Muhammad Mosque No. 25, American Civil Liberties Union of New Jersey, Black is Back Coalition, Newark Education Workers Caucus, Newark Anti Violence Coalition, The New Black Panther Party, NOW-New Jersey Branch, New Jersey Jericho Movement, New Jersey State Industrial Union Council/Solidarity Singers, Veterans for Peace UFCW Local 108, and a number of other local unions, churches and grassroots organizations.
During the four years the Faison case dragged on, the Faison family was a POP fixture. We were in constant contact with Earl Williams. He and Sagirah Williams were our main contacts with the family. Our time with Carolyn Faison was short in that she died a year after her son died. She was sick at the time of his death, but I don't think she would have died had he not been killed. It was just too much for her.
We didn't make any moves without checking with the family first. From the beginning, we saw this as their struggle, not ours. We were behind them, not in front. We were a known quantity, and we used my familiarity with the news media to their advantage.
These protests always fill a pattern. After the death, there is an upsurge. But most people come into struggle jaded, so when things don't happen rapidly, disappointment and disillusionment set in. And then they fall back.
In our work here in New Jersey, some families just went by the wayside because they just didn't have the energy or the wherewithal to keep it up. There are situations where families can't get to the finish line because they disintegrate in the process. Sometimes our people experienced grief at a level where they just can't go forward any more. We've had families that didn't want a protest because their lawyers tell family members to not say anything because public statements might hurt the case. People don't know how hard Black people's lives still are in this country, even though we may look like we're doing well.
The Faison family was not like this. They are a Sunni Muslim family who understood the Civil Rights and Black Power movements. They understood the power of steadfast faith and militant works. That family was prepared for struggle. It was not a good thing that their son died, but I don't think there could've been a better family to carry that ball across the goal line of justice. They were determined they would fight to the end. Earl Williams would come to protests after his leg was amputated. We would just call him and he'd come and speak and he's showing up with one leg. I loved that brother. We struggled side by side.
Today, we are one paycheck away from homelessness, one paycheck away from destitution. So when your child is killed by the police, there isn't even enough money to bury that child. And when you go to the funeral and see the body of that person, that person's face, you recognize how devastating that is: that one whole circle of life completed but others permanently broken. His life has long-lasting, personal impact that is off-camera. Because Earl was killed, his kids grew up without a father. In December 2017, Earl Williams passed away while months earlier, Mikki Wilkins, the mother of Faison's children, had already died of cancer. The ripple effect that these events have, the dysfunctions amplified- are all off-screen.
The strength of the Faison-Williams family—its determination to get justice, its ability to go the whole way without falling apart, and its willingness to let others in, to share its grief and to fight alongside it for justice—were critical in winning those cases.
I don't want to over-emphasize the role of activism. It was very important that the Williams family had strong, competent legal representation. Our role is to help create an atmosphere where it's possible to lead to conviction. I believe the following to this day: if there hadn't been a whole lot of protests around Earl's death, the state would have swept it under the rug because they didn't even bring charges. Without the protests I'm really doubtful that the U.S. attorney would have taken the case further. There was too much anger in the community to ignore it. It couldn't be covered up. That anger made those in power say: We've got to take a look at this. Because it stank from the beginning.
Twenty years have now passed, and POP is still calling for the Faison case to be reopened as a homicide. When I think about the case, I think of Sagirah Williams, who was always quiet but right on point when she did speak. "We will not rest until authorities reconsider the evidence surrounding the death of our son while he was in police custody on April 11, 1999 and then pursue murder indictments." The U.S. Attorney's office in Newark, citing a lack of evidence, said it had no plans to pursue a murder indictment against the five officers. And it never did.
An excerpt of "PROGRESS: The Autobiography of Lawrence Hamm, As Told To Annette M. Alston." Copyright (c) 2019 by Lawrence Hamm and Annette M. Alston.
UPDATED: Video of Thursday night's Faison commemoration can be found here, thanks to @DoshonFarad. Speakers included members of Faison's family, Hamm and Newark Mayor Ras Baraka.


text:
Blogpolls have been coming out across the blogosphere (been a while since I used that phrase... ugh), and while most have Nebraska ranked around the top ten, there was one that caught my eye, and that was Spencer Hall's ballot at Every Day Should Be Saturday.
Hall didn't rank Nebraska.
His reasoning:
For instance, we don't have Nebraska on there because in many ways last year they were Iowa with a.) a mutant on the defensive line, and b.) a worse offense than the Hawkeyes. Take away mutant, return same shitty offense, and you end up unranked.
Forget that Hall has Nebraska unranked - we all know that preseason polls don't mean anything (though it still hurts to be so bluntly rejected) - it's apparent that Hall doesn't think Nebraska will be that good, so I thought I'd ask him for a deeper explanation than what he's given above (even though his thoughts are pretty clear).
After the jump is a Q&A session with Hall. It's not for those who like things sugar-coated, but I think you can handle it.
Q: I think most Nebraska fans would accept the idea that Ndamukong Suh was good enough to be branded a "mutant", but, given Bo Pelini's status as a defensive master, isn't there a possibility that there's another mutant defensive lineman in the works?
Every Nebraska fan will be happy to wax poetic about Suh's season last year, but few will acknowledge just how big a hole losing the best defensive lineman in college football will be, even with Jared Crick lining up to replace him. I've seen a Pelini defense without its key defensive tackle in the form of Glenn Dorsey and the 2007 LSU defense, and they are very different animals with greatly varying results on defense. They'll have to blitz more to get pressure, and that leaves bigger holes, and thus higher risk/reward than you saw last year.
The real factor that scares the daylights out of me re: Nebraska is their offense, though, specifically the case of Zac Lee. If they get behind in any of their games it will be on Lee to bail them out, and if the thought of that comforts you then you ride with the devil and brush your teeth with lit sparklers. I admire you for it, but I'm not following you on that ledge.
Q: I'll grant you that Nebraska's offense last season was horrid, but do you really expect us to be horrid again since we have a quarterback who's gone through a season of starts, a clear set of starters at receiver, at least two good running backs, and enough offensive linemen to get through the season? As horrid as last year?
Not as horrible as last year, but you're also not going to be the number one ranked defense, either. The losses don't quite offset each other here (at least not in my highly speculative non-ranking of them. Emphasis on HIGHLY SPECULATIVE.)
Other polls have Nebraska highly ranked - are we to take it that you:
1. are a madman
2. more insightful than most college football pundits
Certainly not.
3. going for shock value
Not at all. If I want to do that, I'll photoshop Bo Pelini's head on Juila Stiles's body and have him dance with an equally photoshopped Gary Pinkel on a "Save the Last Dance" poster.
4. were clearly pissed at having to watch Nebraska's offense last season and found it so utterly non-offensive you're taking it out on us at the beginning of this season
Probably the best guess of all of these.
5. have been bought out by Texas
There is no new flossy Caddy in the driveway, so no.
Q: The Huskers play in the Big 12 North. Do you see another team winning the North, or do you believe that even with winning the North the Huskers deserve to be unranked at the end of the season?
No, certainly not. If the win the Big 12 North they deserve to be ranked and ranked well. I don't have them on there because in my mind they've got some serious questions in terms of replacing a key cog on their defense and demonstrating some competence on offense.
And do remember, it is a preseason ranking and nothing more. I'll happily put them in the polls that actually count, the ones based on how teams actually play during the season. I'm particularly interested in the Washington game since the Huskies will be a nice stress test for the revamped Husker defense early in their schedule.
Q: Care to offer any predictions on Nebraska's win-loss record this season?
Somewhere around eight wins, maybe nine. Rank guessing, but that's where we are eight days out from actual football.


text:
WASHINGTON — A Navy admiral ordered the destruction of all photographs of the deceased Osama bin Laden before the public could see the images, according to Pentagon e-mails obtained by watchdog group Judicial Watch.
In the e-mail sent 11 days after the raid that killed bin Laden, US Special Operations Cmdr. Adm. William McRaven ordered subordinates to "destroy . . . immediately" the photos.
He sent it May 13, 2011, just hours after Judicial Watch filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit for access to the photos.
Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton said Monday that the timing showed that the administration destroyed the photos, at least in part, because of the lawsuit.
The Obama administration had refused to release photos of bin Laden's body.
The e-mail instructs: "One particular item that I want to emphasize is photos; particularly UBLs remains. At this point — all photos should have been turned over to the CIA; if you still have them destroy them immediately."


text:
Fishing Europa
hold right or left while releasing bubbles to shoot them horizontally (they work a bit better)
Fishing Europa
This is my entry for the Fishing Jam #2 You play as a submersible catching alien fish in bubbles and sending them to the surface. The setting is the under ice sea on Jupiter's moon Europa. The bubbling mechanics were sort of inspired by Bubble Bobble.
It's playable but incomplete. After the jam the following will be updated:
- infinite scrolling background
- better collision detection
- flares/pulses to lure/repel certain fish
- powerups
- bosses
- max depth of 100km
- progressive difficulty
- more alien fish
- gfx polish
I'd like to give a big thank you to Sophie Houlden for hosting the event and Andrew Anderson for creating a very cool MIDI to P8 music convertor tool. Also thanks to for Erik Satie for the music used, Gnossiennes No. 3.
And thank you for playing! I appreciate any feedback and look forward to getting this one 100% completed soooooon :D More of my games @ http://games.acepek.com also please follow me on twitter!
Install instructions
The Archive.ZIP file contains a standalone playable in-browser index.html file and a P8.PNG image that can be played on PICO-8.
For all the pocketCHIP'ers, it can't be 'splored yet but you can play it by entering this in terminal:
wget -O /home/chip/.lexaloffle/pico-8/carts/fishing-europa.p8.png http://acepek.com/games/fishing-europa.p8.png


text:
Incentive South Africa - Into the wilderness
Client: BenQ
Participants: 42 guests
Highlights: BOMA dinner with storyteller, bush walk through the wilderness, ballooning in the sunrise, private luxury tent camp, nature conservation close up at "Rhino-Tagging", drum workshop at the campfire, pure adrenaline during bush flight, wine blending, African night, and much more...
Boundless wide bush land, azure blue oceans and white beaches, adventurous mountain worlds and a fascinating animal world promise unusual and exciting experiences.
As a professional incentive agency COMEO Event ensures with a balanced and exciting program that your guests feel like on cloud nine.
Incentive Kenya - In the footsteps of the Big Five
Client: BenQ
Participants: 35 guests
Highlights: Overnight at Safari Camp, Deerstalking- drives in the savannah, evening event on a Dhow
The safari is over and the guests enjoy a relaxing drink by the campfire. But suddenly screaming Maasai-warriors jump out of the bushes and attack the guests. A nightmare? No, just a fun act and a great surprise at this Kenya incentive.
COMEO Event provides as a professional incentive agency the right kick in the smooth running of your incentives.
Are you looking for an exclusive, customized and unique corporate incentive? COMEO Event is your incentive agency in Morocco, Kenya, South Africa, Botswana and Zambia. From Palm beach to the mountain peaks, from jungle trekking to safari.


text:
What things should you know before you go to college/university
Applying to university /college is one of the most important decision on one's life. It involves emotions and aspiration of parents, thoughts and ideas of students and the potential merits or challenges shared by friends. It is one of those decision which has a lasting impact on one's life and careers.
There are multiple factors which are important and here is a quick guide of things one needs to look at while applying to any university or college as an international or regular student. This post is really handy and informative to make the most informed decisions.
- Look through the programmes you are interested in the school website. Get all the information that you need (what the curriculum is like, campus life). Choose a programme that you are passionate about and a university that you feel will fit your personality.
- Look at the tuition fees. Discuss with your parents. Have financial difficulties? See if the school offers financial assistance to deserving students. You can also take a gap year to get a job and save a bit of money (it may not be enough but at least it's a start) and explore other opportunities. You may just stumble upon something you love and change your mind on the programme you intend to take. There's no rush.
- Have a rough estimate of how much money you will need a year for hostel fees, food, other miscellaneous stuff and books.
- Go to the open houses of the universities you are interested in to get a feel of what life there will be like. Look at their libraries, classrooms and hostels and facilities they provide. Ask students and lecturers in the programme you are interested in about what the assignments and lessons will be like.
- Decide with family if that university is to your liking. Plan your finances, university is very expensive and a lifetime investment.
- Always research, ask questions and be prepared
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It was not meant to be. The Huskies are now 2-2 in the last four years against the Trojans of USC. The game was close, but mental errors were once again the bane of the Dawgs. My instant reactions will be in the form of bullet holes. (Thank you Jeff Sullivan)
- Keith Price played maybe his best passing game of the season. Not to say he played great, but he surpassed my expectations. He made some good throws down the field. Again, he didn't pass perfectly but had himself a decent game and improved as the game went along. Mostly he did better when the throws were made to Austin Seferian-Jenkins. I am in the camp that believes his last interception was an attempt to Cody Bruns that Seferian-Jenkins made an unsuccessful leaping attempt to grab. Keith: hold on to the darn football! Defenders don't fall for your pitch-fakes anymore considering that you have run all of one true option this season. Also, on the first interception, there was no way that Price could have seen the middle linebacker on that play. He should have known that he was lurking over the middle, but still could not have seen him over his offensive linemen.
- Seferian-Jenkins did not have the explosiveness tonight that he uses to get open over the middle and down the field. This can be attributed to his gimpy ankle. I have to believe that part of the reason he was so effective in the second half was because the defense stopped keying on him once they made the halftime adjustments based on his gimpy ankle. There is one problem with this however: he is big. Size doesn't get injured. Unless somebody had to get their leg amputated. If someone had to get their leg amputated they would weigh less and therefore be smaller, technically.
- Kasen Williams struggled to get open. Monte Kiffin's defense rotated coverage to help on top of Williams in addition to having one of the top-two corners in the PAC-12 (along with Desmond Trufant) shadowing him: Nickell Robey. There is no question that, aside from his touchdown throw in the first quarter, he was blanketed.
- Shotgun runs? The offense was run mostly out of shotgun for the entirety of the game. When Bishop Sankey has had success running the football is has been out of single-back, multiple tight-end sets. I understand Steve Sarkisian was trying to set up something with his motioning of Jaydon Mickens across the formation on nearly every play, but it got to the point where Sankey could not get a head of steam.
- Defensively, the game ball would have to go to Danny Shelton. The big boy inside had his best game of the season, as he pushed the pocket into Matt Barkley, helping to disrupt his vision. He had numerous tackles in the backfield of Silas Redd and Curtis McNeal. Shelton went up against a very good center in Khaled Holmes and won.
- Considering this is an instant reaction piece I will name a few more players who had a big impact and how: Marcus Peters (interception, fiery play throughout), Trufant (strong coverage of Marquis Lee and Robert Woods, whoever he was aligned against), Josh Banks (penetration and pass rush) and Travis Feeney (making plays all over the place).
What are your instant reactions?
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Addiction is a disease that affects millions of people worldwide. It is a disease that can affect almost anyone. In addiction treatment there are typically two types of settings, inpatient or outpatient. Both serve the same purpose, which is to help individuals suffering from addiction achieve a successful recovery. However, both treatment settings vary. The purpose of inpatient rehab is to provide individuals with a place to reside while receiving intensive treatment and care. Inpatient treatment tends to be more intense than outpatient treatment as individuals are required to stay on premises 24/7 during their treatment. Inpatient rehab was created with the intent of giving individuals a place where they can receive treatment and solely focus on their recovery without any distractions. Inpatient addiction treatment centers Tampa goes above and beyond to provide clients with the information needed to select a drug rehab facility.
Treating addiction is very complex, it requires implementing the use of multiple effective treatment approaches. Which is why it is important to make the right choice when enrolling in rehab. Although enrolling in rehab is a good thing, enrolling in the wrong rehab could be a bad thing. When choosing a rehab center, you should conduct an assessment to determine if the center is the right choice for you. Tampa substance abuse inpatient can help you choose the right one.
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These are just a few of the factors which should be taken into consideration. Don't enroll in just any rehab center. Call Tampa substance abuse inpatient rehab, and learn what your options are.
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Always keep in mind that detox is the first step in recovery from addiction. It is vital to receive a medically assisted detox at a detox treatment center prior to enrolling in rehab. Getting started with inpatient rehab requires committing to recovery. Once you have made the brave decision to commit to your recovery, you are ready to change your life for the better. Call the helpline now at 813-283-4305 to speak with a knowledgeable representative about getting started with your treatment. At drug treatment centers Tampa, you can expect nothing but professional treatment. Call now.


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Reform Conservatism Needs Place
It is once again a summer of conservative reform. Just as last year's swells of heat and humidity were accompanied by a public discussion outlining the case for a "reform conservatism" by Ross Douthat, Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry, and others, so 2014's retreat of spring has been marked by the release of "Room to Grow," a 120-page prospective agenda designed to drag contemporary American conservatism out of 1981's death grip and give it marching orders fit to the challenges of the present day. Yuval Levin's introduction calls the effort "a conservative governing vision" that articulates how conservatives can embrace policy solutions deriving from their understanding of how society best operates: decentralized and interdependent, not atomized and anonymous. The, by one count 22, policy proposals contained within "Room to Grow" address health care policy and the tax code, education reform and work-life balance, financial/regulatory reforms and family-friendly federal policies.
As responses rolled in, Levin clarified what he saw as a persistent liberal misperception of "Room to Grow" and its associated project, as the GOP's answer to Clintonian DLC centrism:
From my point of view (and I can speak only for myself of course), the key point to understand about what people are calling "reform conservatism" is that it is an effort to move the Republican party to the right. And in particular, it is an effort to move from arguing about how much we should be willing to spend on the liberal welfare state to arguing about how to replace it with a conservative approach to government that advances our vision of a free society.
It is not in this sense a response to the Tea Party movement (and of course it predates that movement by some years) but rather a response to the fat and happy, big-business-oriented, go along to get along, aimless centrism of too much of the Republican party over the past decade, which has been perfectly happy to argue about the cost (if that!) of our government, rather than about its purpose and structure, provided its own friends got a piece of the action. [emphasis added]
Levin's introduction to "Room to Grow" described the aims and purposes of such a pushing of the GOP to the right:
The premise of conservatism has always been, on the contrary, that what matters most about society happens in the space between the individual and the state—the space occupied by families, communities, civic and religious institutions, and the private economy—and that creating, sustaining, and protecting that space and helping all Americans take part in what happens there are among the foremost purposes of government.
That space between the potentially atomized individual and the looming Leviathan state is what prevents either from coming to dominate the social texture, and so hollow out the rich, interweaving webs of relationships that bind a society together. Yet "Room to Grow" rarely takes up the institutions of civil society as a central topic in and of themselves. The family is certainly given ample attention, with W. Bradford Wilcox, Carrie Lukas, and Robert Stein all articulating elements of an agenda to help encourage marriage and family formation and growth. Many of the other policy discussions would surely help support non-commercial civil society institutions, and involve topics very worthy in their own right, such as breaking up the biggest banks and encouraging employment. Indeed, one gets the sense that a great deal of attention has been paid to the vulnerability and uncertainty faced by so many middle- and working-class families, who often feel that they are barely hanging on.
That economic and social isolation is not the product of macroeconomic factors alone, however. The same liberation technocracy that, often out of the best of intentions, undermined the family with the unintended marriage penalties baked into the American welfare state ravaged the neighborhoods and communities that families were once able to rely upon when the hard times came (as they did much more often in previous generations). The progressive spirit came down upon the cities, bulldozing communities weak in the measurables of the moment, but strong in social solidarity and common support. It subsidized interstate systems and street grids that were placed in the hands of planners and engineers who would work with singular purpose to maximize car flow, without a thought given to community cohesion. The postwar explosion in building was dominated by a misunderstanding of human life manifested in suburban sprawl-friendly federal policy and local zoning codes alike. Their legacy has been a country largely built for a prosperous people seeking to purchase entertainment within the privacy of their own homes and backyards, not in town commons or on front porches.
When the days of easy money and economic booms ran out, the United States was left with countless communities struggling to make ends meet, even as they were left living in patterns planned for the luxuries of atomized life. The families Wilcox and Lukas design solutions to support, and Michael Strain proposes to employ, and all the rest of the "Room to Grow" authors orient their chapters around are in such straits, at least in part, because of the absence of community structures to help them support each other in the classic American spirit of "rugged communitarianism."
It is not surprising that "Room to Grow" didn't include these issues within its limited pages; the report covered a wide-ranging territory as it was, and solutions to community breakdown can be difficult to imagine. Recent years have seen a dawning awareness of the costs and causes of atomizing families and neighborhoods, however, and a group of planners and developers calling themselves New Urbanists have been working on recovering the wisdom of previous generations' community design, and developing solutions to help rebuild the American sense of place. Over the coming weeks and months, The American Conservative will be rolling out a project to take up this challenge, and show how a truly conservative reform agenda can live up to its full ambitions and take on the challenge of reinvigorating America's local communities and civil society institutions.
I hope you will join us this summer, and on through the year as we break new ground for very old purposes.


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Promises about Education on Deal-O-Meter
Will protect teacher pensions
Will "protect their retirement pensions from a return to Barnes-style investments that would put their financial security at risk."
Will continue Sonny Perdue's implementation of Race to the Top program
"As governor, I will convene teachers, parents, elected officials and education leaders from the 26 school districts involved to assure that Race to the Top funds are implemented effectively, so that we capitalize on our successes and implement them elsewhere in Georgia."
Allow students to progress to higher levels without having to complete unnecessary hours
Deal's plan would allow students to progress to higher levels without having to complete unnecessary hours…"We will no longer tie the hands of students and teachers by imposing arbitrary 'seat time' requirements."
Develop a plan to encourage the best science, technology, engineering and mathematics students to become teachers
"In order to restore Georgia's competitiveness in science, technology, engineering and mathematics, Deal will work with legislators, state and local school officials to develop a STEM Education Student Incentive Plan that will encourage our best and brightest science and math college students to pursue a course of study to become an educator in these fields. These incentives would be repaid over the course of a teacher's service in our public elementary, middle and high schools."
Allow teachers at underperforming schools accrue service credit at twice the normal rate
"Teachers who agree to dedicate their time in one of our state's most underperforming schools would further be rewarded by accruing service credit at twice the rate, earning two years of credit for each calendar year served."
Develop a plan for more specialized charter schools
"Develop specialized charter high schools with a focus on science, technology, engineering and math"
Create an education funding plan
"By June 30, 2011, Nathan Deal and a team of leaders will come up with possible improvements to better fund public education."
Pay off for working in tough schools 'still a goal,' spokeswoman says
In 2010, then-Congressman Nathan Deal unveiled a series of education initiatives he pledged to enact if voters would sign off on his plans for a job change and elect him Georgia's 82nd governor. Among them was the promise that teachers would have a big financial incentive to work in bad schools.
"Teachers who agree to dedicate their time in one of our state's most underperforming schools would further be rewarded by accruing service credit at twice the rate, earning two years of credit for each calendar year served," Deal said in a press release dated Sept. 7, 2010.
At that time, 503, or 22.6 percent, of the state's 2,221 public schools were failing to make adequate yearly progress, the measure of achievement under the federal No Child Left Behind law.
We checked in with some in-the-know education advocates to see whether they'd heard of any action on this Deal campaign promise. None had. "That's a campaign promise that probably fell victim to a comfortable electoral margin," one said.
We went to Deal's re-election campaign and spokeswoman Jennifer Talaber with some basic questions. Has the governor taken any steps to see whether this could become a reality or is feasible? Has he gotten any projections on the potential costs? Is he still pursuing this?
In one of several email exchanges that followed, Talaber said: "It's still a goal."
But other things had to come first, she said.
"In order to enact any merit-based incentives, we first had to fix the flawed (teacher) evaluation system which, when Deal came to office in 2011, was rating 99 percent of teachers as 'satisfactory'," Talaber said. "We did that in 2013."
The new evaluation system will be fully implemented during the 2014-2015 school year, she said.
"Once that groundwork is laid, we can begin pursuing new initiatives," Talaber said.
Deal's plan would allow teachers to earn two years of credit toward retirement for every one year they work in one of the state's most underperforming schools, the spokeswoman said.
No study has been done to determine the costs, Talaber said.
Under the Teacher Retirement System of Georgia, a teacher who retires with 30 years of service can draw about 60 percent of the average of his or her highest two consecutive years of pay. Some districts also offer their teachers a local pension or allow them to participate in Social Security.
As of May 31, the state's teacher retirement system had 214,567 active members and 104,091 retired members. The system paid out more than $3.5 billion in fiscal 2013 and expects to pay out $3.7 billion for the year ending June 30, said Jeff Ezell, the system's executive director.
Deal "remains committed to improving the quality of students' education and rewarding Georgia's most effective teachers," Talaber said.


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Gardener and seed saver Cate Henderson, who oversees the gardens, offered tours and hosted a seed saving workshop.
What's the difference between heirloom and commercially-produced tomatoes?
Flavour tops the list. Just ask any of the 150 tomato tasters attending this year's popular Heirloom Tomato Day at Providence Motherhouse in late August.
Heirloom, or open-pollinated tomatoes, are varieties that have been reproduced for generations. Some have histories spanning hundreds of years, like the 207 year-old Yellow Pear harvested in the sacred gardens at Providence Motherhouse.
"I find the flavours particularly intense this year, possibly due to the drought conditions we have experienced," says gardener Cate Henderson, caretaker of the seed sanctuary. "These tomato varieties are remarkably hardy and have not suffered this year despite the lack of water. People were amazed to find that we do not water or otherwise irrigate the plants at all and they have still managed to produce a bountiful crop of fruit!"
Is a tomato a vegetable or fruit? This controversial question was actually put to the U.S. Supreme Court over a century ago. If you guessed vegetable, you're right! In 1893, the U.S. Supreme Court, in a unanimous decision, ruled that the tomato be classified as a vegetable. However, botanically, they are considered to be fruits.
Tomatoes bearing fruit names are grown on the sacred gardens including these varieties; Pineapple, Lemon Drop and Garden Peach.
For the first time, live music was featured at the event. Just like the tomatoes being celebrated, seed saver Landon Chatterton and his band performed heirloom songs; music passed down through generations.
In 2008, the Heirloom Seed Sanctuary received the prestigious Silver Sustainable Living Award given to Canadians who celebrate the commitment to protect, preserve and restore the country's environment. There are only two recognized Heirloom Seed Sanctuaries in Canada.
From Cate Henderson:
Heartfelt thanks to our stellar volunteers. The Heirloom Seed Sanctuary has benefitted from the lay community of Kingston by more than 550 volunteer labour hours. By the end of the seed saving season of 2012 alone, we will have logged well over 650 hours, equal to almost half a staff person! Gillian Boden has been volunteering for the Heirloom Seed Sanctuary since 2009, and Lynn Scott since 2010. They really know their seed saving! Volunteering seems to be a win-win activity, since it provides the HSS with much-needed labour and offers volunteers with seeds, seed saving expertise and resources they can use in their own gardens. Thanks so much everyone!