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+Canadian/Australian Sweetheart
Check my Twitter @Alexis_Arnaud for more pictures!
Originally from the sunny coasts of Australia, I moved to Canada to further my studies. Although I may have lost my golden tan, I still maintain an affinity for surfing during my travels. In addition to the perfect wave, I'm always on the hunt for a tennis partner or someone to join this classically trained pianist in a duet.
As for my looks, I am the perfect mix of innocence and allure. I represent the lithe girl next door. My smooth skin, demure personality and feminine curves create the perfect dream come true. Long slender legs and a small waist with full hips that are perfect to grab and pull me closer… The passion that flickers in my doe-like eyes when you look my way can be hypnotizing.
I believe when it comes to appearances, less is more. I am all-natural and minimally made-up. For our date you can expect me to dress in a fashionable yet understated and classic manner. I have a down-to-earth personality and humour which allows me to get along with just about anyone who wishes to relax and enjoy a break from life's rushed pace.
Alexis Arnaud is a 5'7", slender, all natural, 20 year old caucasian woman with long brunette hair and green eyes.
She is available for Men, and Couples.
Playing the piano
Red wine
With your initial email please include one of the following: a provider reference, a picture of your government ID, or a link to your LinkedIn page.
- your address book (vcard)
- your smartphone (QR code)
Scan the following QR code with your smartphone to view or save Alexis Arnaud's contact information:

subset: commoncrawl


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Roman Catholics in the Pilsen neighborhood held their 32nd annual Via Crucis Vivente procession today, a traditional re-enactment of the last hours of Jesus.
The procession began at Providence of God Church just east of 18th and Halsted streets about 9 a.m., making its way to Harrison Park, 12 blocks west on Halsted Street.
The Via Crucis Vivente -- Latin for "Living Way of the Cross" -- procession is a traditional Good Friday event in many Roman Catholic countries.


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12-00333 Power Tripconnect
Protect your Computers & Electronics, Home Entertainment, Large Appliances
Product Specifications
The Power Tripconnect prevents damage from power surges and dips (brownouts) caused by power shutdowns and over and under voltage conditions from unstable power. The duration of these conditions is normally longer and can be especially damaging to air conditioners, electric motors and expensive electronic equipment running under load.
The Power Tripconnect disconnects the power altogether when these conditions occur and remains off for 10 seconds giving the power feed tie to stabilize. The Power Tripconnect is easy to use and LED indicators are provided.
Product Application
Protect your Computers & Electronics, Home Entertainment, Large Appliances
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Shipping Updates...
Hi everyone,
As most of you probably noticed, our picking and packing emails have gone out for all orders finalised in time. If you've not completed the pledge manager yet, the next wave of shipping should go out around Jan 20th, so you'll need to complete the pledge manager by Jan 17th or so,
It has been an extremely hectic week for us here, so our apologies for the lack of updates! The biggest news is that we suffered a delay with book production. We got samples back of our printed rulebook and it was just not what we'd hoped for in terms of quality. This meant adjusting the print options, and reprinting them all. As such, we incurred an extra 2 week delay on the print and they will not be in our warehouse until next week. A 2 week difference, while a total pain at this time of the year, was small enough to justify the big increase in print quality compared to the early proofs and still lets us get everything shipped out in December.
We also suffered a delay of a few days in customs, but all should be good now, and the last of the plastic should be in our warehouse tomorrow :)
The Maelstrom's Edge box set boxes are all done, are in our warehouse and are looking great! Everyone who has seen them so far has been very impressed with the vibrancy and we cant wait until you get your copies!
We'll be packing over the next two weeks most likely, and then shipping between Christmas and New Year. Terrible timing for assembling models during the holidays, but they will still be with the vast majority of backers before the holidays are over, and will be with everyone while the weather is bad outside so painting, modelling and gaming can keep you cozy!
For the 16 backers who have not been able to finalise their payment yet - we have space allocated in the packing queue for your stuff. We will sort it out this week with you. Your orders might go out a few days after the rest as a result, but will still be in the wave 1 shipping. If you failed to complete your transaction before, please try now as we've fixed a bunch of the things that were hampering people. If it still fails, we will email you within approximately 48 hours to follow up.
For the 2 backers who have non-standard boxes (cardboard contents only), these will be sent slightly after wave 1 to avoid risk of errors. We will have to manually process your orders rather than going through our shipping system like the rest of the orders, so are a bit more tied down around the holiday season.
For New Zealanders - anyone with multiple box sets in an order has had their order split into two distinct orders in our packaging/postal system to keep you below the NZ customs threshold.
Thank you all very much for your support and patience - nearing delivery is extremely exciting for us all! To be able to do it on time is especially rewarding and we cant wait to see what you do with your models!
Spiral Arm Studios
Spiral Arm Studios USA Creator on
@Larry, No problem, you'll be shipped out in the next wave by the end of Jan now (possibly earlier if we can fit it between now and then). We'll be sending emails out to everyone who has not completed the pledge manager at the end of January as I'm sure there are plenty who have had it slip their mind! :)
Larry Irish on
Oops - my bad. :( I thought I'd already done that but... *now* it's done. :)
Spiral Arm Studios USA Creator on
@Larry, from what we can see you've not completed the pledge manager yet. You need to visit maelstromsedge.com and sign up with the email address that you use here on kickstarter. It should then pull in everything correctly, you enter your address and we get the terrain shipped off to you in the next batch of shipping. Feel free to message or email us (email@example.com) if you need any more help! You can also read through the pledge manager kickstarter update for more information: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/medge/maelstroms-edge-a-next-gen-sci-fi-miniatures-warga/posts/1434212
WarriorPriest on
@Larry. It depends on what group your order was in and where you live. Does the status show shipped? If so for how long?
Larry Irish on
My order is just for terrain sprues but haven't received anything so far. Should I be concerned?
WarriorPriest on
I am on the east coast so here is hoping for before the new year.
Spiral Arm Studios USA Creator on
@WarriorPriest, it depends if US customs is operating at full efficiency. In theory you should get them before the new year, and they will be in the US before the new year, but shipping times take anything from 2 days to 3 weeks depending on USPS or the courier our shipping agents end up using.
WarriorPriest on
So for those of us in the US we can expect them after the new year???


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Hound of the Baskervilles
London. Autumn. 1889. The famous consulting detective Sherlock Holmes and his friend and colleague Dr. John Watson are called in to investigate a most intriguing mystery: What could have frightened Sir Charles Baskerville to death? Is there an ancient curse on the Baskerville family? Is Sir Henry Baskerville, Sir Charles' young heir, being stalked by a supernatural Hound from Hell or a diabolically clever murderer? In this new adaptation of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's greatest adventure, Holmes and Watson pursue the answers to these questions from their rooms in Baker Street, through the teeming streets of London, and on to the windswept moors of Devonshire. With a dash of humor, this thrilling feast culminates on the fog-bound reaches of Dartmoor, where finally the secret of the Hound of the Baskervilles is revealed.
ACT Theatre Mainstage - 918 M Ave. Anacortes, WA 98221
Thursday, Friday, and Saturday performances @ 7:30 pm
Sunday matinees @ 2:00 pm
All tickets $20
Call (360) 293-6829 to purchase through the box office or
Box Office Hours
Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday: 10 am - 2 pm
Thursday and Friday: 5 pm - 8 pm
Saturday 5 - 8 pm, Sunday 12 - 3 pm (during the run of a show only)


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Claude Gibb
Claude Gibb is our traditional 3-star, on campus accommodation, providing value-for-money single rooms with tea and coffee making facilities, wash hand basins and iPod docking stations.
There are 12 rooms to a corridor, sharing three shower and toilet areas. Claude Gibb boasts a large dining room, TV room and vending machines.
Breakfasts (full English or continental) are served in the Claude Gibb dining hall, and lunch and evening meals can also be arranged for large groups (minimum of 20).
Availability: Mid-June to early September
Bed and Breakfast, From £43 per night
Claude Gibb Hall


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This was the homily from this week's worship service, delivered by Hugh Hollowell. The text was from Matthew 13:1-9 and 18-23.
I grew up on a farm.
Well, a has-been farm. By the time I was born, we didn't depend on the crops for our living. Dad worked in town, and so we just had a huge garden, and some chickens and pigs and goats.
Because ours was a farming community, and because Dad worked in town, I spent a lot of my time with farmers, and retired farmers. People who had spent their whole life planting seeds and then waiting to see if this year they would earn a living. To see if this year there would be money to pay the bills, if this year there would be new clothes for the kids, money to provide a Christmas.
These were people who were drop dead serious about farming. They farmed as if their life depended on it. Because, in lots of ways, it did.
So, the one thing you did not do was waste seed.
Every year, you would hold back a part of the crop to use as seed next year. That seed was the means to your whole livelihood. Every dream you had about the future was tied up in that seed. It was precious.
The ground was no less important than the seed. You had to bust it up, then run the cultivator over it, and then use the harrow to smooth the clods. Then, and only then, when the ground was at its most perfect, did you risk putting your precious seed into it. To do less would be wasteful.
So, when Jesus tells the story of the planter who scatters his seeds all over the place, my first thought is that this planter is a really bad farmer. He is risking his future on bad soil, and he is wasting his seed.
See, if you only have so much seed, you can't take chances on the soil. You only bet on the sure thing.
But this planter doesn't think that way. This planter takes chances. This planter is willing to risk it. This planter is almost promiscuous with his seed, scattering it here and there. Maybe it will grow in the rocks. Maybe it will sprout on the path. To not take a chance is to not ever know.
In the church I grew up in, I always heard this passage as an evangelism text. "You share the word, and those that are ready will snatch it up!" In the way they told the story, they wanted to make it a story about the ground.
But Jesus says it is a story about a sower – a planter. In other words, Jesus is saying, watch what the planter does in the text.
The planter takes risks on all sorts of ground. The planter is reckless and has hope that the seed will sprout on the rocks, on the path, in the thorns. The planter has hope, and the planter is generous.
That is what God is like, and what we are called to be like, by imitating Jesus.
When we follow the way that Jesus modeled for us, instead of only sharing our love and our hope with the people that are worth it, we love generously. We love hopefully, because we have high hopes that the love we share in the bad places will take root and sprout and bear something.
So instead of looking for the right kind of soil, we can focus on sharing love instead. Because unlike seed, there is enough love for everyone.by


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You do the research
Make a plan
Set to work
Voila - It Worked!!
|On the Ridge - 2 x 3.5 inches - Graphite
My adventure with miniatures made with graphite have really given me lots of new ideas. Up until now my miniature work has been based in ink and watercolour using special brushes and fine tip pens to develop my image. I love to draw but I didn't feel I could draw a miniature because my tools seemed too large!!
But after my first drawing, "On the Watch" (see last post) turned out so well I just had to try more. So many "what if's" popped into my head!
What if . . . the picture was smaller
. . .the whole body was drawn
. . .more of the environment was there
. . the format changed
So flushed with success, "On the Ridge" was created!!
Lots is happening:
I have taken on the 30 Paintings in 30 Days Challenge with a fellow blogger, Sea Dean. She has set up a great site for artists to post their pictures and anyone can vote on their favourites. We are already at Day 22, where did the time go!! I have put a page on my blog for all my challenge pictures, you will see it on my header.
Also, Artists, my all day Marketing Workshop is set for Sunday, February 22, 2015, 10-3pm. Build your Marketing Skills to become an Independent Artist on your terms. See Marketing Page for more Information & Registration. Only 2 spots left.
Don't live in the Fraser Valley? I am available for presentations to your art group or come and stay, I have a special workshop Bed and Breakfast rate. Just email for info.
And you thought January was a slow month!?? Have a good day.
And you thought January was a slow month!?? Have a good day.
Contact Wendy to purchase any of my Work. Collectors enjoy a 10% discount on all original work.


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May what I do flow from me like a river, neither forcing nor holding back, the way it is with children.
-Ranier Maria Rilke
Ivan Illich said that when we make ourselves into loudspeakers, we destroy the place between us, between you and I, which is where the subversion of the Samaritan takes place. We set up a new boundary. Boundaries mark out frontiers, real boundaries, symbolic boundaries, imaginary boundaries. When I titled Borderline, this was the nub; and that boundary-thinking maps onto war thinking, and therefore male thinking. Bear with me through a few widely dispersed excerpts from the book. It might seem like I'm leading you through a bog with pockets of psychological and philosophical quicksand, but you can get a few peeks from different approaches into where I'm going with this boundary preoccupation:
One of the psychological manifestations of this preoccupation with boundaries growing out of war-thought among men is male fear of fusion. Women constitute a danger to men, and that is the danger of fusion, the permeation of boundaries implied by mutual emotional surrender. The presumed weakness and irrationality of women is actually understood as a contaminant to men; and men police the boundary of this fear with control over women. Men may cross the boundary, in the same way a solider leaves his firebase to conduct an operation, but no one from the outside is allowed inside the perimeter. Intimacy is a form of danger—the danger that one might be found out, but also the danger of becoming vulnerable. Vulnerability is what war-making and war-making metaphors aim to minimize; and the coincidence of male fear of vulnerability and this imperative of war is one we can ill afford to overlook. (pp. 90-1)
Mary Douglas describes various cultural norms associated with purity and taboos, and she concludes that all societies have psychic demarcations—in fact, no society can be effectively constituted without some notion of outside and inside, of where there is order and what might threaten chaos. We must avoid a purely psychological critique of Descartes, because while anxiety is understood in the (post)modern mind as primarily a therapeutic issue, something that happens in an already Cartesianized self, epistemological crisis is social. This seventeenth-century epistemological crisis was characterized by the terrifying shifts of these boundaries; and Descartes was reinscribing a new internal-external, purity-pollution paradigm to recapture order from chaos.
Descartes felt that he needed to re-ground conviction, but to do so he had to invent "the mind" as something that is "inner." Bordo describes this invention in a chapter titled "The emergence of inwardness." The fact that we now find this idea of the inward mind so unremarkable is a testament to the broad acceptance of Descartes's episteme. (p. 131)
Macintyre said that Freud unmasked our unmasking as projections of ourselves. The context of his remark is the failure of modernity manifest in the emotivist self to establish any universally acceptable basis for moral decision-making, based on the incommensurable premises between contending rootless "individuals." Said differently, society had become a collection of "discordant dispositions," necessitating bureaucratic control. Freud's accomplishment, according to MacIntyre, was to explain why the unmasking of one position by the other is seemingly interminable. There was no rational basis any longer for asserting a moral position. Each of us is the captive of preconscious desires in conflict with irrational but necessary superegos. MacIntyre goes on to say that Freud was mistaken in his belief that he had made some moral discovery, rather than creating an insight about the ramifications of the emotive self.
[Jessica] Benjamin's criticism of Freud is based on Freud's implicit acceptance of the Homo economicus—in Freud's more feral version above, Homo homini lupus, a wolf man—a pure strategic being, trapped inside the boundaries of his redoubt, himself the subject and the world his object. Benjamin calls this approach to psychoanalysis intrapsychic, and against it she proposes a model of psychic life that is fundamentally social, between subjects, not between subject and objects. This approach is called intersubjective.
"The intersubjective view, as distinguished from the intrapsychic, refers to what happens in the field of self and other. Whereas the intrapsychic perspective conceives of the person as a discrete unit with a complex internal structure, intersubjective theory describes capacities that emerge in the interaction between self and others. Thus intersubjective theory, even when describing the self alone, sees its aloneness as a particular point in the spectrum of relationships rather than as the original, 'natural state' of the individual." (Benjamin)
The term intersubjectivity was coined by Jürgen Habermas. Benjamin's thesis begins with the human need for recognition. Human beings have a need to belong. They need to be with other people, and they need to be recognized by them as well as granting recognition. Synonyms for recognition in common speech include acceptance, affirmation, validation, and love. Recognition is mutual. Both of us need to do it at once. For you to recognize me, I need to acknowledge you as a subject like myself, and vice versa. Research with mothers and infants shows that this mutuality begins very early. Unlike the object-relations approach of intrapsychic analysis, the child is not merely an appetite aimed at a breast or seeking warmth. The child and mother actually recognize one another. An infant in short order knows the sight, smell, and sound of his or her mother and takes pleasure in her presence beyond the mere satisfaction of appetites.
In this mutuality, psychic boundaries are necessarily permeable; therefore there is an element of vulnerability. There is also an element of self-assertion. Self-assertion exists in tension with the desire for mutuality when we simultaneously recognize another and want something from him or her. When that tension, or balance, is broken by the polarization of self-assertion and vulnerability between two people, the love that is constituted in mutuality—in fusion, as Hartsock puts it—gives itself over to a dynamic of domination. Benjamin emphasizes this dynamic in her study of sadomasochistic relations, when "the inability to sustain paradox . . . convert[s] the exchange of recognition into domination and submission."
The "fit" that Illich describes in the encounter between the Samaritan and the robbed and beaten Jew (Luke 10:25–37) is that mutuality, which in the parable transgresses social boundaries, renders them permeable with love. It is the paradox that you are mine and still you, and I am yours and still me. Beck talks about love as the permeability of boundaries in the context of disgust psychology, saying, "Love is on the inside of the symbolic self." This intersubjective dynamic creates a situation in which "the other plays an active part in the struggle of the individual to creatively discover and accept reality."
Refusal to accept reality can disrupt intersubjectivity, and failure of mutual recognition makes acceptance impossible. Referring to Hegel, Benjamin summarizes this paradox as the simultaneous need for the "independence and dependence of the self-conscious." In Hegel, this is a struggle to the death that leads to a master-slave relation, because in Hegel, as in Freud and Hobbes, mutuality is foreclosed by a view of the person as a strategic being. Benjamin allows for a tension between independence and dependence in which mutuality is possible. (pp. 239-41)
In military parlance, tactics are a subset of strategy, not its opposite. In De Certeau, they are opposites. Strategy for the military relates to national or overarching objectives. Strategy is executed through various campaigns—the subset of strategy. Campaigns are further broken down into specific combat engagements, or battles. The techniques employed in the battlespace are called tactics, and the tactical level is a subset of the campaign. This can be represented visually as Strategy > Campaign > Tactics (> Techniques?)
A small unit—a modern light infantry platoon, for example—might be part of a counterinsurgency campaign in a certain region, which is part of a national strategy. Imagine this exemplary platoon on a long-range, dismounted patrol. To establish a patrol base to rest and plan, this platoon will establish a perimeter, a single, continuous boundary with an inside and an outside. A perimeter is formed when the members of the platoon face outward, establishing interlocking fields of fire. What that means is the sectors, observed by individual platoon members, overlap one another to create a kind of ring of death. If anyone enters into any member's field of fire, that person is subject to be shot; and because every sector overlaps, that person will be fired upon from two locations. Everyone aims outward; no one aims inward. In the center of this perimeter, the command element establishes a little position in which to supervise, communicate, and plan. In military parlance, the security perimeter is a tactic, a technique employed at a specific place in the battlespace.
However, in De Certeau's terms, this perimeter is a highly strategic action. Here is the crucial difference between the military's use of the terms strategy and tactics and De Certeau's; and we are going to adopt De Certeau's use of the terms.
Strategy, for de Certeau, means a self-isolating calculus. That is to say, strategy begins with an enemy (even if that enemy is seen as a "target population" or, in business, a competitor or client) who is the object of your intentions, and upon whom you desire to impose your will. A strategist requires a place—some segregated dwelling for the strategy's executors. Strategy requires a base of operations, some place that is on the inside—central to the execution of the strategy, and separated from the surrounding environment, everywhere that is not committed to the strategy but influences the strategy's object, and therefore yet another part of the strategic calculus. Isolation is a strategic necessity.
[Enemy, or Target. Object of intentions. Desire to impose one's will. Strategic redoubt (an isolated place marked Inside with all else Outside) (Subject-Object?)]
Look at our notional light infantry platoon. Look at the actual headquarters for Monsanto, Lockheed-Martin, Yale University, the Vatican, or, sometimes, the suburban family. There is a barrier separating us, the insiders, from them, the outsiders. There is planning to impose our will on someone outside—a "target." Institutions embody strategic logic [which is one reason to resist institutionalization in many cases]. We have built an entire edifice of business, teaching, medicine, transportation, food production, and politics based on the isolationist logic of strategy. Homo economicus is a strategic isolate. He is alone, competing with others for scarce resources, and he is suspicious. (pp. 87-9)
Like the Roman fetiales, stories "go in a procession" ahead of social practices in order to open a field for them.
-De Certeau
America is the exemplification of what I call the project of modernity. That project is the attempt to produce a people that believes it should have no story except the story it chose when it had no story. That is what Americans mean by freedom.
-Stanley Hauerwas
At the beginning, there is a fiction determined by a "symbolic" system that acts as a law, and thus a representation (a theater) or a fable (a "saying") of the body. That is to say, a body is postulated as the signifier (the term) in a contract. This discursive image is supposed to inform an unknown "reality" formerly designated as "flesh." The transition from the fiction to the unknown that will give it a body is made by means of instruments that multiply and diversify the unpredictable resistances of the body to be (con)formed. An indefinite fragmentation of the apparatus is necessary in order to adjust and apply each of these sayings and/or types of knowledge about the body, which work as unifying models, to the opaque carnal reality that gradually reveals its complex organization as it resists successive efforts to modify and control it. Between the tool and the flesh, there is thus an interaction that shows itself on the one hand by a change in the fiction (a correction of knowledge) and, on the other, by the cry, which shrieks an inarticulable pain and constitutes the unthought part of bodily difference.
As the products of a craft, and later of an industry, these tools multiply around the images which they serve and which are the empty centers, the pure signifiers of social communication, "non-entities"; the tools represent in concrete form the tortuous knowledge, sharp sinuosities, perforating ruses, and incisive detours that penetration into the labyrinthine body requires and produces. In that way, they become the metallic vocabulary of the knowledge that they bring back from these expeditions. They are the figures of an experimental knowledge won through the pain of the bodies that change themselves into engravings and maps of these conquests. The flesh that has been cut out or added to, putrefied or put back together tells the story of the high deeds of all these tools, these incorruptible heroes. Over the span of a life or a fashion, they illustrate the actions of a tool. They are its human, ambulatory, and transitory stories.
-De Certeau (p. 145)
What the map cuts up, the story cuts across.
-De Certeau
[N]ormative discourse "operates" only if it has already become a story, a text articulated on something real and speaking in its name, i.e., a law made into a story and historicized (une loi historiee et historicizee), recounted by bodies. Its being made into a story is the presupposition of its producing further stories and thereby making itself believed. And the tool ensures precisely the passage from discourse to the story through the interventions that incarnate the law by making bodies conform to it and thus make it appear to be recited by reality itself. From initiation ceremonies to tortures, every social orthodoxy makes use of instruments to give itself the form of a story and to produce the credibility attached to a discourse articulated by bodies. (De Certeau, 149)
From the inside or the outside, they correct an excess or a lack, but in relationship to what? As in the case of removing the hair from one's legs or putting mascara on one's eyelashes, having one's hair cut or having hair reimplanted, this activity of extracting or adding on is carried out by reference to a code. It keeps bodies within the limits set by a norm. In this respect, clothes themselves can be regarded as instruments through which a social law maintains its hold on bodies and its members, regulates them and exercises them through changes in fashion as well as through military maneuvers. The automobile, like a corset, also shapes them and makes them conform to a model of correct posture; it is an orthopedic and orthopractic instrument. The foods that are selected by traditions and sold in the markets of a society also shape bodies at the same time that they nourish them; they impose on bodies a form and a muscle tone that function like an identity card. Glasses, cigarettes, shoes, etc., reshape the physical "portrait" in their own ways. Is there a limit to the machinery by which a society represents itself in living beings and makes them its representations? Where does the disciplinary apparatus's end that displaces and corrects, adds or removes things from these bodies, malleable under the instrumentation of so many laws? To tell the truth, they become bodies only by conforming to these codes. Where and when is there ever anything bodily that is not written, remade, cultured, identified by the different tools which are part of a social symbolic code? Perhaps at the extreme limit of these tireless inscriptions, or perforating them with lapses, there remains only the cry: it escapes, it escapes them.
From the first to the last cry, something else breaks out with them, the body's difference, alternately in fans and ill-bred, intolerable in the child, the possessed, the madman or the sick—a lack of "good manners" . . . Economic individualism is no less effective than totalitarianism in carrying out this articulation of the law by means of bodies. It just proceeds by different methods. Instead of crushing groups in order to mark them with the unique brand of a power, it atomizes them first and multiplies the constraining networks of exchange that shape individual units in conformity with the rules (or "fashions") of socioeconomic and cultural contracts." (De Certeau, 148-9)
Just as Star Wars originated as a Japanese film about Samurai (by a Japanese filmmaker influenced by Westerns), the American Western film traces its origins to Medieval mythical romances featuring the Knight Errant.[1] The formula, which frequently includes a Damsel in Distress trope, is overlaid onto "dime novels"[2] of the mythical moving frontier of the United States' westward expansion. Then it jumped into moving pictures in 1894, originally recorded by and for a carnival called Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show.[3] This was followed in the twentieth century by the increasingly popular Western pulp novels of Zane Grey, Louis L'Amour, Max Brand, and others.With film reaching even non-readers, however, the mythology was firmly fixed in the American social imaginary. The United States was troubled by the legacy of the Civil War, a split that was only partially healed when masses of Southern and Northern soldiers went to the trenches together during World War I. The narrative that filled that space (the latter nineteenth century) was the idealized white narrative of westward expansion. In keeping with the knight errant theme, our heroes were almost always armed and riding a horse.
Like all genres, the Western has been adapted for each succeeding zeitgeist. From a fictionalized American pre-WWII progress myth, it was transformed into war propaganda, then social criticism, then anti-communist allegories for the Cold War, then antihero narratives for the sixties and seventies, and most recently into a handful of liberal/post-feminist stories.[4]
Film Westerns first won their popularity during the Great Depression, when mass unemployment created a crisis of masculinity among American white men.[5]
[EXT] In the United States, Hollywood was mobilized as a palliative. Chirpy movies with happy endings became a major film entrée. Westerns were most popular with men and boys. The Western hearkened to American mythical frontier masculinity, portrayed by "virile" men—heroic, autonomous characters who dominated women, land, animals, and savages, a story of mastery and control as the antidote to the vagaries of the Great depression.
"The hero's triumph over the wild things dramatizes the mastery of the patriarchy," writes Margery Hourihan. Virility breaks down the resistance of all things passive—and we see in many films, as well as in bodice-ripper literature, how the female lead nearly swoons before the masculine mojo of the leading man.[/EXT][6]
When the war came, of course, Westerns were displaced by war films; but when the war ended, Westerns became the Cold War favorite in the U.S.[7] In 1947, major American filmmakers did fourteen Western movies. In 1948, they did thirty-one. By 1956, they were up to forty-six a year. From then until the early seventies, Westerns were consistently the most popular film genre in the U.S., netting a third of all American moviegoers.[8]
[EXT]The postwar Western movie had several archetypical storylines: the town-tamer, the cavalry and the Indians, the revised outlaw, the gunfighter, the High Noon showdown, and the good man with a gun. The Western genre gave each of these narratives a wide "mythic space" in which to tell these differing stories. Cold War Westerns all had some defining borderline, whether it was a river, a fort's palisade, a street, a fence, or the (fragile) boundary between civilization and wilderness, or savagery. A hero or protagonist had to cross those borderlines and by transgressing them "reveal the meaning of the frontier line" as he entered the dark side to protect the good side. Sometimes, after we were schooled in the psychoanalytic wolf-man, as the protagonist dealt with the "darkness" across the border, he also dealt with the darkness within himself. It is always a he. In the Western, the audience was to understand the boundary that separates their past from the viewing present, and therein they understood this to be a tale of progress. Last but certainly not least, there was a resolution, a "regeneration" accomplished by male violence . . .
"A cowboy will not submit tamely to an insult," said Theodore Roosevelt,[9] "and is ever ready to avenge his own wrongs; nor has he an overwrought fear of shedding blood. He possesses, in fact, few of the emasculated, milk-and-water moralities admired by the pseudo-philanthropists; but he does possess, to a very high degree, the stern, manly qualities that are invaluable to a nation." Women in the Cold War Western were portrayed as either markers of civilization and domesticity or threats to manhood—sometimes both at the same time. "While the essential qualities of womanhood that tie women to domesticity are nostalgically honored in Westerns," writes Edward Buscombe, "femininity as a social force is represented as a threat to masculine independence and as the negative against which individual masculinities are tested."[/EXT][10]
In breaking with the Cold War motifs during the seventies, Westerns kept a good deal of the machismo, but dropped the ethical artifices, like the "spaghetti westerns," or they tried to become edgier (with sex especially, Hollywood's go-to for increasing market share) with more "modern" sensibilities (usually portrayed by revising mythical hair and clothing fashions, or thumbing their noses at "virtue"). McCabe and Mrs. Miller come to mind. Recent attempts at "Western realism," like the Deadwood series, have constructed detail-fictions around historical "facts," and to make sure we know they are "realistic," they have plenty of nudity, sex, and bad language, including inserting the term "cocksucker" into every other sentence for almost every character in the series, including the Chinese.[11]
[1] All genres that feature weaponized phalluses, whether guns, light sabers, or swords and lances.[2] Fictionalized accounts of actual people: Billy the Kid, Wyatt Earp, Jesse James, et al, many of them petty criminals (including the law enforcement officers) more interested in inflating their reputations than anything else.[3] Yes, American popular culture did assimilate its main ideas about a period of history based on the racist productions of a carnival barker. William "Buffalo Bill" Cody (1846–1917) was himself a great admirer of William Sherman, who called for outright Indian extermination, and of George Custer, whom he saw as a white martyr. Cody's show, usually billed alongside military tournaments, reenacted "battles" between white men and Indians that emphasized Indian savagery and white nobility.[4] Like The Quick and the Dead, The Ballad of Little Jo, Bad Girls, Gang of Roses, and The Missing.[5] Men, who in the postwar era were encouraged to see themselves as providers for their families, were either cast adrift on the job market or forced into working conditions they would not have heretofore accepted. Unemployed men found their wives less subject to them, especially when the wives were finding spot work unavailable to men. Children listened more to their mothers than their fathers. Drunkenness was accompanied far more frequently by men physically attacking their wives; and for many men the "pansy" became a target for their violent insecurities. Active widespread homophobic violence came to the fore for the first time in the United States during the Great depression.[6] Goff, Borderline, 316.[7] Westerns supported the peculiar military adventure in Korea in as much as they inscribed racialized and militarized boundaries between civilization and threat. The popular Marine Colonel Lewis "Chesty" Puller—a good friend of Western film director John Ford (Fort Apache, Rio Grande, et al.)—gave a speech to his troops in Korea, exhorting them to write to their families about getting "harder" for America: "Tell 'em there's no secret weapon for our country but to get hard, to get in there and fight. " want you to make 'em understand. Our country won't go on forever, if we stay soft as we are now. There won't be an America—because some foreign soldiers will invade us and take our women and breed a hardier race."[8] Ibid., 367.[9] Roosevelt was a huge promoter of the frontier masculinity myths, a man obsessed with proving his own masculinity, and a strong supporter of U.S. Indian removal policies as well as imperial expansionism.[10] Ibid., 368-9.[11] There is plenty of what some call gender-bending (Calamity Jane, e.g.), and some even call the series a critique of masculinity. I am skeptical of this claim, and only note that the series was wildly popular among males, young and middle-aged, because it (again!) presented a world where men could prove themselves openly and unapologetically through violence and misogyny, albeit without the encumbrances of virtue. In this way, it reminds me of extreme sports, where the virtue of courage is separated from any meaningful application that would make it virtuous. The expression of violent masculinity is unencumbered in Deadwood by the traditional Western's emphasis on guarding the border between civilization and barbarism, or protecting good women from bad men and savages.
We'll be back to frontiers further along, using a (very good) Marxist analysis by Jason Moore.
Strategy is defined variously as: a plan of action or policy designed to achieve a major or overall aim; the art of planning and directing overall military operations and movements in a war or battle; a plan for military operations and movements during a war or battle. Plan. Art. Plan.
Military. The roots of strategy are in war; and given that war has always been a largely male enterprise, one that transcends in its basic essence various historical periods and regions, strategy is a "masculine" orientation, an orientation that shares its conceptual coordinates with other aspects of "masculinity" and therefore with patriarchy as well. Just sayin', because it's become a habit now to see how a thing is gendered. A beneficial habit, speaking for myself.
In the military, strategy has a slightly more specific meaning from the dictionary definitions above, because strategy is placed within a hierarchy of planning and actions, which can be divided into three: strategy, operations, tactics, which correspond to war objectives, campaign objectives, and battlefield objectives. For our purposes here, however, we need to supplement these sterile definitions with some insights from Michel De Certeau, who, in looking at everyday people in everyday life, came up with a division between what he called "strategy" and "tactics" which is helpful in understanding why actual strategies seldom work.
I call a strategy a calculation (or manipulation) of power relationships that becomes possible as soon as a subject with will and power (a business, an army, a city, a scientific institution) can be isolated. It postulates a place that can be delimited as its own and serve as the base from which relations with an exteriority composed of targets or threats (customers or competitors, enemies, the country surrounding the city, objectives and objects of research, etc.) can be managed. . . . Every "strategic" rationalization seeks first of all its "own" place, that is, the place of its own power and will, from an "environment." A Cartesian attitude, if you wish: it is an effort to delimit one's own place in a world bewitched by the powers of the Other. It is also the typical attitude of modern science, politics, and military strategy. (De Certeau, Practice of Everyday Life, 35-6)
Foucault's theses on power figure heavily into De Certeau, particularly the bits on dispositifs, the apparatuses of power, the "species" of power. De Certeau's book (linked above) intends to look past the door opened by Foucault for something more granular and situated.
Strategy (the self-isolating calculus) is part of a space-over-time epistemology, with the strengths and limitations of the epistemologies of science and statistics, of efficiency, visual hegemony among the senses, grammar, production, and antibiotic control. Reduce complexity in time-space to a graph, so we can contain it on the two-dimensional space of a page. So sly in its dominance is the encompassing epistemology that we, like fish, remain unaware that we are surrounded by its waters. What remains invisible, apart from and in spite of the water, because it cannot be encompassed, is tactical.
You can't implement strategies, not really, unless you have already appropriated the power, the autonomy, that is only available by controlling a control-space with enough resources to control substantial aspects of the surrounding environment. Descartes would be proud. Control-space is the strategic redoubt, the fortress or base camp or offices of the general staff.
There is a pretense by power, by power, of deep discernment and the swift employment of intimidation and force, their control—while it must always be acknowledged—is part self-deception (self-isolation creates it), part plain unruliness of the real apart from systems and theories, and part bluff. Power operates through a bluff that is internalized by colonized subjects (we are every one colonized subjects), that Gramsci describes as hegemony. The bricolage ("brick-making") of everyday tactics flourishes within the grids of power, operating in all those uncontrolled and unmonitored cracks.
Strategic power—which presupposes some threshold of real capacity—is impossible to break head-on, though it can come apart on its own. Does anyone seriously have some realistic plan, for example, to end generalized money-dependency? Once you've got that, power is a direct function of who has the most, because money gets Every Damn Thing, from pies to spies. Universal exchange equivalent (universal ecological solvent)—the worst you can imagine from the contradiction between use-values and exchange-values. And yet, it is inescapable. The problem becomes when we strategize about the impossible—which is that we can engineer an escape.
Tactics? These are any "action determined by the absence of a proper locus. No delimitation of an exteriority, then, provides it with the condition necessary for autonomy. The space of a tactic is the space of the other. Thus it must play on and with a terrain imposed on it and organized by the law of a foreign power." The tactician is not necessarily at war. In fact, the vast majority of us are engaged in "deep play," as we participate in a game that is not for fun and has shifty rules. The cultural critic is closer to this than the sociologist. We are not decisive, but equivocal. We pass through filters.
Creolism, delinquency, and tactical agility
Creolism is "the art of being in-between," of fusion, what Gloria Anzaldúa called mestizaje, living on borders . . . which subverts them. The Creole lives in a mixed society, on a boundary that is subverted by mixture. Society is creolizing in spite of itself, as a function of our uprootedness and imposed mobility; so the question is, what tactical advantages accrue in Creole culture. The answer is, among other things, tactical agility, which makes an ally of the unexpected.
If the delinquent exists only by displacing itself, if its specific mark is to live not on the margins but in the interstices of the codes that it undoes and displaces, if it is characterized by the privilege of the tour over the state, then the story is delinquent. Social delinquency consists in taking the story literally, in making it the principle of physical existence where a society no longer offers to subjects or groups symbolic outlets and expectations of spaces, where there is no longer any alternative to disciplinary falling-into-line or illegal drifting away, that is, one form or another of prison and wandering outside the pale. Inversely, the story is a sort of delinquency in reserve, maintained, but itself displaced and consistent, in traditional societies (ancient, medieval, etc.), with an order that is firmly established but flexible enough to allow the proliferation of this challenging mobility that does not respect places, is alternately playful and threatening, and extends from the microbe-like forms of everyday narration to the carnivalesque celebrations of earlier days. (De Certeau, p. 130)
Reality arrives as revelation, but things are revealed in many languages. Creoles speak more than one language. They are standpoint hoppers. When you only speak one language, i.e., Scientism (a highly strategic language), you are limited by your language's standpoint deficit. Langue and parole, as Saussure described them, are language and speaking. Language is the chessboard and the rules, beyond out intervention. Speaking is how you play this game, now. Rules are universal-always, and play is local-now. How to act in the Now.
Before you act, you will decide. Before you decide, you will orient. Before you orient, you will observe. The more complex, nuanced, and flexible the forms of observation (not simply reduction), the more precise the orientation. Precise orientation improves the quality of decisions, which are then finally proven (or not) in action. It's a loop, a decision-action cycle with an operator—orientation—that can adapt to changes in mere seconds. Quite formidable, this feedback loop we use. The speed with which we employ it, combined with its adaptability.
It has a name; I'm not making it up. It's called the "Boyd Loop," after Colonel John Boyd, an aerial combat theorist, who "creoled" Gestalt psychology, game theory, cognitive science, and chaos theory together into a theory of "tactical agility."
Tactical agility, in the Boydian sense, implies a recursive cause-and-effect between detailed observation and accurate orientation. Preconceptions, wishful thinking, reliance on luck, these are all the pathways to destruction, because they interfere with the most direct evidence available to us of how things are: observation. That's what local is. And if it's local on a borderline, it's Creole.
Sly as a fox and twice as quick: there are countless ways of "making do."
-Michel De Certeau
I don't want to leave the impression of lifting up The Tactic as somehow inherently "revolutionary." People who count themselves as "revolutionaries," unfortunately (I was one), are always on the lookout for that alignment of the stars, that magic bullet, the critical tuft of yarn we can pull that will unravel our enemies and usher in the Rev. The Tactic ain't it. The field upon which tactics is not constructed by the tacticians. The field is still governed by scarcity (in particular, the scarcity economy of money) and the manifold grids and technologies ramifying out of scarcity to protect and reproduce it. If tactics are an anthropological fact, we have to bear in mind that anthropology has no space for accounts of virtue and vice. Guerrilla gardening is not the same as peddling heroin on the street. Both are tactical. Context is everything. Foucault is postmodern. So was Osama bin Laden.
Asymmetry exposes the weakness inhering in strength for the strategist (the real Strategist, with enough power to bulldoze the most apparent outliers, not some organizer from a sect). De Certeau points out that Clausewitz encounters this conundrum in his treatises on strategy:
[A] tactic is an art of the weak. Clausewitz noted this fact in discussing deception in his treatise On War. The more a power grows, the less it can allow itself to mobilize part of its means in the service of deception: it is dangerous to deploy large forces for the sake of appearances; this sort of "demonstration" is generally useless and "the gravity of bitter necessity makes direct action so urgent that it leaves no room for this sort of game." One deploys his forces, one does not take chances with feints. Power is bound by its very visibility. (emphasis added) In contrast, trickery is possible for the weak, and often it is his only possibility, as a "last resort": "The weaker the forces at the disposition of the strategist, the more the strategist will be able to use deception. I translate: the more the strategy is transformed into tactics.
Clausewitz also compares trickery to wit: "Just as wit involves a certain legerdemain relative to ideas and concepts, trickery is a sort of legerdemain relative to acts. This indicates the mode in which a tactic, which is indeed a form of legerdemain, takes an order by surprise. The art of "pulling tricks" involves a sense of the opportunities afforded by a particular occasion. Through procedures that Freud makes explicit with reference to wit," a tactic boldly juxtaposes diverse elements in order suddenly to produce a flash shedding a different light on the language of a place and to strike the hearer. Cross-cuts, fragments, cracks and lucky hits in the framework of a system, consumers' ways of operating are the practical equivalents of wit.
Lacking its own place, lacking a view of the whole, limited by the blindness (which may lead to perspicacity) resulting from combat at close quarters, limited by the possibilities of the moment, a tactic is determined by the absence of power just as a strategy is organized by the postulation of power. (De Certeau, p. 39)
No group of people is more ill-qualified to "lead" political insurgencies than academics. I love academics, and count many as friends, and I use their valuable productions all the time (though perhaps in ways they did not intend). But this is a group, with some exceptions, that is most thoroughly schooled, or disciplined, in the epistemologies of control: of grammar, of scheduling, of categorization and taxonomy, of encompassing abstraction, of compartmentalization, and of institutional pecking orders. Perhaps the worst-qualified among them are the leftists and progressives, who've grown fonder of their schemae with each battle to protect them from competing schemae, as the Academy has increasingly succeeded in rooting out any whiff of (gasp!) Marxism. The cold war within the Academy has ossified and uglified academic language and practice, such as it is, until it has become self-marginalizing.
The other group that is uniquely unqualified for real leadership are already becoming the politically "qualified" through the incubators of civil society, professional organizations yes, but even moreso the media, government, and "non-profit" non-governmental organizations. It is their incubation in this haute petit bourgeois class bubble that most disqualifies them as leaders, and yet their priorities—especially policy—will take precedence over every other field of endeavor or struggle, because that is all they know how to do.
In both cases, we have people who form almost erotic attachments to their towns and bedroom communities and cities—the simulacra of them, the aesthetics, skylines, cute commercial strips where the extravagant playacting at relaxation which covers the exchange of money until the panhandlers show—and have little contact with the people (practitioners) who live and labor beneath the facades. The petit bourgeoisie does not have the practical intelligence to lead; and it still thinks management is a practice. They naively believe in "non-profit socialism," the transformation of society by NGOs consuming forests of paper and designer coffees, grubbing for cash from the pool of Big Funders . . . the economy of scarcity they can't admit that keeps them inside the lines.
When the "observer" is sufficiently enclosed within his judicial institution, and thus sufficiently blind, everything goes fine. The discourse he produces has every appearance of holding together.
-De Certeau
The world needs academics, especially as cultural critics and researchers (their true fortes), even the activisms of the haute middle class and its bohemian posses surrounding "civil society." But they need to step aside as leaders, vacate those spaces, let things collapse a bit and re-emerge organically. Right now, wittingly or not, they siphon talent off of communities and isolate it within their strategic schemes, neutralizing it or setting up future leaders for cooptation. More importantly, the gifts that are there are wasted, blood and sweat and time poured into salaried strategic delusions, that could be operating under the radar and to far greater actual effect (we have to learn the difference between reality and simulacrum). This fraction's visibility in movements, and their apparent ability to suck movements into their vortex, is created by The Professional Organizer, the paid-with-benefits activism of the 501(c)(3) universe, that affords them the time and resources necessary to be "out there," networking, 40-60 hours a week, on the clock. This is an ecological problem, the introduction of a fabricated niche within which this one species can have an overwhelming and often disruptive impact on the biome.
This is the stratum that has so distanced itself, through education-as-product, education-as-indoctrination, from vernacular thought, language, and practice. With certain exceptions, they cannot allow themselves to see miracles or spirits or demons, the Jewish "strangeness" of Jesus—the most utterly subversive kinds of alternatives to modern epistemologies of control—and in fact will spend a great deal of energy attacking them, because ultimately it is not control or even efficiency they resent, but the fact that they themselves have not been assigned to direct control and efficiency in the name of the apotheosis of Science. They are still, as Audre Lorde might say, inside the master's house and chattering away, growing agitated when the street transforms "isn't" into "ain't" and "conversing" into "conversatin'." They understand at some pre-conscious level that grammar—as the sign, the vaccination scar of Education—reflects the degree of control their own class exercises, and the ungrammatical reflects the limits of that power. "Proper" is the root of "proper-ty."
Non-profits, NGOs, and the rest are part of our terrain; and there are goods that can be gleaned from them. I worked in one for quite some time as an organizer, for which the control-freakery I learned in the military uniquely prepared me; and while my "organizing" was as disruptive as that described above, we did also create an extremely valuable and searchable state campaign finance database that was available to everyone for research. It's not evil; it's that this is not the incubator for tactical leadership, because this milieu is marinated in the strategic delusion and its incessant and deceptive cheerleading approach to politics. There are, of course, exceptions to this—a few people willing to confront their denial and imagine that whatever happens, it won't be "bringing those below us up to our level," but that justice is not possible without our own level being brought low. It really is a zero sum game.
Its episteme is unsuitable for good tactical leadership, which must be practical well in advance of any ideology. I don't care if you can quote The Great Theorist. Can you entertain children? Can you hack a computer? Can you thrift shop? Can you fix a pump? Can you monkeywrench a trackhoe? Can you build a toilet? Can you cook and organize a potluck? Does our politics recognize and respond to the animal loneliness that has taken up residence in late modern subjects . . . all of us? Are you versed in any actual practices which develop the virtues of a good leader? Patience, humility, listening, apprehension of limits and one's own prejudices, admission of error and ignorance, prudent courage, compassion, wise judgement, selflessness, local knowledge? Love?
The petit bourgeois ideologue believes that she or he is magically immune to the same forces it believes prevents everyone else from becoming like the petit bourgeois. "This image of the public is not usually made explicit," writes De Certeau.
It is nonetheless implicit in the "producers" claim to inform the population, that is, to "give form" to social practices. Even protests against the vulgarization/vulgarity of the media often depend on an analogous pedagogical claim; inclined to believe that its own cultural models are necessary for the people in order to educate their minds and elevate their hearts, the elite upset about the "low level" of journalism or television always assumes that the public is moulded by the products imposed on it. To assume that is to misunderstand the act of "consumption." This misunderstanding assumes that "assimilating" necessarily means "becoming similar to" what one absorbs, and not "making something similar" to what one is, making it one's own, appropriating or reappropriating it. Between these two possible meanings, a choice must be made, and first of all on the basis of a story whose horizon has to be outlined. "Once upon a time . . ." (De Certeau, 166)
The petit bourgeois believes in scriptural dominance, the power of the written word to transform the world into "our" likeness. They want to write the new story, then write it into law. They pay lip service to Marx, of course, in the proper settings, but they have become Hegel again, believing the idea—in writing, which requires the world to be literate to be transformed—determines the practice, Hegel's assumption that Marx reversed. The petit bourgeois wants to discipline the body, too, to capture the body with the written word. They settle arguments by saying, "You have to read this book!" Education is the most important product in making everyone else like us.
This blinds them to the reality that people are not living in a state of pure hegemony, that people are "making do," even subverting norms, in ways that are invisible to Starbucks theoreticians, in ways that evade capture by the academic text. They are already tactical. Do you know what they already have in their bag of tricks? Failing some test or another in ideological call-out culture (a toxic atmosphere that means crib death for movements), then, there is nothing "they" can teach "you"?
I watched a leftist youth organizer once congratulate a teenage white bike thief on his "resistance" (because it was stolen from Walmart, The Enemy) as black kids watched the organizer give the thief his approval. But there is a big difference between what happens to the white kid who gets caught and the black kid who is then tracked for lifelong capture in the criminal justice net.
It is not brave to ignore the vulnerabilities of others, especially if what you are saying you want to do might affect them. When men hatch their little macho schemes, do they take into account how they might affect women and kids? It's externalized, because if you're down, you're "militant." (I know that as a former drunk, I can't stand drunks. As a former phrasemongering sloganeer, I have no patience left for phrasemongering sloganeers. I spot it cuz I got it.) But, really? That's what we want? To be intimidating? Because in case you haven't figured it out, we need more people on our side to do the good things we claim we want to do. Few solid relationships are begun with "You suck!" or "You embody pure evil," or, "I want to kill you."
Now you can rebut me with the outrage of the day. I guess, as a former soldier, I have enough outrages under my own belt to see the value of redemption, mercy, forgiveness. I went to a conference not too long ago, where a macho shithead who offered the adventurist left his military training program stated that his first rule is, We Never Forgive. "Congratulations, asshole," I found myself muttering. "Go home and play war in the woods."
"There are now too many things to believe and not enough credibility to go around."
-De Certeau
Whatever may have been the case in the past, we can see, if we leave aside excessively facile (and apolitical) remarks about the psychosociological traits characteristic of all "militancy," that there is vis-a-vis the established order, a relationship between the Churches that defended an other world and the parties of the left which, since the nineteenth century, have promoted a different future. In both cases, similar functional characteristics can be discerned: ideology and doctrine have an importance that is not given them by those in power; the project of another society results in discourse (reformist, revolutionary, socialist, etc.) being given the primary role over against the fatality or normality of facts; legitimization by means of ethical values, by a theoretical truth, or by appealing to a roll call of martyrs has to compensate for the legitimacy that can be claimed by every power through the mere fact of its existence; the techniques of "making people believe" play a more decisive role when it is a matter of something that does not yet exist; intransigencies and doctrinal vetoes are thus stronger than in places where the established power permits and often requires compromises; and finally, by an apparently contradictory logic, every reformist power is tempted to acquire political advantages, to transform itself into an ecclesiastical administration in order to support its project, to thus lose its primitive "purity" or change it into a mere decoration of the apparatus, and to transform its militants into officials or conquerors. (De Certeau, p. 154) [Strategic!]
If we are determined to play war, let's play it without a human object. Let's call the Enemy commodification. How do you fight commodification tactically? This process that rips open the earth, encloses land and minds, perverts our natural human inter-dependency into something ugly and sinful along an axis of domination and subordination. If we are tactical, we always want to ask first, "Can we do this under the radar?"
Christians and leftists
As far as I can understand, I live in a world that has lost the sense of good, the Good. We have lost the certainty that the world makes sense because things fit together, that the eye is made to grasp the sunlight, and is not just a biological camera which happens to register this optical effect. We have lost the sense that virtuous behaviour is fitting and appropriate for human beings, and we have lost it in the course of the late seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries with the rise of the concept and the experience of value. Good is absolute: the light and the eye are simply made for each other, and the unquestioned good is deeply experienced. But once I say that the eye has value for me because it allows me to see or orient myself in the world, I open a new door. Values can be positive but also negative, so the moment I speak, in philosophy, about values, I assume the existence of a zero point, from which values rise and decline in two directions. The replacement of good by the idea of value begins in philosophy, and is then expressed in an ever-growing economic sphere within which my life becomes a pursuit of values rather than a pursuit of what is good for me, we can only be another person . . . Evil is the opposite of good—it's not a disvalue or a negative value—and sin is a mysterious aspect of evil, a personal offence of God which is intelligible only in the light of the new freedom exemplified in the Parable of the Samaritan . . . the replacement of good and evil by value and disvalue has destroyed the basis on which sin was predicated, because sin cannot be connected to negative values. (Illich, Rivers North of the Future, 62-3)
This complex ebb and flow, which has made the transition from the political to Christian religiousness and from the latter to a new politics has had as its effect an individualization of beliefs (the common frame of reference being fragmented into social "opinions" or individual "convictions") and of movements among beliefs across an increasingly diversified network of possible objects. The idea of democracy corresponded to the will to manage this multiplication of convictions which had replaced the faith that had founded an order. What is striking is that by breaking up the ancient system, that is, the religious credibility of the political order, Christianity finally compromised the believability of the religiousness that it detached from the political; thus it contributed to the dis-crediting of what it had appropriated to itself in order to make itself autonomous, and made possible the ebbing away of these beliefs in the direction of political authorities henceforth deprived of (or liberated from?) the spiritual authorities that had formerly been a relativizing as well as a legitimizing principle. The return of a "pagan" repressed was thus affected by this decline of the "spiritual." The erosion of Christianity left an indelible mark on the modern age: the "incarnation" or historicization that in the eighteenth century Rousseau already calls a "civil religion." To the pagan state, which "made no distinction between its gods and its laws," Rousseau opposes a "religion" of the citizen, "whose articles of faith it is for the sovereign to determine." [Constitution worship] "If anyone, after having publicly recognized these very dogmas, conducts himself as if he did not believe in them, let him be put to death." This civil religion of the citizen was distinguished from a spiritual religion of man, the individual, asocial, and universal religion of The Creed of a Priest of Savoy. This prophetic view, far less incoherent than it has been said to be, already articulates the development of a "civil" and political dogmatics on the radicalization of an individual conscience free from any dogma and deprived of any powers. Since then, sociological analysis has verified the accuracy of this foresight.
From the time of the Enlightenment on, belief is reinvested in the political system alone, in proportion as the "spiritual powers" which had guaranteed the civil powers in Antiquity and had entered into competition with them in the Christian West lost their previous positions, and became scattered or miniaturized. (De Certeau, 182-3)
The distinction—today archeological—between the temporal and the spiritual as two jurisdictions, nevertheless remains structurally inscribed in . . . society, but it is now within the political system. The place that was formerly occupied by the Church or Churches vis-a-vis the established powers remains recognizable, over the past two centuries, in the functioning of the opposition known as leftist. In political life as well, a mutation of ideological content can leave a social "form" intact.
One index of these transitions that displace beliefs but preserve the same structural schema, would be the history of Jansenism: a prophetic opposition (the Port-Royal of the seventeenth century) is transformed into the political opposition of an "enlightened" and parliamentary milieu in the eighteenth century. There one can already see that an intelligentsia of intellectuals (clercs) or notables replaces the opposition that a "spiritual" power supported against (or on the margins of) political or "civil" authorities.
Whatever may have been the case in the past, we can see, if we leave aside excessively facile (and apolitical) remarks about the psychosociological traits characteristic of all "militancy," that there is vis-a-vis the established order, a relationship between the Churches that defended an other world and the parties of the left which, since the nineteenth century, have promoted a different future. In both cases, similar functional characteristics can be discerned: ideology and doctrine have an importance that is not given them by those in power; the project of another society results in discourse (reformist, revolutionary, socialist, etc.) being given the primary role over against the fatality or normality of facts; legitimization by means of ethical values, by a theoretical truth, or by appealing to a roll call of martyrs has to compensate for the legitimacy that can be claimed by every power through the mere fact of its existence; the techniques of "making people believe" play a more decisive role when it is a matter of something that does not yet exist; Intransigencies and doctrinal vetoes are thus stronger than in places where the established power permits and often requires compromises; and finally, by an apparently contradictory logic, every reformist power is tempted to acquire political advantages, to transform itself into an ecclesiastical administration in order to support its project, to thus lose its primitive "purity" or change it into a mere decoration of the apparatus, and to transform its militants into officials or conquerors.
This analogy has structural grounds; they do not directly involve a psychology of militancy or a critical sociology of ideologies; but rather they involve first of all the logic of a "place" that produces and reproduces, as its effects, militant mobilizations, tactics of "making people believe," and ecclesiastical institutions in a relationship of distance, competition, and future transformations with respect to the established powers.
The transition from various forms of Christianity to various forms of socialism through the mediation of "heresies" or sects has been the object of many studies, which themselves operate the very passages they analyze. But if these transitions transport vestiges of religious belief in the direction of new political formations, one cannot draw the conclusion that these vestiges of abandoned beliefs make it legitimate to see anything religious in these movements. One is forced to draw that conclusion only if one makes the unjustified assumption that the objects believed are the same as the act of believing (emphasis added), and that, as a corollary, there is something religious about every group in which elements that have been religious are still working.
Another analytical model seems to be more in tune with the realities of history and anthropology: Churches, indeed religions themselves, would be not so much referential unities as social variants of the possible relations between the act of believing and the objects believed; they would be, on this view, particular historical configurations (and manipulations) of relationships linking the (formal) modalities of believing and knowing with the (quasilexical) series of available contents. Today, the acts of believing and knowing are distributed otherwise than in the religions of earlier times; believing no longer modalizes what is believed according to the same rules; in short, the objects to be believed or known, their mode of definition, their status and their inventory have been largely changed and renewed. Thus one cannot isolate and inscribe in a continuity two constellations of "beliefs" by merely noting that they have in common an act of believing, an element that is assumed to be invariable. (emphasis added)
In order to analyze the relations between speaking and believing in the new, political and militant variant presented by leftist parties in a place still historically determined by the role earlier played by the Churches, the archeological perspective must be given up. We must locate the modes in which believing, knowing, and their contents reciprocally define each other today, and in that way try to grasp a few of the ways believing and making people believe function in the political formations in which, within this system, the tactics made possible by the exigencies of a position and the constraints of a history are deployed. This approach to the current situation can discern in it two mechanisms through which a body of dogma has always made itself believed: on the one hand, the claim to be speaking in the name of a reality which, assumed to be inaccessible, is the principle of both what is believed (a totalization) and the act of believing (something that is always unavailable, unverifiable, lacking); and on the other, the ability of a discourse authorized by a "reality" to distribute itself in the form of elements that organize practices, that is, of "articles of faith." These two traditional resources are found again today in the system that combines the narrativity of the media—an establishment of the real—with the discourse of products to be consumed—a distribution of this reality in the form of "articles" that are to be believed and bought. It is the first that needs to be stressed, the second being already quite well known. (De Certeau, 184-5)
This reversal of the terrain on which beliefs develop results from a mutation in the paradigms of knowledge: the ancient postulate of the invisibility of the real has been replaced by the postulation of its visibility. The modern socio-cultural scene refers to a "myth." This scene defines the social referent by its visibility (and thus by its scientific or political representativeness); it articulates on this new postulate (the belief that the real is visible) the possibility of our knowledge, observations, proofs, and practices. On this new stage, an indefinitely extensible field of optical investigations and of a scopic drive, the strange collusion between believing and the question of the real still remains. But now it is a question of what is seen, observed, or shown. The contemporary "simulacrum" is in short the latest localization of belief in vision, the identification of the seen with what is to be believed—once the hypothesis has been given up that claimed that the waters of an invisible ocean (the Real) came back to haunt the shores of the visible and to make them the results, decodable signs or deceptive reflections, of its presence. The simulacrum is what the relationship of the visible to the real becomes when the assumption crumbles that an invisible immensity of Being (or of beings) lies hidden behind appearances. (De Certeau, 187)
The immoral secret of death is deposited in the protected caverns reserved for it by psychoanalysis and religion. It resides in the vast metaphors of astrology, necromancy, or sorcery, languages that are tolerated so long as they constitute areas of obscurantism from which societies of progress "distinguish" themselves. Thus the impossibility of saying goes much further back than the moment when the speaker's efforts are cancelled along with the speaker himself. It is inscribed in all the procedures that quarantine death or drive it beyond the limits of the city, outside of time, work, and language, in order to protect a place. (De Certeau, 194)
An institutionalization of medical knowledge produced the great utopia of a therapeutic politics embracing all the means of struggling against death's operations within the social space, from schools to hospitals. Its general transformation into a power gave a "medical" appearance to an administrative apparatus charged with healing and, still more, with organizing order as a means of prevention.
This prophylactic campaign was supposed to caulk up all the cracks through which the enemy slipped in. It inscribed the schools themselves as a particular sector of a "medical police"; it invaded the realms of private life in order to fill up, by means of prophylactic measures, all the secret and intimate passageways that were available to illness; it established hygiene as a national problem in the struggle against biological woes. (De Certeau, 196)
The impulse of the social engineer. We might be with you in tearing down this old building, but we might become deviant when you talk so confidently about "building the future." We don't know if you are serious, in which case we'll have nothing to do with this kind of power seeking, or if you are cheerleading, in which case we have to point out that manipulative speech is manipulation, even if it is part of a strategic purpose.


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Back in 2009, a fellow from California named Dennis called me and asked me to help him sell a house, a "retail flip" in the Parkview community. Parkview is just across Memorial Drive from my neighborhood, Kirkwood.
We told everyone who had an interest in the eventual $217,000 sale of a gorgeous 4/2/1 in August 2009 that a nifty new shopping center is coming soon to Parkview. Now, it's real – Parkview Station is coming in the Fall of 2010.
I've been hearing about the redevelopment of Parkview Plaza, a rather dilapidated and lowly looking 1960's built shopping center, ever since I moved Intown in 1998. The rhetoric started to pick up in 2007, and lo and behold the roof is getting a skin over, the front facade is getting a facelift and the whole place will be filled with tenants by Autumn 2010…we hope.
Here's a video with a quick look at the project, shot on Monday February 8th.
So, if you've read my blog posts before, you know that I take occasional subjective leaps. Here's another one:
Parkview is also the name of a storied drug and alcohol treatment center that once existed in Nashville, Tennessee.
Country music legend and pioneering television star, Porter Wagoner sang a song that Johnny Cash wrote for him, "Committed to Parkview" on his final LP and here is a video that he cut with Marty Stuart and His Fabulous Superlatives that offers a haunting interpretation of the lyrics that Mr. Cash wrote – the legend is that both Johnny and Porter were once patients at Parkview and ultimately, they both kicked some demons there…
The players on this shopping center redevelopment are all veterans of nearby redevelopment projects, so with a neighborly heart I want to see them succeed with a bustling shopping center filled with nice stores, bars, restaurants and healthy local businesses.
I took my old friends at The Fresh Market and their broker on an Intown tour back in 2007, and they concluded that the opportunities on Memorial would not work for them. I think that The Fresh Market would be a perfect fit in our Kroger / Publix / Wayfield / Aldi / Piggly Wiggly world of eastern Dekalb County, but really, I'm selfish and what do I really know about shopping center demography?
I know that the redevelopment team are committed to Parkview Station, but lets hope that they don't get "committed" to "Parkview" in the risky process of making money in commercial redevelopment nowadays…


text: CM Remote Oil Filter Kits - These kits are designed to give you all the essential parts needed to install one of our remote filter systems. Each kit comes with 8 ft. of stainless steel braided hose, all necessary fittings, billet adapters and mounts. These kits are available in two styles: a "Remote Spin-On Filter ", which utilizes your standard spin-on filter and "Remote Canister Filter" which utilizes one of our large canister style filters which is included in the kit.


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The Teradek Bolt Pro 300 Wireless HD-SDI/HDMI Dual Format Video Transmitter/Receiver Set features internal antennas and offers a fan-less receiver that includes a USB 3.0 output, which allows you to ingest video directly into your computer or DIT cart with ease. This model supports metadata and timecode pass through. It supports wireless HD video with zero delay (<1ms), up to a 300 ft range, and up to 4 receivers. The transmitter accepts either HD-SDI or HDMI input, and the receiver outputs both HD-SDI and HDMI.
|Input / Output
Transmitter: HD-SDI and HDMI input
Receiver: HD-SDI, HDMI, and USB 3.0 output
|Transmission Range
|300 ft (91 m)
|Packaging Infoyuyftqxwvyxvtxrcuewr
|Package Weight
|3.0 lb
|Box Dimensions (LxWxH)
|6.7 x 6.5 x 4.3"


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Sub Penthouse 3 Bedroom 2 Bathroom
Start FromAUD 900.00 / Night
Live the high life in this comfortable and luxurious brand new 3 bedroom 2 bathroom apartment located in the enviable Southbank area. The apartment features floor to ceiling windows that provide you with amazing views of the bay and the city. Apartments include either open balconies or an enclosed balcony.
The apartments are designed with top quality fixtures and finishes, including a modern kitchen complete with appliances such as a coffee maker. All apartments include a Washing Machine and hairdryer, television and WIFI.
Check In Time: 2pm
Check Out Time: 10 am
Early or Late check in/Out can be requested by contacting us.
Check in Requirements
- Primary guest must be at a minimum age of 18 and must have;
- Government issued photo ID (Passport of Drivers License)
- Visa, MasterCard or Amex is accepted for security hold
Latest Rates – Book Online
Book Online


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PRAGUE, Dec 5 (Reuters) - The Czech central bank may raise its main interest rate by quarter of a percentage point each half-year, Governor Jiri Rusnok said on Tuesday.
The central bank has raised the two-week repo rate, currently at 0.50 percent, twice since August when it delivered its first rate hike in nearly a decade.
"We will rather use those mild raises, by one quarter of a percentage point," Rusnok said on national television.
"I would see that as a likely scenario in the coming quarters," he said when asked if the bank could raise interest rates by 25 basis points every half-year. (Reporting by Robert Muller; Editing by Hugh Lawson)


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Auckland-based dairy producer The Collective has embraced social media as its major marketing channel in an effort to better connect with its 'herd' and, in many cases, get them to assist with product creation – a strategy vindicated by its recent naming as the first and only New Zealand brand to feature in The Social Brands 100 list – "the authoritative ranking of brands leading the way in the social age" – coming in at number 57 ahead of brands like Dell, Groupon and Intel.
The Collective, which markets primarily through Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest, has gone from a staff of seven to 40 since launching and is one of the fastest-growing companies in New Zealand.
It was founded in November 2009 by chefs Angus Allan and Ofer Shenhav. Allan was the creator of Naked Organics and Ofer of Pitango Organic Cuisine, but the two former competitors decided to join forces and purchased the boutique Canaan Cheese business. After a crash-course in manufacturing dairy, it launched its range of soft cultured cheeses and haloumi in February 2010, followed by its gourmet yoghurt range in May 2010.
Allan says the marketing strategy has always been "to develop a fun brand and persona that is serious about what it makes". From there the strategy grew and was all about ensuring the loyal community – or as he refers to it, 'the herd', which numbers around 3,400 on Facebook – was looked after.
"The key is showing a genuine personality and interest in the herd," he says. "It's the balance between having fun, sharing news, interacting and thanking our consumers. With all our communications we want to drive people to us, not drive people crazy. We don't need to incentivise people for liking us; we want them to like us because they really, really do. We are very community driven and take social media and the people who are listening to us seriously."
And, as well as creating a quality product, that approach appears to have paid dividends. Today, The Collective is New Zealand's leading gourmet yoghurt brand – and it's still growing (at around 250 percent, as evidenced by its 28th placing in last year's Deloitte Fast 50).
And with product now stocked in Australia, Singapore, Spain, France, Hong-Kong and the United Kingdom, the word – and the herd – is spreading quickly. The company hopes to move into other markets like Canada, Brazil, Mexico and Germany, with a projection to achieve global sales of $30 million by June 2012, $100 million by 2013, $250 million by 2014 and $400 million by 2015.
The Collective's distinctive 'Cow' logo and subsequent '…no bull!' taglines were developed in collaboration with design company pHd3, which was also involved in the ecostore rebrand. The packaging won a bronze Pent Award in the food, dairy products category, one of only three awards for that category. And it also secured two further awards at last year's New Zealand Best Awards for Graphic Design Identity Development (small scale) and Graphic Design Packaging.
As for the Social Brands 100 list, Innocent took number one position.
The UK-based food and drinks brand that Coca-Cola has bought a majority share in made its name with packaging that spoke directly to its customers, and it was one of over 300 brands nominated following a crowdsourced nomination process on Twitter that took place in January. The report found that the best performing brands have a genuine, human voice on social platforms and aren't afraid to get personal.
- Download the full report here: 1_SB100_the_report
- Download the full ranking here: 2_SB100_the_ranking
- Download the rankings by sector here: 2_SB100_ranking_by_industry_sector
Social Brands 100 Top Ten
|Parent Brand
|Travel & Leisure
|Cancer Research UK
|British Red Cross
|7 =
|7 =
|9 =
|The Ellen DeGeneres Show
|9 =
|Met Office
"It feels like not a day goes by without a new 'game changing' platform or technology appearing, and it can be easy to lose sight of the fact that it is people who are at the heart of social media," says Steve Sponder, head of agency at Headstream, the social brand agency that created Social Brands 100. "The brands in this ranking have found some of the best ways so far to become part of the 'people's media' in a transparent and compelling way."
Headstream worked in partnership with social media monitoring company Brandwatch. Social Brands 100 measures social performance across a series of markers that demonstrate the brand is building two-way relationships with its community, engaging in active listening, and behaving in an appropriate way in social spaces.
"Defining a brand as 'social' can be both complex and subjective," says Giles Palmer, chief executive of Brandwatch. "Every brand is different and customers want to interact with them in different ways. This year we have been able to dig deeper than ever before into our data to analyse brand and consumer interaction at a per post level. Our new techniques in data mining give us valuable insights into how, when and where interaction takes place. Add in Headstream's social algorithm and desk research and the result is a definitive measure on brand sociability, which crosses industries and sizes of business. We are proud to be part of it."
Other notable findings:
- A four percent drop in the use of foursquare since 2011, indicating that the use of geo-location platforms has still not taken off.
- Charities and not-for-profit organisations are starting to make the most of social media, representing over 25 percent of the top twenty brands this year.
- In the 10 months since it launched, 49 percent of brands have joined Google+ with the same number of brands now present on Pinterest.
- YouTube appears to be a missed opportunity for many sectors, with the exception of technology brands.
This story originally appeared on StopPress.
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%anchor_text% %anchor_text% Nowadays, as an alternative, you can also use a blog to talk to your existing audience. I use it to publish private content to communicate with my subscribers. top websites 2014 , I don't have to publish content regularly, just when I have something to say that is worth sharing with my subscribers.
top business blogs The key here is to be consistent! Post something all of the time–even when you don't feel like it. Don't just post once or twice and say it doesn't work. In all honesty, you shouldn't evaluate the results of your blogging efforts until a full 90 days have passed.
Not using keyword phrases in the first line of each paragraph.This is a no brainer, again, look at number 1 above. People won't read the whole blog or article, they skim for the good stuff so you need to peak their interest by putting it in their face right off the bat. Be sure your article / blog contains more useful stuff and less non meaningful fluff!!
Create 10 most popular blogs — Make sure your blog is set up correctly from the start. My advise is to use a wordpress blog, as all the %anchor_text% agree that it is the best service with all the features you are going to need.
%anchor_text% %anchor_text% Guess what? You have a serious advantage on your blog, because your business is local and you can cater to the local area, whereas your corporate communication blog competitor cannot! top 10 blogs sites can write posts about your small business and how you interface with the community locally; you can discuss nonprofit groups, schools, parks and all things local.
Bear in mind that most people who use the Internet usually do more scanning than scrutinizing each site word for word. Therefore, it would be better to come with top travel sites that will not bore your readers just because you have these lengthy articles.
Another means to earn money online with your blog is Google AdSense. income online is certainly a financially attractive option if you want to make money blogging. If you have an AdSense account – you can earn from this advertising system, with their ads that are strategically located in your pages. It certainly is a great way to create a substantial finance blogs.
top 50 blogs 's my YouTube "blog announcement" which is another strategy I use to get my links to rank on page on of Google, which brings free traffic. best travel photography blogs use my blog as the platform to link to my YouTube video. When there are enough back-links pointing to my video with my blog, articles, and other blogs, then the permalink is likely to rank on page one.


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10 Allianz
Position: #10
Brand: Allianz
Brand value: 5'706 Mio. EUR
Brand value change compared to last year: +6%
Ranking change compared to last year: +1
The Allianz Group is one of the leading integrated financial services providers worldwide. The company continues to build on last year's success, increasing profits by 14.5% in 2014 and with new Chief Executive Officer Oliver Bäte now taking on the challenge of leading the gigantic corporate structure into the digital age. The brand also refined its approach to social media to better engage with customers. The key differentiator is the Allianz Digital Accelerator, which connects the brand with the start-up and entrepreneurial community to drive innovation. Creating new business models and accelerating implementation within Allianz allows the community to better serve and build value for customers. Allianz also deepened its commitment to corporate citizenship by expanding its global sponsorship portfolio. In addition to partnerships with soccer teams such as FC Bayern Munich, Allianz partners with a diverse array of teams, organizations, cultural figures and educational programs. They forge relationships with partners who support diversity and spread awareness about important social issues, for instance Allianz has launched campaigns to generate awareness of parasports. Allianz drives consistency and presence by following the global brand communication concept "ONE," which places the customer at the center of all activities and helps to create a consistent global brand message. The ONE program is now active in more than 30 countries across four lines of business to foster Allianz' positioning as a "Trusted Partner" and to convey an authentic brand experience across different regions, cultures, and customers' needs.


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The map shows where employed individuals travel to work. The choropleth layer shows the average distance commuted by residents of each of Trafford's 138 LSOAs, the higher distances represented by a bolder shade of blue.
There are also two marker layers which can be toggled onto the map which show a summary of MSOA locations where Trafford residents work, and a layer showing where commuters to Trafford reside. Each marker contains a count for the total value of employed individuals commuting to/from that MSOA and is positioned at the central point geographically.
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Data Source: Office for National Statistics via Nomis.