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What Works: Farmers Increasing Resilience to Climate Change by Diversifying Crops
|Climate change will shift the landscape of agriculture around the word in the coming years. Will farmers, policymakers, and scientists widely support "climate-smart" strategies in response to this shifting landscape?
Molly Redfield is a former research intern with the Worldwatch Institute's Food and Agriculture Program.
|Related Posts
|Supporting Climate-Friendly Food Production
|To Combat Scarcity, Increase Water-Use Efficiency in Agriculture
|Disease and Drought Curb Meat Production and Consumption
|Read More
|Tweets by @WorldwatchInst
The loss of arable land due to climate change may amount to as much as 21 percent in South America, 18 percent in Africa, and 11 to 17 percent in Europe, according to scientists at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. The potential of climate change to adversely impact food security in these regions is staggering.
Countries in Asia are also highly vulnerable. In Vietnam, for example, the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) reports that by 2050, rice yield decreases associated with climate change may amount to 2.7 million tons. But the loss of arable land is just one of many climate change-related agricultural concerns. Many industrially produced crops are especially vulnerable to extreme weather conditions and the shifting demographics of pathogens.
Researchers from the Consultative Group on International Agriculture Research (CGIAR) assert that the majority of food produced in the world comes from too narrow a range of crops. Furthermore, monocropping—a dominant form of agricultural production—can make plants more vulnerable to weather events and pathogens. Large monocropped fields are particularly susceptible to pests, diseases, and extreme weather events because their narrow genetic diversity restricts the adaptability of these populations to environmental stressors. Diversifying crops, meanwhile, can increase crop resiliency and simultaneously reduce the need for pesticides.
Many farmers are realizing that they can decrease pesticide use with "climate-smart" agriculture. Maurice Kwadha (pictured above) owns a farm and tree nursery that, while spanning less than half an acre, hosts a wide variety of crops. Kwadha's mosaic of tree saplings, corn, bananas, onions, sweet potatoes, and tomatoes, bordered with trees that both replenish soil nutrients and decrease erosion, mitigates the effects of Kenya's increasingly unpredictable rains and longer, more intense dry spells. As an added benefit, farmers like Kwadha depend less on fertilizers. The more complex environment that they support also promotes a greater diversity of animals.
A study by Brenda Lin of Australia's Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO) shows that, in addition to increasing the range of crop species, farmers can diversify crops by switching land use practices throughout the year. In Yasothorn, Thailand, smallholder farmers grow and harvest fruits and vegetables between their rice cultivation cycles. They are finding that diversifying crops leads to a diversified income as well, which can protect farmers amid variable market prices.
The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the European Commission recently announced a three-year project promoting, among other things, the diversification of crops as a "climate-smart" agricultural strategy. With support from large research organizations and food programs around the world, agricultural diversification has the potential to help farmers adapt to the myriad challenges of climate change.
Climate change will shift the landscape of agriculture around the word in the coming years. Will farmers, policymakers, and scientists widely support "climate-smart" strategies in response to this shifting landscape? The answer to that will come in time, but efforts from smallholder farmers like Kwadha and international bodies like the FAO prove hopeful.


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Fall Colors
Dells Mill in Eau Claire, WI on a late fall day.
Warp Speed
Taken from a moving car at Itasca State Park.
Feeling Blue
Goosebury Falls right before dark.
These buildings have seen better days.
Top Tier
The upper tier of Minneopa Falls just outside of Mankato.
To the Victor Go the Spoils
Hermann the German stands tall over New Ulm, MN.
As the Sky Opens
Amazing clouds hover over Artist's Point in Grand Marais, MN.
Warrior Jesus
This statue depicts Jesus as a warrior on a white horse, as taken from a chapter in the book of Revelations.
Twin Cities PhotographerGoosebury FallsGoosebury Falls State ParkCanonBlue

subset: commoncrawl


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We know impressing your guests day after day is no small task. From the first welcome message you send them to the moment you wave them goodbye, every effort you make contributes to a great guest experience.
This week, to recognise your dedication, we're awarding a Guest Review Award to all of our partners who had with an average review score of 8 or higher (among other criteria) as of 1 November, 2018.
Did you win a Guest Review Award?
Congratulations! A great review score is evidence of your hard work paying off. Other partners would love to learn from you, so share your formula for success in this thread!
If you have any questions about the awards, visit our Guest Review Awards section in Partner Help.


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A few days ago, Joan Lefkow was walking down a Chicago street flanked by federal marshals when a panhandler walked up to her and said, "God bless you, Judge Lefkow."
It has been nine months since U.S. District Judge Joan Humphrey Lefkow's name and face made relentless news, but what happened to her the night of Feb. 28 still haunts her days and stirs the souls of strangers.
On that winter evening, Lefkow came home from a day in the federal courthouse to find her husband and mother murdered in her basement. In Chicago and beyond, millions felt her loss and terror.
Since that night, Lefkow has done her best...


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We believe you will find the articles below useful and informative as you learn more about senior home care issues and options.
Alzheimer's Disease is one of the saddest and frightening diseases.
Home Healthcare For Aging Seniors Will Continue To Be A Growing Franchising Niche With Plenty Of Opportunities
According to the U.S. Administration on Aging, by 2030 the number of Americans aged 65 and older will more than double to 71 million, that's roughly ...
Top Reasons to Choose Home Care
As tough as it may be to enlist the help of a "stranger" when it comes to caring for your parents, sometimes it's for the best.
Dispelling Myths About Home Care
Peter Ross, CEO and co-founder of Senior Helpers, says there are actually many ways for seniors to afford quality home care. "With new programs ...
The Self-Administered Gerocognitive Examination (SAGE test), which takes less than 15 minutes to complete, is a reliable tool for evaluating cognitive abilities.
The SAGE test can be taken at home by patients, who can then share the results with their physicians to help spot early symptoms of cognitive issues such as early dementia or Alzheimer's disease.


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Sattler AS Font Family
Joseph Kaspar Sattler, one of the great German art nouveau artists created these nice initials in 1897 for the famous royal monumental book project Die Nibelunge for the Reichsdruckerei Berlin. Only 200 exclusive signed masterpieces were printed in four years from 1900 till 1904. Joseph Sattler was the art director, typographer and designer in one person. The Reichsdruckerei showed samples of the unfinished work in 1900 at the world exhibition in Paris to advertise the high craftsmanship of the German presses. Style Initials A uses the OpenType features Superscript and Scientific Inferiors to change the fill layer. You can combine up to three different color inks.
OTF | 1 Font | JPG Preview | 1 Mb RAR


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Fox Uses Hospital's Financial Problems To Attack Obamacare
Blog ››› ››› JUSTIN BERRIER
Fox News attacked President Obama's signature health care reform, the Affordable Care Act (ACA), by seizing on a Pennsylvania hospital's decision to stop delivering babies. But the hospital's decision was primarily based on a financial situation that changed after four doctors decided to leave the obstetrics department.
On Fox & Friends, co-host Brian Kilmeade reported on a Pennsylvania hospital that has decided to stop delivering babies, claiming the hospital is "blaming cutbacks on the president's new health care law" and asking if other hospitals will follow this trend. Kilmeade used the story to attack the ACA, asking Rep. Mike Burgess (R-TX) "what is your greatest fear since you can look at it from the doctor's level, as Obamacare comes to fruition and the bill that no one read is now law?"
But while Kilmeade used the story to attack the ACA, officials at Windber Medical Center pointed to a variety of causes for the decision, the primary one being the departure of four Ob-gyn physicians:
While the main reason is that all four of the Ob-gyn doctors are leaving the obstetrics division, the hospital admits that not replacing them is in part of a financial decision [sic].
In a statement on their website they said, "In today's challenging healthcare environment the board of directors and executive leadership at Windber Medical Center continue to carefully evaluate the current state against reimbursement and industry trends."
Vassilaros says those decisions are being made across the country.
"We are all trying to figure out what's coming, we are all looking down the road making plans
and we are all trying to see what's going to change," Vassilaros told us.
He says it's important to note that it's not just the Affordable Healthcare Act [sic]. Legislation around the fiscal cliff and other decisions are impacting costs.
Following the Supreme Court ruling that the ACA was constitutional, Dr. James T. Breeden, the president of the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, applauded the decision, pointing to the law's provisions that guarantee "direct access to obstetric and gynecologic care":
The American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) applauds the US Supreme Court's ruling today that affirms the constitutionality of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA). "The Affordable Care Act helps ensure all Americans have access to affordable coverage with important consumer protections and benefits, including comprehensive maternity coverage and well-woman care," said ACOG President James T. Breeden, MD. "We urge all states to act swiftly to implement these important access and coverage guarantees."
The ACA also guarantees women direct access to obstetric and gynecologic care. "My own state of Nevada and 42 other states already allow direct access," said Dr. Breeden. ACOG advocated vigorously for this new national ob-gyn direct-access standard so that all women in every state will no longer face costly and burdensome delays and denials.
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Tara McKenzie Allison, Esq., to speak on LGBT-related Issues
Tara McKenzie Allison, an attorney who practices in Columbus, Ohio, will discuss her personal experiences as a member of the transgender community and speak on other lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) issues in the Ohio Northern University Pettit College of Law Moot Room on Tuesday, Feb. 19 at 11 a.m.
Allison is an active public speaker on LGBT-related issues and has been a presenter at the TransOhio Annual Transgender and Ally Symposium (2008-10). She also spoke at the 2010 Ohio Diversity and Leadership Conference and the 2011 Equality Ohio CAUSE Conference at Columbus State Community College.
She has served as a "team leader" for Equality Ohio's Lobby Day and has marched in the Columbus Pride Parade. Allison is a contributing author to OUTLOOK magazine, which is published in Columbus, Ohio. She also is an adjunct professor at ITT Technical Institute, where she teaches a class on "Legal Issues in Construction."
Allison served as a board member and legal counsel for TransOhio, a not-for-profit organization serving to educate and advocate on behalf of the transgender community in Ohio. In October 2010, she graduated from the Pride Leadership Program of the United Way of Central Ohio, better preparing her for further service on other not-for-profit boards. She currently serves on the board for The Legacy Fund of The Columbus Foundation.
In 1987, Allison received her undergraduate degree in marine engineering from the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis. Following graduation, she served as a commissioned officer in the U.S. Navy. After being honorably discharged, Allison (a licensed professional engineer) worked as a nuclear engineer for more than a decade.
In 1999, Allison partially completed an MBA at the College of William and Mary before relocating to Columbus. In 2005, she graduated from Capital University Law School, cum laude, passed the Ohio Bar Exam, and was admitted to the Ohio Bar. Following graduation from law school, she served as general counsel/contracts manager for a mid-sized, construction-industry company in Lexington, Ky. In 2008, she relocated back to Columbus to start her own law practice. She is admitted to practice before the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Ohio.


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Find Our Latest Video Reviews on YouTube!
If you want to stay on top of all of our video reviews of the latest tech, be sure to check out and subscribe to the Gear Live YouTube channel, hosted by Andru Edwards! It's free!
Wednesday August 8, 2007 9:23 am
BookSwim is Like Netflix for Books: But Will it Succeed?
Posted by Lolita Beckwith Categories: Internet
Netflix is the granddaddy of the rent-by-mail craze, making it tres easy to rent DVDs and video games without stepping off your curb. Now comes BookSwim, with the same paradigm: create a queue of books to read, wait for them to be shipped to you, send them back when done so your next title can be sent out. No shipping or late fees, and keep the books as long as you want. BookSwim claims to have over 150,000 titles, and plans range from $20 USD (3 books at-a-time) to $36 USD (11 books!). We're curious to see if BookSwim takes off, as it faces stiff competition from a little something called the Public Library, which we hear is free. But, if you live far from the library, BookSwim could be worth a shot.
Read More | BookSwim
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Neon Drive
Welcome to Gamestein.netThe best in free internet games Macromedia Flash Player.
Gamestein.net, where Einstein would come to play if he were still alive today.
Instead of thousands of mediocre games, we only offer you the best games in their respective categories, and they are all free to play.
You will find everything from simple kids games, to puzzles, and state of the art sports and racing games, many of which are exclusive
and playable only on Gamestein.net
Action Games --- Sports Games --- Racing Games --- Shooting Games --- Puzzle Games --- Kids Games
Copyright 2008 - 2009 All rights reserved.
No part of this site can be reproduced or used without prior written consent.


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The past and the future took center stage at the Life Fitness booth at the International Health, Racquet and Sportsclub Association trade show last week in San Francisco. The company launched several fitness equipment upgrades while also celebrating its original Lifecycle and the man who popularized that product.
Life Fitness introduced a revised version of its Elevation series cardio line. The new Elevation series includes several new technology upgrades to its Engage console, a hybrid feature that adds people-powered entertainment options, an upcoming smartphone app and ePub reader.
The company showcased its new Life Fitness Reader, which lets users read books and magazines right on the Engage console. The standard eBook format ePub lets users store documents on a USB and read them right from the console.
In coordination with the company's Green to Go initiative to develop products and processes that respect the earth's resources, Life Fitness created a hybrid energy-saving feature to work in conjunction with the Elevation Series Engage cross trainers and Lifecycle exercise bikes. The integrated LCD TV on the Engage products is the first of its kind to use the power generated from a user's workout. The new hybrid products switch automatically from electric to self-generated power when a user reaches a certain intensity level in the workout, lowering the energy draw from the console by more than 75 percent.
"Our customers are increasingly interested in green options that will save them money, so we are putting solid investment behind product advancements that will drive a return to our customers," Chris Clawson, president of Life Fitness, said in a release.
On the strength side, Life Fitness added new panel options for its Signature Series weight stack shrouds. The shroud panels now are available in six designer options (steel, bronze, bamboo, redwood and two pattern options) with 10 frame colors and 30 upholstery colors for the seats and benches.
Also at the show, Life Fitness introduced its limited edition Augie's Quest Lifecycle exercise bike. The original Lifecycle bike was introduced more than 40 years ago as the first computerized stationary bike. A portion of the proceeds from the limited edition bike will be donated to Augie's Quest, the Muscular Dystrophy Association's ALS research initiative led by Life Fitness co-founder Augie Nieto, which has raised more than $28 million to date.
Life Fitness also previewed its Virtual Trainer smartphone app, which will allow users to track workout progress while on the go. The app syncs with the Life Fitness Virtual Trainer website, letting exercisers update workout results on both the website and their smartphones. A library of additional training features, such as recommended workouts, music packs and GPS, will be available as add-ons for purchase.
"Our users are busy people, and we're making sure our products support not only a healthy lifestyle but also their daily life activities," Clawson said. "By adding features like the Life Fitness Virtual Trainer app and the Life Fitness Reader, we're streamlining activities for exercisers."
Nieto was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS, or Lou Gehrig's disease) in March 2005. Since his diagnosis, he has worked with the MDA's ALS division to coordinate cure-driven fundraising in support of the organization's worldwide ALS research program.
"Augie shaped Life Fitness into what it is today, and he's an inspirational leader that we will forever support," Clawson said. "Augie has touched the lives of many in the industry who will want this special edition Augie's Quest Lifecycle, not only to support his cause, but also to pay honor to his life's work."
The limited edition Lifecycle displays the Augie's Quest logo with red and black machine accents to coordinate with the Augie's Quest brand image. A motivational quote from Nieto that reads "From Success to Significance" also adorns the upright bike's base.
In addition to these products, Life Fitness announced its Personal Trainers to Watch contest in conjunction with the American Council on Exercise. The contest celebrates the more than 261,000 personal trainers across the country who have helped clients achieve a lasting lifestyle change.


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. home .
Welcome to my web presence. Herein lies information related to my interests, my passions, and my philosophy. Please peruse the various sections listed above. Enjoy.
I'm a developer who likes designing software, implementing new technologies, and playing with code. I have a couple of degrees from Carnegie Mellon and got into a start-up company right away. I enjoy focusing on end-user products with a lot of smarts under the cover: analytics, machine learning, NLP, whatever. Right now I run the R&D software department for my current company.
some of my projects
- Constellation
- Constellation for Insider Threat
- School Safety Center
- Watchboard
- Mobile Indicator
- Mobile Command
- Mobile Assessor
- Mobile Threat Monitor
- Subatomic
- XPilot


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Mindful meditation may be useful in battles against anxiety, depression and pain, according to a fresh look at past research.
Using data from 47 earlier studies, researchers found moderate evidence to support the use of mindfulness meditation to treat those conditions. Meditation didn't seem to affect mood, sleep, or substance use.
"Many people have the idea that meditation means just sitting quietly and doing nothing," wrote Dr. Madhav Goyal in an email to Reuters Health. "That is not true. It is an active training of the mind to increase awareness, and different meditation programs approach this in different ways."
Goyal led the study at The Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. He and his colleagues write in JAMA Internal Medicine that meditation techniques emphasize mindfulness and concentration.
So-called mindfulness meditation is aimed at allowing the mind to pay attention to whatever thoughts enter it, such as sounds in the environment, without becoming too focused. Mantra meditation, on the other hand, involves focusing concentration on a particular word or sound. Approximately 9 percent of people in the US reported meditating in 2007, according to the National Institutes of Health.
For the new report, the researchers searched several electronic databases that catalog medical research for trials that randomly assigned people with a certain condition such as anxiety, pain, or depression to do meditation or another activity. These randomized controlled trials are considered the gold standard of medical research.
The researchers found 47 studies with over 3,500 participants that met their criteria. After combining the data, Goyal said his team found between a 5 and 10 percent improvement in anxiety symptoms among people who took part in mindfulness meditation, compared to those who did another activity. There was also about a 10 to 20 percent improvement in symptoms of depression among those who practiced mindfulness meditation, compared to the other group.
"This is similar to the effects that other studies have found for the use of antidepressants in similar populations," Goyal said. "Clinicians should be prepared to talk with their patients about the role that meditation programs could have in addressing psychological stress, particularly when symptoms are mild," Goyal said.
Dr. Allan Goroll, who wrote an editorial accompanying the new study, told Reuters Health the analysis is an example of an area of much-needed scientific study, because many people make treatment decisions based on beliefs -- not data.
Goroll is professor at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. Goyal said people should remember that meditation was not conceived to treat any particular health problem. "Rather, it is a path we travel on to increase our awareness and gain insight into our lives," he wrote.
"The best reason to meditate is to gain this insight. Improvements in health conditions are really a side benefit, and it's best to think of them that way."© 2014 Khaleej Times. All Rights Reserved. Provided by Syndigate.info, an Albawaba.com company


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Kid Gets In Trouble With School for Shaving Favorite NBA Player Into His Hair
There aren't a lot of red-haired players in the NBA. That's one of the reasons Patrick Gonzalez, who has red hair, is a fan of Matt Bonner, a ginger-headed back-up center for his hometown San Antonio Spurs.
So to pay homage to the sharp-shooting bigman, Gonzalez had a rather accurate image of his favorite player shaved into the back of his head.
Since hair is apparently a touchy subject at Woodlake Hills Middle School, his mom Rose Gonzalez actually went to the school to clear the Bonner-cut with the administration before Patrick showed up for class.
But despite this meeting, Patrick was told that he would have to get rid of his unique hair style or face suspension. According to school official Aubrey Chancellor, Rose Gonzalez may have met with the front office about her son's hair, but permission was never actually granted.
So now it looks like Patrick will have to get rid of his tribute, which has been deemed a "distraction." He says that he is "mad," but will comply with the decision.
If anything good were to come out of this misunderstanding, it would be that it might draw more attention to Bonner, who last year posted a couple pretty clever parodies of basketball instructional videos on YouTube. Check them out below.


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Dan Fincke has announced the second subject of the Forward Thinking project he launched with Libby Anne and it's one that hits very close to home for me. I've had to deal with the question of how to address religious questions at funerals where there is a mixture of views among those who mourn. Dan sets up the question:
Fortunately, in intimate conversations and small groups, we can find those with whom we can each have the kinds of conversations that suit our own emotional and intellectual needs and desires best. But this still leaves a problem: what should we do when we are mourning collectively? Because an important part of many people's individual and personal confrontations with death are the public ceremonies and rituals that mark it. And many people want to hear only words of comfort, while many others might find these ceremonies to be hollow tepid formalities if they don't confront the harsh realities that are really concerning them. Some people want to focus on death and while others want to focus on life. Some people want to banish funerals and dirges and replace them only with memorial parties.
One might say, "well this is simple, let everyone just grieve differently and in their own way." But this is precisely the problem: when we come together, our group ceremonies cannot simply do that because they will invariably bring together people who grieve differently and who are there to remember someone who may have wanted to be grieved even differently than they are inclined to…
So if you were writing the template for collective mourning, understanding the mixtures of people from different traditions and temperaments who would inevitably be present, what would your template look like? We might need multiple templates and I would be one to argue that we should have norms that allow for a fair amount of individual customizations of templates for different individuals, families, and other groups. But what sorts of values do you think should be central to the template? What sorts of rituals for what sorts of purposes would you want to preserve or create?
In short: If it were up to you to design one or more basic models for messaging and for ritual through which people were to regularly mark deaths together, what would such ceremonies be like?
I'm going to avoid answering that question in much detail because, quite frankly, I don't think there can be a single template for everyone. A deeply religious person is going to mourn, and design the rituals that surround mourning, differently from an atheist. And that's okay. But what happens when there are both among the mourners? This is a question I have had to deal with in very real ways.I have written before about the death of my mother, who died 16 years ago, a year after getting a lung transplant. I gave the eulogy at her funeral. And I knew that I would have to address the subject delicately. My mother was a very vague theist. She believed in a higher power of some undefined sort and she believed in life after death. I, obviously, do not. In my eulogy, I tried to find some common ground. I don't remember my exact words but they went something like this:
I would love to think that I will someday be reunited with her, and with others I have lost. Unfortunately, I don't see any good reason to believe that I will. I'm sure many here do believe in such a future. But there is one form of immortality that we can all believe in. She will live on in the lives of her children and grandchildren and her many friends. I will think of her every time I hear a Barbara Streisand song (her favorite singer) or drive by a Bill Knapp's (she loved one particular dish they served). Her grandchildren will think of her every time they go fishing and bait a hook, or every time they bake a pie, just the way she taught them to do. Regardless of whether a heaven awaits us, we all live on in the lives of those we touched while we were alive.
My father is now 77 years old. He is in relatively good health and I expect and hope that he will live many more years. He is an atheist, but he is married to a Pentecostal. A few months ago I had a dream that he had died and my stepmother and I got into a big fight because she wanted a religious funeral and I thought that was inappropriate because he was an atheist. I told my dad about that dream and he agreed that it was quite realistic. But he told me not to worry about it and not to fight over it. "I don't care what goes on at my funeral," he said. "I don't plan to be there."
I expect that I will give the eulogy at his funeral as well, whenever it happens (if I can hold it together; I managed, just barely, to get through it at my mother's funeral, only breaking down at the end, but I think it will be far more difficult at his). And I will try, again, to express my views (and his) without offending anyone else or sparking a fight. A funeral is not the place for such things. And regardless of how we may mourn differently, we will all be mourning. And that will be a time for supporting and loving one another, not for petty arguments.
I don't know if it's possible to design a mourning ritual that would satisfy everyone. I doubt it's even worth trying. But I think it's important as individuals that we give others the consideration of allowing them to mourn in their own way. Did I answer the question? Not really. But it did provoke a great many memories and a bit of thought.


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The T-Zone
Definition: The T-Zone
People have different skin types that can be divided into five categories: oily skin, dry skin, normal skin, sensitive skin and combination skin, which is the most common. Having combination skin means that your face most likely has an oily zone that includes your forehead, nose, and chin, while the rest of your skin has normal to dry patches.
If you were to draw a line through these areas, it would look like the letter "T" — hence, the commonly used beauty term, the T-Zone. The T-Zone is oilier than the rest of your face because it has a higher percentage of oil glands. These areas tend to break out more often and have a higher tendency toward blackheads, whiteheads, irritation, sunburn, and redness.
Caring for your T-Zone is easy: Just remember to keep your hands away from your face, and use a toner or astringent in addition to your cleanser to help keep the area clean.


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Tethered spinal cord syndrome is a neurological disorder caused by tissue attachments that limit the movement of the spinal cord within the spinal column. These attachments cause an abnormal stretching of the spinal cord. This syndrome is closely associated with spina bifida. It is estimated that 20 to 50 percent of children with spina bifida defects repaired shortly after birth will require surgery at some point to untether the spinal cord. The lower tip of the spinal cord is normally located opposite the disc between the first and second lumbar vertebrae in the upper part of the lower back. In people with spina bifida (myelomeningocele), the spinal cord fails to separate from the skin of the back during development, preventing it from ascending normally, so the spinal cord is low-lying or tethered. In patients with a lipomyelomeningocele, the spinal cord will have fat at the tip and this may connect to the fat which overlies the thecal sac (a fluid filled sac that the spinal cord "floats" within.) Although the skin is separated and closed at birth, the spinal cord stays in the same location after the closure. As the child continues to grow, the spinal cord can become stretched, causing damage and interfering with the blood supply to the spinal cord.
Untethering is generally performed only if there are clinical signs or symptoms of deterioration. The surgery involves opening the scar from the prior closure down to the covering (dura) over the myelomeningocele. Sometimes a small portion of the bony vertebrae (the laminae) are removed to obtain better exposure or to decompress the spinal cord. The dura is then opened, and the spinal cord and myelomeningocele are gently dissected away from the scarred attachments to the surrounding dura. Once the myelomeningocele is freed from all its scarred attachments, the dura and the wound are closed. The child usually can resume normal activities within a few weeks. Recovery of lost muscle and bladder function depends upon the degree and length of preoperative implications. The combined complication rate of this surgery is usually only 1 to 2 percent. Complications include infection, bleeding, damage to the spinal cord or myelomeningocele, which may result in decreased muscle strength or bladder or bowel function. Many children require only one untethering procedure. However, since symptoms of tethering can occur during periods of growth, 10 to 20 percent require repeated surgery.


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I keep a black and white photograph on the wall. It's a grainy old black and white photo, poorly mounted and inexpertly framed. Very few people who mount the stairs from the door to my living room recognize the faces in the picture. Usually they ignore it completely but sometimes their attention is drawn by the large hammer and sickle in the center foreground. It has been years since any visitors recognized that the unsmiling, somber figure just above and behind the Communist emblem is the former President of Chile, Salvador Allende. He is, appropriately perhaps, surrounded by members of the Popular Unity government and yet appears to be abstracted and isolated. Only the Minister of Labor, Luis Figueroa, is looking directly at Allende who lay dead in Chile's presidential palace, La Moneda, a week after the photograph was taken. General Augusto Pinochet had seized power in a military coup and the Chilean Air Force had bombed Chile's own government center.
For obvious reasons the coup against President Mohammad Morsi has been compared to the coup against Allende. Emotionally the picture is compelling: democratically elected presidents forced out of office by generals who profoundly hated their politics and who then pursued increasingly violent campaigns against the remaining civilian opposition. In the world of American academic politics the comparison is especially powerful because it suggests that the anti-communism that drove policies a generation ago and now seems shameful and regrettable is surfacing again as "Islamophobia" or an irrational hatred of Islam. Saving democracy, a lost cause in 1973, is now possible and a moral imperative as the events of the past are replayed in a different part of the world with a different cast of characters.
It would be useless to enter an academic hissing match about whether the characters really are playing the appropriate roles: Egyptian General Abdelfattah Sisi as Pinochet and Morsi as Allende. The argument as it stands is rooted in the moral sentiments of observers, but a closer look at the comparison can be useful. It reveals the substantial differences between the use of the electoral process for economic change and political democratization. It also reveals how military interventions may have very different ways of deploying violence, even overwhelmingly high levels of violence. And it reveals the degree to which, regardless of the extent or experience of constitutional rule, armies are likely intervene when levels of political polarization reach the point at which civil conflict threatens.
At the most superficial level the comparison obviously succeeds and equally obviously fails. Two presidents, democratically elected, were both ousted by a military establishment. One, Allende, was engaged within a political system that had been a functioning constitutional democracy for at least 40 years. He sought to fashion a transition to socialism and more particularly to enhance the role of the state in the economy and to make the distribution of goods and services more equitable. Morsi's election in an open contest occurred a year after the collapse of a 60-year old authoritarian regime under the influence of an immense revolutionary upheaval. He appears to have been laying the foundation for an Islamic state the contours and content of which remain somewhat vague. Allende was secular, socialist and considered himself a democrat; Morsi was an Islamist, committed to private property, and also considered himself a democrat.
From the viewpoint of American social scientists and policy makers the differences may not matter. Both men were engaged in "transformative politics" against entrenched interests. Both had been chosen by the appropriate mechanisms to hold the country's highest executive office. Both were overthrown by the military bureaucracies acting on their own and in their own interest. Neither army had fought a foreign enemy in decades and neither general had any experience in combat. Calling Al-Sisi Pinochet, like calling Pinochet Hitler, is sufficiently satisfying not to require further reflection.
What happens though if we look at the comparison as something less like a slogan and more like an analysis? We can begin to see more clearly the outlines of Morsi's catastrophic political failure and we may begin to understand some of its roots. We may also begin to see, unpleasant as it may be, more clearly into the ways in which the Egyptian military intends to use force.
Like Mohammad Morsi, Salvador Allende running as the candidate of the Popoular Unity Coalition won the presidency with a slender lead. Although Morsi received just under 25 % of the vote in the first round, he was elected by about 52 % in a run-off. Unlike Morsi, however, Allende only won a plurality, 36.2 % of the 3 million votes cast; conservative Jorge Alessandri won 34.9 % of the votes and Christian Democrat Radomiro Tomic has 27.8 %. Unlike Egypt, Chile then had no run-off. With no majority candidate, the names of the top two candidates went to the legislature which itself was dominated by Allende's opponents. The legislature had historically chosen the candidate with the most votes, and to placate his opposition Allende signed a formal "Statute of Constitutional Guarantees."
In the end, Christian Democratic congressmen voted for Allende rather than abstain or return Alessandri who had been president from 1958-1964 to the office. Allende obtained the presidency with a considerably weaker electoral mandate than Mohammad Morsi. He knew it, his opponents knew it, and the Chilean population knew it. Allende's Socialist party did gain the Interior (as in Egypt the ministry that controls the police unlike the US where the Interior Department controls the national parks) and Defense ministries but despite nominal civilian control over the Armed Forces it proved impossible to prevent a coup. Jose Toha, Allende's first Minister of the Interior, was suspended by Congress for tolerating the emergence of left-wing militias He was then named Minister of Defense by Allende but was ultimately forced from that portfolio as well. Clodomiro Almeyda, a left-wing Socialist, replaced him until he was himself succeeded by General Carlos Prats.
Unlike Egypt in 2012, Chile had a well-established constitution. It had been written in 1925 and the timing of elections made it almost impossible for a single party to control the executive and legislative branches. No exception occurred in 1970 for the UP coalition had 20 senators (of 50) in the upper house and 60 (out of 150) in the lower house. Unlike Morsi whose own coalition had 235 of 508 seats in the lower house and 105 of 180 elected seats in the upper house, Allende never had a friendly legislature. Before the Egyptian Supreme Constitutional Court dissolved the lower house, Morsi had a working plurality in the Egyptian parliament. After the dissolution of the lower house and the passage of the new constitution in December 2012 Morsi was a president with a majority in the rump upper house that constituted the legislature (and to which he had, by right, appointed 90 of the total of 270 members).
The hostility of the courts and the legislature was directly rooted in Allende's socialist agenda challenging the inviolability of private property. His insistence on completing the nationalization of the large mining properties (already begun as "Chileanization" under Eduardo Frei, his Christian Democratic predecessor) as well as other sectors of the economy brought him into conflict with the judiciary and the legislature. His equally great insistence on distributing many of the fruits of the nationalization through programs such as provision of milk to all children was seen by many as a threat: whether by degrading the efficiency of the economy or deploying the strategy of the "rentier state" (a phrase that had barely been invented at the time) to enhance his party's control over the powers of government.
The relationship of the Armed Forces to the executive and more generally to the constitutional order is less easily comparable than other aspects of the two presidents' tenure. Allende's civilian ministers of defense and the interior never really controlled the armed forces or the police respectively. Nevertheless, when Allende was elected the Chilean Armed Forces had not intervened against a civilian government in more than 40 years and it was common to argue that Chile had an unbroken chain of constitutional governments going back to the late nineteenth century. No coup was possible in Chile until violence within the military itself had brought new leadership to the Army. This process began when a group of dissident officers and former officers, with the aid of the US Central Intelligence Agency, murdered Army Chief of Staff General René Schneider in October 1970 shortly before Allende's inauguration.
Until 1973, the Army had been guided by the so-called "Schneider doctrine" expressing the general's belief in the need for a complete separation of political and military power. Schneider's successor, General Carlos Prats, accepted the doctrine and even put down an attempted coup on June 29, 1973, the so-called Tanquetazo. Prats was forced out of the Army weeks before the coup and in 1974 was murdered in exile by the Chilean secret services. In his place, Allende appointed the little known and colorless Augusto Pinochet as chief of staff. It is not surprising that before 1970 scholars ranked the Chilean Armed forces as one of the least likely to make a coup and that until the very end few Chileans or foreigners had reason to believe that any move by the army would result in a dictatorship that would last nearly two decades.
The Egyptian Armed Forces have a very different relationship to the government and since 1952 have been intimately connected to the sinews of the state if they did not in fact constitute them. Until the election of Mohammad Morsi all Egyptian presidents had come from one or another branch of the Armed Forces; generals and former generals served as provincial governors, government ministers, and at the head of state-owned economic enterprises. The armed forces have been an autonomous administration within the larger state and the 2012 constitution formalized that relationship by requiring that the Minister of Defense be a general rather than a civilian and by removing the Army's budget from significant legislative oversight. For the first time in Egyptian history the army hierarchy itself came to power in a coup against former President Hosny Mubarak in February 2011 and assumed the country's executive and legislative authority until at least mid-2012 when it relinquished both authorities to elected civilians. In August 2012 Morsi retired the two key military leaders who had ousted Mubarak, Mohammad Tantawi and Sami Anan, and chose Abdelfattah Al-Sisi as the new Chief of Staff and Minister of Defense.
It is no secret that since 1954 Egyptian governments and the Armed Forces have tried many times to destroy the Muslim Brothers. Morsi thus faced an officers' corps with no particular commitment to constitutional government and with a deep distaste for his politics. Despite much wishful thinking by observers outside the army, it has also shown no inclination to split in the face of popular unrest. It is difficult to know whether Morsi truly thought he had neutralized the Armed Forces but if he did it was, given their previous 60 years, a colossal mis-reading of the situation.
What of the political context of the periods during which Allende and Morsi held office? This is where the similarities may be greatest but where crucial differences also become most apparent. Lacking control of the legislature and attempting to change the structure of property rights in favor of tenants, workers, and the impoverished, Allende and the UP resorted to rule by decree and refused to implement countervailing court orders based on the existing laws. Allende thus found himself increasingly in conflict with the judiciary and the Supreme Court. Although the Chilean Supreme Court is far less powerful than its Egyptian counterpart, the justices engaged in a public dispute with Allende including an exchange of letters accusing him of undermining the rule of law. Congress had been in the hands of his opposition since 1970 and the 1973 elections did not materially change the political balance of forces. Mass demonstrations against Allende to influence a legislature already hostile to him were unnecessary. On August 22, 1973 a majority of the lower house voted to ask the military to intervene and overthrow the Allende government.
The UP's attempt to re-shape the Chilean economy had important repercussions especially in a country that had long suffered from high levels of inflation and rigidly separate labor markets and whose balance of payments depended on the export of a single commodity. The decline of copper prices diminished the government's income during Allende's presidency and the ensuing lack of foreign currency made imports, including food, scarce and expensive. Workers in the formal sector, especially mining and processing, had won some significant wage increases. Price-fixing and rationing, especially the role of the Price and Supply Boards, worsened the situation rather than ameliorating it. This in turn helped to re-create inflationary pressure that reached at least 140% a year in 1972 whereas measured Egyptian inflation appears to be on the order of 12 %. Much is made of the depreciation of the Egyptian (from about 5 to the US dollar in 2010 to somewhat over 7 today,), a drop of about 30%. In the equivalent period of Allende's presidency the escudo dropped from 20 to the dollar to 3000. Unhappy as Egyptians have been with the worsening economic situation over the past year it is hard to imagine how the country would have reacted to the vaporization of the currency that Chile experienced which would have rendered the central bank's foreign reserves worthless long before they were spent.
Nationalizations included firms driven out of business by worsening economic problems and this made investors increasingly skittish. Consequently the population suffered from increasing shortages of consumer goods and rising prices that affected the poor as well as the wealthy. Strikes and lock-outs also affected production and a strike by truck-owners, many of whom were impoverished, with both political and economic goals dislocated commerce. Allende's opponents viewed the repression of the truckers' strike (deemed economic sabotage by the UP government) as a violation of his pledge to respect the constitution. One crucial difference between the strikes during the Allende period and widespread strikes in Egypt over the last two and a half years is that neither the Army nor the Muslim Brotherhood used its regulatory authority to win the support of striking workers against owners or to extend the role of state ownership or control. The strikes by associations known as gremios were for economic ends but they also had an anti-trade union edge. Unsurprisingly the Chilean trade union movement (CUT) strongly supported Allende, opposed the gremios, and in turn received significant support from the UP government.
In Egypt the nature of the revolutionary upsurge itself affected several key industries, notably tourism an important employment sector and a source of foreign currency. Egypt is often called a rentier state but unlike Chile in the 1970s it has several streams of foreign income. Remittances and Suez Canal receipts are other important sources of foreign currency although Canal passages declined somewhat in the wake of the global financial crisis of 2008. Egypt ceased being an oil exporter in 2007. Foreign exchange is crucial for a country that imports about half the wheat it consumes. There were longstanding shortages of butane gas (crucial for cooking and heating among lower income groups), gasoline (crucial for transport), diesel and electricity. From late 2011 on there were frequently long lines at gas stations, rolling blackouts, and insufficient diesel for a variety of urban and agricultural production. The Egyptian trade union movement has long been under the control of the state but has been challenged by wildcat strikes and independent union movements. Its independent leadership resisted any alliance with the Muslim Brotherhood and its formal organization is in disarray. To the degree that voting in the industrial cities of the Delta over the past three years is any indication it would be difficult to say that there is any coherent majority organizationally or politically with the industrial workforce.
Allende, certainly a secular politician if not necessarily a liberal, faced significant opposition from devout Catholics and the church hierarchy. In March 1973, the UP government announced plans to reform the educational system (K-12), the so-called National Unified School curriculum (ENU). Perhaps the biggest problem for Allende was that the ENU called for educating students in the values of "socialist humanism" which the Church found offensive and which provoked sufficiently significant opposition to force Allende to temporize (but not withdraw) the proposal. Morsi was obviously not committed to a secular program in education or anywhere else nor was he committed to overhauling the Egyptian educational system. He and the Muslim Brotherhood evoked opposition from the mainstream religious establishment represented by the Mufti of the Republic or the Shaykh of Al-Azhar.
Internationally, however, the two leaders faced different situations with the United States. US policy makers increasingly wanted to see Allende ousted both because they feared the emergence of a socialist government on the Latin American continent and because the Hickenlooper Amendment formally committed the US to oppose governments that nationalized foreign property with insufficient compensation. It would be wrong to say that the US supported Morsi as such but the US appears to have been committed to Morsi's presidency as a step toward democratization and initially sought, albeit halfheartedly, for his return as the legitimate holder of the office.
To sum up, by the weeks before the respective coups Morsi and Allende faced widespread public opposition that may have accounted for a majority of the population. This opposition had also taken the form of street fighting and the increasing possibility of violent confrontations. They also both faced significant opposition from significant state institutions, notably the judiciary and the military. They both faced a rapidly deteriorating economic situation.
Allende's opposition had two primary roots. One lay in opposition to his project for socialist transformation. The US, Chilean private enterprise, landowners, the Catholic Church, sections of the Armed Forces, and multinational firms all opposed the policies that aimed at a Chilean transition to socialism for reasons of material interest, ideology, or principle. In addition there was significant opposition to the Allende government because of the economic and social disruption the projected socialist transformation caused. Allende and the UP may have expected to win over Chile's working class and the poor as the socialist transformation went forward, but the real process of implementing the outlines of socialism alienated many Chileans.
Before addressing the nature of the opposition to Morsi it is worth noticing that his project, unlike Allende's, was vague at best and contradictory at worst. The US government and many specialists have analyzed the events of the last two years as a process of democratization. Was this, however, the way that Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood and the Freedom and Justice Party looked at events? Morsi and MB/FJP appear to have been of two minds about the process in which they were engaged. It has never been clear if they saw themselves as a party committed to democratic transition or to the revolutionary re-structuring of the state and politics. The clearest way to understand the difference is to look at how the Morsi government sought to deal with the so-called feloul or remnants of the old regime. Morsi tried by decree to deny political rights to members, especially from the leadership, of the dissolved National Democratic party. When this failed by order of the Supreme Court it was written into the new constitution. It is easy enough to understand why a revolutionary party wants to proscribe leaders of the old order, but it is less easy to see why a democratizing party wishes to do so especially when the existing law limits the political rights of anyone convicted of criminal acts. Acute as the political polarization in Chile was it never occurred to the UP, despite its formal commitment to revolutionary social and economic change, to strip the members of opposition parties of the right to run for office.
Morsi also clearly faced at least two distinct strands of opposition. There were those who opposed him on principle or and those who feared him but before the late fall of 2012 neither expressed the kind of implacable hatred that characterized Allende's opposition. To the contrary, a significant number of his opponents conceded his electoral legitimacy. Certainly the Christian communities were uncomfortable with Morsi and Muslim Brotherhood from the beginning as were trade union leaders who refused as early as 2011 the idea of an MB-oriented union movement. He was also opposed by sections of the Armed Forces and probably most of the police. Religious minorities and trade unions, however, play a much smaller role in Egypt than in Chile and the police and armed forces had, by early 2012 lost popular support. However, as the economy began to deteriorate through 2012 and into 2013 and as street violence became more pronounced opposition to Morsi clearly grew. Official Islam in the guise of the Azhar, which like the Catholic hierarchy in Chile commands broad respect, became increasingly hostile as did broader sections of the population, the press, and local communities and groups of soccer fans (whose networks and institutions have played a significant role in mobilizing Egyptians over the past year).
In Egypt, unlike Chile where disagreement with Allende was expressed by an elected legislature, popular discontent with the Morsi presidency manifested itself in a petition campaign and massive demonstrations. Egyptian constitutions since 1923 have guaranteed the people the right to assemble peacefully. Western liberals in the wake of the coup seem to have decided that the Egyptian people were wrong to demonstrate or at least to demonstrate in such large numbers while making demands that not only contravened a constitutional whose ink had barely dried but which invited the Armed Forces to intervene again in the political process. This is not a question germane to this discussion but clearly the generals in both countries acted on their own judgment. It expects too much, I think, to believe that masses of people will use their rights not only to express their beliefs but with the kind of unrealistically sophisticated prudential or moral judgment required by theoreticians of rationality or moral philosophy.
Comparing Egypt and Chile in the wake of their respective coups brings us to what political scientists like to call a "puzzle." To grasp the nature of this puzzle it is necessary first to do something few people want to do: accept the not all violence is the same. It can be deployed in different ways for different ends. Thousands of people were killed both in Egypt and in Chile after the coups but the nature of the violence and, at least in the short term, its political implications are different. This is not to say that one is acceptable or excusable. It is simply to recognize that there is a profound difference in how the major institutions associated with organized violence, the army and police, have deployed it and the political implications of its use. This is important if any form of constitutional democracy is to be restored to Egypt.
I have insisted on what distinguishes Chile from Egypt in order to make a fundamental point. In Chile the Armed Forces took power during a period of severe economic and political upheaval from a weakened president who had never had a clear electoral mandate or much institutional support. Internal and external agents re-shaped the Chilean Armed Forces by violence and argument to make them the instrument for a coup, thereby vitiating Chile's significant history of constitutional democracy.
The Egyptian Armed Forces have taken power twice in the past three years as the country has experienced the initial phases of economic and political breakdown. They did so most recently from a president with an electoral mandate and a friendly legislature, but they also did so as an Army that was no stranger to intervening in the affairs of government. There was no need to re-shape the Army itself in order for it to remove a fragile constitutional government but the second time around the Armed Forces have so far chosen, unlike 2011 and unlike in Chile, not to rule directly. General Abdelfattah al-Sisi may be the big man in the government but he is not the president and the decisions of the government are at least formally made by the government rather than by a junta acting as the government (as was also the case during the period in which the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces ruled Egypt in 2011-12).
If we look at the way in which the two armies deployed violence there is one important difference: in Chile violence was used to overturn established institutions of constitutional democracy and to uproot the entire set of political parties from the center Christian Democrats to the extreme left MIR. Acts of violence included mass arrests, summary executions ("disappearances"), the proscription of parties, the dissolution of parliament (where Allende's opponents had a majority), and the prohibition of demonstrations. Pinochet, in short, not only repressed Allende and his allies but his enemies as well.
In Egypt Morsi was already under the control ("protection") of the Armed Forces when the coup occurred. The coup itself, in the midst of massive anti-Morsi demonstrations, was (unlike Pinochet's attack on La Moneda) peaceful. The military and the police have used overwhelming and arguably criminal violence to disperse the large sit-ins supporting Morsi (early July and again in August) and killed more than a thousand people. Most, but not all, of the top leadership of the Muslim Brothers organization is under arrest but the organization itself has not yet been dissolved although the government is taking steps in that direction. The armed forces dissolved the legislature. They have not so far attacked many of Morsi's political allies or his enemies. The Salafi parties have, for example, continued to function as does the Freedom and Justice party which has chosen new leadership and continues to call for and lead demonstrations. Without minimizing the terrible violence used to disperse the demonstrations in Cairo or apologizing for it, it is nevertheless true that a significant fraction of the Islamist section of the political spectrum continues to function. This was simply not true of the equivalent parties and leaders in Chile in 1973.
What is puzzling is why the violence of the armed forces in these two situations is, at least initially, so different. Why did the Pinochet regime deploy violence against wide sections of Chilean society including the centrist political elite when it was clear that a majority of Chileans and that elite, through their votes and political affiliations, rejected the Allende presidency? There is every reason to think that a majority of the legislature and the Supreme Court would have agreed on a decision by the Armed Forces to hold new elections and that a candidate from the Christian Democrats or the Conservatives would have won (as they had the two free elections before 1970). Why have the Egyptian Armed Forces not deployed such violence against wide sections of Egyptian society and the political elite given that Morsi (unlike Allende) had won a majority in the presidential election and that his party had a majority in the legislature? Why have, in contradistinction to Chile, parties more radical than the MB (the Salafi Nour party in particular) been allowed to remain in existence and why have some members of the Freedom and Justice party (the political arm of the MB) been allowed to remain free, and why have (for the moment at least) human rights groups been allowed to function? Not long ago Ziad Bahaa al-Din, the Deputy Prime Minister for the economy, proposed a truce between the government and the FJP. None of Pinochet's ministers proposed such a truce with the UP and had any of them done so they would have been immediately retired if not imprisoned or perhaps executed. Additionally why is the new government so intent on re-writing the constitution rather than simply ruling by decree as the Pinochet government did for seven years?
One answer might be that the Egyptian Armed Forces are kinder and gentler than the Chilean Armed Forces. The repeated use of violence against massed protesters makes this unlikely although it does not answer the question of why there was no immediate move to attack the sit-ins. The Egyptian high command may be more interested in creating a civilian government than was Pinochet because they may prefer a role in which their power derives as much from balancing between contending parties as from the use of violence.
Another possibility is that the Egyptian generals are more cunning than their Latin American counterparts in the 1970s. Where generals in Argentina, Uruguay, and Chile wiped out elected governments and ruled directly, the Egyptian generals understand the need for an intermediary. Whether they are inherently so or simply learned during the experience of direct rule by the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces they have a more complex strategy which relieves them of the need to deploy the high levels of constant force deploy in Chile.
It may also be that the Egyptian Armed Forces simply lack the capacity for the level of repression Chile experienced. The Egyptian Armed Forces are proportionately smaller than their Chilean equivalent. Pinochet commanded about 65,000 men for a population of not quite ten million; Sisi's Egypt has nine times the population but only seven times as large an army. Unlike Pinochet, Sisi's armed forces are necessarily deployed in a border area (Sinai) as well as in the population centers. Thus, General Sisi may not have the necessary force at his disposal to engage in the level of repression that characterized the Pinochet regime. Or perhaps, as is frequently asserted, the Egyptian armed forces are simply incompetent as is the state apparatus more generally. It is an army that has not fought a war since 1973 (although the Chilean Armed Forces had not fought a war since in the 69 years preceding the coup) and has extensive domestic interests. Fighting more frequent wars does not seem, however, to be in the interests of the Egyptian people nor is it clear that more frequent wars would be a key to more democracy. Generally speaking the reverse is true: war has been the pathway through which dictatorship was consolidated in the French, Russian, and Iranian revolutions.
Sisi, unlike Pinochet, also faces significant American opposition to the new government. The US government today views some Islamist movements as potential partners in the project of democratization where the US government of 40 years ago viewed communists and socialists alike as revolutionary enemies. This shift in US strategy under President Obama, echoed in part by Republican Senators McCain and Graham during a visit to Egypt in early August, may have an impact comparable over time to the US preference for military leaders as modernizers in the 1950s.
There is at least one other, more surprising possibility: the more unsettled revolutionary nature of the situation in Egypt. Wiping out the threat of socialism or even social reform in Chile required more than simply decapitating the one party whose candidate had become president. It required a much broader assault on the organized social forces that supported him. In Egypt there was no similar coalition of parties and organizations whose program was both clear and yet transcended the presence of a single party at the center of government. Consequently in Egypt the Armed only wishes to uproot one party but not necessarily to destroy institutions of governance with which it has itself has long been intimately associated.
Unlike Morsi and his presidential election, neither Allende nor his coalition was inexperienced in Chilean electoral politics. He had first run for the presidency in 1952 and won 5.5 % of the vote; in 1958, running against Alessandri, he was in second place with 28 % of the vote; in 1964, against Eduardo Frei he had amassed nearly 39 %. He had been a minister in a Popular Front government in 1938 and an elected senator since the 1940s. He was not only a founder of the Chilean Socialist party, on whose ticket he ran, but one of the authors of the politics of an electoral (Chilean) path to socialism. The revolution in Chile was, unlike Cuba or Nicaragua, electoral politics. In Egypt, by contrast, Morsi's electoral victory was the fortuitous result of a revolutionary upheaval in which millions of people took to the streets.
It was neither the expected result of a long-term electoral strategy within a constitutional and democratic order nor was it the result of an armed struggle against the old regime. This verges on the problem of revolution which also outside the scope of this discussion. Suffice it to say that if by revolution we mean the entry of masses of people into action in unexpected ways that break down the old ways of organizing politics then Egypt has been in revolution for the last three years. If by revolution we mean the creation of a new order, preferably in some Utopian mold, then Egypt has certainly not.
The problem is less that the MB were unprepared to govern as that they seem to have had no very clear idea of what they wanted to govern for: was it the revolutionary re-structuring of the political order and the seizure of power or was it the consolidation of democracy? Did they want to dismantle and re-make the existing institutions of governance or did they simply want to share in the spoils? To what degree were they interested in punishing and excluding the old regime and to what degree were they interested in including its supporters?
Chile's politics were far more organized than Egypt's but they were not accompanied by the kind of massive spontaneous upwelling of support that has characterized Egypt in the past two years. Several Allende policies were extensions Frei government. Allende's policies neither extended nor weakened his electoral base significantly, but they did expand the power and influence of the institutions and organizations in his electoral coalition, especially the Communists, the Socialists, the MIR, and the Chilean trade union movement. They also attracted some support in other organizations and mobilized a few new social groups, especially in the countryside. Paradoxically in the absence of Allende himself there was every possibility that not only the left parties but the centrist parties would attempt to pursue the policies of the UP after this ouster. The use of violence against even those, such as the legislature and its Christian Democrat majority, was testimony to the military's desire for a clean slate. There is no reason to believe the Egyptian Armed Forces want a clean slate or desire to pursue their own Utopian fantasy as dictated by Chicago-trained economists.
It is only an apparent paradox that the Egyptian military has used more violence but in a far more focused fashion than their Chilean counterparts. Uncertain of their own goals, the Muslim Brothers rode the wave of a massive uprising. They were therefore propelled by it to as great a degree as they were able to shape it. Dispersing the demonstrations at successive locations in Cairo (the Republican Guards Club, Raba'a al-Adawiya, and Nahdah Squares) and arresting most (but not all) of the MB leadership has thus dislocated the adversaries of the Armed Forces' preferred order. There is no need, for the moment, to extend the overt repression to other organizations or institutions. In fact, there is every reason to avoid anything that might evoke renewed spontaneous demonstrations.
There are two other important differences between Chile and Egypt: the relative independence of the Egyptian judiciary. While this independence may depend in part of corruption and nepotism, it is also real in the sense that the judiciary has guarded as best it could its own institutional and social field from the other institutions of the state. In comparison to the Chilean judiciary the Egyptian courts have a history of using their authority against the legislative and executive branches. The rush to re-write a constitution can be best explained if the judiciary is itself a partner, through the Supreme Court, in the re-making of the state. The courts do not need to be exemplars of justice or paragons of Weberian rationality to pursue their own institutional ends and thereby limit, even if only to a degree, the authority of the army and the executive.
The other profound difference is the emergence of at least one area of opposition to the coup based not only on geography but religion. Upper Egypt has emerged as an area in which the control by the central government has become highly contested and on occasion disappeared. This loss of control is connected to the mobilization of both anti-Christian and anti-regime sentiments. This too is unlike Chile where the MIR, the Communists and the Socialists were never able to create zones in which the power of the government ceased to exist for days or weeks at a time. Even had they created "liberated zones" in the terminology of the day those would not have been based on any claim of religious (or ethnic) community. The success of this form of mobilization especially in communities such as Dalga where several churches and a monastery were looted and destroyed, Christians killed, and where Christians were reportedly required to pay ransom as well as the sectarian-tinged murder of members of the Social Democratic party in Asyut are a dark underside to the claims of supporters of President Morsi that they only desire the return of constitutional governance. Rightly or wrongly, it is precisely this kind of unrestrained social violence that many of Morsi's opponents feared would occur if his presidency continued.
The remaining question is what happens next. As in Chile in 1973 there will be those who wish to oppose the armed forces and what Karl Marx would have called the party of order with violence. Attacks on police stations and the attempt to assassinate the Interior Minister are examples. In Chile, as in most places, these actions—even if they accomplish their immediate goals—are almost never successful as forms of political organization. Throughout a long history in which they have been variously called exemplary acts, focos, terrorism, or armed struggle they have almost invariably demobilized mass movements, given the state an excuse for further violence, and ended in disaster and tragedy. Egypt may, of course, be an exception but it is not very likely.
The MB and its political allies will also face some difficult political choices and it is worth reflecting on the experience of Chile, different as it was. In the wake of the coup, it took a long time for Pinochet's opponents to develop a workable and coherent strategy. In the end it was a decision that recognized that the Allende experience would never be revived nor would the 1925 constitution and that the only path forward was the construction of a new Chilean democracy rather than a revolutionary re-structuring of society.
For Chile's left-wing socialists, the MIR and the communists this was a bitter defeat and they have never recovered anything like the place in Chile's political life that they held on September 10, 1973. The communists have essentially disappeared from Chile's political life as has the left-wing of the Socialist party once embodied in leaders such as Clodomiro Almeyda and the Revolution Left Movement (MIR) is also only a shadow of its former self. It would once have been self-evident that the Marxist left in Chile, like the Muslim Brotherhood today in Egypt, could not be eliminated from public life. It was, many would have said, too deeply implanted in the society and too deeply rooted in the unions and working class communities. This turned out not to be the case but what is also true is that there were other avenues for unions, working class communities, and political leaders to struggle for social justice and the immediate demands connected to it. The MB may turn out not to be the only way to imagine a link between Islam and politics and their brand of Islamism may turn out, like Communism, to be a real but historically delimited political movement.
Michelle Bachelet, a socialist, was elected president of Chile in 2006 and served until 2010. She was the daughter of Air Force Brigadier Alberto Bachelet (another military opponent of the coup) who died after being tortured by the Pinochet regime in 1974. But she was not the first president elected after the fall of the Pinochet regime. That was Patricio Aylwin, a Christian Democratic member of the legislature in 1973 who had voted on the resolution asking the Armed Forces to step in. Aylwin came to regret his stance and his candidacy was backed by Ricardo Lagos, leader of the Socialists and of the Democratic Alliance, and himself later president. Lagos emergence as the leader of the Chilean Socialist party was also testimony to how much the party had changed since the years when Allende, Almeyda, and Toha had been its leaders. Lagos, an international civil servant with a degree in political science from Duke University, is known for his work on unemployment policies rather than his desire to expropriate the means of production. He is most famous for the "Lagos finger" when he pointed at Pinochet in a television debate and called him a liar and torturer. But he did not bring Pinochet to justice and he served in Aylwin's cabinet.
For Egyptians of all political persuasions, this may be the most bitter political reality of any comparison of Pinochet's Chile with events in their own country today. In the wake of Mubarak's downfall there was a long debate about how slowly the wheels of production were turning and how impatient Egyptians had become. Unfortunately the wheels of justice will not turn any more quickly along the road to democracy.


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On behalf of all of the interested Disney Infinity Fans we asked some questions.
What is your real name?
Frank S. United States (New York City)
What is the origin story of your Toy Box submission username?
TheBaroness89 is a gamer tag I adopted in 2011 to always remember the person who literally saved my life. I used to call her my Baroness because she was the spitting image of The Baroness from GI Joe.
You received a Toy Box Artist of the Year award as one of the Toy Box Artists most likely to be recruited by S.H.I.E.L.D. What do you think that means?
Lol in a perfect world it means potentially a future job on the Community Team making toy boxes for everyone but in actuality it probably has to do with myself and the other 2 recipients having numbers at the end of our names kind of like how SHIELD has Agent 13 and Agent 33
What made you decide to buy Disney Infinity?
I was in Gamestop one day and the trailer was playing on the monitor. As soon as I saw the Avengers fighting Frost Giants I wanted to try it. So my love for Marvel made me buy it not really knowing what Infinity was and now its my favorite game ever.
What is your favorite play set and why?
Tie: The Incredibles playset and The Avengers. I love the superhero team concept of running around the city and beating up the bad guys and eventually that showdown with Syndrome or Loki
Who is your favorite Disney Infinity 2.0 character and why?
Donald Duck hands down. If any character is me its Donald...it would actually be Donald and Mr Incredible mashed together but Donald's temperament is all me.
Which character would you like to see included that hasn't already been and why?
Indiana Jones. Star Wars is a given but Disney owns those rights and oh my god can you imagine an Indiana Jones playset ? He'd have a whip, a gun, the hat and maybe Short Round can be a side kick.
What is your favorite power disc and why? What is your favorite new toy from 2.0 ?
USS Swine Trek- because I loved the Muppet Show when I was a kid, Muppet Babies etc. hopefully one day we get a Kermit figure.
Now that I am going thru Disney Infinity 1 and can really see the difference and the new toys vs the old... LOGIC GATE..sounds geeky I know but the Logic Gate solves so many problems when you want events to happen, when you want to create animation etc
What made you want to build toy boxes for challenges?
To be honest I didn't really think about entering challenges until I saw videos of the Toy Box Summit. Knowing that all those artists had such a great time and as a bonus got to play with the Marvel figures FIRST! that was motivating...being a long time Star Wars fan I would love to qualify for the Summit and be one of the first to make a Darth Vader toy box. The only way I could see that happening is if I entered challenges and try and make a favorable impression on the Disney Infinity team. It sounds selfish but I do make it a point to create to bolster the Community content also to balance out. At last count I have 23 uploaded boxes with a goal of 100.
When you hear of a new challenge, what steps do you take to make your idea for a Toy Box a reality?
I research the theme and the important elements of it, I sketch out an idea of what it will look like and then go over the sketch again picking out areas of where I want the player to have something to do. I have the toys and textures memorized so I make notes on the sketch of what goes where-basically a blueprint. Now here is where it gets weird : I pick out the one figure who will build this toy box, find a song that fits the mood of the box and then if there is a movie or a show - I watch it right before starting on an empty box. And it has to be empty- I only feel comfortable with a blank canvas.
What do you consider to be your specialty when building Toy Boxes?
The look. I try to make every box look like a part of a playset mainly because if someone downloads the box and they don't like the story or the choice of enemies they can always rip out the logic and still have the architecture to build in.
What is your favorite Toy Box that someone else has built?
I don't have one favorite toy box. I have favorite creators and will try any of their creations. I guess if I have anything its a top five boxes that I played multiple times : Disneyland Paris, Merida's Archery challenge, Black Suit Spider-Man, Grand Prix of Kaua'i, Disney Classics Clash
What are some of your classic Toy Boxes that have not been a featured top 5 Toy Box?
I really love Capt. Jack and the Pirates of the Nether Realm from the power disc challenge and I love how Disney Princess Power Raceway turned out from the Race challenge and my Big Hero 6 Downtown Showdown 2.0 I have a special place in my heart for because it was my first toy box ever.
What is your dream Toy Box challenge?
Wow.. let me see- if it's just for 2.0 then I would like to see a challenge for Donald Duck but for any Infinity as a Dream Challenge? Original Star Wars Trilogy challenge.
Share a story of adversity from when you were building one of your Toy Boxes that you had to overcome.
When I was building my power disc challenge it was supposed to be a multi level Mr Incredible toy box. I no longer have the ability to link toy boxes and there I was with 4 finished levels that all had one storyline, satellite toys, all themed around Mr. Incredible and a day before the deadline I find out I can't link them. They made no sense separately and I almost didn't submit anything. I took the first box and spent the night remaking it to fit the entire story in one box for Mr. Incredible. Then Box number 2 became a Spider Buggy power disc entry after I inserted a race track and changed Metroville to a Mashup of Disney movies Cars, Big Hero 6, Monsters U and Marvel Universe. Box number 3 got remade into Capt. Jack and Box four became the one that got featured Stark Factory meltdown. Originally that was the final challenge level for Mr. Incredible.
Share a funny story from when you were building one of your Toy Boxes.
I had never seen Frozen and my niece and nephew wanted a Frozen toy box. So I went and bought Elsa and Anna. I get the movie and and on my phone my niece had downloaded the song Let it go. So I'm on the train going home and I decide to play the song...its catchy...in other words it stays with you in your head whether you want it or not... but there I am sitting on the train sketching an outline for the toy box, playing the song in my ears and somehow my ear phones got disconnected from my phone and now Let it go is playing full blast and I'm not surrounded by Disney fans and physically I don't fit the mold of someone who should be blasting the theme to Frozen but some girls were sitting across from me and they started singing along with the song and it was all good. At that point I realized just how powerful Frozen seems to be.
Do you have any advice for aspiring Toy Box Artists?
Umm I guess my advice would be to pre-plan as much as possible before you ever open up a new box and start laying terrain. Nothing feels worse than sitting there staring at the tv wondering what to do next. Figure out beforehand the center of your box, the theme you are shooting for and work outwards. Think of it like a movie- there is a clear beginning, middle and a good climatic ending- so know where on your map you want those things and it makes it easier to fill in the rest. Beyond that become best friends with Spark Mode because it will be easier and faster to create. I used to fly around from area to area doing it the long way and that's where mistakes would happen for me. Lastly don't rush and if you have the time open up a box and experiment with the games and logic you want to create.. if you know the game you are making then planning around the game is easier.
You had two Gravity Falls toy box submissions get chosen for featured toy boxes in the Gravity Falls Challenge. Are you a big fan of Gravity Falls? Would you like to see more Gravity Falls in 3.0?
For the challenge I binge watched season one and laughed so much- its such a great show that without Infinity I would have never discovered. If Disney wants to throw in Dipper and Mabel they won't get any complaints from me. I took to that show so hard and had so many ideas swimming in my head that I made 3 boxes. Disney denied one of them and it never got uploaded but that's my fault as I totally screwed up the logic.
Gravity Games Mocking Gnome was built on the premise of the Gnomes and their obsession with Mabel so the main game was a Gnome tossing challenge and the entire box was based on the first 3 episodes of Season One Gravity Falls. Because I'm my own worst critic I immediately hated the box and started a new one THE WITCH of The WOODS. That box is totally made up and not based on any episode. I just wanted to capture the feel of the show and make a toy box that could be played over and over without getting boring. The best thing about the challenge is that Disney gave us so many items and toys from Gravity Falls that the box makes itself the real challenge was implementing a game that fit the tone of the show. This was probably my favorite challenge until 3.0.
Your Brave: Dunbroch Highlands Festival toy box was selected as a featured toy box in the Brave Challenge. Please give us some Inside the Toy Box details on your Brave: Dunbroch Highlands Festival toy box.
I was a fan of this movie, I think its under rated and I wanted to do it justice. My goal was to create games not done before in a box. I put 7 challenges in the box and for the most part they turned out great but my favorite is Jousting. I wanted to figure out how to put a joust in for some multiplayer action and it turned out alright. I also wanted to give players a game that they could play over and over and level up a character so the 1 Hit 1 kill shooting gallery was born from that idea. Again Disney gave so much from Brave that the box makes itself so I figured everyone is going to have a great looking box because we all have the same stuff so ultimately it comes down to the games within and I got lucky because there were a lot of great boxes submitted.
Your Stark Factory Meltdown toy box was selected as a featured toy box in the Pick a Power Disc Challenge. Please give us some Inside the Toy Box details on your Stark Factory Meltdown toy box.
It was an accident. Turns out a great accident -but it was a Mr. Incredible final level box- I had about 2 and a half hours before deadline to alter that box from Incredible to Iron Man. I almost didn't submit it.
Your Baroness County USA: Race your face off toy box was selected as a featured toy box in the Battle Race Challenge. Please give us some Inside the Toy Box details on your Baroness County USA: Race your face off toy box.
I just realized this box is number 5 for me. So now I have a huge smile on my face. Baroness County is inspired by the Baroness in my life and Need for Speed Rivals. Originally I submitted it with the title Need for Speed Infinity and it got denied. I then changed the title at 2:48 pm est and re-submitted... 12 minutes before deadline! So when it got chosen I was shocked. I played some fantastic races in this challenge and everyone submitted great stuff. I'll gladly take the Top Five nod but if I'm being honest- if Erdadi3 had submitted GRAND PRIX of KAUA'I in time.... I get pushed out of the Top Five.
Your Ronan vs Asgard toy box was selected as a featured toy box in the Marvel Villains Challenge. Please give us some Inside the Toy Box details on your Ronan vs Asgard toy box.
Ever since I first played ASSAULT ON ASGARD- I have wanted to build an ASGARD toy box. Mainly because any figure that isn't Marvel can't be used in that particular toy box game...well maybe I want to see MALIFICENT v ASGARD ? maybe I want to see Stitch or Syndrome in an ASGARD themed game ? So I built this box and left it open (there is a platform underneath the play area with all the logic) so that anyone who doesn't have the toy box game or maybe some people who don't have the patience to sit down and build ASGARD, can have the freedom to use any Infinity character or rip out the logic and put in a different game but still use the play area I built.


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Choose from an extensive range of options in a variety of colours. We offer printing and embroidery services to personalise your uniform and enhance your identity.
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Home >> Course Descriptions >> College of Arts and Sciences
Undergraduate Research
One-three semester hour.
Designed individually through consultation between the student and instructor to suit the student's need and interests. Additional requirements may be established by the department. May be repeated for credit. Prerequisite: Permission of instructor.
Home - General Information - Student Services -
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Appendix A - Appendix B - Appendix C - Appendix D


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This demo was written for Bock's birthday in 2004. It's my first demo with proper graphics, proper gameplay and proper music, and it was certainly a lot of work; but I think I managed to bring a new genre to the Master System in a relatively successful way. It may have been a little late for his birthday but you have to expect a little slippage in games develoment. Some notable features:
- Full, almost original PSG music
- Loads of compressed artwork
- A real game this time
- And it's fun!
Bock's Birthday 2004 (41KB)
Source will be released at the same time as a bugfixed version. This version will not run well on all emulators, or on a real system.


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Resource Guide: Full-Length Floor Mirrors
A full-length floor mirror leaning against the wall of a home - like this one in Liz & Joe's Cute & Crafty Coach House - serves dual purposes. First, and perhaps most importantly, it allows you to check yourself before you head out to face the world. Secondly, a strategically placed mirror can help make a room appear larger. Get the look with one of the mirrors we've rounded up in the list after the jump.
Word to the wise: No matter which mirror you choose, be sure to secure it to the wall in some way. A leaning mirror can become a million little pieces in no time!
• HOVET Mirror from IKEA $129
• Benchwright Floor Mirror from Pottery Barn $499
• Mirror Framed Floor Mirror from Horchow $599
• Dawson Wood Mirror from Kirkland's $199.99
• Floating Wood Floor Mirror from West Elm $399
• Cheshire Antique Mirrors from Ballard Designs $299
• Channing Silver Beaded Floor Mirror from Williams-Sonoma $650
• Distressed Long Floor Mirror from Brookstone $174
(Images: 1. Liz & Joe's Cute & Crafty Coach House; All others: As credited above.)


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Texas Fashion Collection - 2 Matching Results
Search Results
- Dress
- Day dress of black silk taffeta. The dress, in the style of the Aesthetic or Reform Movement, is full-length, with a slender silhouette. The front and back of the bodice is styled of tiny vertical knife-pleats, which gather into the rounded neckline. The side panels of the bodice are plain, and there is a line of 14 snaps along the left side forming the closure. The long sleeves are smooth, with slight pleating at the padded shoulders, and they taper to the pointed wrists. The sleeves have 5 hidden snaps and a line of 12 domed non-functioning black taffeta covered buttons on each sleeve. Bodice and skirt are divided by a thin black band. Skirt is fully pleated with tiny vertical knife-pleats. Bodice is lined with thin black crepe. Label sewn inside at back below neckline: "Harbison / Vandervoort's St Louis" Not shown is the accompanying cummerbund of black taffeta, the waistband of large horizontal pleats with a large fan/bow at back with wide, trailing ribbons. (43" from waist to lowest point of ribbons)
- Wedding Shoes
- Wedding shoes of off-white leather. The shoes have pointed toes, and a "Mary-Jane" style strap across the instep which secures with a domed opalescent button. At throat of each shoe is a rectangular ornamental buckle covered with matching leather. The medium-high heel tapers slightly to the base and is covered with matching leather on the rounded sides and back; it has the same natural brown colored leather on the heel's curved inside and on the soles of the shoes. Retail's label stamped inside one shoe: "Sanger Bros. / Dallas Texas" Stamped inside both shoes on leather upper: "36-2 68082" The shoes are accompanied by a shoe bag of tan colored raw silk with a Japanese character style embroidery motif of blue silk worked in satin stitch. Worn by Jessie Knapp Nunnally of San Angelo, TX, at her wedding in 1902.


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TOPEKA, Kan. - (WIBW)-- An explosion obliterated a split-level house located on 1905 SW Navajo Lane just before noon on Monday and rocked the quiet Southwest Topeka neighborhood to the core.
Police officers and firefighters responded to the building explosion at around 11:40 A.M. Firefighters battled the flames from the ensuing fire for hours, wearing masks against the thick flames almost two stories high.
The fire had engulfed what was left from the blast. Only charred beams and what appeared to have been blackened car remained.
The blast was felt by residents more than a mile away.
"I just walked into the kitchen, and when it blew up, the percussion and the sound just knocked me back a little bit," Roderick Hunt said. He was visiting relatives living right across the street. "I couldn't figure out what was going on, until I stepped out and saw that the house was completely gone."
Viewer Video from the Scene:
"The roof was laid up against my tree," Freda Kinney, a next-door neighbor said. "Then it started burning, then the flame really came close to my house."
Neighbors said the resident of the home, an elderly woman, was conscious and speaking to emergency personnel when they arrived on scene.
Neighbors reported seeing her hair and hands were on fire.
"When we got here, we found that a house had in fact exploded," Lt. Jana Harden with the Topeka Police Department said. "And we found so far one victim that has been taken to the hospital."
Topeka Police report that a sprinkler system was being installed when a gas line was struck, causing the explosive impact.
The installation happened in a neighbor's back yard to the back side of the burnt-down house, on Arrowhead Road.
An area around the home was secured by Topeka Police - Authorities are investigating it as a crime scene.
Natural gas has also been shut off for the area.
"Our crews are on site," Dawn Ewing with the Kansas Gas Service said. "They are currently in the process of shutting off natural gas for approximately 77 residences."
The affected residences are:
-the 1700, 1800 and 1900 blocks of SW Arrowhead RD on both odd and even sides of the street
-the 1700 and 1800 blocks of SW Cheyenne Rd on odd side only and
-the 1900 block of SW Navajo Lane on odd side only.
There is no current estimate of how long it will be shut off, Ewing said.
Late Monday night, 13 News learned that the victim in the explosion was a 73-year-old woman, who was taken to a local hospital, then air-lifted to KU Medical Center, in serious but stable condition.