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system solutions and savings over the entire lifetime of a project.
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staff to ensure our enclosures meet and surpass their expectations.
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The Killark product portfolio of control products come in both metallic and non-metallic designs. The size and depth of the control product range
enable us to provide the best solutions to your control problems.
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© Hubbell Incorporated 2013
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We all know the effects of a weave or color gone bad but we still love them. Remember that summer you got micros and it pulled out all your sides? Or those bleach blonde highlights that ate away at your hair? Even though weaves and color look great for the moment they definitely have a lastly effect. Many of us, have chosen to join team natural because of the damage caused by styling. Just like us, celebrities get bored with their style and need to switch it up. Which leads me to wonder what celebrities like Naomi Campbell or Beyonce would look like if they joined team natural?
Naomi Campbell
We have all seen the embarrassing photos of Naomi's thinning sides. That was definitely a weave gone bad. This picture captures the natural beauty that is hidden behind the long Indian hair that Naomi loves so much.
Beyonce! Beyonce! I love this girl and really can't get enough of her music but I'm a bit tired of seeing the same old long blonde tresses as she pops her booty on stage. This pic of Beyonce reminds me a little of Tina Turner or Diana Ross….one of the two but I think she would be a beautiful addition to team natural.
It is undeniable that Rihanna is the queen of hair and fashion trends. Remember the asymmetrical bob trend? Yea I know you do. I bet you even tried it. Or her jet black mohawk? When it comes to style Rihanna's got it. She appears to be over her fierce red mane as we recently saw her sport a new do. Rihanna looks fabulous in this afro/twisted wig.
Nicki Minaj
Nicki is definitely not scaaarrreed to change up her look. From bright pink to multi colored blonde Nicki has tried it all. What I would really like to see is how she would look with her natural tresses. She is such a beautiful girl with an awesome voice.
Jennifer Hudson
If one person in hollywood has brought sexy back its Jennifer Hudson. She looked great 40 pounds ago but she looks even better now. Looks like having a baby and a new man has been good for Jen (it usually works the opposite for most of us---referring to weight). I loved her role in "Sex and the City" and " Dream Girls", in both movies she wore a curlier mane. I think her beautiful face would definitely compliment a textured fro.

subset: commoncrawl


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NEWTON — McPherson High's Jacob Lackey shot a highly creditable 77 on Tuesday to earn fourth-medalist honors in the Newton Invitational Golf Tournament contested at Sand Creek Station.
Behind Lackey, who had his second score in the 70s in three tournaments, the Bullpups took third place with a 338.
Carroll, led by medalist Bobby Armstrong with a 74, won the team title with a 313. Arkansas City (318) was second, while MHS edged out Newton (342) by four shots for third.
Other scores were Derby (346), Salina Central (360), Valley Center (361), Campus (371), Winfield (382) and Newton B (440).
MHS' CJ Steiner was 12th overall with an 83. Other MHS scores were Casey Cheek (88), Kaden Warren (90), Drew Pyle (97) and Tommy Smith (102).
The Bullpups are off until April 24 when they play at Salina South.


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Adrian's latest book, Behind the Throne: A Domestic History of the Royal Household, is published this autumn by Jonathan Cape and Basic Books. To buy your copy, click here for the UK edition or here if you live in the USA.
Or you could always visit your local bookshop. They would love to see you.


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From Dial-Up to High Speed
How many of us remember the ear splitting sound of a dial-up modem as you fired up your Internet? Prior to the age of cable modems and DSL, the world had to live with dial-up. It was enough to create a few web pages, but loading was incredibly slow. There was no potential for streaming any type of video or music and even simple photographs took forever to load. As people began to use the Internet for increasingly more, it became clear that higher speeds were needed. The development of T1 lines, cable modem, and DSL made it possible for websites like Hulu and Netflix to provide thousands of movies and television shows to people 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
Broadband Deals Available
With the necessity of a fast Internet connection, many companies are able and willing to supply you with the service. Each one is unique with its own methods, varying prices, and even upload and download speeds. As a way to get people to switch from their current provider or to choose them initially, many companies will offer you various discounts and promos for first-time customers. In addition to cost savings, many will offer perks such as gift cards, free modems, plus more for being willing to stick with the company for a year or more. The companies don't mind giving these gifts if it means having a customer for at least a year. The goal is to have the customers enjoy the services so much that when their term expires, they'll stick to the company.
Save the most with a Package
Many companies provide not just Internet, but other services in addition such as phone and television. They want you to buy all the services from them and will provide you a cost savings if you package them together. The idea of a package is the cost of the bundled services will be less than all three of them purchased separately. Sometimes the savings will be significant for the consumer. If you take advantage of a package or a broadband promo code, it will save you a lot of money on Internet.
Broadband Internet has become a necessity of living and you can get the best deal by using a broadband promo code. Visit MoneyNing.com and discover the code that works best for you.


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François Grünewald
While cities grew with the acceleration of the rural exodus and urbanisation, the conflicts of the Cold War directed humanitarian action towards rural environments. Cities, which had been the scene of violence up till WWII with the bombing of Dresden, the siege of Stalingrad and the ruins of Hiroshima, began to take centre stage again at the beginning of the 90s with wars such as those in Sarajevo, Mogadishu and Grozny. Humanitarian practices were not adapted to these new operational contexts. Groupe URD began its research project "Wars in cities and cities in wars" in 2001 which aimed to shed light on the challenges of humanitarian action in cities and urban reconstruction. This was followed by major projects on Afghan cities, post-tsunami reconstruction and finally on integrating specific urban characteristics into the response to the Haiti earthquake. For ten years now, it has been one of our priorities to promote an urban perspective in a world where crises in cities and cities in crisis are more and more frequent and destructive.
The Cities and Crises conference in April 2011, organized in partnership with the Mairie de Paris and with the support of the Rhône-Alpes Region, was an opportunity for a wide variety of representatives from humanitarian and development organisations, NGOs, UN agencies, Red Cross organizations, Regional Cooperation bodies and universities to discuss their work, their practices and their difficulties. This special issue of Humanitarian Aid on the Move, written by some of those who spoke at the conference, aims to give an idea of the richness of the exchanges which took place. Far from closing the subject, these articles raise fundamental questions for the sector which call for reflection, exploration and innovation.
François Grünewald


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This week has been a little out of sorts, toward the crazy side. Trying to finish projects I've started and get a few things ready for a last minute show opportunity. Well at least most of what I set out to do is done.
My son has some of my prints in the "Tides of March" on Folly Beach this weekend, a half way decent business card, my first ACEO's are done, (willl be posted on Facebook, then Etsy). I still have 2 originals I am working on, maybe I can get back to them now that the "maddness" is done.
For those who are in the Charleston, SC area, The "Tides of March" event is taking place at the Folly River Park on Folly Beach March 13-14, Satuday 10-4, Sunday 1-4. See my Facebook fan page, become a fan and get the special offer Good only for the "Tides of March". http://www.facebook.com/dksartstudio.


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Do you allow pets?Pets are typically allowed the third Monday in September until the second weekend in May.
Do you provide laundry facilities?We do not have on-site laundry for our guests.
How do beach badges work?There is a fee to access the beach in the summer which requires a beach badge for anyone over the age of 12. The Engleside Inn will provide badges to you at no cost for your stay with us as long as they are returned at checkout. If they are not returned, you will be charged for lost badges.
Are there lifeguards?We have certified private lifeguards at our pool. All beaches in Beach Haven also have certified lifeguards on duty.
Does the Inn provide bikes?We do not have bike rentals on site, but can provide you with the names and numbers of local rental places.
If I get sick while on vacation, is there somewhere close to get medical attention?There are a number of local walk in clinics both on Long Beach Island and on the mainland. The mainland also has a hospital. Phone numbers and directions can be provided to you if needed.
Why does it say that parking is not guaranteed?Although we have our own parking lot, we do not reserve them for the hotel as we also have the restaurant and outdoor sandbar which are open to the public. There is public parking between blocks and along the park across the street. There is no charge for these spaces as there are not metered spaces on LBI.
Does the Inn have babysitting services?Unfortunately we do not offer this service.
Do you offer fitness equipment?Unfortunately the Hotel does not offer fitness equipment. Elite Fitness located at 12904 Long Beach Blvd Beach Haven Terrace offers a daily pass for purchase. Visit www.elitefitnesslbi.com for details.
Is there public transportation on Long Beach Island?Unfortunately, there is not public transportation (bus, train etc.) available. There are a few cab companies in the area. If you are in need of these services, please ask a front desk associate for a phone number.
What are check-in and check-out times?Rooms are guaranteed to be ready by 3:30 pm. We do not have "early check-ins" available. If you arrive before your room is ready, you are welcome to use the facilities (changing rooms, pool, beach badges) and we will call you when room is ready.
Check out is at 11:00 am. There are no "late check-outs" available. Once checked out of your room, you are welcome to hold your beach badges, use pool and shower/changing room until 3:00pm without an additional fee.
Is Wi-Fi available?We do provide Wi-Fi at no charge to our guests. It is through Xfinity.
What is in an Efficiency room?An efficiency room is a single room that has a small kitchenette, which includes a small refrigerator, microwave, toaster, coffee maker, sink area, table and chairs.
What is an Efficiency Suite?An Efficiency Suite has a bedroom with either two double beds or a king bed, a sitting room with a queen pullout sofa bed, and a small kitchenette.
Are there smoking rooms available?The Engleside Inn is completely non-smoking. If you are smoking in any of our rooms you will be charged a cleaning fee.
Are there Non-Pet rooms available?Yes, we have a limited number of rooms that we do not allow pets. Please mention your request for a non-pet room when booking.
Do you have cots and cribs available?Yes, we have a limited number of cots and pack-n-play cribs available.
How old do you have to be to reserve a room?You must be at least 21 years old to reserve a room. There also must be someone 21 or older in the room at all times.
Do all room types have refrigerators?Yes, all of our room types have a coffee maker and dorm-size refrigerators.
Is breakfast included in the cost of our reservation?The Engleside Inn does not offer breakfast. We have a Coffee Shop that offers light fare items at a cost.
When is the early bird menu available?The early bird specials are available from 5pm-6pm any day the Dining Room is open except Saturdays and holidays.
When is the Sand Bar open?The Sand Bar is open mid-April through mid-October, weather permitting. It opens at 11:30am, and closes after the dinner hour around 8:00pm.
What is the dress code for the Dining Room?The dress code is business casual.
What is the closest airport?Either Philadelphia International Airport or Atlantic City International are easily reachable.
Besides the beach, what else is there to do nearby?Beach Haven is a vibrant hub of activity on LBI. There are restaurants, shopping, a water park, pubs, live entertainment, ice cream parlors, live theater, museums, putt-putt golf, a small amusement park, and much more.
How far are you from Atlantic City?Atlantic City is less than 1 hour away by car.
Is the Hotel oceanfront?The Engleside is Oceanfront with direct access to the beach.
How far are you from the LBI bridge?We are 8 miles south of the bridge; about a 12-18 minute drive depending on traffic.
Reservations & Info
- 30 Engleside Ave., Beach Haven, NJ 08008
- 800-762-2214
- 609-492-1251
- Room Reservations: email@example.com
- Find us on map


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Subjective well-being in United States: 70% of people in the United States said they were satisfied with their life, well above the OECD average of 59%.
In terms of health, life expectancy at birth in the United States is 77.9 years, more than one year below the OECD average. The level of atmospheric PM10 – tiny air pollutant particles small enough to enter and cause damage to the lungs – is 19 micrograms per cubic meter, and is lower than levels found in most OECD countries.
Concerning the public sphere, there is a strong sense of community and high levels of civic participation in the United States. 92% of people believe that they know someone they could rely on in a time of need, just above the OECD average of 91%. Voter turnout, a measure of public trust in government and of citizens' participation in the political process, was 90% during recent elections; this figure is also higher than the OECD average of 72%. In regards to crime, only 2% of people reported falling victim to assault over the previous 12 months.
Money, while it cannot buy happiness, is an important means to achieving higher living standards. In the United States, the average household earned 37 690 USD in 2008, much more than the OECD average.
In terms of employment, nearly 67% of people aged 15 to 64 in the United States have a paid job. People in the United States work 1768 hours a year, more than in other OECD countries. 73% of mothers are employed after their children begin school, suggesting that women are able to successfully balance family and career.
Having a good education is an important requisite to finding a job. In the United States, 89% of adults aged 25 to 64 have earned the equivalent of a high-school diploma, higher than the OECD average. As to the quality of its educational system, the average student scored 500 out of 600 in reading ability according to the latest PISA student-assessment programme, slightly higher than the OECD average.
For a full report, please visit: http://www.oecdbetterlifeindex.org/


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Five Ways to Dress Up Food For Maximum Flavor
If food tastes delicious, it must be unhealthy in some way. And those healthy choices? They are bland and boring.
Sound familiar? Unfortunately these misconceptions can lead to unhealthy food choices because we all want appetizing and satisfying food. In reality, nutritious and healthy food can be delicious when prepared well. With a little experimentation and a willingness to try something new, you can create snacks and meals that are both tasty and good for your family.
Operation Live Well's free cookbooks, Grill & Chill and Eat Well to Live Well, are great resources incorporating the following ideas.
Here are five ways you can dress up your food for maximum, healthy flavor:
1. Herbs and spices. Change up the flavor in your tried and true recipes by using a variety of herbs and spices to enhance vegetable, meat, and fish dishes. Sautéing or roasting vegetables in some extra virgin olive oil, garlic, and fresh herbs brings out the natural sweetness in the veggies and makes them taste great. Make a paste with Greek yogurt, dill, and lemon zest and rub it on salmon fillets before cooking. The combinations are endless. Experiment to discover your favorites. Check out Operation Live Well's guide to herbs for recipes, instructions on how to prep and store, and even herb/food pairing suggestions.
- Yogurt Sauce – Grill & Chill – Page 5
- Herbed Tilapia – Grill & Chill – Page 6
- Grilled Pork Tenderloin – Grill & Chill – Page 10
- Black Bean and Corn Salad – Grill & Chill – Page 17
- Vegan Tzatziki – Grill & Chill – Page 20
- Herbed Goat Cheese & Sun-Dried Tomato Spread – Eat Well to Live Well – Page 7
- Winter Tomato Soup with Bulgur – Eat Well to Live Well – Page 10
- Tuscan Bean and Kale Soup – Eat Well to Live Well – Page 12
2. Salad additions. Add fruits and nuts to your salads, such as berries, apples, and walnuts. Change up your dressings with flavored vinegars, like balsamic, champagne, or wine vinegar.
- Tossed Salad – Grill & Chill – Page 12
- Broccoli Salad – Eat Well to Live Well – Page 16
- Mediterranean Salad with Green Beans and Feta – Eat Well to Live Well – Page 17
- Grand Marnier Salad Dressing – Eat Well to Live Well – Page 22
3. Citrus. Add lemon, lime, or orange zest to meat, fish, salad dressings, and even desserts. Citrus zest brings a fresh, yet not overwhelming, zing to your food. You also can add citrus wedges to a pitcher of water to quench your thirst in a flavorful way.
- Asian Tuna Burgers – Grill & Chill – Page 4
- Grilled Salmon with Citrus Salsa – Grill & Chill – Page 7
- Alida's Grilled Boneless Chicken Breasts – Grill & Chill – Page 9
- Chilled Avocado & Yogurt Soup with Melon – Grill & Chill – Page 14
- Seared Scallops & Fresh Pea Puree – Eat Well to Live Well – Page 30
4. Replace salt with spice. As an alternative to salt, try different types of ground pepper or hot sauce to give foods like eggs, soups, starches, and meats a bit of pizzazz.
5. Grill fruit and veggies. Grilling enhances the taste of vegetables such as bell peppers and zucchini. Mushrooms grill up nicely as a side dish or vegetarian option. Grilled fruit makes for a great dessert – no sugar needed to enhance the flavor! Pineapple, peaches, and mangos work really well.
- Grilled Vegetables and Fruits – Grill & Chill – Page 11
- Karen's Poultry Pineapple Grilled Cutlets – Eat Well to Live Well – Page 25
- Grilled Pineapple – Eat Well to Live Well – Page 43
If you have a recipe that uses one of the strategies above, please let us know in the comments!


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Gran Turismo 5 is one of the big upcoming heavy-hitters for the PlayStation 3, and now we know when we can expect Gran Turismo 5 Prologue, the precursor to the full game. Prologue will land in North America on April 17 for $39.99 via Blu-ray and direct download through the PlayStation Store.
Prologue will be less than the full game, but much more than a pricey demo. The game will include 60 vehicles, along with the ability to play online against up to 16 vehicles at once. Prologue will also fully support the upcoming Dual Shock 3 controller, which means fans of rumble in their racing will have something to celebrate.
"Ten years following the introduction of Gran Turismo on PSOne, Gran Turismo 5 Prologue delivers the most realistic and technologically advanced racing experience on any platform," said Jeff Reese, director of software marketing for SCEA. "With 1080p graphics, revolutionary online features like Gran Turismo TV, and the new in-cockpit racing view, the world's best-selling racing franchise will once again set the standard for racing games."
There remains no date for the final version, but PlayStation 3 owners now have a date for one of the system's most anticipated titles.


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Confession: Traveling to a country where English isn't spoken makes me a little uncomfortable. Learning languages was never my strong suit, and not knowing the words around me is tough on my little writer soul. Sure, signage helps some. Take an arrow coupled with a graphic of a subway car or the iconic McDonald's "M," and I'm not completely paralyzed. Yet I do feel disoriented, get lost, and more easily peter out—much like a search engine trying to index a web page scant on words.
Yeah, like me, search engines need words.
When a search engine tries to make sense of a web page merely blanketed with graphics—deal coupons, logos, and picture galleries, for example—it's pretty much like me roaming a Slavic country fraught with Cyrillic signs. It is literally disoriented. The search engine is a map for web users. The verbiage built into your website is a map for the search engines. Put them together intelligently, and more (usually lots more) customers find you online.
Not just any words will do. Enter SEO. As my colleague recently described, SEO—getting carefully researched key words where they need to be on your site—is the foundation of your digital marketing strategy. Yet when people like my colleague go through the work of finding the just-right keywords for your site, the results are often phrases that sound like toddler-speak. To understand what I mean, think about the way you search the web yourself: You don't type "Where's a good place to get my oil changed in Madison?" You type, "Oil change Madison." Now try using oil change Madison in a sentence (without sounding like English isn't your first language, smarty pants).
Wait. That's our job. I and other content creators at MDM are professional creative writers that weave those often awkward keyword phrases into copy without sounding like freaks and robots. We weave them such that they flow naturally, are in the right places, and make for a good read. Now, I'm not telling you to toss out your graphics yet. They're important, too, but if you don't build a word-based map to get found, they won't get seen by nearly as many people—and neither will you. If you have a website fraught with graphics but scant on quality verbiage, you're losing out on potential customers every day. We can help put you on the map!


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Arthur Bough's letters (December 10 and December 18 2009), and his fuller version of the argument of these letters on his blog [1], reveal a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of the CPGB's discussion on the issues of the economic crisis.
To some extent this was the result of unclarities in Peter Manson's brief report (December 3) of my opening on this issue at the November 29 CPGB aggregate. We had intended to transcribe and edit my opening for publication, but this was held up for various reasons. In fact in the December 3 paper we printed the opening I gave at the November 28 Hands Off the People of Iran annual general meeting on the policy of US imperialism. This argued that the decline of US world dominance, paralleling but different from the decline of British world dominance in the later 19th century, was the primary driver of international economic and political dynamics in the present period.
The primary purpose of my November 29 opening, upon which this article is based, was to stress both the real uncertainty of the immediate economic situation and the need to take seriously the arguments that what is involved may be merely a 'blip' and avoid staking all our political orientation on 'slumpism'.
My personal opinion is that a 'second leg down' of the recession in 2010 – driven by concerns about state finances, leading to public expenditure cuts and other forms of withdrawal of liquidity which hold down consumer demand – is now more likely than not. However, I also emphasise both the level of uncertainty in all predictions, and that it is not the business of Marxists to hope for crashes and slumps to make our politics attractive; and that much of the left which does predict a severe crisis does so precisely in the hope that a slump will make their rather unattractive alternative to capitalism attractive. In reality, such a slump is more likely to benefit the far right.
In discussion comrade John Bridge criticised my opening as tending to reduce the problem with capitalism to that of cycles and to offer a cyclical theory of history more generally (this relates to my Hopi opening). It was in this context that he made the point that "it was not just a question of capitalism's cyclical crises that ought to concern us, but the fact that it is a system in long-term decline".[2]
My reply to the discussion was to a considerable extent addressed to the question of the decline of capitalism and the meaning and limits of this idea. I address this question again at the end of this article.
Economic conjuncture
Looking at the immediate indicators, there has been a rise in global markets over the last few months, and the general expectation is that the increase in unemployment will be reversed now that confidence has returned in the financial markets and the 'real' economy – there is some data indicating a rise in actual output. In theory UK output is still in decline, but whether this is accurate remains to be seen. There was a brief acute bout of nerves on the market following the Dubai government defaulting on its debts. But it is not clear if this is a complete default, and this is essentially a huge, but single property development which has gone bust.
The nerves caused by its collapse show the fear which exists amongst the investing section of the capitalist class that we are in a similar phase as 1929-31 – after the first crash, but yet to fall off the precipice, when the downturn hits the material economy and unemployment sky-rockets, masses of factories close, there is major deflation, etc. There is a perception among both Marxist and bourgeois economists that this is a possibility. At the same time there are those on both sides who argue this will not happen and that what has occurred can be compared to the market crashes of 1987, 1998 or 2001; a big financial crash, but one which capitalist states can manage by interventions to ensure liquidity.
It is important to be clear that having a Marxist methodology does not give us an answer to this question. Why this is the case can best be explained by looking at the attempts of Marxists to explain the current crisis as a minor financial bubble. Permanent Revolution takes this line, and a recent article by PR's Bill Jeffries argues that the underlying trend is a massive recovery of capitalist profitability, which has continued since the fall of the Soviet Union in the late 1990s, and the rise of capitalist zones and foreign investment in China.[3]
Long waves
Capitalism goes into crisis because it runs up against limits to the profitable investment of capital, the consequence being that it shifts into speculative activities and the search for short-term liquidity. Hence there is an overproduction of fictitious capital (a bubble), leading in due course to a financial crash, which temporarily chokes commercial credit, resulting in depression and recession in the real economy. But Jeffries argues, broadly following Trotsky's argument around long waves in the capitalist economy, that fundamental transformations in global conditions may allow for capitalist investment in new areas. Whether they take the form of new technology, a world-historical defeat of the working class or capitalism expanding into pre-capitalist countries, the new possibility of investment creates the conditions for a major revival in the profitability of productive industry and therefore a sustained expansion in investment. This does not do away with the business cycle, but mitigates the effects of it. The downturns are less acute and shorter, and the 'up' phases are stronger and more persistent. In PR's view the fall of the Stalinist regimes and the market turn in China and Vietnam created the same effect as, in the 19th century, capital breaking into Africa or east Asia, opening up large fields for profitable investment.
In this view the underlying condition since the late 1990s is one of long-term boom analogous to the period of capitalist expansion in the late 19th century, or the 1950s boom and capitalist realignment. Why did World War II open up the possibility for profitable investment? Because it broke up the British and French colonial empires, which to a large extent kept US business out of their colonies. The effect of British dependence on the US was that Britain had to hand over large quantities of overseas investments, to be passed on to US corporations, in payment for the arms which were supplied. Britain and France were also compelled to agree to the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (Gatt 1), which managed trade between the main capitalist powers, but centrally broke down the old imperial protection system and allowed US capital to dramatically expand into British and French territory.
Arthur Bough, an ex-member of the Alliance for Workers' Liberty, has an alternative view which must be taken seriously, though he is an individual rather than representing a group, since he offers considered economic arguments. His argument draws on Kondratiev rather than Trotsky. Kondratiev argued that over the long term there was an (approximately) 50-year cycle running concurrently with the usual short cycle of booms and slumps of capitalism. In the first half of the cycle there are strong booms and weak recessions, and in the second half there are weak booms and heavy recessions. In Bough's view the recessionary phase of the cycle opened in the early 1970s and closed in the 1990s, so we are about 10 years into the boom phase.
Kondratiev never offered a serious causal explanation of why there should be a long cycle, or why the periodisation should be 50 years. A variety of causal mechanisms have been offered ranging from technical innovations to long-range weather changes which affect harvests and hence food prices. None of them are really satisfactory.
The idea of fixed-period cycles is itself generally problematic. The short boom-bust cycle takes very approximately six to 10 years. Marx made some attempt to theorise this periodisation on the basis of the turnover time of fixed capital. That is, to simplify grossly, capitalists all buy machines and buildings at the same time, causing a forward push for a boom, then demand for these 'capital goods' necessarily falls and a downturn results until the fixed capital has to be replaced, triggering another upturn. There is correspondence between Marx and Engels where Marx is looking for evidence that the turnover of fixed capital accounts for the boom-bust cycle and so the latter can be reduced to a mathematical certainty. Engels – who was engaged in running a capitalist business at the time – denied the importance of this, telling Marx that capitalist decision-making was often based on guesstimates and back-of-the-envelope calculations.
There is an approximate regularity, and it is certainly the case that free-market capitalism cannot go longer than 10 or 12 years without a recession caused by a financial crash (if it is not triggered earlier by state action, as it was by the 'demand management' of the 1950s-70s). But talking about a range between six and 10 years is not the same thing as the ability to predict the date of crashes, and so on; there are many contributory factors in the determination of the cycle.
If this is the case with short cycles, why should there be a 50-year cycle over the long term? It is worthwhile pointing out that Kondratiev conceived the 50-year cycle based on 100 years worth of data – hardly sufficient to demonstrate a trend. In contrast, we know that the short business cycle has a considerable degree of regularity, including from the data going back to 1760s Britain.
This was Trotsky's original criticism of Kondratiev – that there was not enough data to draw such a firm conclusion. Hence Trotsky's 'long waves' were both less definitely periodised, and driven by aspects of the class struggle and capitalist expansion rather than 'internal' capitalist dynamics.
Both Kondratiev cycles and Trotsky's long waves gained popularity among Marxist economists because of the long boom in the 1950s and 60s. In this period there was sustained material growth in the imperialist centres and colonial countries, as well as in the USSR and China, and there was a mitigated form of the business cycle: that is, neither booms nor busts ran away. It was a standard Marxist idea that with imperialism, capitalism had reached its terminal stage, and would tend to stagnation and persistent, repetitive crisis. That worked pretty well as a characterisation of the world between 1914 and 1948, but the question was how Marxists could explain the new stage of the 1950s and 60s. Long cycle theories came to be used to address this problem.
While comrade Bough's argument is over-dependent on the dubious long waves of Kondratiev, Permanent Revolution's argument has a considerably stronger basis: what happened in 1989-91. The Stalinist regimes were half-inside the capitalist economy; their purchase of higher-tech production equipment from the west gave a significant stimulus to 'department I' (capital goods) industries, with the usual multiplier effects for the rest of the economy. They also sold raw materials on a large scale to the capitalist economies. So, although the domestic relations of production in the USSR, etc were not straightforwardly those of capitalist production, the productive activity of those countries was in a contradictory sense part of the capitalist world economy.
In that sense, the breakdown of those economies and in particular that of the former USSR was the equivalent of an enormous bankruptcy. A fundamental part of the Marxist theory of cycles and crisis is that at the end of the boom period over-investment of capital occurs, and in order to clear this, particularly in certain sectors, a wave of bankruptcies is necessary. This is the crisis phase of the cycle and opens the way to new growth by devalorising a section of capital. From that point of view, it is correct to say, as Permanent Revolution does, that in this period we saw an enormous devalorisation of fixed capital – factories, etc – in the formerly Stalinist states. This devalorisation and reduction in barriers to trade opened the way for a substantial increase in potential capitalist investment, considerably so in China and Vietnam, but also in eastern Europe.
The fall of the Soviet Union and semi-marketisation of the eastern regimes should, therefore, in theory have paved the way for a prolonged period of capitalist growth. However, as pointed out by other Marxists, including Hillel Ticktin and István Mészáros, there was so much standing overcapacity in the capitalist economy that it is not clear if the collapse of the Stalinist economies provided that much of an opening for new profitable productive investment. Unemployment and underutilisation of capacity still afflicted the western and 'southern' economies. Though money profits rose after 1989, this overcapacity and underutilisation persisted through the 1990s. It remained the case that there were factories in the US and Mexico running at 60% of their capacity. So it is not clear that the fall of the Stalinist economies provided a real help in dealing with this overcapacity. In the 'third world' countries, production has shifted around more from one location to another: for example, from Latin America to China.
It is not clear that if we crunched the global numbers they would show an actual increase in total productive output, as opposed to goods being cheapened by major reductions in global average wage costs. What is clear is that in many peripheral countries there is endemic mass unemployment. Indeed in the core capitalist countries there is both endemic unemployment and underemployment in productive industry. The real level of unemployment is masked in a variety of ways. In the UK, this has been performed by transferring workers to sickness benefit, by the increase in training schemes and by expansion of higher education. The latter has not been undertaken because of a growing demand for highly skilled labour – overwhelmingly the demands of capital are for part-time, casual labour: flipping burgers, fruit picking, cleaning and so on. It has almost entirely been a device to mask unemployment.
The state also runs what are effectively white-collar job-creation schemes, duplicating work and multiplying bureaucracy. Local councils, for example, employ significant numbers processing claims for housing benefit, mostly from tenants in council housing. They also employ significant numbers to chase those tenants to pay their rent, which is, under legislation introduced by the Conservatives and continued by Labour, theoretically based on 'market values'. It would actually be cheaper and more efficient for the council to lease the houses rent-free to benefit claimants, or to equalise the values of the rent and housing benefit. Housing benefit is a pure recycling of notional money as a way to keep clerical staff in work.
Projects like this and NHS marketisation create many a form-filling job for white-collar staff and managers. Privatisation has produced a series of regulatory quangos, and also multiple companies with their own bureaucracies and staff duplicating the same functions. In the case of the utility companies we have infrastructure monopolies (Transco and the electricity distribution companies) providing 'services' to a series of pure rentier/speculator companies running their multiple billing departments. The value of such companies is not based on any fixed capital or control over infrastructure, but on artificially created markets in gas or electricity futures – another form of fictitious capital.
If there had been a real global rise in the real rate of return of productive industry post-1989, one would have expected to see a substantial expansion of capitalist operations in Russia and eastern Europe, but in reality this has been quite marginal. When the US took power in Iraq, one could have expected huge investments by US capital flowing into Iraq, as when Britain took over parts of India. On the contrary, what we have seen is capitalist firms pretending to invest in Iraq as a way of stealing money from the US government – and the Iraqi government to the extent that it has to pay for reconstruction – for fraudulent construction projects.
If Permanent Revolution's theory is correct, capitalists should be showing confidence that investment in material productive activities will yield above-average profit. They are not behaving this way; indeed predominantly their attitude is that material production will yield no profit, or not an adequate one for the investment, compared to ripping off the state through PFIs, through financial speculation and so on. Their behaviour would indicate they do not believe the rate of return on material production to be high enough to support a sustained expansion in the material productive economy. This is not the 1930s. But it is also not the 1950s.
Is it the case – as Permanent Revolution, Arthur Bough and Michel Husson, among others, argue – that there was a rise in the underlying global rate of profit in productive activities from the late 1980s? It is at least arguable that the statistics used to judge this are so contaminated by unproductive activities that what they reveal is not movements in the rate of profit in productive activities, but simply the ability of the US and the financial services sector to rip everyone else off to a greater extent. Aggregate GDP and profitability figures include the activities of lawyers, accountants, business consultants and the like; and these do not represent new production of material surplus, only the redistribution of surplus.
The point is that PR's theory is a tenable one, but whether the available evidence really supports that theory is highly debatable. Some economists like Andrew Kliman have attempted to 'get behind' these figures, and drawn the conclusion that profitability was high in the 1950s and 60s, then declined and has remained at a low level since. Part of the problem with this approach is that it relies on statistics on productive output by sector (which can then be used to disaggregate the productive and unproductive sectors) which are only published every six years. So it is possible to explain events half a business cycle ago, but impossible to predict future movements in more than the broadest outline.
The view that we are in a phase of long-wave expansion triggered by 1989-91 is on its face theoretically tenable, but appears empirically problematic unless the 'world economy' is treated as merely an aggregate of the national 'advanced economies' and marginalist aggregate and average statistics, which fail to differentiate productive from unproductive activity, are taken at face value. Why?
My own take – for what it is worth, which is limited – is that the 'long wave' phenomenon reflects at least partly the shift between the positive effects of an ascendant world-dominant capitalist state (as creating fairly stable world money and 'order' conditions for global trade and productive expansion) and the negative effects of a declining world-dominant state (as exacting financial and other tribute from rising countries and protecting exhausted sectors of its own industry). On this basis a new phase of long-wave capitalist expansion like the 1950s is possible, but depends on the overthrow of the military power of the USA by capitalist rivals and the creation of a replacement world-dominant power: ie, a new 1914-45, which is not on the immediate agenda.
Hence, though in other respects the conditions exist for a new phase of capitalist dynamism and progress, what we actually get is a succession of bubbles and crises against a backdrop of endemic overcapacity and inability of capitalism to break beyond the auto/aerospace/petrochemicals economy. The other side of this coin is increasing irrationalism in politics and the persistence and deepening of the export of death and destruction in the form of the 'war on terror'.
Against slumpism
PR may be right or wrong. But why does this matter? Of course, it matters to Marxists whether or not we are entering a big depression, but it is not vital for us to know the exact time or place that crisis will hit first. The fundamental points of Marxism's critique of capitalism and bourgeois political economy are, firstly, that cycles are unavoidable and there will be booms and busts – no amount of management will do away with the business cycle. Secondly, that free markets spontaneously tend towards radical inequality – the concentration of wealth in the hands of an increasingly small number and the relative impoverishment of an ever larger number of workers and petty proprietors. Whether the current crisis is another great depression or another short-cycle financial crisis like those of 1987, 1998 and 2001 but on a larger scale is completely immaterial to these facts about capitalism.
Permanent Revolution's argument is a negation of that of the Workers Power group from which PR came. WP argues that capitalism entered its terminal phase in 1914, and that the working class needs to create a state like the early Soviet Union, complete with the dictatorship of the party and the dictatorship of the leadership over the party. In this view, the more there is economic chaos and war-induced recession, the more workers will move into action. The Transitional programme is the other side of this coin: people will move into action based on immediate economic concerns, not a vision of an alternative future, and revolutionaries can lever them, step by step, through wage demands, etc, then soviets, into taking power. Without the masses having the idea in their heads that the parliamentary regime is corrupt and unacceptable or that it is possible to institute an alternative socialist order. Without a prolonged period of building up forces, delegitimising the existing state regime and spreading the idea that an alternative system is not just better than capitalism in the depths of recession, but better than capitalism in its boom phase.
The consequence of this strategy is that it becomes essential to predict, as Workers Power does, an enormous slump, which will bring with it street violence, mass strikes, the formation of councils of action and so on. In this situation the small group (whether it be WP, the Spartacists or indeed the Socialist Workers Party) can manoeuvre the masses into taking power. For these groups crisis is fundamental because it leads to the only conditions – if their theory of capitalism is correct – in which masses of workers might conceivably be desperate enough to think it would be good idea to give all power to the central committee of the SWP (or the equivalent 'Leninist combat party' group of your choice).
The method is the same; the small cog driving the bigger wheel; the enlightened vanguard vested with dictatorial powers. It is only when crisis gets so severe as to totally dislocate the capitalist economy that it is plausible that broad masses of the working class would consider this a serious alternative to capitalism. Even under these conditions it seems dubious. In a sense we can see this in the failure of the revolution in Germany, in Luxemburg's critique of the Russian Revolution and the split in Comintern in 1921. The majority of the west European working class did not view the regime in Moscow as representing a superior alternative to capitalism – in spite of World War I, the acute economic contradictions following it and, in the case of Germany, in spite of the brutality with which Noske, Ebert and Scheidemann in alliance with the military right suppressed the radical wing of the workers' movement.
Because the strategic conceptions of the far left stake everything on slump, there actually develops a desire for it. Crisis is transparently irrational – because of overproduction and overinvestment, people are laid off, reduced to poverty and starved. Too much wealth produces poverty. But actually wanting to experience slump conditions is an irrationality of its own sort, certainly if our aim is the self-emancipation of the working class majority, rather than a coup d'etat by the central committee of your choice.
To return to the present economic situation, the only possible thing to say is that it is uncertain. It may be that the fiscal stimulus from the Bank of England will be enough to re-inflate the financial bubble, at least in the core economies. If that happens there will still be acute crises in the periphery economies, examples of which we have seen already, including the instability in Ireland and eastern Europe.
Each past cyclical bust -1987, 1998, 2001 – has had severe consequences for some periphery countries, like the Argentinian crisis in 2000-01. Millions lost their savings, banks closed, and the country still has many cooperatives formed by factory occupations, such was the acuteness of economic dislocation. Ireland has seen a mass movement spring up. Even if stimulus packages were enough to re-inflate the bubble in the US, western Europe and perhaps China, this would still be at the expense of major recession in several peripheral countries.
It is also possible that a more severe recession will hit the core economies some time this year. If David Cameron were elected and introduced massive cuts in public expenditure, that would probably trigger a severe material recession. Actually doing what has been promised, to sack vast numbers in the public sector, cut local government funding and attack pensions and benefits, would sharply reduce consumer demand, undermining the service sector and triggering serious material recession.
Which way things will go we cannot know, though it seems unlikely that we are in a long boom and this is just another minor recession without consequences. If states have succeeded in re-blowing the bubble, we will see deepened instability in the peripheral countries; the core will be protected, but only for another four to eight years. There will be another upswing, but this will be dependent on liquidity and hence followed by a more severe version of the 2008-09 financial crash (just as 2008-09 was more severe than 2001, which was more severe than 1998, which was more severe than 1987).
Comrade Bridge is correct to say that capitalism is in decline. Contrary to comrade Bough, this statement has absolutely nothing to do with Lassalle's "iron law of wages",[4] with the idea of a secular tendency for the working class to be impoverished, with the Zusammenbruchstheorie (theory of collapse) criticised by Bernstein and wrongly defended by some of his opponents, with Soviet narratives of "the 'crisis' and the 'crash'", or with Trotsky's 'death agony'.[5] Conversely, however, in my opinion when we understand capitalist decline correctly, the fact that capitalism is in decline has only limited implications for the diagnosis of the present economic conjuncture.
Social orders or forms of class rule – the slave-based urbanism of antiquity, feudalism, capitalism – are over historical time replaced by radically different social orders and forms of class rule. That is to say that each individual social order as such rises and declines. We have no reason to suppose that capitalism will be uniquely persistent.
To say that a social order or form of class rule is rising is to say that it plays an increasing role in organising the society's productive activity and shaping its structure and self-image, replacing any prior social order. To say that it is declining is – obviously – the reverse: that it is decreasingly able to organise the society's productive activity, that it decreasingly shapes the society's structure and self-image, that it begins to be displaced by other forms of social order and to lose its legitimacy.
The phase of decline is characterised by statisation. The Roman empire, which artificially created and subsidised cities to keep them alive and attempted to intervene against the potentes, making the free peasants into private clients, represented the decline of the social order of classical antiquity. European monarchical absolutism and the analogous Tokugawa shogunate were forms of the decline of feudalism.
Like certain sorts of coral atolls, social orders may enter into decline at their historical centres even while they are spreading geographically. This is clearest in the case of feudalism. Feudalism was at its apogee in western Europe in the 11th-12th century, but already facing challenges from the rising proto-bourgeoisie and in decline at its core from the 13th century; but it continued to expand geographically both in eastern Europe and in the last phase when as it were 'neo-feudal' societies were created by the Spanish state in Latin America in the early modern period.
To say that capitalism is in decline is to say that it is in an analogous phase: declining at the core, while continuing to expand at the periphery at the expense of subsistence and artisan production, forms of feudalism and other pre-capitalist societies. At the core the decline began in the mid-19th century. The rise of the organised workers' movement, beginning with Chartism and the early trade unions, led to concessions to the working class which had to be organised by the state. The biggest of these concessions was the extension of the suffrage.
This has involved the rise of a different organising principle of society: that of conscious, collective social decision-making: expressed in a distorted form in the form of the growth of state provision and regulation at the expense of market provision.
Meanwhile, the concentration of capital has the result that in several sectors there are firms which are 'too large' to be allowed to go bust, and that there are whole sectors which, like transport and agriculture, require permanent subsidies – again resulting in the extension of the capitalist state and of statised capitalism at the expense of the capitalist class in its proper sense.
And the extension of mechanisation has the result that capital needs a more educated proletariat and more extensively educated specific sections of the proletariat. As this extends, the underlying rationality of entrepreneurial 'one-man management' – that is, of the social-hierarchical division of labour – declines. This, too, is expressed in distorted forms (the corporate institutional bureaucracies mimic the state bureaucratic hierarchy).
It is also expressed, paradoxically, in the fragmentation of the left: there are too many people who are perfectly capable of serving on central committees, as full-timers and so on for the organisation run by long-serving career 'professional revolutionaries' to make sense as an organisational form; the result, given that the leaders cling to their positions and control and mimic the state bureaucratic hierarchy, is the proliferation of ever smaller and smaller splits (far worse than – for example – the divisions of the British far left before World War I).
The feudalism which Spain exported to Latin America was not the classic feudalism of the central middle ages, but the statised feudalism of the absolute monarchies. In the same way, the capitalism which has expanded geographically at the expense of pre-capitalist social orders and of Stalinism is not the 'classic' form of capitalism, but 'mixed economy' and corporate, statised capitalism.
In a certain sense, the decline of capitalism is most sharply expressed in the difference between the later 19th century decline of Britain as a world-dominant power and the decline of the US. The first involved Britain – and the other European imperialist powers – exporting population on a large scale to their global empires in an endeavour to create a form of order in the colonies which would serve the metropolitan society. (I do not mean by this to prettify the results of the European colonial empires; the observation is simply that the colonialists did seriously attempt to govern their colonies and protectorates.) Conditions for the working class and middle class in Britain were unpleasant enough to support this process, while the empire was, for Britain and other imperialist states, a source of domestic political legitimacy.
The decline of the US is sharply contrasting. The concessions made by US capital to the working class mean that the US continues to be characterised by large-scale net immigration. Its imperial role is a source, not of domestic political legitimacy, but of domestic political illegitimacy. The overseas operations remain acutely sensitive to US casualties – the 'Vietnam syndrome'. The result is that the dominant form of US overseas intervention is not to impose any sort of order on the target state, but to impose destruction and chaos. In terms purely of weaponry, metropolitan population and domestic production capacity, the US has more war-fighting power than the British empire ever had: but its decline has set in more quickly than British decline and it is, at the end of the day, weaker in decline than the British empire was.
Decline and crisis
The arguments for seeing capitalism as in decline presented here are arguments in the long term. The analogies should make this obvious: the Roman empire was a form of decline, but lasted for another 500 years in the west and more than 1,000 in the east; feudalism was in decline from the 13th century, but the decisive capitalist breakthrough did not happen till the 17th, or, indeed become Europe-wide until the 19th.
Of course, capitalism develops more rapidly than feudalism (which developed more rapidly than the slave-based urbanism of classical antiquity). We may therefore not unreasonably expect it to 'burn out' more rapidly too. But it would be most unwise to use this as an argument that capitalism must be in terminal decay now.
The crisis of 2008-09 is in a certain rather limited sense the product of capitalist decline. This sense is that the immediate trigger of the crisis was financial instruments built on subprime mortgages in the US; and subprime mortgages in the US were a part of the system of controlling the US working class through material concessions, the apogee of the policy of 'property-owning democracy' and in a sense the moment at which this policy flew too close to the sun and its wings melted.
Indeed, the more general credit bubble was in part the product of the efforts of the US and other core capitalist states to stave off a crisis which should have produced a more or less severe recession in 1998 by pumping liquidity into the system. If we ask why the recession could not simply be allowed to proceed, the answer is that it was politically unacceptable. It was politically unacceptable because credit expansion and the 'property-owning democracy' was the primary means of managing working class expectations after the 'social-democratic consensus' was abandoned in the 1970s.
More deeply, however, the failure to break through to a new regime of productive investment is the product not of capitalist decline as such, but of the decline of the USA as a world-dominant power and the specific forms that this decline takes. I do not think that the decline of capitalism as such has proceeded so far that it is excluded that the US can be replaced by a new world-dominant capitalist power, allowing a new long wave of productive growth. The problem is rather the costs of replacing it – namely that the military power of the US has to be broken: the world has to go through another experience of global great-power war like 1914-18 and 1939-45 – and hope that this does not end in the US, in its Götterdämmerung phase (twilight of the gods; the Nazis in 1945), unleashing its nuclear arsenal.
We are as yet some way – probably decades – away from this threat, though the immensely destructive character of the US invasion of Iraq and the millenarian fantasies of the US right already tell us that it is a real one. The idea of a peaceful transfer of power from the US to some other capitalist force (or to a reformed United Nations) is utterly illusory. The only real alternative is if, before the point of global war, the working class can begin to act politically and on at least a continental scale to project its own power as an alternative to capitalist class rule.
We are as of now a long way from this possibility. Hopefully, the workers' movement will manage to catch up before the processes of US decline reach their end-point.


text: Now that Thanksgiving is over, people have really started focusing on Christmas. The decorations are everywhere, and it's next to impossible to find a place to park. It IS December, so crowded malls and beautiful light displays are to be expected. But did you know that Christmas actually came to South West Ohio in October? "The Christmas Spirit," a new Hallmark-made for TV movie, starring Nicolette Sheridan from Desperate Housewives, was filmed in Lebanon this fall. So although Halloween hadn't arrived yet at the time of filming, Christmas took center stage in downtown Lebanon. The city street lamps were decorated with wreaths while snow covered the ground. Some shop owners even got into the "spirit" by putting up trees in their windows. Check your local listings. "The Christmas Spirit" aired on December 1st and will continue playing throughout the month.


text:
what is blackskimmerblog?
it is asking: what is this human experience? what does it feel like now? what has been our past journey? where are we headed?
two main features are:
our large size, abstracts us from the swirling squaredances of molecules that earth is.
and our sudden awakening to the intricacies and depths of experience that our tangled 20billion neuron brains are capable of has thrown us into fear and confusion.
these two drove us to imagine that we are ultimately unearthly spirits wrongly or at least incomprehensibly shackled to cracked corrupt bodies. we are enthralled by our ideas of mind, spirit, and we are repelled, bored by flesh.
[read notes towards mythology of the human journey and science]
but certainly the EVIDENCE plainly before our eyes is that spirits cannot live without eating other plants and animals. The EVIDENCE plainly is that we are polluting flesh on Earth.
and a curious development happened in European culture over the past 400 years. a group of men began the concerted effort to wrench themselves from intoxication with their inner experience and begin REALLY LOOKING, really being INTERESTED in the living presences outside of themselves.
and BOY, WHAT WE'VE FOUND!
roughly, in the past 150 years, what we've found are: 2000 different minerals, and hints at their modes of formation. We've catalogued so far, 2 million different kinds of plants animals mushrooms microorganisms. We've found that organisms are immense hierarchies of complexity from organism to organ systems to tissues to cells to organelles to macromolecular assemblies, to macromolecules to molecules to atoms to protons and electrons to the very equations of the universe.
We've begun to learn the creative abilities of atoms and molecules, basically, mud! we've begun to learn how simple energy flow through collections of molecules with simple rules causes dynamic order to occur. We've begun to learn the mathematics that gives us complex subtle behavior from finite simple rules iterated over trials of molecular bombardments...
We've learned that our own brains are an immense tangle of 20BILLION interconnected neurons. we've begun to explore what it's like to connect that many parts with simple rules and see what it's capable of.
we've learned the reality of chance, random input, which the ancients refused to accept, believeing all came from conscious purposeful mind.
we've begun to explore CAREFULLY just how our minds work, are they monolithic purposeful consciousnesses? or are they communities of interacting processes feeding on random input?
we've explored possibilities of creation of the wealth of 2million different critters by a processes of iteration of actions, choices, trials and errors, feedback loops among populations of simple organisms over generations. we've counted the layers carefully all over the Earth and have uncovered 3.8 billion years of living Earth history.
We've begun to learn to put aside our chauvanism and anthropomorphizing and respectfully ask the other 2million critters we share this life with: what IS your life like? what is YOUR experience of it?
[read complexity]
no longer can we put the creativity and love that has been the realm of God and human spirit in one box, and put dumb mud and flesh in another.
no longer must spirit be alien to this muddyfleshybirthingdyingsexing Earth.
Thursday, October 11, 2007
what is blackskimmerblog?
Posted by barry goldman at 9:46 PM
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text:
Pointe-de-Bute Cemetary
Canon EOS-5D Classic, Tokina AF 19-35
Less than a week ago, I sold my only working digital camera - the EOS Digital Rebel T3i, mainly to help cover part of the cost of a Mobility Scooter for my wife Kathy. Other than a Panasonic DMC-FH27 I had borrowed from her, I had nothing but film cameras left, which didn't bother me, as film has placed me on a seriously new learning curve. But yesterday, I found a deal too sweet to pass up - a Full Frame Canon EOS 5D "classic" (some call it the Mk-I, others call it the 5D Original). No matter what you call it, this was in the local classifieds, so I could avoid all the "++" charges on Ebay, and it was very reasonably priced. I won't say what I paid, except that it was about 25% lower than actual selling prices on Ebay. It's condition is spotless - like new, shutter count is around 10,000, it came with a custom focus screen (the one with the Grid etched into it), 3 batteries and a rarely ever seen AC power adapter. Also included in the deal were a Tokina AF 19-35mm f3.5-4.5 ultra wide angle, and a Canon EF 28-105 USM (I already had one, now I have two, one for film and one for digital!)
I spent last evening checking everything out thoroughly, and found that everything is indeed 100% great. This morning, it was very rainy, so I took it out and did three shots from the car window, starting with the one above, plus these two:
All three were taken with the Tokina lens, which is also my first experience ever with an extreme wide-angle on a full-frame body, and with the ISO at 400. There was also a fourth shot, but I'm saving that for a later day, because I brought my Elan-7 along with me, and did exactly the same shot with the same lens (the EF 40mm STM), and made sure the two cameras were set with everything exactly the same. I want to determine for myself, and my readers, the difference between film and a full frame digital sensor. I've gotten a bit of criticism lately about some recent comparisons I've done - mainly along the lines that my digital files were not processed enough to make them compare more favourably with film! My thinking was that this is the whole point - compare a straight from camera digital JPG to a straight from scanner film JPG - and of course film does look better every time when this comparison is made. However, one individual suggested that I should've optimized the digital camera RAW files to make the comparison more fair - so that is now going to be the way I do it - the digital will be optimized RAW to JPG conversions, and the film scan will be optimized as necessary TIF to JPG conversions, using exactly the same optimizations done with the same software. It is true, I suppose, that digital photographs need a lot of optimization to make them look anywhere close to the way film already looks without any help. Fair enough - that's what I'll do.
So - about the 5D Classic - falling in love with this camera cannot be helped. As far as DSLR's go, it is absolutely rock-simple. There are no bells and whistles like you find on all lower-end cameras. This is a serious high-end, less-is-more workhorse. It is eight years old now, so naturally it is lacking features found on the most recent DSLR's, like Live View, Video, super high ISO, super high Pixel Density, and high resolution rear monitors. Let's start with the Monitor - it is really useless - the image quality on it is so poor, you can't really determine much about the quality of the picture you just took, except that you actually did take the picture. The best thing to use this Monitor for is in full-info mode, showing the RGB histogram, and a tiny representation of the picture in the upper left corner. Being more of a film fan anyway, I actually like this - I don't want my monitor telling me that I got the picture right - rather I want to know I'm getting the picture right because I'm making the correct settings - and then having a tiny picture along with the histogram makes for a bonus over film, unless I choose to leave the monitor off completely. The rest of the experience in using the 5D Classic is actually very like that of an EOS film camera. All of your various settings are made by using buttons, control wheels and the top LCD monitor - very little is actually done through the rear LCD Menu - and I really like that too.
The camera is heavy and solid - a lot more than any of my EOS film cameras, and even heavier than the best DSLR I'd previously owned - the 7D. I don't mind big and heavy, but there's a lot to be said for light and agile too - such as my bare minimum EOS 500n (Rebel G) -an exceptionally lightweight all plastic bodied camera. My Elan7's are not that heavy, even with the battery grip attached. The 5D Classic is a real no-nonsense, minimalist professional working machine.
How about the image quality? Well, so far, I've only been working with the Tokina ultra-wide lens - it's far from being a Canon L series, so I don't really know for sure yet if I'm commenting on this lens or on the camera itself. Oh yes, I did one shot this morning with the EF 40mm, which turned out lovely, but I don't think it was any better than the Tokina. I will say that I'm very impressed with the little bit I've done so far. It's a 12.8 MegaPixel sensor, which for a full-frame these days, is about half of what you get brand new. But 12.8 is still plenty, and every other reviewer out there says that bigger pixels can be better than more pixels, because bigger pixels have much better signal to noise specs at high ISO settings. So far, everything I've done is at 400 ISO, and compared with 400 ISO film, the 5D images are remarkably noise free - very clean. This coming weekend, I'll be shooting another cat show, and I'll be doing that at ISO 1600. The 5D's highest setting is 3200, so compared to the last cat show I did last June, using the Rebel T3i at 6400, I'm at a big disadvantage. Then again, I was shooting cat shows in 2008 - 2010 with a Rebel XS, which was also an ISO -max of 1600, so I've been there before.
I believe I'm going to find the 5D Classic to be an exceptionally good DSLR when it comes to image quality - I'm expecting it to be equal, but still different than film - I really don't know yet where my preferences will fall. I really love how using this camera is so much like using an EOS film camera - it is very similar to using an Elan-7; there's not a whole lot of digital features to choose from, the ISO range is pretty much the same as you'd have used in the film era, and even though there is a rear LCD that shows you the picture you just took, there's no way that this LCD can even begin to tell you that you took the picture right - for that you need to wait until you get home to view the files on a computer screen.
I should also mention the Tokina 19-35mm f3.5-4.5 ultra-wide zoom lens. It's supposed to be a cheap lens - they're selling used now for around $150. First of all, click on the above images to enlarge them - this is just as much the lens we're looking at here as it is the camera. I think the IQ is excellent. The lens body seems to be entirely metal - you certainly don't get that with lower-end but way more expensive Canon lenses. The grip rings for manual focus and zoom are made of a better quality rubber than any low-end Canon lens, and finally, the zoom and focus rings turn as smooth as butter - among the best I've ever seen. Also, the auto-focus is very snappy and accurate. I expect I'll be using this lens a lot - it's a perfect focal range for shooting large buildings, cars and trucks.
There'll be a lot more to come from me as I spend the next little while with the EOS 5D Classic!


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Alyx got Cheetah of the Week in his classroom. He gets an 'All About Me' poster to display in the classroom all week long. He set the papers aside, so I didn't see it until last minute, so we quickly threw it together. He was happy, and I enjoyed discussing his favorite things!
I wasn't feeling so hot today, so Kate and I took it easy and enjoyed the quiet afternoon.
She asked for yogurt for lunch and decided to eat it with her fingers.
...then she got tired.
It is so cute when she drags her blanket, or sometimes pillow, along with her. Lately, it's this blanket. And when we're at home, she doesn't want to wear pants ;).
Reading before nap time.
Alyx loves to be tucked into bed, so out of habit from him, I did it to Kate one night, and now she loves it!
Hehee. I love her mohawks :).
Come on spring!


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by Charlie
Here's the thing. If I was reviewing an Ian Rankin 'Rebus' I wouldn't be giving much away if I told you it was a gritty account of one man's struggle to bring justice to a world in which alienation battles with hope. I would add it was a cracking whodunit to boot, written with a sure hand and a dark wit and I wouldn't be spoiling it for anyone. You know what you have when you hold a 'Rebus' in your hand. The problem here is that to define Marina Lewycka's latest book as a whole would weaken one of its greatest strengths – that although her tone is light, I felt that calamity might take the whole book to unexpectedly dark places. And that's all I'm going to say on that; if you pick up a copy, and you should, you'll have to find out for yourselves the path
The book finds Georgie our narrator and central character, having come 'unstuck' from her husband, meeting the remarkable Mrs Shapiro who lives with a population of cats in a large crumbling house. Rather to her surprise Georgie is befriended by Mrs Shapiro and becomes her reluctant champion when Mrs Shapiro is beset by social workers, scheming estate agents and matters of a DIY nature. Alongside this Georgie is trying to figure out if she wants her self absorbed husband back or a new and salacious love life, puzzling over her teenage son's newfound religious leanings and cleaning up quite a lot of cat poop. Oh and Georgie also writes articles for an adhesives magazine when not struggling with her novel of romance and revenge, The Splattered Heart.
The first time I met Wonder Boy, he pissed on me. I suppose he was trying to warn me off, which was quite prescient when you consider how things turned out.
What befalls Georgie and Mrs Shapiro is both touching and comical; and sometimes laugh out loud funny, particularly in moments that involve bargain shopping or cats. This is at heart a story of almost everyday events and almost ordinary people but as we, like Georgie, are drawn in we are also taught more than one lesson. Snippets of the history of Israel and Palestine after WWII, how fundamentalism may take root in unexpected places when the internet is in every bedroom, the treatment of Jews in Denmark during the Second World War and how the Miners strike in the 1980s touched adults and children in those communities. Not to mention we discover quite a lot about glue.
That's a lot of targets to aim at and whilst Marina may not hit the bull's-eye every time, her aim is more than sure enough to make us think, and more importantly, feel how the past shapes lives in the present. Some might accuse her of cherry picking events to make her points and they might have an arguable case if the book is seen as a history per se rather than a human drama. Some might also accuse her of bringing her subtexts to the surface a little too often but I was not unhappy to see them. Like Georgie, a northern lass by birth,
Let me be blunt as well. Go buy this book. It isn't War and Peace; it isn't The History of the Decline and Fall of the
Finally I cannot help but include a personal aside. In another life I was an industrial chemist, making adhesives for a living. I never thought I would want to hear about the stuff again. Thanks to
Read our interview with Marina ...


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How to create a generic list using reflection
Reflection is a very powerful feature which allows you to do lots of crazy things.
But sometimes you want to create a generic class which can be really annoying if you dont know how to do it.
If you try to do it as usual then you will receive an exception.
An example would be
var myType = typeof (double); var list = (List<myType>) Activator.CreateInstance(typeof (List<myType>), null);
The compiler tells you that a type or namespace is expected and not myType!
In order to do that you can use the MakeGenericType method to add the generic types to the List and after that you can create the instance
var myGenericType = typeof(List<>).MakeGenericType(new []{typeof(double)}); var myList = (List<double>)Activator.CreateInstance(myGenericType);
Note that the MakeGenericType method only creates the type which then is used to create an object in the next line


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Sunlit child emerged from the forest. All the trees leafed out. Spring happened up in the canopy./
My husband and I alternated walking side by side and single file as the narrow trail allowed. Our son ran ahead. His feet, protected only by socks, easily handled the path's contours. His tousled hair caught the sunlight, a two and a half year old sun of the earth. He was all light and light, having emerged like golden bird from his growth spurt.
We paid for our son's newest achievements, which I soon will describe, with sleepless nights, early risings, late bedtimes, hunger pangs, pickiness, bad tempers, unhappiness, tears, stubbornness, fidgetiness, upsy downsy. Everything, anything you can imagine. When we were a couple days into it, my husband and I agreed, "Growth spurt." "This is awful. My nervous system needs a vacation," I continued. But, I forget sometimes. It feels like it will never end.
Mid-growth spurt, I wonder, "Is this my child? So irritable, so needy? I'm so irritable, so needy." My husband and I make big plans, desperate plans. Night weaning. His own room. Yet, I know he will look for me, "Momma?" When the sun rises, my husband and I take turns taking breaks. I blow my top. feel guilty. I feel entitled. I yell. I apologize. We talk. I console. We read books. I do elaborate things to pass the time, and am upset when they fail or end in tears.
And so, trailing behind my sunlit child, his hair a white candle against the green earth, I watch him move with joy. This is my child, but so is the fiery whip for whom I brewed teas of catnip and lemon balm, whose sippy cup I spiked with skullcap tincture, whose demands drove me from the room, counting, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10... tears in my eyes, hands clenched.
We stopped at this trail because a couple miles back our son said, "Off, off," as he tugged at his pants. "Do you have to pee?" my husband asked. "Mmm, hmm," was the reply. "Can you wait? Can you hold it?" We turned down a quieter road. Driving fast, we passed a perfect gravel pull off and found nothing but a narrow shoulder and roadside ditches. At last, we came to a parking lot for a hiking trail. Our son happily blessed the parking lot.
I felt like a real adult, a real parent. I think about my parents pulling off the road to let my brother pee. The phrase "full circle" is usually used for events more, well, event-like, but I felt as though I was my own parents.
Our son runs on and on and arrive at a pond. We see a little heron escapes into the nearby forest. We watch planes fly low overhead. A trio of turtles climb onto a partially submerged tire in the center of the pond. One tiny, two larger. "Momma, Momma," he calls them. A great blue heron flies over, a red-tailed hawk is chased by crows, a turkey vulture on drunken wings loops by. A towhee calls from a crabapple. On the trail back, a rabbit jumps into the thicket. At our feet, wild strawberries bloom. We pull garlic mustard for dinner and cleavers for tea.
And what is new?
A potty "trained" child - my son is untrainable. He does it his way, himself, with guidance from the adults around him.
"Mouse's house" - Stringing two words together. He describes the block house he's built and who it belongs to.
Walking up the stairs, alternating feet.
Pulling on his pants, as though he's done it his whole life.
Increased consciousness of needs, "Food" "Water"
And, all the trees leafed out. Spring happened up in the canopy.
I wish I remembered when he went through the growth spurt that brought about imagination. That's a growth spurt or two back now. That was amazing to see.


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Baby Elsa Skating Accident
Baby Elsa Skating Accident
Elsa is great skater, but unfortunately she had an accident and fell in a thorn bush. She is badly injured, and needs you help. Could you be her doctor? Clean all the wounds, remove the splinters, and suture the biggest wound. Put plaster or bandage when ever is needed. At the end apply ice on bruises. You will do it all easy!
Date added: 2015-02-28
Instructions: Use mouse to play. Follow in game instruction.
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"I alone cannot change the world, but I can cast a stone across the waters to create many ripples."
― Mother Teresa
Ahimsa translates as non-harming. This concept includes compassion, reverence, and love. Lately I have been thinking about this concept a lot. We live in a world that is constantly pointing out our differences. Dividing us into groups and sub-groups, us against them. In yoga philosophy the concept is that we are all one. As pieces of a whole, by seeing the good in others I see the good in myself, If I help my fellow creatures I help myself. If I hurt my fellow humans, animals, or even the planet, I hurt myself. It is the concept so many "sub-cultures" talk about. We here it in reggae, punk rock, hip-hop, blues, and folk music. All very different styles with one message: unity.
"I can do things you cannot, you can do things I cannot; together we can do great things."
― Mother Teresa
Ahimsa is not exclusive to things we like. Compassion is about recognizing the similarities between you and another being, even when (or maybe especially when) the interaction is unpleasant. It is difficult to accept this concept sometimes. Personally I am not crazy about the idea of being nice to "pests" like mosquitos, or biting flies. It is easier to love a cute cuddly dog or baby bunny. This goes for people too. Sometimes we just can't seem to get along with a particular person. but finding compassion for your family and loved ones is usually easy. We forgive them and accept their flaws because we love them. We want the best for them and we will go out of our way to help them on their path. Yoga invites us to expand that circle of compassion. Start including that person you have a hard time with. Then maybe think about your community, your state, our nation, other cultures and even the whole world in your concept of family, and see what happens. When you are faced with a particularly hard interaction with someone, I suggest you use a trick my teachers taught me: simply say to yourself " maybe its not about me" and try your best to see things from the other beings perspective. Ask yourself " what would have to be true for them to be right" start evaluating the facts of the situation. Take a deep breath, feel the ground beneath you and try to listen.
"If you judge people, you have no time to love them." ― Mother Teresa
Practice compassion or Ahimsa and hopefully you can resolve your differences from a place of kindness or even love. It is possible for both of you to be right. sometimes its just a matter of preference or perspective that has you stuck on opposite sides. If we could communicate with respect for each other, we might be able to work together, to find unity. We could change this world for the better, one small act at a time. Yoga can help us get there. Ahimsa is the first step.
One Love! UNITY! Namaste, (the light in me respects the same light in you) ~ Robin