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"Every day, in every way, we are getting meta and meta," the philosopher John Wisdom used to say, venturing a cultural counterpart to Émile Coué's famous mantra of self-improvement. So it makes sense that in the aftermath of the Simpson trial the focus of attention has been swiftly displaced from the verdict to the reaction to the verdict, and then to the reaction to the reaction to the verdict, and, finally, to the reaction to the reaction to the reaction to the verdict—which is to say, black indignation at white anger at black jubilation at Simpson's acquittal. It's a spiral made possible by the relay circuit of race. Only in America.
An American historian I know registers a widespread sense of bathos when he says, "Who would have imagined that the Simpson trial would be like the Kennedy assassination—that you'd remember where you were when the verdict was announced?" But everyone does, of course. The eminent sociologist William Julius Wilson was in the red-carpet lounge of a United Airlines terminal, the only black in a crowd of white travellers, and found himself as stunned and disturbed as they were. Wynton Marsalis, on tour with his band in California, recalls that "everybody was acting like they were above watching it, but then when it got to be ten o'clock—zoom, we said, 'Put the verdict on!' " Spike Lee was with Jackie Robinson's widow, Rachel, rummaging through a trunk filled with her husband's belongings, in preparation for a bio-pic he's making on the athlete. Jamaica Kincaid was sitting in her car in the parking lot of her local grocery store in Vermont, listening to the proceedings on National Public Radio, and she didn't pull out until after they were over. I was teaching a literature seminar at Harvard from twelve to two, and watched the verdict with the class on a television set in the seminar room. That's where I first saw the sort of racialized response that itself would fill television screens for the next few days: the white students looked aghast, and the black students cheered. "Maybe you should remind the students that this is a case about two people who were brutally slain, and not an occasion to celebrate," my teaching assistant, a white woman, whispered to me.
The two weeks spanning the O. J. Simpson verdict and Louis Farrakhan's Million Man March on Washington were a good time for connoisseurs of racial paranoia. As blacks exulted at Simpson's acquittal, horrified whites had a fleeting sense that this race thing was knottier than they'd ever supposed—that, when all the pieties were cleared away, blacks really were strangers in their midst. (The unspoken sentiment: And I thought I knew these people.) There was the faintest tincture of the Southern slaveowner's disquiet in the aftermath of the bloody slave revolt led by Nat Turner—when the gentleman farmer was left to wonder which of his smiling, servile retainers would have slit his throat if the rebellion had spread as was intended, like fire on parched thatch. In the day or so following the verdict, young urban professionals took note of a slight froideur between themselves and their nannies and babysitters—the awkwardness of an unbroached subject. Rita Dove, who recently completed a term as the United States Poet Laureate, and who believes that Simpson was guilty, found it "appalling that white people were so outraged—more appalling than the decision as to whether he was guilty or not." Of course, it's possible to overstate the tensions. Marsalis invokes the example of team sports, saying, "You want your side to win, whatever the side is going to be. And the thing is, we're still at a point in our national history where we look at each other as sides."
The matter of side-taking cuts deep. An old cartoon depicts a woman who has taken her errant daughter to see a child psychiatrist. "And when we were watching 'The Wizard of Oz,' " the distraught mother is explaining, "she was rooting for the wicked witch!" What many whites experienced was the bewildering sense that an entire population had been rooting for the wrong side. "This case is a classic example of what I call interstitial spaces," says Judge A. Leon Higginbotham, who recently retired from the federal Court of Appeals, and who last month received the Presidential Medal of Freedom. "The jury system is predicated on the idea that different people can view the same evidence and reach diametrically opposed conclusions." But the observation brings little solace. If we disagree about something so basic, how can we find agreement about far thornier matters? For white observers, what's even scarier than the idea that black Americans were plumping for the villain, which is a misprision of value, is the idea that black Americans didn't recognize him as the villain, which is a misprision of fact. How can conversation begin when we disagree about reality? To put it at its harshest, for many whites a sincere belief in Simpson's innocence looks less like the culture of protest than like the culture of psychosis.
Perhaps you didn't know that Liz Claiborne appeared on "Oprah" not long ago and said that she didn't design her clothes for black women—that their hips were too wide. Perhaps you didn't know that the soft drink Tropical Fantasy is manufactured by the Ku Klux Klan and contains a special ingredient designed to sterilize black men. (A warning flyer distributed in Harlem a few years ago claimed that these findings were vouchsafed on the television program "20/20.") Perhaps you didn't know that the Ku Klux Klan has a similar arrangement with Church's Fried Chicken—or is it Popeye's?
Perhaps you didn't know these things, but a good many black Americans think they do, and will discuss them with the same intentness they bring to speculations about the "shadowy figure" in a Brentwood driveway. Never mind that Liz Claiborne has never appeared on "Oprah," that the beleaguered Brooklyn company that makes Tropical Fantasy has gone as far as to make available an F.D.A. assay of its ingredients, and that those fried-chicken franchises pose a threat mainly to black folks' arteries. The folklorist Patricia A. Turner, who has collected dozens of such tales in an invaluable 1993 study of rumor in African-American culture, "I Heard It Through the Grapevine," points out the patterns to be found here: that these stories encode regnant anxieties, that they take root under particular conditions and play particular social roles, that the currency of rumor flourishes where "official" news has proved untrustworthy.
Certainly the Fuhrman tapes might have been scripted to confirm the old saw that paranoids, too, have enemies. If you wonder why blacks seem particularly susceptible to rumors and conspiracy theories, you might look at a history in which the official story was a poor guide to anything that mattered much, and in which rumor sometimes verged on the truth. Heard the one about the L.A. cop who hated interracial couples, fantasized about making a bonfire of black bodies, and boasted of planting evidence? How about the one about the federal government's forty-year study of how untreated syphilis affects black men? For that matter, have you ever read through some of the F.B.I.'s COINTELPRO files? ("There is but one way out for you," an F.B.I. scribe wrote to Martin Luther King, Jr., in 1964, thoughtfully urging on him the advantages of suicide. "You better take it before your filthy, abnormal, fraudulent self is bared to the nation.")
People arrive at an understanding of themselves and the world through narratives—narratives purveyed by schoolteachers, newscasters, "authorities," and all the other authors of our common sense. Counternarratives are, in turn, the means by which groups contest that dominant reality and the fretwork of assumptions that supports it. Sometimes delusion lies that way; sometimes not. There's a sense in which much of black history is simply counternarrative that has been documented and legitimatized, by slow, hard-won scholarship. The "shadowy figures" of American history have long been our own ancestors, both free and enslaved. In any case, fealty to counternarratives is an index to alienation, not to skin color: witness Representative Helen Chenoweth, of Idaho, and her devoted constituents. With all the appositeness of allegory, the copies of "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion" sold by black venders in New York—who are supplied with them by Lushena Books, a black-nationalist book wholesaler—were published by the white supremacist Angriff Press, in Hollywood. Paranoia knows no color or coast.
Finally though, it's misleading to view counternarrative as another pathology of disenfranchisement. If the M.I.A. myth, say, is rooted among a largely working-class constituency, there are many myths—one of them known as Reaganism—that hold considerable appeal among the privileged classes. "So many white brothers and sisters are living in a state of denial in terms of how deep white supremacy is seated in their culture and society," the scholar and social critic Cornel West says. "Now we recognize that in a fundamental sense we really do live in different worlds." In that respect, the reaction to the Simpson verdict has been something of an education. The novelist Ishmael Reed talks of "wealthy white male commentators who live in a world where the police don't lie, don't plant evidence—and drug dealers give you unlimited credit." He adds, "Nicole, you know, also dated Mafia hit men."
"I think he's innocent, I really do," West says. "I do think it was linked to some drug subculture of violence. It looks as if both O.J. and Nicole had some connection to drug activity. And the killings themselves were classic examples of that drug culture of violence. It could have to do with money owed—it could have to do with a number of things. And I think that O.J. was quite aware of and fearful of this." On this theory, Simpson may have appeared at the crime scene as a witness. "I think that he had a sense that it was coming down, both on him and on her, and Brother Ron Goldman just happened to be there," West conjectures. "But there's a possibility also that O.J. could have been there, gone over and tried to see what was going on, saw that he couldn't help, split, and just ran away. He might have said, 'I can't stop this thing, and they are coming at me to do the same thing.' He may have actually run for his life."
To believe that Simpson is innocent is to believe that a terrible injustice has been averted, and this is precisely what many black Americans, including many prominent ones, do believe. Thus the soprano Jessye Norman is angry over what she sees as the decision of the media to prejudge Simpson rather than "educate the public as to how we could possibly look at things a bit differently." She says she wishes that the real culprit "would stand up and say, 'I did this and I am sorry I caused so much trouble.' " And while she is sensitive to the issue of spousal abuse, she is skeptical about the way it was enlisted by the prosecution: "You have to stop getting into how they were at home, because there are not a lot of relationships that could be put on television that we would think, O.K., that's a good one. I mean, just stop pretending that this is the case." Then, too, she asks, "Isn't it interesting to you that this Faye Resnick person was staying with Nicole Brown Simpson and that she happened to have left on the eighth of June? Does that tell you that maybe there's some awful coincidence here?" The widespread theory about murderous drug dealers Norman finds "perfectly plausible, knowing what drugs do," and she adds, "People are punished for being bad."
There's a sense in which all such accounts can be considered counternarratives, or fragments of them—subaltern knowledge, if you like. They dispute the tenets of official culture; they do not receive the imprimatur of editorialists or of network broadcasters; they are not seriously entertained on "MacNeil/Lehrer." And when they do surface they are given consideration primarily for their ethnographic value. An official culture treats their claims as it does those of millenarian cultists in Texas, or Marxist deconstructionists in the academy: as things to be diagnosed, deciphered, given meaning—that is, another meaning. Black folk say they believe Simpson is innocent, and then the white gatekeepers of a media culture cajolingly explain what black folk really mean when they say it, offering the explanation from the highest of motives: because the alternative is a population that, by their lights, is not merely counter-normative but crazy. Black folk may mean anything at all; just not what they say they mean.
Yet you need nothing so grand as an epistemic rupture to explain why different people weigh the evidence of authority differently. In the words of the cunning Republican campaign slogan, "Who do you trust?" It's a commonplace that white folks trust the police and black folks don't. Whites recognize this in the abstract, but they're continually surprised at the depth of black wariness. They shouldn't be. Norman Podhoretz's soul-searching 1963 essay, "My Negro Problem, and Ours"—one of the frankest accounts we have of liberalism and race resentment—tells of a Brooklyn boyhood spent under the shadow of carefree, cruel Negro assailants, and of the author's residual unease when he passes groups of blacks in his Upper West Side neighborhood. And yet, he notes in a crucial passage, "I know now, as I did not know when I was a child, that power is on my side, that the police are working for me and not for them." That ordinary, unremarkable comfort—the feeling that "the police are working for me"—continues to elude blacks, even many successful blacks. Thelma Golden, the curator of the Whitney's "Black Male" show, points out that on the very day the verdict was announced a black man in Harlem was killed by the police under disputed circumstances. As older blacks like to repeat, "When white folks say 'justice,' they mean 'just us.' "
Blacks—in particular, black men—swap their experiences of police encounters like war stories, and there are few who don't have more than one story to tell. "These stories have a ring of cliché about them," Erroll McDonald, Pantheon's executive editor and one of the few prominent blacks in publishing, says, "but, as we all know about clichés, they're almost always true." McDonald tells of renting a Jaguar in New Orleans and being stopped by the police—simply "to show cause why I shouldn't be deemed a problematic Negro in a possibly stolen car." Wynton Marsalis says, "Shit, the police slapped me upside the head when I was in high school. I wasn't Wynton Marsalis then. I was just another nigger standing out somewhere on the street whose head could be slapped and did get slapped." The crime novelist Walter Mosley recalls, "When I was a kid in Los Angeles, they used to stop me all the time, beat on me, follow me around, tell me that I was stealing things." Nor does William Julius Wilson—who has a son-in-law on the Chicago police force ("You couldn't find a nicer, more dedicated guy")—wonder why he was stopped near a small New England town by a policeman who wanted to know what he was doing in those parts. There's a moving violation that many African-Americans know as D.W.B.: Driving While Black.
So we all have our stories. In 1968, when I was eighteen, a man who knew me was elected mayor of my West Virginia county, in an upset victory. A few weeks into his term, he passed on something he thought I should know: the county police had made a list of people to be arrested in the event of a serious civil disturbance, and my name was on it. Years of conditioning will tell. Wynton Marsalis says, "My worst fear is to have to go before the criminal-justice system." Absurdly enough, it's mine, too.
Another barrier to interracial comprehension is talk of the "race card"—a phrase that itself infuriates many blacks. Judge Higginbotham, who pronounces himself "not uncomfortable at all" with the verdict, is uncomfortable indeed with charges that Johnnie Cochran played the race card. "This whole point is one hundred per cent inaccurate," Higginbotham says. "If you knew that the most important witness had a history of racism and hostility against black people, that should have been a relevant factor of inquiry even if the jury had been all white. If the defendant had been Jewish and the police officer had a long history of expressed anti-Semitism and having planted evidence against innocent persons who were Jewish, I can't believe that anyone would have been saying that defense counsel was playing the anti-Semitism card." Angela Davis finds the very metaphor to be a problem. "Race is not a card," she says firmly. "The whole case was pervaded with issues of race."
Those who share her view were especially outraged at Robert Shapiro's famous post-trial rebuke to Cochran—for not only playing the race card but dealing it "from the bottom of the deck." Ishmael Reed, who is writing a book about the case, regards Shapiro's remarks as sheer opportunism: "He wants to keep his Beverly Hills clients—a perfectly commercial reason." In Judge Higginbotham's view, "Johnnie Cochran established that he was as effective as any lawyer in America, and though whites can tolerate black excellence in singing, dancing, and dunking, there's always been a certain level of discomfort among many whites when you have a one-on-one challenge in terms of intellectual competition. If Edward Bennett Williams, who was one of the most able lawyers in the country, had raised the same issues, half of the complaints would not exist."
By the same token, the display of black prowess in the courtroom was heartening for many black viewers. Cornel West says, "I think part of the problem is that Shapiro—and this is true of certain white brothers—has a profound fear of black-male charisma. And this is true not only in the law but across the professional world. You see, you have so many talented white brothers who deserve to be in the limelight. But one of the reasons they are not in the limelight is that they are not charismatic. And here comes a black person who's highly talented but also charismatic and therefore able to command center stage. So you get a very real visceral kind of jealousy that has to do with sexual competition as well as professional competition."
Erroll McDonald touches upon another aspect of sexual tension when he says, "The so-called race card has always been the joker. And the joker is the history of sexual racial politics in this country. People forget the singularity of this issue—people forget that less than a century ago black men were routinely lynched for merely glancing at white women or for having been thought to have glanced at a white woman." He adds, with mordant irony, "Now we've come to a point in our history where a black man could, potentially, have murdered a white woman and thrown in a white man to boot—and got off. So the country has become far more complex in its discussion of race." This is, as he appreciates, a less than perfectly consoling thought.
"But he's coming for me," a woman muses in Toni Morrison's 1994 novel, "Jazz," shortly before she is murdered by a jealous ex-lover. "Maybe tomorrow he'll find me. Maybe tonight." Morrison, it happens, is less interested in the grand passions of love and requital than she is in the curious texture of communal amnesty. In the event, the woman's death goes unavenged; the man who killed her is forgiven even by her friends and relatives. Neighbors feel that the man fell victim to her wiles, that he didn't understand "how she liked to push people, men." Or, as one of them says of her, "live the life; pay the price." Even the woman—who refuses to name the culprit as she bleeds to death—seems to accede to the view that she brought it on herself.
It's an odd and disturbing theme, and one with something of a history in black popular culture. An R. & B. hit from 1960, "There's Something on Your Mind," relates the anguish of a man who is driven to kill by his lover's infidelity. The chorus alternates with spoken narrative, which informs us that his first victim is the friend with whom she was unfaithful. But then:
Just as you make it up in your mind to forgive her, here come another one of your best friends through the door. This really makes you blow your top, and you go right ahead and shoot her. And realizing what you've done, you say: "Baby, please, speak to me. Forgive me. I'm sorry."
"We are a forgiving people," Anita Hill tells me, and she laughs, a little uneasily. We're talking about the support for O. J. Simpson in the black community; at least, I think we are.
A black woman told the Times last week, "He has been punished enough." But forgiveness is not all. There is also an element in this of outlaw culture: the tendency—which unites our lumpenproles with our postmodern ironists—to celebrate transgression for its own sake. Spike Lee, who was surprised but "wasn't happy" at the verdict ("I would have bet money that he was going to the slammer"), reached a similar conclusion: "A lot of black folks said, 'Man, O.J. is bad, you know. This is the first brother in the history of the world who got away with the murder of white folks, and a blond, blue-eyed woman at that.' "
But then there is the folk wisdom on the question of why Nicole Brown Simpson had to die—the theodicy of the streets. For nothing could be further from the outlaw ethic than the simple and widely shared certainty that, as Jessye Norman says, people are punished for doing wrong. And compounding the sentiment is Morrison's subject—the culturally vexed status of the so-called crime of passion, or what some took to be one, anyway. You play, you pay: it's an attitude that exists on the streets, but not only on the streets, and one that somehow attaches to Nicole, rather than to her ex-husband. Many counternarratives revolve around her putative misbehavior. The black feminist Bell Hooks notes with dismay that what many people took to be a "narrative of a crime of passion" had as its victim "a woman that many people, white and black, felt was like a whore. Precisely by being a sexually promiscuous woman, by being a woman who used drugs, by being a white woman with a black man, she had already fallen from grace in many people's eyes—there was no way to redeem her." Ishmael Reed, for one, has no interest in redeeming her. "To paint O. J. Simpson as a beast, they had to depict her as a saint," he complains. "Apparently, she had a violent temper. She slapped her Jamaican maid. I'm wondering, the feminists who are giving Simpson such a hard time—do they approve of white women slapping maids?"
Of course, the popular trial of Nicole Brown Simpson—one conducted off camera, in whispers—has further occluded anything recognizable as sexual politics. When Anita Hill heard that O. J. Simpson was going to be part of the Million Man March on Washington, she felt it was entirely in keeping with the occasion: a trial in which she believed that matters of gender had been "bracketed" was going to be succeeded by a march from which women were excluded. And, while Minister Louis Farrakhan had told black men that October 16th was to serve as a "day of atonement" for their sins, the murder of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman was obviously not among the sins he had in mind. Bell Hooks argues, "Both O.J.'s case and the Million Man March confirm that, while white men are trying to be sensitive and pretending they're the new man, black men are saying that patriarchy must be upheld at all costs, even if women must die." She sees the march as a congenial arena for Simpson in symbolic terms: "I think he'd like to strut his stuff, as the patriarch. He is the dick that stayed hard longer." ("The surprising thing is that you won't see Clarence Thomas going on that march," Anita Hill remarks of another icon of patriarchy.) Farrakhan himself prefers metaphors of military mobilization, but the exclusionary politics of the event has clearly distracted from its ostensible message of solidarity. "First of all, I wouldn't go to no war and leave half the army home," says Amiri Baraka, the radical poet and playwright who achieved international renown in the sixties as the leading spokesman for the Black Arts movement. "Logistically, that doesn't make sense." He notes that Martin Luther King's 1963 March on Washington was "much more inclusive," and sees Farrakhan's regression as "an absolute duplication of what's happening in the country," from Robert Bly on: the sacralization of masculinity.
Something like that dynamic is what many white feminists saw on display in the Simpson verdict; but it's among women that the racial divide is especially salient. The black legal scholar and activist Patricia Williams says she was "stunned by the intensely personal resentment of some of my white women friends in particular." Stunned but, on reflection, not mystified. "This is Greek drama," she declares. "Two of the most hotly contended aspects of our lives are violence among human beings who happen to be police officers and violence among human beings who happen to be husbands, spouses, lovers." Meanwhile, our attention has been fixated on the rhetorical violence between human beings who happen to disagree about the outcome of the O. J. Simpson trial.
It's a cliché to speak of the Simpson trial as a soap opera—as entertainment, as theatre—but it's also true, and in ways that are worth exploring further. For one thing, the trial provides a fitting rejoinder to those who claim that we live in an utterly fragmented culture, bereft of the common narratives that bind a people together. True, Parson Weems has given way to Dan Rather, but public narrative persists. Nor has it escaped notice that the biggest televised legal contests of the last half decade have involved race matters: Anita Hill and Rodney King. So there you have it: the Simpson trial—black entertainment television at its finest. Ralph Ellison's hopeful insistence on the Negro's centrality to American culture finds, at last, a certain tawdry confirmation.
"The media generated in people a feeling of being spectators at a show," the novelist John Edgar Wideman says. "And at the end of a show you applaud. You are happy for the good guy. There is that sense of primal identification and closure." Yet it's a fallacy of "cultural literacy" to equate shared narratives with shared meanings. The fact that American TV shows are rebroadcast across the globe causes many people to wring their hands over the menace of cultural imperialism; seldom do they bother to inquire about the meanings that different people bring to and draw from these shows. When they do make inquiries, the results are often surprising. One researcher talked to Israeli Arabs who had just watched an episode of "Dallas"—an episode in which Sue Ellen takes her baby, leaves her husband, J.R., and moves in with her ex-lover and his father. The Arab viewers placed their own construction on the episode: they were all convinced that Sue Ellen had moved in with her own father—something that by their mores at least made sense.
A similar thing happened in America this year: the communal experience afforded by a public narrative (and what narrative more public?) was splintered by the politics of interpretation. As far as the writer Maya Angelou is concerned, the Simpson trial was an exercise in minstrelsy. "Minstrel shows caricatured every aspect of the black man's life, beginning with his sexuality," she says. "They portrayed the black man as devoid of all sensibilities and sensitivities. They minimized and diminished the possibility of familial love. And that is what the trial is about. Not just the prosecution but everybody seemed to want to show him as other than a normal human being. Nobody let us just see a man." But there is, of course, little consensus about what genre would best accommodate the material. Walter Mosley says, "The story plays to large themes, so I'm sure somebody will write about it. But I don't think it's a mystery. I think it's much more like a novel by Zola." What a writer might make of the material is one thing; what the audience has made of it is another.
"Simpson is a B-movie star and people were watching this like a B movie," Patricia Williams says. "And this is not the American B-movie ending." Or was it? "From my perspective as an attorney, this trial was much more like a movie than a trial," Kathleen Cleaver, who was once the Black Panthers' Minister for Communication and is now a professor of law at Emory, says. "It had the budget of a movie, it had the casting of a movie, it had the tension of a movie, and the happy ending of a movie." Spike Lee, speaking professionally, is dubious about the trial's cinematic possibilities: "I don't care who makes this movie, it is never going to equal what people have seen in their living rooms and houses for eight or nine months." Or is it grand opera? Jessye Norman considers: "Well, it certainly has all the ingredients. I mean, somebody meets somebody and somebody gets angry with somebody and somebody dies." She laughs. "It sounds like the 'Ring' cycle of Wagner—it really does."
"This story has been told any number of times," Angelou says. "The first thing I thought about was Eugene O'Neill's 'All God's Chillun.' " Then she considers how the event might be retrieved by an African-American literary tradition. "I think a great writer would have to approach it," she tells me pensively. "James Baldwin could have done it. And Toni Morrison could do it."
"Maya Angelou could do it," I say.
"I don't like that kind of stuff," she replies.
There are some for whom the question of adaptation is not entirely abstract. The performance artist and playwright Anna Deavere Smith has already worked on the 911 tape and F. Lee Bailey's cross-examination of Mark Fuhrman in the drama classes she teaches at Stanford. Now, with a dramaturge's eye, she identifies what she takes to be the climactic moment: "Just after the verdict was read I will always remember two sounds and one image. I heard Johnnie Cochran go 'Ugh,' and then I heard the weeping of Kim Goldman. And then I saw the image of O. J.'s son, with one hand going upward on one eye and one hand pointed down, shaking and sobbing. I couldn't do the words right now; if I could find a collaborator, I would do something else. I feel that a choreographer ought to do that thing. Part of the tragedy was the fact of that 'Ugh' and that crying. Because that 'Ugh' wasn't even a full sound of victory, really." In "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" Wallace Stevens famously said he didn't know whether he preferred "The beauty of inflections / Or the beauty of innuendoes, / The blackbird whistling / Or just after." American culture has spoken as with one voice: we like it just after.
Just after is when our choices and allegiances are made starkly apparent. Just after is when interpretation can be detached from the thing interpreted. Anita Hill, who saw her own presence at the Clarence Thomas hearings endlessly analyzed and allegorized, finds plenty of significance in the trial's reception, but says the trial itself had none. Naturally, the notion that the trial was sui generis is alien to most commentators. Yet it did not arrive in the world already costumed as a racial drama; it had to be racialized. And those critics—angry whites, indignant blacks—who like to couple this verdict with the Rodney King verdict should consider an elementary circumstance: Rodney King was an unknown and undistinguished black man who was brutalized by the police; the only thing exceptional about that episode was the presence of a video camera. But, as Bell Hooks asks, "in what other case have we ever had a wealthy black man being tried for murder?" Rodney King was a black man to his captors before he was anything else; O. J. Simpson was, first and foremost, O. J. Simpson. Kathleen Cleaver observes, "A black superhero millionaire is not someone for whom mistreatment is an issue." And Spike Lee acknowledges that the police "don't really bother black people once they are a personality." On this point, I'm reminded of something that Roland Gift, the lead singer of the pop group Fine Young Cannibals, once told a reporter: "I'm not black, I'm famous."
Simpson, too, was famous rather than black; that is, until the African-American community took its lead from the cover of Time and, well, blackened him. Some intellectuals are reluctant to go along with the conceit. Angela Davis, whose early-seventies career as a fugitive and a political prisoner provides one model of how to be famous and black, speaks of the need to question the way "O. J. Simpson serves as the generic black man," given that "he did not identify himself as black before then." More bluntly, Baraka says, "To see him get all of this God-damned support from people he has historically and steadfastly eschewed just pissed me off. He eschewed black people all his life and then, like Clarence Thomas, the minute he gets jammed up he comes talking about 'Hey, I'm black.' " And the matter of spousal abuse should remind us of another role-reversal entailed by Simpson's iconic status in a culture of celebrity: Nicole Brown Simpson would have known that her famous-not-black husband commanded a certain deference from the L.A.P.D. which she, who was white but not yet famous, did not.
"It's just amazing that we in the black community have bought into it," Anita Hill says, with some asperity, and she sees the manufacture of black-male heroes as part of the syndrome. "We continue to create a superclass of individuals who are above the rules." It bewilders her that Simpson "was being honored as someone who was being persecuted for his politics, when he had none," she says. "Not only do we forget about the abuse of his wife but we also forget about the abuse of the community, his walking away from the community." And so Simpson's connection to a smitten black America can be construed as yet another romance, another troubled relationship, another case study in mutual exploitation.
Yet to accept the racial reduction ("WHITES V. BLACKS," as last week's Newsweek headline had it) is to miss the fact that the black community itself is riven, and in ways invisible to most whites. I myself was convinced of Simpson's guilt, so convinced that in the middle of the night before the verdict was to be announced I found myself worrying about his prospective sojourn in prison: would he be brutalized, raped, assaulted? Yes, on sober reflection, such worries over a man's condign punishment seemed senseless, a study in misplaced compassion; but there it was. When the verdict was announced, I was stunned—but, then again, wasn't my own outrage mingled with an unaccountable sense of relief? Anna Deavere Smith says, "I am seeing more than that white people are pissed off and black people are ecstatic. I am seeing the difficulty of that; I am seeing people having difficulty talking about it." And many are weary of what Ishmael Reed calls "zebra journalism, where everything is seen in black-and-white." Davis says, "I have the feeling that the media are in part responsible for the creation of this so-called racial divide—putting all the white people on one side and all the black people on the other side."
Many blacks as well as whites saw the trial's outcome as a grim enactment of Richard Pryor's comic rejoinder "Who are you going to believe—me, or your lying eyes?" "I think if he were innocent he wouldn't have behaved that way," Jamaica Kincaid says of Simpson, taking note of his refusal to testify on his own behalf. "If you are innocent," she believes, "you might want to admit you have done every possible thing in the world—had sex with ten donkeys, twenty mules—but did not do this particular thing." William Julius Wilson says mournfully, "There's something wrong with a system where it's better to be guilty and rich and have good lawyers than to be innocent and poor and have bad ones."
The Simpson verdict was "the ultimate in affirmative action," Amiri Baraka says. "I know the son of a bitch did it." For his part, Baraka essentially agrees with Shapiro's rebuke of Cochran: "Cochran is belittling folks. What he's saying is 'Well, the niggers can't understand the question of perjury in the first place. The only thing they can understand is, 'He called you a nigger.' " He alludes to Ebony's fixation on "black firsts"—the magazine's spotlight coverage of the first black to do this or that—and fantasizes the appropriate Ebony accolade. "They can feature him on the cover as 'The first Negro to kill a white woman and get away with it,' " he offers acidly. Then he imagines Farrakhan introducing him with just that tribute at the Million Man March. Baraka has been writing a play called "Othello, Jr.," so such themes have been on his mind. The play is still in progress, but he has just finished a short poem:
Free Mumia!
O.J. did it
And you know it.
"Trials don't establish absolute truth; that's a theological enterprise," Patricia Williams says. So perhaps it is appropriate that a religious leader, Louis Farrakhan, convened a day of atonement; indeed, some worry that it is all too appropriate, coming at a time when the resurgent right has offered us a long list of sins for which black men must atone. But the crisis of race in America is real enough. And with respect to that crisis a mass mobilization is surely a better fit than a criminal trial. These days, the assignment of blame for black woes increasingly looks like an exercise in scholasticism; and calls for interracial union increasingly look like an exercise in inanity. ("Sorry for the Middle Passage, old chap. I don't know what we were thinking." "Hey, man, forget it—and here's your wallet back. No, really, I want you to have it.") The black economist Glenn Loury says, "If I could get a million black men together, I wouldn't march them to Washington, I'd march them into the ghettos."
But because the meanings of the march are so ambiguous, it has become itself a racial Rorschach—a vast ambulatory allegory waiting to happen. The actor and director Sidney Poitier says, "If we go on such a march to say to ourselves and to the rest of America that we want to be counted among America's people, we would like our family structure to be nurtured and strengthened by ourselves and by the society, that's a good point to make." He sees the march as an occasion for the community to say, "Look, we are adrift. Not only is the nation adrift on the question of race—we, too, are adrift. We need to have a sense of purpose and a sense of direction." Maya Angelou, who agreed to address the assembled men, views the event not as a display of male self-affirmation but as a ceremony of penitence: "It's a chance for African-American males to say to African-American females, 'I'm sorry. I am sorry for what I did, and I am sorry for what happened to both of us.' " But different observers will have different interpretations. Mass mobilizations launch a thousand narratives—especially among subscribers to what might be called the "great event" school of history. And yet Farrakhan's recurrent calls for individual accountability consort oddly with the absolution, both juridical and populist, accorded O. J. Simpson. Simpson has been seen as a symbol for many things, but he is not yet a symbol for taking responsibility for one's actions.
All the same, the task for black America is not to get its symbols in shape: symbolism is one of the few commodities we have in abundance. Meanwhile, Du Bois's century-old question "How does it feel to be a problem?" grows in trenchancy with every new bulletin about crime and poverty. And the Simpson trial spurs us to question everything except the way that the discourse of crime and punishment has enveloped, and suffocated, the analysis of race and poverty in this country. For the debate over the rights and wrongs of the Simpson verdict has meshed all too well with the manner in which we have long talked about race and social justice. The defendant may be free, but we remain captive to a binary discourse of accusation and counter-accusation, of grievance and counter-grievance, of victims and victimizers. It is a discourse in which O. J. Simpson is a suitable remedy for Rodney King, and reductions in Medicaid are entertained as a suitable remedy for O. J. Simpson: a discourse in which everyone speaks of payback and nobody is paid. The result is that race politics becomes a court of the imagination wherein blacks seek to punish whites for their misdeeds and whites seek to punish blacks for theirs, and an infinite regress of score-settling ensues—yet another way in which we are daily becoming meta and meta. And so an empty vessel like O. J. Simpson becomes filled with meaning, and more meaning—more meaning than any of us can bear. No doubt it is a far easier thing to assign blame than to render justice. But if the imagery of the court continues to confine the conversation about race, it really will be a crime. ♦


text:
That's the summary of my point of view (POV) regarding the pharma HOTSPOT topic: "Should Pharma reconsider its mobile application approach with FDA guidance looming?" See the annotated video below:
A "counterpoint" was offered by Dr. Chetan Vijayvergia, PhD, Director of Medical Strategy, Ignite Health, on Ignite Health's Pharma HOTSPOT web site. Dr. Vijayvergia's point was "The apps that are currently being created in the Pharma space don't have a predicate in the FDA database. Pharma needs to reconsider the mobile approach to actively help the FDA shape industry guidance" (see here).
Vijayvergia contends that the current FDA draft guidance for MMAs "casts a very wide net" and if pharma app developers are not careful, their apps can get "dinged as an MMA [mobile medical application]" and be subject to regulation as a medical device.
The fear that FDA is casting too "wide a net" over MMAs was first expressed by PhRMA (see "FDA Mobile Regulatory Fear Mongering by PhRMA"). IMHO, the FDA was pretty clear about staying away from most health-related apps aimed at consumers such as diet apps, etc.
The Best Defense Against Zealous FDA Regulation is Self-Regulation!
In addition to offering FDA its POV regarding what is and what is not a MMA subject to medical device regulation, the pharma industry, IMHO, should begin policing itself to develop MMAs that comply with standards such as Happtique's App Certification Program; listen to this podcast regarding that:
Listen to internet radio with Pharmaguy on Blog Talk Radio
You may also enjoy reading these previous posts regarding pharma mobile medical apps:

subset: commoncrawl


text:
MILLEDGEVILLE, Ga. - The Georgia College & State University department of athletics added 29 student-athletes to the Peach Belt Conference (PBC) Honor Roll taking the total number of honorees to 110, the most of any school in the league.
This season, the PBC divided the group into four levels by GPA, as all students between 3.00 and 3.24 are Presidential Scholars, 3.25 to 3.49 are Bronze Scholars, 3.50 to 3.74 are Silver Scholars and 3.75 to 4.00 are Gold Scholars.
For the fourth-straight year, Bobcat soccer had the most on GCSU's list with 27, also the third-best per-roster member ratio of 90 percent (27/30). Women's cross country had the second-most honorees with 15, followed by men's cross country with 14. The women's harriers also posted the best team ratio at 94 percent (15/16), while Golf had the second-best percentage at 91 (10/11). GCSU had 19 Gold Scholars, 29 Silver Scholars, 29 Bronze Scholars and 33 Presidential Scholars.
Due to a clerical error at GCSU, the men's and women's cross country honorees and one golfer were left off the original list. A listing of the omissions is below, visit HERE for a list of the previously-named honorees.
Women's Cross Country (15) Presidential: Margy Coleman (Alpharetta, Ga.), Virginia Balkcom (Fayetteville, Ga.), Alex Taylor (Marietta, Ga.), Heather Raines (Loganville, Ga.); Bronze: Jen Keeton (Snellville, Ga.), Andrea Sisson (Evans, Ga.); Silver: Becky Kellum (Macon, Ga.), Julie Mitchell (Lilburn, Ga.), Dani Destiche (Snellville, Ga.), Caroline Rentz (Columbus, Ga.), Bonnie Ueltzen (Blairsville, Ga.); Gold: Patricia Dedrick (Loganville, Ga.), Sarah Hakala (Jacksonville, Fla.), Kellie Hughes (Blairsville, Ga.).
Men's Cross Country (14) Presidential: Rob Elliot (Loganville, Ga.), Ryan Hudson (Douglasville, Ga.), Matt Holland, Eric Ottoson (Suwanee, Ga.);Bronze: Rich Dobson (New Hamburg, Ontario), Steven Jackson (Lilburn, Ga.), Michael Demarest (Lawrenceville, Ga.), Tim Cary (Monroe, Ga.);Silver: Alex Pate (Byron, Ga.), Josh Hollar (Canton, Ga.), Michael Hague (Lilburn, Ga.), John Hubert (Savannah, Ga.); Gold: Marc Barsby (Brantford, Ontario), Derek Hossbach (Peachtree City, Ga.).
Golf; Silver: Niclas Szieger (Skanor, Sweden).
Visit www.GCSU.edu/Athletics to nominate your favorite former Bobcats and Colonials to the GCSU Athletics Hall of Fame. The GCSU Department of Athletics sponsors 10 varsity athletic programs at the NCAA Division II level. As a Division II program, GCSU prides itself on balancing the life of the student-athlete, evidenced by the Bobcats' multiple appearances in post-season competition as well as documented academic success and community-service involvement.


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Once common throughout Africa and Asia, elephant numbers were severely depleted during the 20th century, largely due to the massive ivory trade. While some populations are now stable and growing, poaching, conflict and habitat destruction continue to threaten the species.
4-6 tons
18-24 ft.
The largest land mammal on earth, the African elephant weighs up to eight tons. The elephant is distinguished by its massive body, large ears and a long trunk, which has many uses ranging from using it as a hand to pick up objects, as a horn to trumpet warnings, an arm raised in greeting to a hose for drinking water or bathing.
Asian elephants differ in several ways from their African relatives. They are much smaller in size and their ears are straight at the bottom, unlike the large fan-shape ears of the African species. Only some Asian male elephants have tusks. All African elephants, including females, have tusks. Elephants are either left or right-tusked and the one they use more is usually smaller because of wear and tear. The Asian elephant has four toes on the hind foot and five on the forefoot, while the African elephant has three on the hind foot and five on the forefoot.
Led by a matriarch, elephants are organized into complex social structures of females and calves, while male elephants tend to live in isolation. A single calf is born to a female once every 4-5 years and after a gestation period of 22 months—the longest of any mammal. These calves stay with their mothers for years and are also cared for by other females in the group.
The two species of elephants—African and Asian—need extensive land to survive. Roaming in herds and consuming hundreds of pounds of plant matter in a single day, both species of elephant require extensive amounts of food, water and space. As a result, these large mammals place great demands on the environment and often come into conflict with people in competition for resources.
Turtles, tigers, and more species receive additional protections at global wildlife meeting
Governments from around the world recently gathered to discuss the threat of wildlife trade on species.
The Elephant Family
Why They Matter
Elephants help maintain forest and savanna ecosystems for other species, and are integrally tied to rich biodiversity.
Elephants directly influence forest composition and density, and can alter the broader landscape. In tropical forests, elephants create clearings and gaps in the canopy that encourage tree regeneration. In the savannas, they reduce bush cover to create an environment favorable to a mix of browsing and grazing animals.
The seeds of many plant species are dependent on passing through an elephant's digestive tract before they can germinate. It is calculated that at least a third of tree species in central African forests rely on elephants in this way for distribution of seeds.
Today, the most urgent threat to elephants is large-scale poaching to supply the illegal ivory trade. Other threats facing elephants in Africa and Asia include conflict with humans and habitat loss and degradation.
WWF advocates an end to commercial elephant ivory sales in the US and other major markets like China, Thailand and Hong Kong as the most effective and efficient solution to end this illegal ivory trade.
Habitat Loss
Elephants are also losing their habitats—and ancient migratory routes—due to expanding human settlements, plantation development and the construction of infrastructure such as roads, canals and pipelines. As a result, the level of human-elephant conflict rises as elephants are forced to try access resources.
Illegal Wildlife Trade
In 1989, the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) banned the international trade in ivory. However, there are still some thriving but unregulated domestic ivory markets in a number of countries, which fuel an illegal international trade. Poaching to meet growing demand from affluent Asian countries is driving up the rate of poaching. In some countries, political unrest contributes to elephant poaching.
What WWF Is Doing
Research and Monitoring
WWF establishes new protected areas within elephant ranges and improving management effectiveness within existing protected areas. We help to determine the population status of elephants in sites across Africa and Asia to make our conservation projects more effective. The results of the MIKE (Monitoring the Illegal Killing of Elephants) surveys in Central Africa provided baseline data on key elephant populations like elephant hotspots and areas where poaching activities are taking place. We also radio collared pygmy elephants in Borneo and forest elephants in Cameroon, which provided important insights into their natural history. Such information makes it possible for WWF and partners to prioritize specific sites and issues for intervention.
Reducing Conflict between People and Elephants
To increase public support for elephant conservation by reducing conflict, WWF helps train wildlife managers and local communities to use modern methods and tools to mitigate human-elephant conflict. We mobilize communities to help protect their crops by monitoring elephants to provide early warning systems, erecting fences where required, and educating communities to reduce conflict through behavior change. Our long-term goal is to put in place proper land use planning that gives elephants space for seasonal movements, combined with fences to protect crops and infrastructure. On the outskirts of the Tesso Nilo forest, WWF has trained elephants and local people to form a "flying squad" that drives wild elephants away from farms and back into the forests. In Namibia and Kenya, we help people benefit from living alongside elephants and rhinos through wildlife tourism.
Strengthening antipoaching initiatives
Rangers and community-based operations are on the frontlines of the fight against wildlife crime and WWF helps train and equip them. In Mozambique, WWF helped the government establish Quirimbas National Park to conserve more than 2,300 square miles of miombo woodland and its resident elephants. WWF trained park guards in elephant monitoring and antipoaching techniques, and works with communities to mitigate conflict with elephants.
At the borders of Lao PDR, Cambodia, and Vietnam, WWF trains, equips, and supports local staff to patrol protected areas and assess elephant distribution and numbers. In Lao PDR, WWF works to conserve the largest elephant populations in Indochina. In Vietnam, WWF worked with Fauna and Flora International to develop a national elephant action plan, which was adopted by the Vietnamese government in 1996.
Stopping illegal ivory trade
WWF works with TRAFFIC, the international wildlife trade monitoring network, to reduce the major threat that illegal and illicit domestic ivory markets pose to wild elephants. TRAFFIC also manages a global record of ivory seizures, called ETIS (Elephant Trade Information System) that helps to identify routes and countries of particular importance in illegal trade.
Protecting Elephant Habitat
WWF works with elephant range state governments, local people and non-governmental partners to secure a future for this powerful symbol of nature by thinking beyond protected areas. We advocate for large conservation landscapes like KAZA, the largest transboundary conservation area in the world. Home to almost 250,000 elephants, we work to maintain this space to provide elephants freedom to roam.
Thirty Hills
WWF and partners secure protection for critical rain forest in Sumatra. Thirty Hills is one of the last places on Earth where elephants, tigers and orangutans coexist in the wild.
Wildlife Crime Technology Project
Over four and a half years, the Google.org-funded Wildlife Crime Technology Project (WCTP) provided WWF a platform to innovate and test a number of innovative technologies, many of which have the potential to change the course of the global fight against wildlife crime.
Demand Under the Ban: China Ivory Consumption Research 2019
Ivory Trade in Japan: A Comparative Analysis
Demand under the Ban: China Ivory Consumption Research Post-Ban 2018
China's Ivory Market after the Ivory Trade Ban in 2018 from TRAFFIC
How You Can Help
Sign On to Stop Wildlife Crime
We are dead serious about stopping wildlife crime. Stand with WWF. Together, we will make a difference. Sign the pledge today.
Adopt an African Elephant
Make a symbolic African elephant adoption to help save some of the world's most endangered animals from extinction and support WWF's conservation efforts.


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Tunisia one more step toward World Championship qualification finals
Tunis, Tunisia, November 23, 2013 - Tunisia's men's volleyball team claimed the gold medal at the African Zone 1 (Pool M) qualification tournament for the 2014 World Championship after they achieved their second win against Algeria 3-1 (25-15, 25-22, 21-25, 27-25) in the final day of the competition at Rades hall in Tunis on Friday.
Tunisia improved their win-loss ratio to 2-0, while Algeria dropped to 1-1 to claim the silver medal ahead of Morocco who came at the bottom of the table with 0-2.
According to the qualification format, Tunisia already secured a berth to the final round as one of the top three ranked teams in the 2013 FIVB World Ranking and will be joined by Algeria as zonal representatives.
Tunisia will head Pool three in the finals along with Seychelles, Congo Brazzaville, Senegal and Niger, while Algeria will be drawn with Cameroon, Nigeria, Gabon and Zone 5 winner in Pool 1.
Men Final Phase Pools
Pool 1: Cameroon- Zone 1 winner- Zone 3 winner- Zone 5 winner- Zone 4 runner up
Pool 2: Egypt- Zone 6 winner- Zone 2 winner- Zone 5 runner up- Zone 6 runner up
Pool 3: Tunisia: Zone 7 winner- Zone 4 winner- Zone 2 runner up- Zone 3 runner up
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Recent Comments
- on 01-17-17 Billy Dysvik said…
the green/black sekova guitar you have pictured above, i had one when i was a kid. i sold it it and desperately trying to find another just like it. could you PLEASE help me find one or if you decide to sell the one you have in the pic. It rekindles good ole memories even the it doesnt have much vintage value, i wished i had never sold mine. it was my first guitar as a kid. please keep me in mind if you run across this green/black sekova mavric. thank you!
- on 01-12-17 D Sherman said…
Grover, I have one of these I'm getting ready to post for sale, literal mint condition with hard case. Let me know your best offer, I'd rather not help make ebay more money.
- on 01-08-17 Autumn williams said…
How much is this guitar worth if you don't mind me asking? I have the same one but black and I'm trying to find out how much it's worth
- on 01-05-17 Arlene R. Weiss said…
Thank you so much for posting my July 2001 interview with the legendary Clarence "Gatemouth" Brown!! Just want to add the last line of my interview that was cut off. Gatemouth "If they can do a solo better, they can play on top of a track and change a solo, but that's about it."
- on 01-02-17 Rocky Barton said…
Hey I have one just like this an was wondering Wat it was worth
- on 12-25-16 Michael Brohl said…
You didn't look very hard. There is Emerald, Blackbird, Klos,Journey, Composite Acoustics. All make all carbon fiber guitars.
- on 12-16-16 Don Kunes said…
- on 12-14-16 wannabe said…
Love the color. Very rich and nice to see the wood grain . sweet
- on 12-13-16 Jack Hollowell said…
I have a 2002 Gibson CS-336. Gibson told me that with the serial number that the color code was GG but that they did not know what color that was. It looks like the All-Antique Gold that you have a picture of the SG in the same color. It was not a color that was offered for that guitar and they can not say whether or not it was a custom order. They, and I, have not seen another gold ( front and back )CS-336. Does anyone have any idea this? Here is a link to see the guitar. https://reverb.com/item/3249465-gibson-cs-336-1995-gold Thanks, Jack
- on 12-04-16 Ed Ippoliti said…
I love BC RICH guitars! Had quite a few over the years , i currently own 3 of them , A older bronze Warlock , a bronze mockingbird , and a jr. Std. V that has a vintage rave neck , the warlock im restoring , with new paint and pick ups -and a new neck -which is a reverse usa made -no logo (yet)-and no inlays -which I'm might put a single Iommi cross at the twelfth fret .
- on 12-01-16 Adam said…
Here is a link to an article that shows the Ibanez guitars he helped design and him talking about his partnership with them. It shows the pre-eq model you are speaking of, the first eq model I have and the eq models that came after the 2262. Pretty cool read!! http://www.vintageguitar.com/7578/7578/
- on 12-01-16 Adam said…
Opps. Made 3 years, '77-'79 before changed. He is on the '77 catalog.
- on 01-17-17 Billy Dysvik said…
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I have completed my CD of Beatles songs. The song list is:
Things We Said Today
And I Love Her
In My Life
Ticket to Ride
Hard Day's Night
Day Tripper
Here, There, and Everywhere
Let It Be
While My Guitar Gently Weeps
Golden Slumbers
If I Fell
They are all instrumentals. I used nearly every guitar in…[Read more]
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Since the last time I was on here, I have purchased an Ibanez GSR205SM Bass that now has a brass nut and an Ibanez 305B Bridge. I have also won an Alvarez CC7HCEAR Cádiz series Acoustic Electric Guitar.
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Silent Sunday
Hello,this blog is somewhere for me to record snippets of family life as these boys of mine grow up. Time flies,so the saying goes and I want to save some of my precious memories and this seems a good way to do it. I want this blog to be a happy place so much of what I post on here will be the nice stuff of life, that's not to say it is all blue skies and sunshine here but just that I choose to make the happy times recordable
Sunday, April 7, 2013
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By Red
Lucky finds
Sep 9, 2010 (edited)
Sometimes the fates smile upon you. Last week I was perusing the book section at one of the local thrift stores when I came upon a set of the trilogy in hardcover. It was a first impression of the Unwin Allen second edition in very good condition. The best part is I picked it up for about 5 pounds. Has anyone else ever been lucky enough to stumble on a similar situation?
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E Tarot Pro 9+
- ¥120
With E Tarot, take your personnal fortune-teller everywhere !
No need to know the meaning cards. Finally a game that gives you a true interpretation of the draw !
In every game, texts are differents according to the chosen theme (love, money, work).
The only application which gives you possibility of drawing so many game with frequents new added according to the requests of the users.
Unique graphics with possibility of animate them or of choosing a more classic theme.
Original and clear texts by Emanuela, Astrologer and Tarologer.
Credit to Karen for the freshness of his illustrations.
Interaction investigated to be fast and efficiently.
•••• 5 Games ••••
• A difficult choice to take between two situations ? In this new game, 3 cards are pulled for the first possibility and 3 cards for second. Read texts according to the chosen theme and at the end you will have a small help which says to you which situation you must choose, if the first one is more positive or on if they are both negatives, etc.
• A quick question on love, money or work? The Major Arcana's cards will give you a answer quickly with a pertinent reading on the chosen theme.
• Interessted by the evolution of your love, work or money path ? Choose the past-present-future game.
• Some more complete ? You can use the four cards method that give you an explanation of the global situation:
in postition 1 (current) represent the present context.
in position 2 (against) represent the possibles barriers.
in position 3 (flow) indicate the developments and evolution of the situation.
in position 4 is the Answer of your question.
And finally the synthesis. The fifth card is chosen according to 4 other cards.
• A game with a simple response : Yes-No-Uncertain
バージョン 6.5
bugs fix
- 販売元
- Philippe Ruffieux
- サイズ
- カテゴリ
- ライフスタイル
- 互換性
iOS 8.0以降。iPhone、iPad、およびiPod touchに対応。
- 言語
イタリア語, フランス語, 英語
- 年齢
- 9+
- まれ/軽度な成人向けまたはわいせつなテーマ
- Copyright
- 2006 Phemka ©
- 価格
- ¥120


text:
- Four research briefs are available as early deliverables from the TAACCCT national evaluation, focusing on the following topics:
- The national evaluation of TAACCCT grants adds evidence on what works in workforce development and community college training. It provides lessons on the design, implementation, and operation of TAACCCT grants. For more information see www.taacccteval.org.
National Evaluation:
Trade Adjustment Assistance Community College Career Training Grant Program
The U.S. Department of Labor's Trade Adjustment Assistance Community College and Career Training (TAACCCT) grant program is a major investment to increase the ability of community colleges to address the challenges of today's workforce. Grants are designed to help workers eligible for training under the Trade Adjustment Assistance (TAA) for Workers program, as well as a broad range of other adults.
Every state received funding for each of four years through 256 grants totaling $1.9 billion. TAACCCT grants, which continue through September 2018, are impacting 60% of the nation's publicly-funded community colleges and building industry-aligned programs in manufacturing, health care, information technology, energy, transportation, and other industries.
Through TAACCCT, community colleges have developed or redesigned nearly 2,600 programs of study to help adults learn skills that lead to family-sustaining jobs. Each college or consortium of colleges developed programs of study aligned with local and regional business needs, which were identified through partnerships formed or strengthened with grant funds. To help adult students obtain industry-recognized credentials more quickly, colleges are using TAACCCT funding to innovate with strategies such as career pathways, credit for prior learning, competency-based models, online training, and strong student support systems. The curriculum and other learning materials developed by TAACCCT grantees are being made widely available to all types of training providers on SkillsCommons.org, as described a Training and Employment Notice.
Through this expansive effort, the U.S. Department of Labor is helping to strengthen our nation's institutions of higher education as engines of economic opportunity where adults can succeed in acquiring the skills, degrees, and credentials needed for high-wage, high-skill employment while also meeting the needs of employers in hiring skilled workers. The Department is implementing the TAACCCT program in partnership with the U.S. Department of Education.
Fact Sheets
These fact sheets help illustrate the postive impacts TAACCCT is making on the community college and workforce systems across the country and will be updated as new information becomes available.
- TAACCCT Program Information
Offers an overview and key program information about TAACCCT, such as programs launched, participants enrolled, and credentials earned.
- The Broad Reach of TAACCCT Funding
This map illustrates the broad reach of TAACCCT funding across the nation's community colleges. Find total funding for each state, and learn about the types of grants each state received.
- A Catalyst for Systems Change
Find an overview of state consortium grants, which represent over half of TAACCCT funding, and the impact they are having at the state level.
- Deepening Employer Engagement
This fact sheet provides examples of how TAACCCT grants are deepening employer engagement within industry sectors across the nation.
- Community College Presidents' Voices on Impact
Hear directly from six community college presidents how TAACCCT is impacting their institutions.
- Open Educational Resources
A one-page overview of SkillsCommons.org, the online repository that makes the materials produced with TAACCCT funds available to ALL training providers.


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Lawmakers chastised the State Highway Administration Wednesday over an audit that criticized the agency's work-zone speed camera program even as officials said that any problems with the program have been resolved.
The state Office of Legislative Audits released a report last week that criticized the highway agency for failing to have its vendor's cameras independently tested for accuracy during the first nine months of the program. Auditors also faulted the 2010 process by which the SHA awarded the contract to manage the cameras to the sole bidder, now known as Xerox State and Local Solutions.
The vendor is the same company that manages speed cameras in Baltimore school zones that were found in a Baltimore Sun investigation to be generating erroneous tickets.
Senate Minority Leader E.J. Pipkin, an Upper Shore Republican, noted the auditors' finding that while bids were being evaluated, highway officials had cut the required percentage of readable license plate images from 95 percent to 90 percent. He suggested that if the minimum had been set lower earlier, the state could have attracted more bidders.
"This is a growing business, to say the least," Pipkin said.
Auditors also found that during a pilot project from October 2009 to June 2010, only 44 percent of the violation photos were readable. The report found that the agency did not establish benchmarks called for in the contract with Xerox.
Melinda Peters, who became state highway administrator late last year, said that after the pilot program began, officials realized that the radar-based technology initially used was inadequate for multilane highways. She said that technology was replaced with a laser-based system with a much higher readability rate.
After that system was implemented in 2010, Peters said, it was tested by the manufacturer and Xerox but not by an independent laboratory. Since that testing was added in early 2011, she said, all cameras have been calibrated and no problems have been found.
Peters said the agency's SafeZones speed camera program has succeeded in reducing speeds in work zones and that traffic fatalities in those areas are down.


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Greenwich boys basketball coach Bill Brehm steps down
There are three things good coaches never do.
They never sleep, they never forget a loss and they never stop caring about the game and its players.
You can check all three off the list when talking about Greenwich boys basketball coach Bill Brehm during his 20 years coaching basketball at the school.
Brehm will continue caring about the players and game, but his winter nights will now be much more restful after stepping down as head coach at Greenwich on Thursday.
The decision was not easy to come to, but it is one Brehm is content with.
"It took a long time to make this decision and I have been thinking about it every day since the season ended," Brehm said. "I am happy with my decision and I think it is the right thing to do. I am going to coach my kids' team and this will allow me to help teach them the game I love so much. This is a great opportunity for me to be with them."
Beginning as a volunteer in 1991 and coaching the junior varsity for several seasons before taking over as head coach from 1999-2002, Brehm stepped away to focus on getting his masters degree, returning in 2006 to once again lead the Cardinals.
His best season was also his last, leading Greenwich to a 24-4 record, advancing to the FCIAC finals and Class LL semifinals. The 24 victories by the Cardinals is a school record.
Brehm was named the 2013-14 FCIAC Coach of the Year by his peers and was the Hearst Connecticut Media Coach of the Year as well.
The team was led by Gatorade Connecticut Boys Basketball Player of the Year Alex Wolf and Hearst Super 15 All-Star CJ Byrd, with several other seniors on the roster.
"Those are two, what I call, marquee players and the team is losing a big group of seniors, but there is still a solid foundation in place," Brehm said. "I am going out on a high note. This is undoubtedly my favorite group of players I coached. Not just because of their record but because of the character of these kids. I will miss the relationships with the kids and coaching staff most of all."
Wolf said his coach made it a pleasure to attend practices.
"He is a great coach, we wouldn't have done as well without him," Wolf said. "Coach pushed us hard every day in practice and taught us a lot of excellent plays to run. We really developed great team chemistry under his leadership."
The Cardinals had several rivals during Brehm's run, including border rival Westhill, Bridgeport Central the past few seasons, and Ridgefield, which was always tough on Greenwich. But the games with Trinity Catholic were always special.
Because the schools are close geographically, several Greenwich residents have played for Trinity, including Tremaine Fraiser this past season. The games were always competitive and often dramatic, making it the best rivalry of Brehm's tenure.
Trinity coach Mike Walsh said the rivalry with Greenwich was good, but his friendship with Brehm is what he will miss most.
"I'm sad to see him go. He's a good coach and I'll lose a friend in the profession. We are pretty good friends," Walsh said. "It seems every time we played, it was a one-point game and he probably out-coached me most of the time. He always got the most out of his players and we were always in for a fight going to Greenwich."
Never sleeping
When asked which team kept him up at night, Brehm says it didn't matter who the Cardinals were playing next. Between December and March, he just didn't sleep much most nights no matter the opponent or the outcome of that night's game.
After a loss, he was up wondering what he could have done better. After a win? Brehm would stay awake thinking about how to beat his next opponent.
"If you want to do a good job, you aren't sleeping," he said. "You always want to do the best you can for the team. That's another part of the reason I am OK with stepping down. I don't sleep three and a half months out of the year."
Never forgetting
Brehm never forgot a loss, but one that stung above all others came in December 2011 at Ridgefield when the Cardinals were run out of the Tigers' gym, losing 59-16.
Brehm called it "the worst coaching experience of my life."
That made beating Ridgefield twice this past season, including in the FCIAC semifinals, so rewarding for Brehm.
Never stop caring
Brehm added former Greenwich baseball coach Mike Mora to his staff this past season after Mora stepped down as varsity baseball coach for similar family reasons.
Brehm and Mora talked at length about the pros and cons of walking away.
Neither hated their job or were tired of the players, quite the contrary. Both loved coaching and the relationships they built with players, but both realized spending time with their young children was more important.
Brehm said it will be tough when December rolls around, but if he can still be involved with the game through his own kids, it should ease the transition.
"I love this game, it's in my blood," Brehm said. "I had conversations with my own kids and asked them if they even wanted me to coach them and they both said yes. When I told my son I stepped down, he gave me a huge hug. This was not an easy decision but in the long run, I want to be there and see my kids learn to love this game, too."
firstname.lastname@example.com; @EricsonSports
Staff Writer David Fierro contributed to this story


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I love all animals and I am involved in rescue. But, I don't believe cats should be treated as wild animals and allowed to roam. Usually they live short misserable lives, trying to survive kids, cars, poisoning, dogs, coyotes, disease and parasites.
Taking Aim at Outdoor Cats
Assemble a group of bird lovers and cat lovers in a room, and it's a sure bet feathers will likely fly (pun intended).
There are few nature-related subjects that elicit more response and prompt more passionate emotion than the debate about free-roaming and feral cats and their impact on U.S. songbird-and game bird-populations.
These days, when a writer accurately reports that millions of birds are killed annually by outdoor cats, more often than not cat supporters by the hundreds immediately rally to the defense of pet cats allowed to run freely, in addition to those abandoned or homeless (feral) cats that live outdoors year 'round.
Until recently, few organizations or individuals dared to condemn the well-meaning but misdirected Trap, Neuter and Return (TNR) programs implemented by some cities and municipalities that capture feral cats, then turn them loose again after inoculation and sterilization.
American Bird Conservancy (ABC) is one of the few conservation groups that fully grasps the irrationality of TNR programs and hasn't been afraid to say it. The organization produces videos, fact sheets and launched a Keep Your Cat Indoors campaign back in 1997.
In December 2009, a superior court judge ruled in favor of a coalition of conservation groups, including ABC, to halt the practice of TNR of feral cats in the City of Los Angeles, pending environmental review.
A 2010 peer-reviewed University of Nebraska-Lincoln report, Feral Cats and Their Management, put the annual economic loss from feral cat predation on birds in the U.S. at $17 billion.
In a column last spring, Worcester (Mass.) Telegram & Gazette outdoors columnist Mark Blazis didn't pull any punches. While noting cats are not native to America, Blazis called for a national educational effort to significantly change long-ingrained habits of pet owners who assume their right of ownership to let their cats roam free.
"They need to know they are killing with their permissive kindness," Blazis wrote.
According to Blazis, the ABC and others, an estimated 80 million feral cats currently roam the U.S. outdoors. Studies show that Wisconsin alone annually loses somewhere between 17 million to 30 million songbirds to outdoors felines. Nationally, feral and domestic cats annually kill between 100 million to 300 million songbirds in America, with some estimates placing that number closer to 1 billion.
In 2005, 57 percent of the 12,000-member Wisconsin Conservation Congress voted to support a proposal to allow hunters to kill feral cats in an effort to protect game birds and songbirds from predatory stray felines. Then-Gov. Jim Doyle's office was inundated with letters and e-mails from angry cat lovers, and he subsequently caved to pressure, announcing he'd never sign a bill allowing open season on free-roaming cats.
The proposal was subsequently dropped.
You see, there's no such thing as middle ground in the debate about cats in the outdoors.
- J.R. Absher Editor, The Birding Wire
Published in The Birding Wire, Swarovski Optik, January 16, 2013.
Views: 77
As a cat owner I couldn't agree more. And up here in rural Canada (Central Alberta), there's more issues as well. Without fail, due to temperatures reaching 30 below and more, I've had to deal with half dead frostbitten feral cats, more than I'd like to admit. Many a farmyards here have wild earless cats due to cold winters.
Also there's the opposite issue in regards to predication, in that, as they make an excellent food source for coyotes, it creates an unnatural increase in their population, which in turn causes problem for the coyotes natural prey. Of course people don't have near the same problem accepting culling native coyotes than the non native, domestic, introduced wild cats.
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IZOD IndyCar Series: Pocono IndyCar 400
Topics: Pocono IndyCar 400
Scott Dixon
July 7, 2013
THE MODERATOR: We are joined by our race winner, Scott Dixon. This is Scott's 30th IndyCar win, which gives him with sole ownership of 10th an the all‑time win list. This is the 100th win for Target and 200th for Honda. Scott, talk about today's race and the important milestones.
SCOTT DIXON: Yeah, the milestones are great, but I think the first person I saw when I got out of the car was Chip and I said to him, you know, this morning, I didn't think we would be sitting here.
To say the least, it was a little bit of a shock. I knew the car was good. We just weren't really sure about our pace. We kind of went out there aggressively. We trimmed the car quite a bit, and just hoped that we would be able to at least hang with them and on the pit stops, maybe have a better stop and better fuel mileage, and the fuel mileage was massive. Something that we didn't expect to see as much, but I think the Chevys, looking at a lot of them on the grid, had a lot of downforce and a lot of drag on their car, so I think that helped our cause, as well.
You know, excited for the team. It's been a rough year for us, for Team Target, and also for HPD. We have had sort of small parts of goodness but not the consistency that we have been used to. I think when we have had good cars, we've maybe had an engine problem and when we've had good engines, we've had a bit of a car problem.
So it's nice to get back. Obviously to have the team sweep at the podium is fantastic. Approaching the year anniversary of my last win, so it was nice to get one out of the way this year and get back on the top spot of the podium. I think more importantly, super excited for the team.
Everybody has been working extremely hard and to have a glimpse of something great and some things to be positive about, hopefully we can keep this momentum rolling.
Q. Before the race you had an engine change, was it a new one or one you had used in testing?
SCOTT DIXON: No, the engine change we actually did right after the first day, which was scheduled. We were just shy by a hundred miles or so on the other. So it was more of a precautionary thing that we didn't want to be running massive miles on the last engine to get through the race. So, yeah, we had it in when we started.
Q. When I was here in this room in August last year, Jeff Gordon had won and I asked him, what's the win like, and he said, you never know when your next win is going to come, and he really was savoring it. Can you talk a little about the feeling and about momentum; is there that monkey off your back? What's the feeling right now?
SCOTT DIXON: Yeah, you know, we hoped that's the case. I think we know the issues and why we have been struggling a little bit. We have not had dominance as some of the other teams. I think what you've got to look at is that when we have equal equipment to all the other teams out there, our record is pretty damn good.
We maybe got a little lax in some areas and some other people, as well, so I think we are definitely pushing as much as possible. But when you get in these tough moments, yeah, you think, well, maybe I won't win another race. But you know, when you are with a good team and you've had a good sort of track record before, it's just great to work things out and make sure that you can get back into the groove of things.
For me, it's the first time I had ever been to the circuit. I had obviously seen it many times on TV and watched Cup races, as well, but to come here for the first time, just the sheer size of the track, seems bigger than Indy, I don't know why; maybe with so many grandstands around it, but turn one is fantastic.
And the support that we had here today for the first time back, the fans and everybody that were out here were knowledgeable people; and people from the Watkins Glen area and some of the other racetracks and Nazareth where I got my first win, you know, five years ago or something silly.
So excited, super excited and just hope that we can, as I say, carry this momentum and have some more great results.
Q. Seems that July and August is when you hit your stride, especially with Mid‑Ohio coming up in a couple weeks. What is it about this time of year when it gets real hot and humid and you just seem to shine?
SCOTT DIXON: I don't know. Obviously it's the first time we've been here, so it's not a traffic preference thing. I hope that at Mid‑Ohio we have our typical tendency to do well here.
Super excited for next week, and Toronto also is going to create some great racing. And we had a pretty decent run at Detroit even with all the problems that we had. I don't know; I wish we started the year a little more positive and we wouldn't have to work so hard in the summer months. But I think that we have a lot of good racetracks coming up.
Helio has still got a sizable lead in the championship. We are 65 or so points or so out off the lead, sitting at fourth. I think to make second is definitely achievable, but to start making some serious in‑roads on Helio, we need him to have a couple of bad races here. Not wishing any bad luck on him, but that's what we will need.
Considering the crazy and poor results we've had throughout the year, it's still astonishing that we are fourth in the championship.
Q. Dario talked a little about how surprised he was when he would see the other guys pitting and he was getting such great fuel mileage. What was your reaction when you saw maybe the same thing?
SCOTT DIXON: Yeah, you know, sometimes on the radio, your team will play with that a little bit. You know, just because the other teams are always scouting you, and when I started to see some of the other teams pit, and Mike is going, yeah, another seven laps; I'm like, yeah, he's just turning the other teams on a little bit. And then I looked down at my actual tank number and I'm like, wow, yeah, we can go another seven laps.
So I think we were beating the majority of them. I think Will was probably the closest Chevy to us on fuel mileage. He was sort of pitting maybe a lap in front (ph) us or a couple, some were three or four. We saw that pretty early on, probably after the second stint.
The first stint, you're not really ever sure how accurate it is, but once we got running there, two and three, we knew we had a pretty sizable advantage. And I think it kind of hit them a little bit late to make corrections. Then started with one stint and a half to go, they started to save fuel drastically. It's a lot easier to save fuel over, you know, 150 laps than try and save it all about 30. They knew they were in trouble and they were probably hoping for a caution to try to even things out at that point. Even at the end there, they had to pit so early, that they couldn't run full fuel at the end where we could run full fuel the whole race.
Q. While you were not luckily involved in what went on in pit road today, there was an incident on pit road today; now that you've had a full 400‑mile race to experience going in and out of the hot pits and pit stops, would you like to see some modifications to pit in and out?
SCOTT DIXON: I didn't see what happened in the pit lane. It looked like it was quite a ways down, so probably nothing to dowith the entry and exits.
No, I think today, as long as people are courteous enough and not being idiots out there. I think you definitely get backed up a little bit where you're sort of getting somebody in the middle of one or somebody that's coming in the middle of three, but it's the same for everybody. Sometimes it works for you and sometimes it doesn't.
No, you know, I think if we use the spare lane on the inside of the track, it's very narrow and it's probably quite slippery and you still have draft to go across and you have people pushing to go in there and maybe spin on the drafts and actually end up on the track sideways. So I think the way it is, you know, it definitely keeps you on your toes and it's pretty exciting. I don't see that there needs to be any changes.
Q. At one point in the race Tony passed you for the lead and his wing clipped your tire; did you feel that?
SCOTT DIXON: I didn't know anything about it. I could see him being really close, so I kind of, you know, breathed a little bit, and that must have been when it happened going into one, is the only time I can think of it.
And then when he started to have trouble‑‑ which was actually probably a lap and a half later. How bad that was, I have no idea. Maybe that was a little bit of missed timing. I figured he was going down there, so I breathed a little bit and I think we just touched each other. I didn't feel it in the car and I didn't know until the team told me several laps later.
Q. I know as you guys look at the schedule for next year or this year, you look at the tracks and you think, I like that one, I don't like that one, that one is okay. Now that you've won here, your first time; when you look at the schedule and see Pocono, what are you going to think? How was it today out there compared to other tracks?
SCOTT DIXON: Yeah, you know, I'll give you a little bit of background to that. I think typically IndyCar has taken away the tracks that I like, Watkins Glen, Nashville, Kansas, a lot of tracks that we have dominated at. So I'm glad to see this track on the calendar, a track that we came here and had a great race today.
I think that we have got to go to these circuits where there's a great fan base here, very knowledgeable fans. And for us, for me, I don't know how the others feel, but I love the circuits. It's very challenging and it's very different, and you have to be good in both one and three, as opposed to just sort of just getting on a run. Yeah, I'll always be excited to come back to Pocono for sure.
Q. Dario was asked that he has 31 wins and you have 30, you and made the comment about going further. I saw your first win over at Nazareth, and now your win here at Pocono; are you going to be the triangle king?
SCOTT DIXON: You know, I don't know. I think, you know, for us, every racetrack we come to on every weekend, all we want to do is win. So that's how approach it. There's circuits that you know you like a little bit more than others. Maybe some you dislike a little bit.
But I think that we have a great mix throughout the season. It's great to be adding ovals instead of getting away from them. I think oval is very important to the heritage and history of IndyCar and where it sort of came from. I love the mix that we have and hopefully next year we can add another one or two to the calendar.
But yeah, obviously Nazareth is quite a tricky little track and it's a shame that that's gone away, and Pocono is obviously like a Nazareth but on major steroids. It's a great circuit and as I said, I really hope that it stays on the calendar for a long time.
Q. How important is it for you to be the driver that gave Honda another win? I'm sure T.E. has a couple facilities he wants to visit in the next couple of days.
SCOTT DIXON: I can't wait for the bonus I get, right, T.E.? Must be a pretty big bonus for that one (chuckling).
I think the milestones are good, and we've been sitting on that 100th Target one for quite some time and obviously Honda have made a good dent in their 200th earlier this year.
It does mean a lot. It's special. I haven't been a Honda all my career but the time I've had with them has been fantastic. We've gone through ups and downs and won a lot of things together, and my biggest races have been won with Honda. Obviously love working with them and great group of people, and to be at that milestone with them is fantastic for me.
So you know, let's move on to 300 I guess.
Q. Speaking of milestones, this is your 30th victory so one more victory, seeing you beat Dario to the next checkered flag will tie you along with Bourdais and Paul Tracy. Can you talk about that?
SCOTT DIXON: You know, it's‑‑ I don't know. As I said, I think we treat each race weekend as its own, and you know, stat‑stuff are great to look back on, but for me, right now it's just trying to get the maximum that we can. It would be great to look back and think that's a lot more than 30 or 31. But you know, it's been, for me, 29 of those wins have been with this team.
Dario has been doing it a little bit longer, and hopefully I can continue a little bit longer. No, it's exciting, and to be on the list of names that we are sort of encroaching on is for myself and Dario and Bourdais, it's very exciting. There's some massive legends out there, people I've looked up to my whole career, and to be on a list not far from them is pretty exciting.
Q. You talked at the beginning about how tough a year it's been; how have you endured to get to this point?
SCOTT DIXON: I don't know, take it on the chin. Take it race by race. I think for me in some ways, I think we have been in some slumps before in '04 and '05, different circumstances, different pieces of the pie.
You know, going through those years, that's where I did most of my growing and understanding what you need to achieve and how you need to approach it. If you can do 100 percent, then there's nothing really for yourself to look back on and know that maybe deep down with yourself, as long as everybody you're working with and everybody around you are giving 100 percent, that's all you can ask for, and if you keep doing that, things will get better.
It has been a tough year. We've had some great races and we've had a lot of bad ones. That's motor racing, man. There's ups and downs and sometimes things are out of your control, but I'm very, very lucky to be doing what I'm doing. I love racing, and to say that's my job, you know, I'm pretty lucky, that's all I can say.
THE MODERATOR: Thank you so much for your time. Congratulations on the win.
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