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How historic brickwork techniques were used to repair failing Hampton Court Palace chimney stacks. Felix Mara reports
'The most horrible moment with a project like this is working on scaffolding, dealing with a wobbly structure, and having to remove the cement haunching, which requires considerable force inflicted on an unstable structure at height,' says brickwork specialist Emma Simpson, adding: 'but there is no alternative.'
The project, a finalist in the 2011 Brick Awards, is the repair of Hampton Court Palace's Wolsey Chimney, which her firm, Simpson Brickwork Conservation, effected with architect Donald Insall Associates. Although the palace was built for Cardinal Wolsey in the early 16th century, this decorative chimney stack, almost 6m high, is thought to have been built between 1825 and 1850.
'The shafts of the chimney have lovely, flowing lines and are incredibly ornate, but it is in extremely poor condition, having taken the brunt of the weather,' says Simpson. 'It has been repointed and bodged with over-strong cement mortar, causing further damage.' Movement of the chimney under wind loading had fractured its cap, which had undersized jointing pieces, so its three shafts were no longer restrained at high level. The wind had caused the shafts to rotate independently, so they leaned by 1.5-2 degrees. The bed joints no longer lined through, and there were steps of up to 37mm between shafts. Insall associate Patrick Duerden explains that the decision to depart from the Tudor practice of oversized flanking shafts reduced windload resistance.
Hampton Court is a royal palace, cared for by Historic Royal Palaces, which required the minimum amount of work necessary to return the chimney to good repair. The repairs had no stated design life but, because access is difficult and costly, they had to be effective in the long term and retain existing fabric wherever possible.
'The chimney is significant for its design and the contribution it makes to the roofscape of the palace says Duerden. 'We therefore aimed to retain its original appearance as far as possible and accepted that individual bricks whose condition was unsuitable for re-use could be discarded, with new facsimile replacements used for repairs.' The false mortar joint introduced in the chimney cap was considered necessary to maintain the chimney's symmetrical appearance in elevation. False joints are part of the repertoire of cut and rubbed brickwork, involving bravura and sleight-of-hand. The strategy would have been very different had the chimney been Tudor fabric, in which case every effort would have been made to retain individual bricks, regardless of condition.
Four options were considered:
1) Do nothing, leaving the chimney in a dangerous structural condition.
2) Insert tension rods in redundant chimney shaft flues, so the entire fabric above roof level could be post-tensioned, and reconnect the flues at cap level. This might have prevented structural movement of the chimney, though not monolithically, but, while solving one problem, it might have caused new ones, such as compression failure of shafts during tensioning or long-term failure of lower-level brickwork under wind loading. 'Post-tensioning would only have transferred the problem to the base shaft and the chimney would have been too rigid,' says Duerden.
3) Take down the chimney and re-build it to a new design, incorporating existing decorative elements and brickwork but altering the outer shafts' design, so the shafts would be properly engaged at cap-level; or rebuilding the cap to a new design, incorporating more brickwork bridging between the shafts, enabling the cap to retain its integrity under wind loads. This was seen as a last resort.
4) Rebuild the cap to the existing design, incorporating structural reinforcement to enable it to act monolithically.
The project team chose the fourth option. 'In the absence of a structural design standard, this would give the cap a fighting chance of retaining its integrity,' says Duerden. 'We can't say this will make the problem go away, but all the other options involved radical interventions, although it is possible that the chimney might fail again.' The proprietary brickwork bed joint reinforcement was the only permanent structural intervention.
It was agreed that, because of the project's complexity, the workshop should be on roof-level scaffolding. Three quarters of the bricks were replaced and, as part of the cut and rub work, Simpson cut 20 basic low-fire brick shapes with high silicate content, known as rubbers. 'A complex rubber with a roll and corner twist takes over two hours to prepare,' says Simpson, who worked with oversized rubbers. These were bedded and squared, manually rotating them against a grinding stone. Rubbers were checked for right-angled corners and true flatness by running a set square down their length until no daylight was visible at junctions.
The stone and square eventually wear out and have to be checked for accuracy. 'We start with the best original brick piece available,' says Simpson. 'This is scribed onto plastic and its shape transcribed onto a plywood former used to construct an open box,which in turn is used as a guide to cut the bricks with a wooden bow saw. Bricks were cut in the box, then filed, using the box as a guide to produce a flat surface.
Simpson acknowledges the project was more complex than expected and it has only been possible to gloss over it here. A methodical, collaborative and empirical approach achieved the right balance between appearance, fabric retention and stability.
Emma Simpson demonstrating cut and rub brickwork at the Brick Development Association's Brick Conservation Day
Project data
Start on site June 2008
Date of completion September 2008
Procurement GC Works 2
Cost Undisclosed
Client Historic Royal Palaces and Hampton Court Palace
Brickwork specialist Simpson Brickwork Conservation
Architect Donald Insall Associates
Structural engineer Hockley and Dawson
Brick manufacturer The Bulmer Brick and Tile Company
Mortar analysis Peter Ellis
Quantity surveyor Harris and Porter
Project manager Historic Royal Palaces
Contract administrator Historic Royal Palaces Surveyor of Works
Design proposals were developed in consultation with English Heritage's Government Historic Estates Unit
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Raising questions on the basis of details provided by Janata Party President Subramanian Swamy yesterday, Leader of Opposition in Rajya Sabha Arun Jaitley told reporters that if it was true that such a transfer had taken place then it could lead to various consequences for the Congress party, including withdrawal of tax exemption.
Jaitley said he merely wanted a specific answer from the party and not adjectives like baseless and untrue as was used in a communication issued by Rahul Gandhi's office to Swamy threatening defamation case against him.
He said if the Congress party were to say that what Swamy has alleged was wrong then the matter ends.
If not, then the whole issue is one of "gross impropriety and gross illegality".
The former Law Minister maintained that a political party can use its funds only for political purposes and not any business or financial activity.
Swamy had alleged that All India Congress Committee (AICC) had given Rs 90 Crore to Associated Journals Private Limited, publisher of National Herald and Quami Awaz, which was allegedly written off by a new company Young Indian, a Section 25 Company in which Rahul and Sonia Gandhi own 38 per cent shares each.
"As Prime Minister, Rajiv Gandhi made an amendment to the Representation of the People Act and later the Election Commission also issued detailed guidelines which serve as a code of conduct for the political parties.
"Article 8 of the EC guidelines says all political parties will use their financial resources only for political purposes," Jaitley said, adding that this is the basis on which both the donors and the political parties enjoy income tax exemption. (MORE)

subset: commoncrawl


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For the few of you who've traveled the timeline, you'll know that we've been blogging since well before the term entered the general vocabulary. Our very first post covered the passing of the torch from Bill Gates to Steve Ballmer at Microsoft. A couple posts later, we celebrated the fact that the Y2K bug did not bring the downfall of Western Civilization, and barely a year and a half after that, we briefly posed the question on whether 9/11 would change conceptions about disaster recovery (from the IT perspective, that was).
What a long strange trip it's been. With this post, we are shifting to a bigger stage, courtesy of friend and colleague Andrew Brust, who's kept me honest more than a few times over the years (and typically over some choice Belgian brews) about the reality of database outside the ivory tower of the analyst world. As of today, we're now trying to achieve what we originally hoped to do in those early days of the century: scrounge up some excuse of original thought on a weekly basis. We are joining distinguished company, as ZDNet in its wisdom is expanding the Big on Data blog; along with Andrew, we'll teaming with George Anadiotis. With Big Data analytics beginning to penetrate the Early Majority, ZDNet's plan to boost coverage is a visionary move, and we're gratified to be part of the conversation.
As of this week, we'll use this space to post links to our ZDNet posts, which should come a lot more frequently than you've seen from us for a while. And so, here's the link to our debut post, on what MongoDB should be when it grows up. Thanks for taking the trip with us, we're looking forward to having you in our new, scaled-up quarters.


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iCube Review
- Publisher: Unnyhog FZ-LLC
- Genre: Entertainment
- Released: 26 Sep, 2011
- Size: 48.8 MB
- Price: $0.99
- Like one of those puzzles you find in stores or restaurants, this game has a tactile pleasure in slowly solving the puzzle by playing around.
- Control not optimal.
- Some may find the music annoying.
A fun little 3D maze game that should amuse most players, but only the most dedicated will continue to play as the puzzles get more elaborate.
- Full Review
- App Store Info
Have you ever spent time in a games shop or visited a bar or diner where they have those puzzles made of wood, metal, or plastic laying around? Maybe you need to disconnect the rings from each either, maybe you need to get an object around the grooves to the other side, or maybe like in the game iCube, you need to rotate a ball around a maze to its final destination.
The funny thing is the controls of iCube sort of give the same tactile pleasure of play that holding one of these puzzles in real life would. It probably has to do more with the element of playing around involved as you try to solve the maze, but pivoting the camera and the game's gravity with your two thumbs is kind of analogous to real rotation. Of course in real life you can't freeze the ball as you turn the maze over and under looking for your next move, so as usual, the videogame offers advantages over whatever it might be imitating in reality.
The graphics are pretty bare bones, doing what they can to make everything clear (although the freeze effect is a nice touch), and the music is a bit intrusive, but otherwise the presentation can be described as average for most of the eighty one levels available.
But it's not the presentation that makes iCube worth looking into. Solving these mazes is quite intuitive and soon you'll find yourself sucked into the plight of this trapped orb in its three dimensional prison. As long as you understand that what you see is what you get, there should be no regrets if you decide to make the purchase.
DescriptionYou are looking at maze cube. Some of you had this toy in the childhood. Now it's time to play it again, but on your mobile device.
While it's pretty simple to choose a correct path in a two dimensional maze, you'll need to watch carefully to find it in a three dimensional one. The mission is to get the ball out of a glass cube as fast as possible.
Main features:
- Awesome graphics
- Convenient controls
- 3D mazes
- 9 difficulty levels
- 81 unique mazes


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England 16-26 New Zealand, Twickenham, November 6
Kiwis withstand England fightback
Huw Richards at Twickenham
November 6, 2010
Chris Ashton could not prevent Hosea Gear from scoring New Zealand's opening try at Twickenham
© Getty Images
Two first-half tries gave New Zealand the cushion they needed to begin their European tour with their ninth consecutive victory over England, Graham Henry's men getting across the line 26-16.
The five-pointers were fair reward for a brilliant start in which they looked likely to score whenever they had possession. England, though, pushed them hard once they had a decent share of possession in the second-half, forcing the All Blacks into at times desperate defence that was penetrated only once, by England's New Zealand-born hooker Dylan Hartley.
Any thought that England's barrage of pre-match positive talk had been disinformation or delusion was dispelled in the opening moments as they ran back at New Zealand from the kick-off, going rapidly through several phases before a pass from scrum-half Ben Youngs missed its target just inside the All Black half. Not many would have bet that the first boot to be put to ball would have been a New Zealand one, but so it proved.
But England's initial liveliness was put into perspective once New Zealand in turn took ball in hand and ran at them. Within two minutes centre Ma'a Nonu was sliding past Mike Tindall, setting the tone for an unhappy first-half for England's midfield veteran, to initiate an assault that saw Mils Muliaina coming in from fullback to slice down the left, a foot on the touchline saving England from early worry.
All of New Zealand's early pressure - and there was plenty of it - came down the left flank as they punched through defence made uncertain by the sheer pace and dexterity of the attacking to give wing Hosea Gear several early runs. The first was only foiled when Mark Cueto tracked across from the opposite wing for a try-saving tackle.
Outside-half Dan Carter missed a ninth minute penalty and, as England for the first time spent an extended period in All Black territory, there was a sense that the early storm might have been seen off. Maybe so, but the second surge proved to be lethal as the All Blacks scored twice in the space of four minutes.
The first, from Gear, was awarded only after a long consultation with television match official Guilio de Santis concluded that he had, by the narrowest of margins, touched down before England wing Chris Ashton's tackle drove him into touch. The move had been initiated by debutant centre Sonny Bill Williams' signature move, driving into cover and flicking the ball out of contact to supporting flanker Jerome Kaino, whose pass found Gear in space on the left.
Carter converted and was on the mark again four minutes later as rookie scrum-half Alby Mathewson ran laterally from a scrum five on the left, Gear was held up close to the line and Kieran Read drove over unstoppably from the breakdown.
Fourteen points down, England responded positively, with outside-half Toby Flood landing a 24th minute penalty to cut the deficit. They then chose to go for the corner after Mathewson was penalised for a rugby league-style scrum put-in, but were unable to capitalise on lock Courtney Lawes' clean take from the line-out. Instead Carter restored the 14 point margin after skipper Lewis Moody was penalised for entering a ruck from the side.
Flood missed a 40 metre penalty and England ended the half positively, but still well in arrears as sufficient All Black bodies inserted themselves between Ben Foden, the ball and the ground as the England fullback was driven over by a white-shirted phalanx.
Flood and Carter exchanged penalties to maintain the status quo early in the second half and Martin Johnson began the usual wave of substitutions by sending on Dylan Hartley at hooker for Steve Thompson. And it was Hartley who broke through for England in the 54th minute, stretching an arm for his first Test try, confirmed only after reference to television replays.
Scored by a native Rotoruan, it was a try made in Wigan by the enterprising Ashton who launched an England counter-attack from deep in his own territory and, with slightly better soccer skills, might have scored himself as he led the chase for a kick through. Flood converted to bring England within a single score.
Carter extended the gap to 10 points within three minutes, but Flood was on the mark after a brawl that earned warnings for Hartley and All Black lock Brad Thorn, and England - with Gloucester lock Dave Attwood and Leeds flanker Hendre Fourie on for their debuts as replacements - went into the final 14 minutes once more within a score.
Carter once more restored the status quo, before England staged a roaring finish that had the crowd on its feet and the All Blacks tackling desperately. Kaino was yellow-carded with eight minutes left and England came close to claiming a second try from one of their own Kiwis, but De Santis correctly ruled that Nonu's flying challenge had forced Shontayne Hape into a knock-on as he touched down with seven minutes left.
© ESPN Sports Media Ltd.
Communication error please reload the page.


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Printable New England Patriots
Football Schedule
Below you will find our Printable 2019 New England Patriots Schedule. Our schedule features the Date, Opponent, and Time of each game, along with a place to write in the score. Due to the NFL's flex scheduling system, game times are subject to change in weeks 5 through 17. We also have the Future New England Patriots Opponents and Schedule for the 2020 and 2021 seasons, where we know the opponents and location of each game, but not the date and time. We also have the complete New England Patriots Season Record History, and don't forget to check out our NFL Weekly Pick'em Sheets!
Visit our store to try our Poster Size Football Squares
or our Football Square Scratch Off Cards!
or our Football Square Scratch Off Cards!


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|Home >> Course Descriptions >> College of Arts and Sciences
|English Composition II
|Three semester hours. (FL/SP/SS)
This course offers a continuation of the expository and analytical writing skills developed in English 1301 and introduces the principles of argumentation and more extensive interpretation of selected readings. Students will again be engaged in all steps of the writing process, generating argumentative essays based on thoughtful analysis and discussion of reading assignments. In addition, students will be guided through the steps of more sophisticated research writing techniques, information literacy skills, and evaluation of primary and secondary sources, culminating in a series of essay length research projects. To earn credit, this course must be completed with a "C" or better. Prerequisite: ENGL 1301. See Texas Success Initiative in the section entitled UNIVERSITY COLLEGE.
Home - General Information - Student Services -
Academic Undergraduate Regulations -
Undergraduate Degrees - Academic Graduate Regulations -
Graduate Degrees - Course Descriptions - Faculty -
Appendix A - Appendix B - Appendix C - Appendix D


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Richard Kelley started out his career as a fully accredited F1 photographer in 1972 at the United States Grand Prix. He quickly adopted his characteristic 'fly on the wall' style of photography – getting as close as he could to the moments, without influencing the emotion or drama of the moment. He witnessed and recorded hidden moments that became pivotal incidents in Grand Prix history.
Richard's images have sat unpublished for more than 30 years and we're proud to release these stunning limited edition prints for sale.
This photo sadly captures Francois Cevert moments before his fatal accident - as described by Richard:
"By 1973, Francois Cevert was in ascendency; he had learned race craft from Tyrrell teammate and great friend, Jackie Stewart and discovered the rewards of a Formula 1 driver's life, courtesy of Bridget Bardot. There wasn't another driver of that era who better embraced the combination of a flat-out life style with intelligence and sure-to-be next World Champion talent. I had spent the entire morning making images of Francois, as I knew he would be inheriting Stewart's team leadership in 1974. It wasn't meant to be.
This is the final image ever made of Francois. Two minutes later, an accident in Watkins Glen's Esses would take his life. He would have been France's first World Champion and would have made a fantastic ambassador for the sport."
The black & white photo is professionally printed and framed with a black frame and white mount and features a hand-written limited edition number.
The framed print measures 55cm x 75cm and is protected with museum-grade perspex 'artscreen' instead of glass - you won't be able to tell the difference when it's hanging on your wall.
Limited edition of 50 prints.


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A "Speciale" reception also on the 'net
The official launch of the 458 Speciale took place yesterday, at the opening of the Frankfurt Motor Show and it immediately caused a sensation in the traditional media and also on the Internet.
"We don't speak Italian well," said the people at Motortrend, "but having seen and heard the Prancing Horse in the video of the 458 Speciale, we have a much better understanding of how this car got its name."
"How much closer could a driver get to a Formula 1 car without having to spend a million Euros," added Automotive News, while the Daily Telegraph asked itself, "More powerful, more agile, lighter, what's not to like about the 458 Speciale?"
Apart from these glowing tributes from the general and specialist press, the 458 Speciale definitely got great reviews from the web surfers, as can be seen from the countless messages plucked from the blogosphere and social networks. "An enormous object of desire…I started drooling even before I'd clicked on the video link!… An incredible car and a beautiful video!… Pure perfection! Bravo Ferrari, bravo!!"
The style and sound of the latest special series model from Maranello has pleased everyone, while the moveable aerodynamics and dynamic controls have tickled people's curiosity. Some have compared it to previous specials, such as the 430 Scuderia and the 360 Challenge and some nostalgic types would like to see it with a manual gearchange. All ask the same question: what's it like to drive? Oh, and to the sceptics who ask if the video has used computer generated images, we can tell them, no, it's all real: all the work of a 458 Speciale and a Ferrari test driver!


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Thursday, December 4, 2008
Final thoughts on A.J., and dubious reporters' anonymous sources
If there was any justice in the universe, A.J. would sign with Atlanta today so that we can rid our minds of any thoughts of him someway, somehow making his way back to Toronto.
It was fun to have him around while it lasted, but when it comes to A.J., we'd laid the wreath upon that stone some time ago.
The Braves are a great fit for A.J., and we suspect that for the first little while, he'll look like Nolan Ryan and will make some comment about Toronto that will put our knickers in a twist. Then he'll blow out his arm, and someone in Atlanta will wonder if they learned anything from their half-decade with Mike Hampton.
Godspeed, Pete Puma.
There are anonymous sources, and then there is this horseshite
Our antipathy towards Marty York has been expressed on numerous occasions, but we never thought that our views of Canada's Premier Commuter Paper Sports Journalist could fall further.
That was until we say York's piece on the Jays' layoffs in their ticketing department.
While the story was definitely newsworthy, we can't believe that York had the audacity to include the following paragraph:
"Sources in professional sports told Metro that no Canadian sports franchise in history has laid off as many employees in one day as the Jays did Tuesday."
We're sorry, but that is an absolute load of hooey.
There is a time and place to make use of anonymous sources in journalism, but they should be used judiciously, and only when there is no other option. This clearly is not one of those times. This is a simple statement of facts, and if York wanted to run with it, he should have verified those numbers instead of taking the lazy way out.
Unfortunately, someone is going to take this purported statement of facts as the truth, when for all we know, it was the usher at Toronto Rock games who made the claim off the top of his head. If York had any shame at all, he would have either found a legit source that would go on the record with this claim, or he would have done the research himself.
We don't expect much from Marty York, but this is even beneath his low standards.
16 comments:
- eyebleaf said...
Isn't it amazing that Marty York still finds a way to disappoint?
- December 4, 2008 at 11:43 AM
Really? Even with the Expos, Noqdiques, Jets and Grizzlies moving? Or does York's source not consider those layoffs? Maybe layoffs are different than fuckoffsweareleavingtownyouhavenojobanymores.
- December 4, 2008 at 12:31 PM
- Tao of Stieb said...
A ha! A very salient point by Fongo...Over to you, Mr. York!
- December 4, 2008 at 1:15 PM
- Colin said...
Fongo, my first thought also went to the Expos, as this would imply that the team had less than 24 staffers who did not want to move to Washington.
Or how about the Renegades when they folded? They didn't bring anyone to another city, everyone lost their jobs then, and I have to think that they had more than 24 people running the organization. What a ridiculous statement.
- December 4, 2008 at 3:07 PM
- Torgen said...
I think we should hope AJ does sign with us, since I'd rather have him than nobody.
- December 4, 2008 at 3:19 PM
- Tao of Stieb said...
The other thing that Marty missed in his all-fired push to tie these layoffs to the passing of Ted Rogers was that there had been cuts across all of Rogers Media on that day (more than 100 in total).
Viacom just let go of 850.
Gird your loins kids.
- December 4, 2008 at 3:22 PM
- The Southpaw said...
I sit in sackcloth and ashes because I quoted that comment without even realizing who wrote the article. When it was pointed out I was compelled to edit in a caveat but what you just noted didn't occur to me.
But you are right. Hat tip to you sir.
- December 4, 2008 at 3:22 PM
- Brendan said...
To be fair to Metro New and their anonymous sources(just for fun), perhaps in the situations you mentioned before, the layoffs were spread out over several days, as opposed to all on just one. You know, since it'd make a huge difference if a franchise laid off 23 employees each day from Monday to Friday, instead of just 24 on a Wednesday. Right?
- December 4, 2008 at 3:45 PM
- Ian H. said...
Who is the fox in that picture? Is it A.J.'s wife?
- December 4, 2008 at 5:23 PM
Holy shit, that whore looks familiar
- December 4, 2008 at 8:48 PM
she looks good until you click on the picture
- December 4, 2008 at 10:40 PM
That was a good call on Rowand in SF this year. Total HR = 13
- December 4, 2008 at 11:26 PM
Also, what will be the next death defying wager?
-brent in Korea (and the one above)
- December 4, 2008 at 11:27 PM
- Darren Priest said...
Anonymous talking shit about the girl in the picture. Post one of yourself or STFU. Take your ignorance elsewhere. We have standards.
- December 6, 2008 at 8:32 AM
- Joanna said...
that's not his wife...his wife is rumoured to be hot but never seen. it's kind of a mystery
- December 6, 2008 at 5:44 PM
- Ian H. said...
That's freaky. We need photographic evidence of A.J.'s wife!
- December 7, 2008 at 12:02 PM


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This significant article shows a potential new source of support for winning Single-Payer healthcare: organized labor. Unions which had held back from embracing Single-Payer because they had their own health plans are now realizing that Obamacare does not just encourage employers to cut back full-time jobs to un-benefited part-time jobs. Obamacare also damages hard-won union-based health plans.
The Fiscal Times, August 30, 2013
Why Organized Labor Is Organizing Against Obamacare
(Read this article on-line at http://tinyurl.com/pchnggr )
By ERIC PIANIN, The Fiscal Times
Now look who's making a fuss about Obamacare.
President Obama has had his hands full fending off Republican assaults against Obamacare. Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas and a handful of other GOP lawmakers even favor shutting down the government, if necessary, to prevent the new law from fully taking effect.
But Obama is also getting blasted these days from an unexpected quarter: Major labor groups instrumental in helping the president win a critical second term are charging that Obamacare is undercutting existing union-sponsored health insurance programs and even encouraging employers to cut workers' hours.
This is the latest bizarre wrinkle in the unfolding political drama over Obama's signature program for extending health insurance coverage to millions of uninsured Americans.
Last month, leaders of three of the largest labor unions sent a scathing letter to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), warning that if the problems with the insurance program are not addressed, the new health care law will "shatter not only our hard-earned health benefits, but destroy the foundation of the 40-hour work week that is the backbone of the American middle class."
The letter was written by James Hoffa, president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, Joseph Hansen, president of the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union, and Donald Taylor, president of UNITE-HERE, a union that represents hotel, airport and food service workers. It stressed the unions' displeasure with a law they all had previously supported and helped to pass.
"When you and the president sought our support for the Affordable Care Act, you pledged that if we liked the health plans we have now, we could keep them. Sadly, that promise is under threat," said the letter. "We have been strong supporters of you. In campaign after campaign we have put boots on the ground, gone door-to-door to get out the vote, run phone banks and raised money to secure this vision. Now this vision has come back to haunt us."
AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka echoed those concerns Thursday, telling reporters during a breakfast event that the administration and Congress made some serious blunders in drafting the legislation that must be fixed to quiet the growing union discontent.
"We've been working with the administration to find solutions to what I think are inad-vertent holes in the act," said Trumka. "When the act was put together, it wasn't thought completely through. So we work on a daily basis. I'm hopeful we get something done in the very near future."
From labor's perspective, arguably the biggest problem is that the law – when fully implemented – will create an incentive for employers to keep their workers' hours below 30 hours a week.
The Affordable Care Act will eventually penalize firms employing 50 or more people that don't offer health insurance – or that offer coverage below minimum standards. This is the so-called "employer mandate." The White House this summer put that provision on hold until 2015 to give medium and large employers the opportunity to better prepare and plan for the changes and reporting requirements. But once that provision finally takes hold, union leaders say that companies will cut the hours of workers below 30 hours per week to get under the 50-worker threshold for providing health care coverage.
With salaries remaining relatively static during this tepid economic recovery, a cutback in hours would be tantamount to a substantial pay cut for many union and other workers who are struggling to make ends meet.
"Employers are trying to plan their future by creating a work force that gets 29-and-a-half hours or less a week, so that they don't have to pay health care," Trumka said yesterday. "That is obviously something that no one intended….Is that an issue? Yeah, that's an issue."
Labor leaders also fear that Obamacare may end up "destroying" the union's multi-employer health plans unless it is changed.
At issue are "Taft-Hartley plans" – the non-profit health care plans long used by union-ized workers in the building trades and service industries and jointly administered by participating companies and unions. Those plans have traditionally allowed workers in transient industries to move between employers while still preserving the same quality of health care. Because union leaders have helped negotiate those plans, they typically offer strong coverage at a low out-of-pocket cost to workers.
Under the Affordable Care Act as currently interpreted by the administration, union members with this form of health insurance coverage would not be entitled to federal tax subsidies available to others who purchase policies from private companies in the new insurance exchange, according to labor leaders. Moreover, many union members who hold these "non-profit" policies may get hit with federal taxes to help offset the cost of the subsidies offered in the new state exchanges.
"Taken together, these restrictions will make non-profit plans like ours unsustainable, and will undermine the health-care market of viable alternatives to the big health insurance companies," according to the letter sent to Reid and Pelosi by the labor chiefs.
The Treasury Department has signaled it views the Taft-Hartley plans as equivalent to other employer-based plans, which aren't eligible for subsidies. And the Congressional Research Service, a nonprofit legislative analysis group, published a paper saying Taft-Hartley plans likely wouldn't be eligible for subsidies based on the way the law is written.
The health care law is likely to be a prime topic of conversation when Obama addresses the AFL-CIO's Quadrennial Convention next month in Los Angeles. Obama's relations with labor have been rocky at times, for sure. Yet while he'll talk about his plans to create jobs, provide better pay and strengthen workplace protections, the president's speech on Sept. 9 may not include every reassuring word that labor leaders are right now longing to hear.
Shortlink to this post: http://wp.me/p3xLR-ur


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MILLBURY — A police officer whose firing in 2012 was overturned by an arbitrator last summer has sued the town and its representatives for civil rights violations and wrongful termination, among other charges.
Police Detective Kimberly Brothers' suit was filed Jan. 17 in federal court in Worcester, naming the town of Millbury, Board of Selectmen Chairman E. Bernard Plante, Special Lt. Richard F. Bates and Special Maj. Edward J. McGinn Jr. as defendants.
Lt. Bates and Maj. McGinn are Worcester Police Department officers who were hired by Millbury officials to conduct internal affairs investigations, including investigating Detective Brothers. Maj. McGinn, a deputy chief in Worcester, is Lt. Bates' superior in the Worcester Police Department.
Millbury officials fired Detective Brothers in August 2012, after an investigation, for allegedly harassing three residents of the town and excessively texting on duty. The action was overturned by arbitrator Timothy J. Buckalew in July 2013, who found the town had not met its burden of proof on either claim.
The lawsuit claims Detective Brothers was intentionally harmed by the town in its investigation of her and in its delay to comply with the arbitrator's order to reinstate her to her former position with no loss of seniority, rank or benefits and to pay her for lost wages, overtime and paid details she would have otherwise received.
"It was clear that this was a sham from the beginning," said Timothy M. Burke, Detective Brothers' lawyer, about the investigation that led to her termination.
He said the town had not paid Detective Brothers back wages until the lawsuit was filed.
Mr. Plante and Town Manager Robert J. Spain Jr. said they had not read the full complaint since they received it Wednesday and had no comment.
Lt. Bates and Maj. McGinn did not return phone calls for comment Thursday.
Detective Brothers had been assigned by former Police Chief Richard L. Handfield to investigate allegations against another Millbury police officer, Daniel Daly, according to the lawsuit.
In August 2011, after Detective Brothers had uncovered evidence of potential wrongdoing by Officer Daly, Lt. Bates was hired to investigate Officer Daly.
One of the 10 allegations against Officer Daly, engaging in conduct unbecoming an officer, was sustained. An arbitrator later overturned the charge.
The lawsuit claims that Lt. Bates was biased against Detective Brothers because she had filed a complaint about him when he was an instructor of hers in criminal justice studies at Anna Maria College.
"As a result of improper bias against plaintiff by defendant Bates, the purported 'investigation' into the wrongdoings of Officer Daly quickly morphed into an investigation of the plaintiff," the lawsuit says. "On March 13, 2012, the Board of Selectmen hired Bates to conduct an investigation into Ms. Brothers' alleged misconduct."
The lawsuit continues that Lt. Bates had an additional conflict of interest when he applied for the vacant Millbury chief of police position while in the midst of investigating Detective Brothers.
However, the chief's job wasn't posted until October 2012, after Gov. Deval L. Patrick approved removing the position from civil service and seven months after the investigation into Detective Brothers was completed.
Detective Brothers' lawsuit asks for punitive damages in addition to all compensatory damages, benefits and legal fees.
"She was wrongfully terminated and put out of a job for a year," Mr. Burke said.
He added that Detective Brothers suffered personal and financial distress and her reputation was damaged by the attention the case received. "Prior to this she had an excellent reputation."
Contact Susan Spencer at firstname.lastname@example.com. Follow her on Twitter @SusanSpencerTG


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Book Bugs Book Group/Winter-Spring 2009
From Wiki
- The Tale of Despereaux by Kate DiCamillo (met February 5 at 4:00)
Book Bug Consensus: The Book Bugs were excited about this book, especially since the movie had just been released. This book pulled in a lot of new Book Bugs, which was great.
- Holes by Louis Sachar (met February 26 at 4:00)
Book Bug Consensus: The Book Bugs loved this book and most of them borrowed the movie after finishing the story.
- So B. It by Sarah Weeks (met April 2 at 4:00)
Book Bug Consensus: Most Book Bugs enjoyed this book (two did not). Everyone agreed it was very sad.
- Gregor the Overlander by Suzanne Collins (met April 30 at 4:00)
Book Bug Consensus: The Book Bugs really enjoyed this book. Most Book Bugs are planning on reading the next book in the series.


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In the spring of 1863, Lord & Taylor in New York, down on Ladies' Mile, opened a "mourning store," where the new widows of the Civil War could dress their grief in suitable fashion. Some idea of what they shopped for is apparent from the inventory advertised by Besson & Son, in Philadelphia, a mourning store of the same period: "Black Crape Grenadines / Black Balzerines / Black Baryadere Bareges / Black Bareges." The Civil War dead are still among us—long after their beautifully dressed widows have passed away—and the problem is how to get them buried. The acceptable thing to say now, as it was then, is that the soldiers, and their sacrifice, are what remain to inspire us. But it's the corpses that haunt us, not the soldiers, as they haunted us then, and no amount of black crêpe can cover them over. The scale of the dying disillusioned a country, and also, as Lincoln saw, gave us a country—turned a provisional arrangement of states into a modern nation. A few new books attempt to place the dying in the right context: What did people of the time make of all that dying? More provocatively, did those who died in some sense want to die, and, most provocative, did so many die, after all?
Drew Gilpin Faust, the Civil War historian who is also the new president of Harvard, has published what will probably be the central book in this accounting: "This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War" (Knopf; $27.95). Her argument is that the scale of the killing between 1861 and 1865 demanded a new cult of memory—a new set of social rituals, some rooted in the Bible, but many intensely secular, the rituals of Republican mourning. These rituals—the response to the mass killing, from military cemeteries, neatly rowed, to a taste for tight-lipped prose—made us what we are. The embalming fluid developed at the time by Yankee ingenuity to preserve dead bodies on their way home from the battlefield still runs through our veins.
Faust, like most American academic historians, is a pragmatically lily-livered social constructionist: she thinks that ways of mourning, like lust and greed and kinship and other seemingly hardwired features of human experience, are remarkably plastic. The academic left wing believes that these attitudes come top down, as power enforces them; the right that they come bottom up, as a people evolves them; and a good liberal like Faust that they come from somewhere in between—half from what the rich and powerful tell you to feel, and half because the rich and powerful stay rich and powerful by letting ordinary people express their lust and grief more or less the way they want to. A moment of shock at a new blow (Pearl Harbor, September 11th, a son's death on the battlefield) is swiftly followed by set-piece reactions, widely shared. How these set pieces get set is Faust's subject. "It is work to die, to know how to approach and endure life's last moments," she writes. "Death also usually requires participation and response." If this makes death sound oddly like an undergraduate exam ("Before deceasing, please fill out all questions below, and respond in full; show all work"), it is also obviously true. "Americans had to identify—find, invent, create—the means and mechanisms to manage more than half a million dead: their deaths, their bodies, their loss."
The fight, Faust reminds the reader, which was expected to be, if not a romp, then at least a rout, turned out to be a bloody war of attrition, where defensive firepower so overwhelmed the offense that—at Antietam and Fredericksburg and the Wilderness—the soldiers mostly just stood there and watched each other die. "Neither North nor South had expected the death tolls that Civil War battles produced, and the steadily escalating level of destruction continued to amaze and horrify," she writes, and goes on:
The Mexican War had claimed approximately 13,000 U.S. lives, of which fewer than 2,000 had been battle deaths; the First Battle of Bull Run had shocked the nation with its totals of 900 killed and 2,700 wounded. By the following spring at Shiloh, Americans recognized that they had embarked on a new kind of war, as the battle yielded close to 24,000 casualties. . . . By the time of Gettysburg, a year later, the Union army alone reported 23,000 casualties, including 3,000 killed. Confederate losses are estimated between 24,000 and 28,000; in some regiments, numbers of killed and wounded approached 90 percent. And by the spring of 1864, Grant's losses in slightly more than a month approached 50,000.
The killing was horrifying in its suddenness: eighteen-year-olds were ripped apart at close quarters by minié balls, or shot down in the middle of normal drill by tree-infesting snipers. There is no pleasant way to die in battle, but presumably a Byzantine axe-bearer or an Anglo-Norman longbowman in Henry V's train would have some belief that his individual courage or resourcefulness could help him control the outcome. The Civil War battlefield was pure Russian, or Virginian, roulette; you walked out and prayed that your bullet didn't come up. S. H. M. Byers, of Iowa, "remembered one terrible battle where 'lines of blue and gray' stood 'close together and fire[d] into each other's faces for an hour and a half.' "
Organized massacre—men advancing to their death through close rifle fire—was the rule of battle; chaotic massacre the rule of its aftermath. Faust does a good job of making us see the war for what it was, not a neat epic of blue and gray but four years of terror and cruelty and violence. With all the gallantry of an Einsatzgruppe on the Eastern Front, the gentlemen of the South set about killing black soldiers indiscriminately. "Private Harry Bird reported that Confederates after the Battle of the Crater in 1864 quieted wounded black soldiers begging for water 'by a bayonet thrust,' " Faust writes. "Bird welcomed the subsequent order 'to kill them all'; it was a command 'well and willingly . . . obeyed.' General Robert E. Lee, only a few hundred yards away, did nothing to intervene."
The corpses left on the battlefield were often so close together that retreating survivors had to walk over them. Men became "putrefied meat, not so much killed as slaughtered," Faust writes. One soldier who accidentally stepped on a dead man's leg compared it to "a piece of pickled pork—hard and yet fleshy." After Antietam, a Union surgeon reported, "the dead were almost wholly unburied [and] stretched along, in one straight line, ready for interment, at least a thousand blackened, bloated corpses with blood and gas protruding from every orifice, and maggots holding high carnival over their heads." The rotting dead turned blue, then black. "Not a purplish discoloration, such as I had imagined in reading of the 'blackened corpses,' so often mentioned in descriptions of battlegrounds, but a deep bluish black, giving to a corpse with black hair the appearance of a negro," a Gettysburg veteran observed. (Faust points out how weirdly unsettling this rotting must have been in a society in which "race and skin color were of definitive importance." Dying, all men were brothers.)
To deal with these horrors, a new set of social rituals, designed not so much to "blind" survivors to the reality as to make them believe that the reality was necessary and noble, came into being. The beauty and originality of Faust's book is that it shows how thoroughly the work of mourning became the business of capitalism, merchandised throughout a society. The national mourning store included, of course, inspirational poems and high rhetoric, along with that new practice of embalming with zinc chloride, which "marbleized" flesh and allowed some of the dead, at least, to travel home for burial in recognizable shape. (There was a secondary market in icebox coffins, for the same reasons. Faust reproduces a full-page advertisement, inserted in the Gettysburg paper soon after the battle, for "Transportation Cases": "Preserves the Body in a natural and perfect condition . . . for any distance or length of time.")
Amplifying the new rituals, and democratizing them, were the recent inventions of the telegraph and the photograph. The telegraph meant that news of the battle, with the terrifying "lists," was available in a timely way. One hadn't consigned one's son or husband to a Hades on Earth from which he might or might not emerge years later; one would know, and soon. For the soldier, there were new kinds of photograph—tintype, daguerreotype, ambrotype—which made those left behind more real and constant; many soldiers died clutching photographs of their families. One of the most storied deaths of the war was that of Amos Humiston, a Yankee soldier felled at Gettysburg, who was found with an ambrotype of three children in his hands but no other identification. "The ultimately successful effort to identify him created a sensation, with magazine and newspaper articles, poems, and songs celebrating the devoted father, who perished with his eyes and heart focused on eight-year-old Franklin, six-year-old Alice, and four-year-old Frederick," Faust writes. In an irony that the postmodernists would appreciate, Humiston was most famously commemorated, clutching that photograph, in a Frank Leslie's Illustrated woodcut.
Faust places these rituals and manners, and the more familiar ones of mass cemeteries and "sanitary commissions," against the larger background of a changing faith in family life. Unlike the European practice of war, where peasant and proletarian infantrymen—largely detached from their families, who had long since given them up to the army and its institutions—and a tiny cadre of professional officers fought professional battles with a professional code of soldiering, the American Civil War soldier was often embedded in an ongoing family life. He hadn't enlisted as a teen-ager and then been lost to the Continent and the Empire. He had gone to fight in Virginia for Ohio or Pennsylvania. His parents and siblings were waiting for him. The Civil War took place in a time, and in a country, where "modern" feelings of attachment to the small bourgeois family were not just ascendant but aggressively honored, more, perhaps, than anywhere else. The ancient facts of battlefield death had to be parsed not as the medieval vestige they in some sense remained in Europe but within the grammar of the bourgeois life that surrounded them. In "Vanity Fair," the battle of Waterloo is both a social event and an aristocratic game, played for high stakes; when Amelia's husband dies, it is a risk taken in a risky life. By contrast, in "Little Women," that matchless novel of home-front life in the North, the March girls regard their father's war service not as a gamble but as a sacrifice. What spurred new rituals of naming and caring, Faust writes, "was the anguish of wives, parents, siblings, and children who found undocumented, unconfirmed, and unrecognized loss intolerable. The Civil War took place in a newly and self-consciously humanitarian age . . . an age in which family ties were celebrated and sentimentalized, an age that believed, moreover, that it possessed the agency and responsibility, as well as the scientific expertise, to mitigate suffering."
Faust is tracing a true fault line in modern consciousness. In these years, and despite much conventional religious piety, there's a nascent sense that the deaths of the young men will never be justified in the eyes of a good God, and never compensated for by a meeting in another world. Their deaths can be made meaningful only through a vague idea of Providence and through the persistence of a living nation. Lincoln's address at Gettysburg, through the dignity of near-Biblical expression, elevated sordid nationalism to a shimmering ideal of popular government; and it resonated because it said what a lot of people already felt. Fewer people found comfort in the promise of eternal life; more found it in the idea of a new world worth making.
It wasn't a small shift. For most of history, ordinary people lived their lives vertically, with reference to a Heaven above and a Hell below. Now we live our lives horizontally, with reference to a past that we can repair or extend, and to future generations for whom our sacrifices and examples may make a better life. (We live horizontally, too, in the knowledge of sex and death as shaping principles.) The Civil War was one place in which this change got made. At the end of the war, the rituals that Faust catalogues were not merely secular but in their quiet way anti-religious, grounding the meaning of the war entirely in the sublunary realm of gains and losses. It is as if the scale of death and suffering had vitiated the idea of a good God not so much by outright rejection as by forcing another rhetoric and language of explanation.
The effort to give shape and meaning to the bleak horrors of what happened can be seen in the rituals of mourning, but it can also be seen in the war's literary relics. Literature is, as Faust recognizes, always in a way atypical. Emily Dickinson and Ambrose Bierce are not "representative" of anything; if they were, they wouldn't matter. But there's a sense in which the strange, astringent, skeptical tone that they distilled from the war is revealing of the era's search for ritual and rhetoric. Walt Whitman is the real hero of Faust's book, because he is the one figure in whom this double movement—toward the war as a noble enterprise; away from all war as horrific slaughter—is conscious and complete. Faust reminds us how deeply implicated he was in the war—not just as a poet or chronicler but as a witness and, most touchingly, a devoted "correspondent," a letter writer to the bereaved. He was writing rote letters of condolence to the families of the dead even as he was working on his great war poems, which, as Faust says, "suggest no promise of an afterlife beyond that of nature's own renewal," and where the suffering, far from ennobling, simply doesn't end:
The living remain'd and suffer'd, the
mother suffer'd,
And the wife and the child, and the
musing comrade suffer'd,
And the armies that remain'd suffer'd.
A republic of suffering is made of infinite islands of mourning; we form the archipelago afterward, and only in our minds.
For historians like Faust, the key fact about the Civil War is the shock of carnage on an unanticipated scale: no one expected that much death, and people had to dress it as best they could. But what if the mass killing and dying of the Civil War was willed, wrought, and already existing in antebellum America? That is the thesis of Mark S. Schantz's arresting revisionist history, "Awaiting the Heavenly Country: The Civil War and America's Culture of Death" (forthcoming from Cornell; $24.95). In his view, a cult of death preceded the fact of dying. "Even after generals had felt firsthand the awful impact of the rifled musket, trench warfare, and long-range field artillery, they persisted in drawing up the same kinds of field orders," Schantz writes. "Perhaps even more surprisingly, their men obeyed them, and loved ones on the homefront accepted these catastrophic losses as the natural cost of war. There was, however, nothing natural about this devastating loss of life. But to a people steeped in the martial and civic traditions of the Greek revival, heroic death on the battlefield was something that could be comprehended and admired."
It wasn't just memories of pillared porches and pedimented façades that kept them dying. There was the Protestant cult of the afterlife, which had, Schantz shows, a kind of folk-art particularity in American sermonizing. Heaven was not merely a general idea of glory but a particular idea of reincarnation: in the afterlife you wouldn't just linger as a well-meaning spirit; you'd get your whole body back, good as new. He writes:
A vision of heaven that literally restored bodies to wholeness may have been powerfully compelling to men in such circumstances. We do not have evidence that soldiers consciously risked their lives and the very real possibilities of physical disfigurement because they knew that they would be fully restored in heaven. But the hearty belief in the restoration of full and glorious literal bodies in heaven could not have been far from their minds in a culture rife with the idea.
The revival of a Classical martial code; a maniacally detailed vision of Heaven; a rural cemetery movement that guaranteed a safe resting place—all these things together, Schantz argues, prepared American soldiers for death on the battlefield. In his view, it wasn't the bloody war that made the rituals; it was the rituals that enabled the bloody war.
Schantz produces many memorable texts and weird instances of morbid imagination at work in the years preceding the war—one has only to recall Mark Twain's Emmeline Grangerford, with her graveyard poems, to get a sense of just how weirdly ghoulish even backwoods American culture could be. But in the end the reader feels that this is cultural history pushed close to the point of self-parody. The line that Schantz draws between what the preachers and poets say and what people do is just too straight to be credible. All the Dickensian morbidity, all the "salvationist" sermons on the afterlife, couldn't force someone onto the battlefield. Besides, the accounts we have are not of soldiers rushing forward to a glorious death but of soldiers shrinking from a hideous slaughter, and driven forward, finally, by the thing that drives all soldiers forward—the habit of obedience and the fear of looking like a coward to the guy beside you. You have his back, not your country's, and not your church's.
A pervasive cult of death might explain why the Civil War was so outlandishly bloody. Yet what if, of all unthinkable thoughts, the war wasn't that bloody, and has come to seem so only in retrospect—what if it's part of the self-caressing insularity of American life to think that it has some special, epoch-marking awfulness? This is the thesis of a pugnacious and partly persuasive book by the historian Mark E. Neely, Jr., "The Civil War and the Limits of Destruction" (Harvard; $27.95). Neely argues, at length and with some sideswipes at Faust's earlier work, that it is only in our own time that the Civil War has come to be seen as a total war. He recalculates the figures for deaths in combat, the study of which Faust has pioneered, and concludes that the real number of dead killed on the battlefield is about a hundred and thirty-five thousand for the North and sixty-six thousand for the South. "In absolute numbers, then, the North suffered deaths equal to about two and one half times the number of Americans killed in Vietnam, and the South experienced well below one and a half times the deaths of American soldiers in Vietnam," Neely writes. "Neither figure begins to approach in magnitude the American casualties suffered in World War II."
After a time, the reader sees that Neely isn't really arguing against Faust's view, the standard view: the soldiers did stand there and watch each other die; the bodies formed a road on the field and turned black from rot. His point is not that this view is false but that it is provincial. In reality, our Civil War was a mid-nineteenth-century war more or less like any other, Crimean or Mexican, and the casualties were just about what you might expect. Neely argues that the mythology of reconciliation has led us to bundle together deaths on both sides, North and South, so that the total "American" losses are represented as misleadingly large. This is, in effect, as absurd as combining German and British deaths in the Second World War into a single "European" figure. "If we consider the Civil War casualties one 'country' at a time, then the 360,000 Union dead do not equal even the 407,000 Americans killed in World War II," he writes. "The 260,000 Confederate dead constitute but 64 percent" of the Second World War dead. The Civil War was a total war only if you had the bad luck to be a black soldier facing Confederates or a Native American facing either side. "The central restraining force on the destructive abilities of Civil War soldiers was their visceral perceptions of racial identity," Neely says bluntly. Americans created a "modern cult of violence," he says, out of a desire to ennoble the Civil War: by making its violence somehow epic and unprecedented, they would make the war of epic and unprecedented significance.
But if the Civil War was not, strictly, a "total war," what war would be? Even on the Eastern Front of the Second World War—and if that was not a total war, ignorant armies clashing by night, then nothing could be—the fighting was done largely by regular armies under regular rules; when the Russians finally overran the last German H.Q. at Stalingrad, after unspeakable suffering of unthinkable numbers on an unimaginable scale, they took the remaining officers prisoner and marched them off to the mess hall and polite interrogations; many in the German Sixth Army survived the war to argue bitterly about what had happened. The estimated proportion of total dead on the Soviet side is somewhere around twelve per cent of the population, and on the German less than that. These are huge numbers—one in ten is what we should mean by "decimated"—but compared with, say, the European deaths in the Black Plague of 1348, where at least one-third of European humanity is estimated to have died, the numbers are small enough to allow the possibility of the quick recovery, which did, in fact, take place. Even total wars are never entirely total.
Yet the fact that the Civil War was seen as uniquely horrible—not predictably horrible, à la Schantz, or proportionately not so horrible after all, à la Neely—points toward a feature of our moral modernity that this war helped usher in. We sense an abyss between death and all other kinds of events, greater even than our fear of it warrants. It is our moral equivalent of the speed of light, the one fixed absolute. If less than one per cent of the population suffers from depression, or is too fat, or can't find a mate, or even loses a home, we can adjust and contextualize; it isn't really that bad. If four hundred thousand people are killed, then that is, with intimate family touched on, a million people—an unimaginably large number, more people than you will ever meet in a lifetime—whose lives have been blighted. That only a few hundredths of a per cent of New Yorkers died on September 11th hardly alters its significance for New York.
There is a curious double consciousness at large in liberal civilizations. On the one hand, they grant enormous importance to the individual and the individual's immediate links—family, garden, small group, the Little Women waiting. On the other, they have been shaped by mass death and a readiness for mass killing, by what Papa goes through. (This imbalance may explain why we give murder such undue weight, why our most popular storytelling apparatus, nightly television, is devoted largely to the lore and legends and compulsive retelling of individual homicides, even though such investigations are a vanishingly small percentage of what policemen really do.)
The most affecting stories from the Civil War are of people who came to recognize this duality: believing in the goodness of the Cause and still finding nothing in the Mourning Store that fit; ignoring the usual vertical rituals of church and sermon, and trying to improvise horizontal rituals to make sense of what remained intolerable loss. Faust tells the story of Henry Ingersoll Bowditch, whose son Nat was killed in Virginia in 1863, after being left wounded on the battlefield. Grief-stricken, the father tried the usual cant of consolation: he listened to sermons, he read inspirational poetry; Nathan, he told himself, died for a great cause, he had "died happily," he was waiting, as the preachers insisted, "just the other side of the veil." None of it helped; it was, historically, too late for that. "My heart seems almost breaking," he said simply, and he couldn't turn his mind from his loss. At last, he made a monument for his son in the shape of his sword, and to "get out of myself" he crusaded for better ambulance service on the battlefield, the kind of thing that might have saved his son's life. There was no comfort to be found; but there was work to do, no pride in death, merely unending sorrow and the possibility, some distant day, of meaning. ♦


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EMPORIA — The National Wild Turkey Federation (NWTF) will hold its 2012 NWTF Kansas State JAKES Camp for youth on Sept. 15-16 at Camp Alexander, near Emporia. JAKES stand for Juniors Acquiring Knowledge, Ethics and Sportsmanship, and the acronym is also a common name for young male wild turkeys.
The cost of this event is $20 for JAKES members, $30 for non-JAKES members, and $20 for adults. Youth 17 years old and younger get to select from 15 activities in which to participate, including fishing, first aid in the field, air rifle, small game animals, arts and crafts, nature hikes and birding, firearms handling and safety, shotgun live fire, turkey calling, archery, sporting dogs, GPS, JAKES Take Aim range, and game calling.
Ralph Duren, two-time Grand National turkey calling champion, will present "Calls of the Wild" and will entertain campers later around the campfire Saturday night. Youth attending can participate in the 3rd Annual NWTF Kansas State youth turkey calling contest Saturday evening.
Attendees may choose to tent camp Saturday night or commute. Top-notch meals will be provided both days. Last year's Kansas State JAKES Camp was awarded the NWTF "Best State JAKES Event" at this year's NWTF National Convention in Nashville, Tenn.
For more information or a registration form, contact Gib Rhodes at 620-437-2012.


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Bret Michaels' Thanks Fans For Keeping Him Strong During Surgery! Exclusive!
Bret had heart surgery Jan. 24, and his fans honored him with donations for diabetes research!
Bret Michaels might just have the best fans in Hollywood! Bret's rep tells HollywoodLife.com that from the moment Bret, 47, underwent surgery to repair the hole in his heart Jan.24 at St. Joseph's Hospital and Medical Center in Phoenix, Ariz., there has been a "major influx" of donations to Bret's longtime charity, the American Diabetes Association.
"Bret would like to send out a big thank you to all those who donated to the ADA," his rep tells us. "He is extremely appreciate of this incredible support."
The Poison frontman was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes when he was six and has since been a huge advocate for his cause. Bret even won Donald Trump's Celebrity Apprentice in 2010, raising $640,000 for the ADA. This past weekend, the recently engaged rocker stopped by the Barrett-Jackson Collector Car auction and sold his 1969 Camaro for $220,000 — donating all the proceeds to his longtime charity, the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation.
Even in Bret's must vulnerable moments, he is beyond charitable — and his fans are clearly moved by his kindness. Bret is currently in ICU and expected to be released from the hospital tomorrow.
Get well soon, Bret!


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AMERICUS - The Georgia Southwestern baseball team was swept by Francis Marion University in a three-game series over the weekend. Francis Marion picked up 8-4 and 15-2 wins on Saturday before completing the series sweep on Sunday with an 11-3 victory.
The Hurricanes have lost four games in a row and finish the weekend at 5-12 overall and 2-6 in Peach Belt Conference play. Francis Marion sits at 8-5 overall and 4-2 in the PBC.
The Hurricanes finished with more hits than FMU (10-8), but was doomed by 10 walks from the pitching staff, five of which came in the Patriots' four-run first inning.
FMU quickly pulled ahead 5-0 after adding a run in the second.
The Patriots tacked on six runs in the fourth behind three hits, two walks, two hit batters and an error.
GSW broke up the shutout in the seventh with a pair of runs on Michel Coffey's RBI single. Stephen Eldridge doubled to open the eighth inning for the Hurricanes and scored moments later when Kyle Nobles belted an RBI single to center.
Patriots starter Jeffrey Stoner (2-0) threw six scoreless innings and struck out nine while walking two. Austin Cox, Chance DuCharme and Trevor Hutto tossed an inning apiece out of the bullpen.
GSW starter Earl Dupree (0-3) threw 3 1/3 innings before making way for Dylan Folds, Bray Bishop and Justin Lott. The Hurricanes held FMU scoreless over the final 5 1/3 innings behind Bishop (two innings) and Lott (3 1/3 innings).
Michael Wilson finished 3-for-6 for FMU with a triple, two RBIs and 2 runs scored.
Coffey, John Duran and Josh Sanders had two hits apiece for GSW.
Game 2 of Saturday's doubleheader was a pitching duel until the seventh inning. That's when the wheels fell off for GSW.
Hurricane starter Matt Suggs (2-2) threw six innings of shutout ball up until FMU's rally. Suggs had struck out eight and held FMU to three hits.
The Patriots brought 12 batters to the plate in the seventh. Jacob Golliday highlighted the eight-run inning with a two-run home run.
Corey Benson put the Hurricanes on the board in the bottom half of the seventh when he curled a two-run shot around the left-field foul pole for his first home run of the season.
FMU quickly answered with five more runs in the eighth. The crushing blow came from a Will Chandler grand slam.
Stephen Tarkenton plated two runs in the ninth with his RBI single to round out the scoring.
Wilson, Tarkenton and Casey Gebhardt collected three hits apiece for FMU.
Don Sandifer (2-2) threw seven innings, allowed two runs and four hits, walked two and struck out six.
Chase Burnfin and Bishop came in from the pen for GSW to relieve Suggs.
The Hurricanes fell behind 4-0 after FMU scored three runs in the second inning and a run in the fourth.
GSW cut the lead in half with two runs in the bottom of the fourth. Neal Chambless doubled to start the inning and eventually scored. Josh Sanders picked up an RBI with his fielder's choice that scored Benson.
FMU pushed across the deciding runs in the sixth, scoring three on four hits, and added another run in seventh.
Jarrod Taylor drove in a run in the seventh for GSW to make the score 8-3. Eldridge doubled in the ninth and scored Taylor for the 'Canes final run.
David DeWolfe turned in a 3-for-3 game for FMU. Wilson and Jacob Watson added two RBIs apiece.
Sanders collected three hits for GSW, drove in a run and scored a run.
Starter Gary Ashcraft (2-1) earned the win for FMU. Ashcraft threw 6 1/3 innings, allowed three runs and seven hits, walked three and struck out four. John Rossi threw 1 2/3 scoreless innnings and Brandon Stoots tossed the final frame.
Frank Ambrosino (0-3) took the loss for GSW. Ambrosino pitched six innings, allowed 11 hits and five earned runs, walked one and struck out two. Drew Cataldo threw the final three innings.
Southwestern returns to action on Wednesday with a non-conference tilt against Valdosta State. First pitch at Hurricane Stadium is set for 5 p.m.


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Mexico's ongoing drug cartel problems have created a virtual powder keg, so when a black Toyota Land Cruiser with diplomatic plates refused to stop for federal police, they opened fire, injuring two U.S. embassy employees and one Mexican sailor.
The embassy party was driving through a mountainous region teeming with drug gangs, so it's not all that surprising that the SUV's driver decided not to stop as they made their way toward Mexico City. But it also makes sense that the police, who were investigating a kindnapping, fired their weapons.
The Mexican Marines killed Arturo Beltrán Leyva, head of the Beltrán-Leyva Cartel, in 2009, leaving behind a power vacuum. The result has been a drug gang free for all in that region, so those charged by the government to carry weapons undoubtedly have itchy trigger fingers.
The 12 officers are in jail for the next 30 days as the, uh, justice system down there investigates the charges brought against them: attempted murder, bodily harm, property damage, abuse of authority, and abuse of public duty.
Photo credit: CNN


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Teammates inspired by Darvish's near-perfect night
HOUSTON -- Two of Yu Darvish's rotation mates said they were inspired after watching his terrific performance against the Astros on Tuesday. Matt Harrison watched the final inning from the top of the dugout and was visibly angry when Marwin Gonzalez broke up the perfect-game bid with a two-out single in the bottom of the ninth.
"To experience something like that, it was unbelievable to watch," Harrison said. "He was on top of his game from the beginning. You almost wish it had been the first batter to get the hit. It's tough to lose a perfect game. He took it well, better than I thought he would. Anytime you see a teammate do something like that, you get inspired. It makes you want to be a better pitcher, be as good as that guy. That was a lot of fun to watch."
This was the fourth time in Rangers history that a pitcher lost a no-hitter in the ninth. Charlie Hough lost one against the Angels in 1986, and Nolan Ryan lost two to the Blue Jays and Tigers in '89. All three of those ended with one out.
"One of the greatest games I've ever see," pitcher Derek Holland said. "To really see that motivates you. What Darvish did was unbelievable. I don't care who it is against, a perfect game is not something that easily happens."


text:
wu-tang clan
Cilvaringz: Wu-Tang Report
- 2003-04-18 16:13:04
© The Wu-Tang Corp.
- 2003-04-18
Peace to all,
Just got back from 6 weeks of touring. First of all thanks to everybody that came through. Much love to Milan for coming through with 7300 people... Most love goes out to the illest crowd of Sofia, Bulgaria with 6000 jumping, crying and screaming people. Peace to Zagreb who came through with 3000 people, Budapest 2000 and all the others. We had 17 sold out shows, Wu-Tang still going strong into battles, still loved by many!
I got to spend a lot of time with both
Masta Killa
and we got to know each other more which allowed me to go deeper into stuff I and all of us wanted to know. Spoke about many things, cleared many things up, updated the knowledge about Wu-Tang's history. Being a die hard fan myself I decided to update yall on some shit I got to know about on tour.
Wu-Tang Clan
, it used to be
All In Together Now
) +
Five Deadly Venoms
Method Man
Inspectah Deck
Ghostface Killah
). U-God & Method Man were room mates. Ghostface & RZA were childhood friends. Masta Killa was never really into emceeing. He used to hang with GZA who introduced him to RZA. The day they recorded Protect Ya Neck, Masta Killa was asked by GZA to come through to which Masta Killa answered: "Hell nah, yall go and do yall thing"... When GZA brought the tape back to Masta the day after, Masta was impressed and decided to come through and drop a verse. The rest is history... Masta Killa became the 9th and final member of the Clan. For all those who think all is peace & happiness in the Clan at all times, think twice. There have been many fights among the brothers. For example, recently U-God and Rae went at each other about who got the illest albums. Rae dissed Goldenarms Redemption, and U-God told Rae Cuban Linx was dope only because Ghost was on it. But in the end all falls back in place, but there have been physical fights. The most recent one lasted 7 hours between Rae and U-God about which album was whacker, Goldenarms Redemption or Immobiliarity.
The Cure has some of the deepest lyrics I ever heard in life. Some tracks include: "Mozes" "Knowledge Wisdom Understanding" "99 Attributes Of Allah" and one about RZA being a sperm cell going through violent battles to fertilize the egg. RZA has recorded 2 songs with
), 8 with
(Dido told RZA she wrote her entire first album listening to 36 Chambers & Cuban Linx), 7 with
Isaac Hayes
, 1 with
Sean Lennon
(son of
John Lennon
), 11 with
Rage Against The Machine
, 3 with
. Ever wondered what other producers think of RZA?
The Neptunes
walked up to RZA, each grabbed his hands and kissed them, their look was enough to express their respect.
Dr. Dre
told RZA that he was the absolute master in the rap game.
told RZA nobody else but himself would ever produce on
Cypress Hill
albums but RZA because he respected him so much. In '97 when Wu-Tang Clan was at it's highest peak, RZA was approached by
Quincy Jones
who came to his photo shoot to show his respect.
and RZA used to battle each other with beats, after that Primo picked up RZA's sample-chop style and paid his respects to RZA numerous times. Right before the tour RZA was approached by
Fine Young Cannibals
and recorded a track with them, they later said they were some of the biggest Wu-Tang fans alive. Other unexpected Wu-Tang die hard fans include:
Ethan Hawk
Uma Thurman
System Of A Down
(Who still chill with RZA many times),
Ozzy Osbourne
and wife,
Quentin Tarantino
Bokeem Woodbine
Bill Gates
' family, the entire
family, Bjork, U2,
Naomi Campbell
, Isaac Hayes and many many others.
The new Wu-Tang Clan LP will most likely be the very last one and will come with a Wu-Tang manual including all the lyrics of all their albums and DVD including footage of the recording of Enter The 36 Chambers: "Imma show you how we looked back then, we looked like real crack heads!" The title will be what RZA always wanted it to be: "The Eighth Diagrams". It will most likely be a box set, a collectors item including unreleased songs and the biggest hits. The price could rise up to $50.
4th Disciple
is RZA's favorite producer inside the Wu-Tang camp. 'Protect Ya Neck II The Zoo' was actually a song off Cuban Linx, it was recorded by Raekwon & Ghostface Killah and later re-recorded by Ol' Dirty and Brooklyn Zoo. For the producers under us, 'Guillotine' and 'Wildflower' did not contain any samples, it was all played. RZA lost 130 beats in the flood. They were beats for Deck's LP, Meth's and Raekwon's LP... Recently Deck pulled out some disks from the flood and they worked again and he used 1 for his upcoming album on Koch.
In Mannheim I recorded 3 more tracks with RZA of which 2 were produced by
Moongod Allah
and 1 by 4th Disciple. RZA also produced 1 song for
Dutch album)...
Sayyid Imad Al Din
Bronze Nazareth
& Cilvaringz each got 1 beat produced on Digi Snacks. Other songs that might wind up on there are "Whistle" , "Grits" , "We" , "Radio" and "Skitzko" ... If you ever wondered who is was taking a shower in the beginning on 'Black Shampoo' on Wu-Tang Forever.. that was
Dom Pachino
Since Wu-Tang has been unsigned, they have had offers from Dr. Dre and Aftermath, Interscope Records,
and Bad Boy Records and Def Jam among others... No deal has been made yet though.
Now.. as far as my project is concerned. I recorded some new songs for my LP with RZA and hope to get Masta Killa and GZA when they out here. We are planning to do a double album: one CD with songs and the other CD with an enhanced part (which is in the works already and will contain all the lyrics, photo's, thank you's, explanation of the songs, info about Ringz & Partners Entertainment and other stuff) and DVD which will have a summary of the RZA/Cilvaringz tour and the first Wu-Tang Killa Beez tour, lots of funny stuff, behind the scene, in the studio etc etc... that's why I'm still taking my time a little you know... get all this done correctly, then in November we will start shopping to labels for many regions in Europe, America, Asia and Australia... all in all it's gonna be worth the wait and worth the money... that's one thing I promise to all who are waiting for my shit... The singles will each contain unreleased songs such as 'City Limits feat.
Royal Fam
' .. 'Energy feat.
Beretta 9
, 4th Disciple and Bronze Nazareth' and 'Razasharp'... Also, the song 'Brothers Ain't Brothers' will be added, 'Fuck Americcca' as well and 'Sheherazad, My Beloved' plus many skits featuring RZA and myself... A skit regarding
by RZA will be on 'Brothers Ain't Brothers'... the album is still untitled!
That's it for now... I'll probably remember more later.
News Archive
RZA announces new album 'Wu-Tang: The Saga Continues'
Wu-Tang Clan on the Mayweather vs. McGregor fight
Common to star in RZA's 'Black Samurai' reboot
Boombotix Speaker Comes With Unreleased ODB Track
GZA Earns The 1st Platinum Album For The Clan In 20 Years
Proof, that the Wu-Tang Clan ain't nothing to mess with
Unpublished 'Ya'll be warned' video unearthed after 13 years
Wu-Tang Brand Unveils Winter 'Iron Flag' Collection
NuHo Online Film Festival presents an epic ODB Memorial
Masta Killa releases Selling My Soul on Dec 11th
Get the Original Sound Track from The Man with the Iron Fist
First official single from Black Knights´ new project
Join the Wu Fest tour 2011/2012
Get an awesome piece of Wu-tang memorabilia
check older news
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Copyright ©2000 - 2019 The Wu-Tang Corp.


text:
Successful June Summer Programs Conclude
St. Vladimir's June Summer Programs allowed laypeople and clergy alike to study and participate in group discussions in a uniquely stimulating environment. Participants in our iconography workshops patiently labored over sketches, gesso, paint, and gold leaf, as they watched brilliant images emerge from wooden boards. Protodeacon Nazari Polataiko taught the Russo-Byzantine style, while Khouriya Erin Mary Kimmett taught the Greek-Cretan style to students. Seminary Dean Fr. John Behr taught his class the meaning of the Nicene Creed and its place within the broader framework of Scripture and church tradition, in his summer course, "From Gospel to Creed." Students privileged to enjoy Fr. John's expertise in patristics described the course as "mind-altering."
In the meantime, every year, the Diaconal Liturgical Program and the Practical Liturgics Program, developed and headed by Archdeacon Kirill Sokolov, grows in popularity. Deacons and lay diaconal candidates received intensive practical and theological training to augment their ministry.


text:
Multiline Message Sifting With DFSORT
MartinPacker 11000094DH Visits (15087)
Frank Yaeger of DFSORT Development suggested I pass this tip along to y'all. It's his solution to a problem set by Brian Peterson of UnitedHealth Group... In z/OS Release 12 two new messages were introduced: IEF032I and IEF033I replace IEF374I and IEF376I. The older messages were single-line step- and job-end messages. The new ones are their multiple-line analogues: IEF032I is 3 lines and... [More]


text:
|Land Matters Discussion Area Discussion Relating to Your Land/Legislative Issues
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Request for Feedback
The Discovery Pass is heading for a bit of rework.. Can't solve all the issues at once but would love feedback on some options that will be proposed and how they could impact us.
Transferability is by far the number one concern with many folks.
1)Current proposal on the table is to have 1st pass be $30.00, 2nd pass be $15.00 so an incremental approach.
2)Another idea was to have first pass be $30.00 and option to buy a super pass for additional 30.00 with unlimited transferability.
3)Have one pass, with additional space for multi vehicles, up to 2 vehicles.
Volunteer hours was also a huge topic but one that we ran out of time to discuss but feedback is being asked by the user groups to provide options on how to manage.
My 2 cents: I see a program that will evolve much like our We Did it.. you apply for your event to be included as a sanctioned event, you designate contact person for that event, you make them accountable to collect names, miles traveled and hours spent. If trash clean up how much was picked up, if trail maintenance how much material was user provided, travel time, hours spent. You all get the idea.
There was talk about community service time and those that are state mandated to work .. should those hours count toward a pass?
I also would like some feedback on the following areas as well. If collectively we can help provide solutions or ideas. Saying "dont have the pass"
will not work for as you know the short fall in budgets will lead to them closing areas. So lets be proactive and provide ideas that could work for all of us.. I know many of you recreate not just in your OHV but also Hunt, or Fish or even Horseback..
What are your thoughts on the following:
1)On Discounts (Due to existing state laws, certain residents are exempt from paying for access to parks but not exempt from DFW/DNR lands).
Senior citizens
Foster families
2)Volunteers hours
3)Recreation area designations
4)Convenience charges at DF&W Dealers
5)Dual registrations - Some street legal orvs have the ORV tab, and are trailered into DNR lands for trail use technically they are required to have a pass on the trailered vehicle if it is street legal and in most cases these folks are buying the ORV tab voluntarily the intent was to get the towing street legal vehicles, but not the ORVs.
On the dual registration this one really only effects us and the sport bikes. So as you can imagine they are not overly concerned on this one. But that is not to say if we could help them better define this ruling, why in our case some of our street legal vehicles really are not street legal do to WAC rules. This one is a real grey area.. and maybe that we dual register knowing the tab fees do more for us then the pass does. This one is still needing a bit more understanding on the impacts and solutions.
Please feel free to provide comment here or send them to me via Email.
I know you all have opinions and so do your friends.. the more we can collect for concerns, solutions or ideas the better chances that we may end up with something that works.. it will not go away and fees will not change for 2 years.. So getting mad is not the solution.
Working to find a way to make this work is what is needed..
Heck we spend more on parts in a given weekend that cost is not the factor just the inconvience and yet another fee..
All the feedback collect will be passed on to the DNR. Here is your chance to make your voice heard.
Dorothy Churchill
Washington State Director
Cascade 4x4s
Overbored Racing
Okay folks.. I am going to stick my neck out here! I am one person and I know that for me 30 bucks is not an issue and I can drive mine to the trail so I could potentially only have one pass. Until Tamara comes home! LOL..
I do have my opinions on this and I am seeking your opinions.. I really need these by the end of Month.. I was hoping for at least some feedback. I know you all have opinions.. I have heard a few in passing.
Help me out on this.. heck our opinion is being asked for and will be used to possibly change a few things.... sorry the pass will remain but, we can infuence the way it reads.............
Dorothy Churchill
Washington State Director
Cascade 4x4s
Overbored Racing
I think you already know my feelings on this dorthy. I have no issue at all with a pay to play system but we should only have to pay once. The pass should be good for a household or at least transferable to multiple vehicles of the same owner. The way the system is set up now only fosters cheating umong users and a total distrust of the govt. ability to do anything right.
We also need a higher percentage going towards "OUR" use. If I want to go to a state park then I will pay for that. (I already was doing this through lic tabs). They also need to fix the volunteer hours thing. We have lots of small workparties with DNRs approval but now unless its advertised on their website it dosent count Total BS and it just discourages people from volunteering.
So theres my 2 cents
Member #40 Hombres jeep club
Region 2 landmatters chairman
I did post a responce shortly after your orginal post. I deleted it for a couple of reasons.
First off I think our lawmakers stuck something somewhere where the sun does not shine. In fact I think this whole bill came out of where they stuck their something. It is/was clear that no one gave this any thought other than a way to collect money (kinda like how they how much thought they put into stealing Nova/OHV funds). Well with no thought they did it again.
1st problem was a $30 pass that cost $35. Even the author of the bill does not agree that was the way he meant it to be.
2nd problem was the single vehicle per pass idea. I understand they did intend it to be that way from the start. However I think they could of authored the bill and modified it later to the single vehicle per pass after the public had a chance to recover from the idea of pay to play.
3rd problem is we as a wheeling community do not support the split. 8%/8%/84% somehow to me still does not seem like a fair split. State parks get the majority.
Those are my main gripes about this. I have others.
I have also seen some of how this is working for the state. Most of the parking is taking place outside of the state parks that I often drive past (fee avoiders). I have also read that where it is impractical to park outside of the park that the park use is down in a major percentage. One park reports 50% less atendence. I work in the forest where there is a checkerboard of land owners. Where a pass is required we have fee avoiders parking (off DNR/WFDW land) so they do not need a pass. I also have people who try to use their Discover Pass on the National Forest (it's not valid on National Forest). After giving an earful they reluctantly pay the required fee.
One also cannot get consistant answers as to if and where a pass is required. Where I work it is required that a certain level of conviences be offered before a fee can be inposed. The state seems to think that just because you are there you are subject to the fee.
You say this fee is here to stay. I seem to remember the same thing was said about an entrance/parking fee imposed a few years ago at state parks. One season later the fee was resinded. Attendence drop and flak about already paying enough thru existing taxes caused the lawmakers to rethink.
I have yet to of met a person who thinks this is/was a logical way to solve the states problems.
I have an idea that probably would not be to popular. That is resind this fee and carry the collection over to my state property taxes. Us a dedicated fund that could not be used anyhow else. And make the split more equatable or make it a grant process.
I agree with both of you on your comments and I thank you.
Many of discussions have come regarding the free loaders.
For us the split does seem un fair and in the scope of things agree. But in numbers that are given the higher percentage of users are not us. But like discussed those that would have thought to pay the pass to go to the parks for the hikers or mountain bikes are now parking outside of the parks and not paying for the pass.
So now the question is in these tough times how do you pay to keep operations open to the public when there is no money available and they are being asked to trim the fat??
What would it take for us beside the transferability and money split to buy the pass? What would be an acceptable medium??
Here is what another member from our COG group had to say!
1.Transferability - The inability to transfer a pass from one vehicle to another is a poor design and options to offer multiple discounted passes don't address this. Transfer mechanisms for sold vehicles are cumbersome and add complexity to a system that is already overly complex for the many license offices to administer. Also, many of our members own more than one vehicle which they might use to visit a state park instead of using their tow vehicle.
2.Dual Registration denial - It should be sufficient to have either an ORV permit or a Discover Pass ... but for street legal 4X4 and dirt bikes already paying for both license plates and having dual registration with an ORV tab, the D-Pass is a required third government sticker ... and that's unreasonable. This also adds complexity in that these dual registered vehicle only need the D-Pass when they're on State land but only on roads where their plates are required. Otherwise if they're strictly off road, their ORV permit suffices. This denial creates a third tax for the user and a complicated structure for determining when it's required.
3.Complexity/USFS dissimilarity - We already have one "pass system" for off road recreational use in this state and it's been around for a long time. The fact that this new one chose to change transfer rights, volunteer policies and even ties it to a vehicle creates an unnecessary burden of understanding for our users and a similar unnecessary burden for teaching and communication for the government. Several of the reasons for this design were perhaps driven by the desire to increase revenues as well as the complexity of joining with State Parks and DFW in the system. You're adding yet more complexity as you seek to fix the problem of routine changing of license plates (because when I change license plates for any one of several routine reasons my pass is now invalid). Rather than adding the burden of this new pass to support DNR programs, another approach would be to use the existing User Fee system with ORV permits and establish the level of revenues users are willing to support. That then can must drive the expense side of the DNR's program's. What we instead have here are expenses driving the revenues ... and revenues falling short. With the complexities and overlaps of this system you're unable to determine just what YOUR DNR user group is willing to fund ... and part of the Dual Registration desire comes from users willingness to purchase ORV permits while knowing DNR gets SO MUCH of that revenue compare to the D-Pass.
So what would I offer as solutions here (in addition to the obvious message of right-sizing expenses)?:
1.Create a simpler Pass - Construct a D-pass scheme using transferability and volunteer policies mirroring the USFS Forest Pass. I assume this is possible given the legislation but that does need to be checked. Survey to find out participation rates for various pricing levels using these assumptions to drive net revenue projections. This addresses the desire for transferability ... which really isn't addressed by discounted 2nd passes. And it quantifies the voice of the users so that leadership can respond. Without this you'll be continuing to try to sell a recreational system that users can't afford.
2.Allow Dual Registered Vehicles exemption - This is another question regarding the law ... can someone who HAS a license plate AND ORV permit and is on a DNR road be exempted from the D-Pass? If so, thank you ... if not, this crystallizes a legislative change for the next session.
Written by a member of WOHVA.
Sorry for the length of the post but this is a huge topic and needs to be looked at in many ways!
I pesonnally welcome the comments
Dorothy Churchill
Washington State Director
Cascade 4x4s
Overbored Racing
My main beef with the current system is having to buy one for each vehicle...that means 4 passes for me! One for the Sami, one for the tow rig, one for the XJ (hunting rig/dd), and one for the wife's ZJ if we were to go up in the hills in it....I've already got enough hours for one pass via the volunteer hours credits, but my understanding is you only get one free pass per yr....I figure if you volunteer enough (lord knows I do!!!), you should be rewarded for that by being allowed more than one per yr...If that were the case, I have enough for two...almost.
Which brings the volunteer hours thing to light, 24 is not alot of hours, but means at least two trips to my ORV area, which equates to at least $100 in fuel money thru the tow rig/wheeler, plus food, and any other moneys spent during the trips (which goes to local businesses)...16 hrs could be an option, as a loooooong day volunteering, 16 could be attained in one trip...just a thought.
The multiple pass/discounted rate scale idea would help...but I'd still have to buy 4 passes, potentially....
Dirt-Nappin' at its finest!!!
A PNW4WDA Region 1 Affiliate Club
The pass should be just like the FS pass. One pass per household and it can go from rig ro rig and covers the tow vehichle and trail rig. Simple and easy.
Dirt-Nappin' at its finest!!!
A PNW4WDA Region 1 Affiliate Club
To restate my position: I pay property taxes. In the tax statement there are numerous acessements (fire, schools, hosipital, library, etc). Seems it would not be a hard thing to establish a taxing district called State recreation. Each property owner would share the burden of supporting parks and rec. Seems to simple and fair to have something like this created. But so goes the State Gov. Seems like the state is helll bent on fixing the problem rather than solving the problem.
This has been the way the FS has done it forever, seems to work.
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