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In 1999, the Croatian novelist Slavenka Drakulić visited The Hague to observe the trials for war crimes committed in the former Yugoslavia. Among the defendants was Goran Jelisić, a thirty-year-old Serb from Bosnia, who struck her as "a man you can trust." With his "clear, serene face, lively eyes, and big reassuring grin," he reminded Drakulić of one of her daughter's friends. Many of the witnesses at The Hague shared this view of the defendant—even many Muslims, who told the court how Jelisić helped an old Muslim neighbor repair her windows after they were shattered by a bomb, or how he helped another Muslim friend escape Bosnia with his family. But the Bosnian Muslims who had known Jelisić seven years earlier, when he was a guard at the Luka prison camp, had different stories to tell. Over a period of eighteen days in 1992, they testified, Jelisić himself killed more than a hundred prisoners. As Drakulić writes, he chose his victims at random, by asking "a man to kneel down and place his head over a metal drainage grating. Then he would execute him with two bullets in the back of the head from his pistol, which was equipped with a silencer." He liked to introduce himself with the words "Hitler was the first Adolf, I am the second." He was sentenced to forty years in prison.
None of Drakulić's experience in creating fictional characters could help her understand such a mind, which remained all the more unfathomable because of Jelisić's apparent normality, even gentleness. "The more you realize that war criminals might be ordinary people, the more afraid you become," she wrote. What Drakulić discovered, in other words, is what Hannah Arendt, at the trial of Adolf Eichmann, in Jerusalem, some forty years earlier, called "the fearsome, word-and-thought-defying banality of evil." Drakulić titled her book "They Would Never Hurt a Fly," after Arendt's description of a typical Nazi functionary who "does not regard himself as a murderer because he has not done it out of inclination but in his professional capacity. Out of sheer passion he would never do harm to a fly." Arendt's concept has become so famous that it is hard to remember how bitterly controversial it was when she first used it. Many readers resisted what looked like an attempt to trivialize the Nazis. "No banality of a man could have done so hugely evil a job so well," one critic wrote. Yet even those who dispute Arendt's judgment acknowledge her influence on the way we think about political evil. As long as ordinary people can be transformed overnight into mass murderers, we are still living in Hannah Arendt's world.
It is an ambiguous tribute to Arendt, then, that her scholarly and popular profile is higher today than at any time since she died, in 1975, at the age of sixty-nine. In the past few years, a number of Arendt's works have been published by Schocken Books, where she worked as an editor in the nineteen-forties. "The Origins of Totalitarianism" has been accompanied by several collections of essays—most notably "The Jewish Writings," edited by Jerome Kohn and Ron Feldman, which includes Arendt's wartime journalism. Scholars around the world have kept pace with a torrent of studies—on Arendt and international relations, Arendt and human rights, Arendt and the Jewish question. It is hard to name another thinker of the twentieth century more sought after as a guide to the dilemmas of the twenty-first.
Yet it is not just political theorists who find Arendt a source of fascination. The most intense curiosity about Arendt in the past few years has had less to do with her work than with her life. Above all, the publication in English, in 2004, of Arendt's correspondence with Martin Heidegger, after decades of speculation about their relationship, brought renewed scrutiny to her intimate life. To a thinker who believed that the personal was emphatically not political, this kind of attention would have been very unwelcome. She derided the "pseudoscientific apparatuses of depth-psychology, psychoanalysis, graphology, etc." as nothing more than "curiosity-seeking." Yet Arendt's deeply ambivalent relationship with Heidegger—her lover, teacher, and friend—has a more than personal significance, since it casts light on the most vexed issue in her work: her tangled relationship with Jewishness and Germanness.
Arendt's legend—or, perhaps it is better to say, her image—has become as important to posterity as her theories. In part, of course, this is because Arendt is one of the few women in the traditionally male pantheon of political philosophy. It makes sense that it is feminist readers who find the most food for thought in Arendt's image—even though Arendt denied that she was a feminist. Julia Kristeva devotes some pages of her recent book on Arendt to her changing appearance, as documented in photographs: from the girlish "seductress" of the nineteen-twenties, gazing poetically at the camera, to the confident intellectual of the fifties, whose "femininity . . . beats a retreat" as her face becomes "a caricature of the . . . battle scars" received during her public career.
Kristeva's reverie on Arendt's "psychic bisexuality" is not the kind of attention that gets paid to Kant or Heidegger. Yet it is a sign of the way that Arendt has emerged as something both more and less than a political theorist. The most rewarding way to read Arendt, and the best way to make sense of both the strengths and the limitations of her work, is to approach her as Michelle-Irène Brudny does in "Hannah Arendt: An Essay in Intellectual Biography": "I definitely take Hannah Arendt to be less a political philosopher or a political theorist . . . than an author in the strong sense of the word." Kristeva, still more emphatically, considers Arendt's writings "to be less a body of work than an action." Like so many Jewish writers of her generation, Arendt attempted in her work to shine the light of intellect on the extreme darkness she lived through. That she chose to do this in the most impersonal of genres—philosophy and history—rather than through memoir, or even poetry (which she loved to read, and wrote from time to time), is itself a clue to the immense psychological pressures that shaped her work and, in the end, partly disfigured it.
The power of the impersonal is the great theme of Arendt's work, and it is no coincidence that she first discovered it in the most literary, least theoretical of her books, "Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewess." It was the first book she wrote (not counting her doctoral dissertation), but it was not published for almost two decades, and it remains, even today, a kind of orphan in the Arendt canon. Readers of "Eichmann in Jerusalem" and "The Origins of Totalitarianism" tend to ignore this impressionistic biography of a late-eighteenth-century hostess and letter writer, whose Berlin salon was one of the breeding grounds of German Romanticism. Yet the Rahel biography, as Kristeva says, is "a veritable laboratory of Arendt's political thought."
Arendt acknowledged her deep affinity with Rahel Varnhagen, née Levin, calling her "my very closest woman friend, unfortunately dead a hundred years now." What they had in common was their predicament as highly gifted Jewish women in a culture that exacted a terrible psychic toll both on women and on Jews. In Berlin, at the time of the French Revolution, Rahel's friends included some of Prussia's greatest minds. They were drawn to her freedom from social convention, and to the exquisite sensibility that informed her cult of Goethe, her extensive correspondence, and her love affairs. Yet during the Napoleonic Wars, as Prussian nationalism began to flourish, many of Rahel's German friends deserted her; her Gentile fiancé, whom she saw as her ticket to respectable society, refused to marry her. She was left alone with her inwardness, mourning "the thing which all my life seemed to me the greatest shame, which was the misery and misfortune of my life—having been born a Jewess." Not until she was dying did she decide that, all the same, Jewishness was the one thing "I should on no account now wish to have missed."
When Arendt first discovered Rahel, in the late nineteen-twenties, she recognized her as both a tutelary spirit and a cautionary tale. Arendt was born in 1906, into a family that, like so many German Jewish families, ardently pursued Rahel's ideal of culture, or Bildung. "With us from Germany," she wrote bitterly during the Second World War, "the word 'assimilation' received a 'deep' philosophical meaning. You can hardly realize how serious we were about it." Again like Rahel, Arendt was conspicuous for her intelligence from an early age; as a young woman, she was nicknamed Pallas Athene. When, in 1924, she went to Marburg University, she entered into the study of theology and philosophy as into her own inheritance, even though she recognized that they might be uncomfortable subjects for a Jew. When she signed up for a seminar on the New Testament, she sternly warned the professor, Rudolf Bultmann, that "there must be no anti-Semitic remarks."
Yet Arendt could not have suspected just how fraught her encounter with philosophy would turn out to be. Like all the most enterprising students, she enrolled in a class with Martin Heidegger. Heidegger was then at work on his magnum opus, "Being and Time," but already he had a reputation as a thrilling teacher. As Arendt remembered a lifetime later, in her tribute to Heidegger on his eightieth birthday, "Little more than a name was known, but the name made its way through all of Germany like the rumor of a secret king." She was thus more than prepared to respond when the married, thirty-five-year-old professor began to fall in love with her.
The fact that Heidegger and Arendt were lovers was no secret to her close friends—"Oh, how very exciting!" Karl Jaspers exclaimed when Arendt told him—and it has been public knowledge since Elisabeth Young-Bruehl revealed it in her 1982 biography. But the affair became a kind of highbrow scandal in 1995, when Elzbieta Ettinger, a professor at M.I.T., wrote about it in a short book, "Hannah Arendt / Martin Heidegger." Ettinger, who had been granted access to the Heidegger-Arendt correspondence for the purpose of writing a new biography of Arendt, instead made it the subject of a sensational exposé. The book was loftily derided by Arendtians; yet, without the curiosity that Ettinger excited, it is doubtful that Arendt's and Heidegger's estates would have consented to the publication of their letters, which cast a fascinating new light on this most important chapter in Arendt's life.
The correspondence, which is collected in "Letters 1925-1975," is revealing, first of all, in its very incompleteness. Arendt kept all of Heidegger's letters, from the very beginning; he kept few of hers, and none from the early years. As a result, Heidegger's voice dominates the book, just as his personality and his decisions dominated the affair. As one would expect, Heidegger—an older male professor, who also happened to be one of Europe's greatest philosophers—treats his teen-age lover with a combination of passion and condescension. He is capable of poetic raptures: "The demonic struck me. . . . Nothing like it has ever happened to me," he writes not long after their first meeting. Yet while Arendt's intellect helped draw him to her, he is deeply patronizing about her intellectual ambitions. He urges her to take a "decisive step back from the path toward the terrible solitude of academic research, which only man can endure," and to concentrate instead on becoming "a woman who can give happiness, and around whom all is happiness."
Understandably, after a year of covert meetings and emotional confrontations, Arendt left Marburg for Heidelberg, where, in Jaspers, she found a more equable teacher. It is just possible to glimpse in the letters the pain that the affair caused Arendt—above all, by enforcing a sense of powerlessness. Early on, in an autobiographical composition addressed to Heidegger and titled "Shadows," Arendt described herself in the third person: "Her sensitivity and vulnerability, which had always given her an exclusive air, grew to almost grotesque proportions." As late as 1929, when Arendt ran into Heidegger at a train station and for a moment he failed to recognize her, she found the experience shattering: "When I was a small child, that was the way my mother once stupidly and playfully frightened me. I had read the fairy tale about Dwarf Nose, whose nose gets so long nobody recognizes him anymore. My mother pretended that had happened to me. I still vividly recall the blind terror with which I kept crying: but I am your child, I am your Hannah.—That is what it was like today."
The full significance of her experience with Heidegger did not unfold, however, until the early nineteen-thirties. As the Weimar Republic collapsed and Nazi violence grew, Arendt began to hear unsettling rumors about Heidegger's sympathy with National Socialism. Her letter to him on the subject is lost, but we can gauge her anxiety from Heidegger's response, which is tentatively dated "Winter 1932/33." "The rumors that are upsetting you are slanders," he begins, and proceeds to give an evasively technical defense of his treatment of Jewish students and colleagues. (If he refused to supervise a Jewish student's dissertation, he explains, it was only because "I am on sabbatical this winter semester"; and, besides, "the man who, with my help, got a stipend to go to Rome is a Jew.") Nowhere in the letter is there any denial of Nazi sympathies. Instead, Heidegger simply assures Arendt that, whatever happens, "it cannot touch my relationship to you." After reading this letter, Arendt could not have been entirely surprised when, in 1933, Heidegger joined the Nazi Party and became the rector of Freiburg, with the mission of aligning the university with the new party-state.
By that time, Arendt was already in exile from the land of her birth. In the spring of 1933, just after Hitler took power, she began to do clandestine work for a Zionist organization, documenting anti-Semitism in the new Germany. She was arrested and interrogated, and, after eight days, released. Immediately, she and her mother fled the country, slipping across the Czech border at night. But while she later dated her political awakening to the Reichstag Fire, it is clear that, for several years before 1933, she had been growing more and more alert to the untenable position of Jews in Germany. The private humiliation and political betrayal she suffered at the hands of Heidegger, the living embodiment of German intellect, only brought home to her the lessons she was already learning from her study of Rahel Varnhagen.
When she came to write about Rahel's life, then, Arendt brought to it a passion and a personal commitment born of her own experience. No one could have believed more seriously than Rahel in the cultivation of the spirit. Yet to Arendt she appears as merely the victim of a terrible illusion—"the hapless human being, the shlemihl, who has anticipated nothing." The lesson that Arendt drew was that a beautiful soul is not enough, for "it was precisely the soul for which life showed no consideration." To live fully and securely, every human being needs what Arendt calls "specificity," the social and political status that comes with full membership in a community. Arendt had said of herself, in the "Shadows" letter, that "she did not belong to anything, anywhere, ever"; so, too, Rahel was "exiled . . . all alone to a place where nothing could reach her, where she was cut off from all human things, from everything that men have the right to claim." Avoiding that helpless "place" became the goal of Arendt's life and thought. The categorical imperative of her political theory might be phrased: Thou shalt not be a shlemihl.
By the time she finished writing "Rahel Varnhagen," in 1938—thanks in part to the prodding of Walter Benjamin, her friend and fellow-exile—Arendt had come to see Rahel's predicament as an early sign of the political naïveté that had left European Jewry so vulnerable to Nazi persecution. The biography was written, she later said, "with an awareness of the doom of German Judaism (although, naturally, without any premonition of how far the physical annihilation of the Jewish people in Europe would be carried)." And, just as Arendt's attitude toward Rahel was an unstable mixture of sympathy and criticism, so, too, her reaction to the Jewish crisis was a blend of urgent concern and haughty contempt.
Arendt's tendency to blame the victim, which produced such an explosive effect in "Eichmann in Jerusalem" in the nineteen-sixties, is already obvious in the articles she wrote during the war for Aufbau, the German-language Jewish newspaper in New York. Arendt had been able to flee Vichy France for the United States in 1941, thanks to a visa she received with the help of the Emergency Rescue Committee, a volunteer group that used both legal and illegal means to get Jews and others in peril out of the country. She moved into two rooms on West Ninety-fifth Street, and was joined a few weeks later by her mother, who also managed to escape France by way of Lisbon. It is a measure of Arendt's dauntlessness, and her determination to make her voice heard publicly, that before the year was out she was hired as a columnist for Aufbau. It was the first step in an American journalistic career that eventually, as her facility in English improved, led her to become a contributor to Partisan Review, The New Yorker, and The New York Review of Books.
Arendt's wartime articles, collected in "The Jewish Writings," offer a crucial insight into the political experiences that shaped her theoretical work. In particular, they show Arendt developing a self-contradictory brand of Zionism, which might be called a Zionism of necessity. Faced with the collapse of Jewish assimilation, Arendt turned to Zionism as an "escape route from illusion into reality, from mendacity and self-deception to an honest existence." And the major subject of her wartime writing is the need for Jews to regain their political self-respect—to refuse any longer to be shlemihls. As she wrote in 1941, "One truth that is unfamiliar to the Jewish people, though they are beginning to learn it, is that you can only defend yourself as the person you are attacked as. A person attacked as a Jew cannot defend himself as an Englishman or Frenchman. The world would only conclude that he is simply not defending himself." That was why Arendt strongly urged the creation of a Jewish army, which would enable the Jews to hold up their heads as equals among the Allied powers.
What Arendt's Zionism lacked, however, was any positive content, any genuine interest in Judaism or Jewish history. This attitude was typical of the assimilated German Jews of her generation, a natural product of an upbringing where, as she recalled, "I did not know from my family that I was Jewish. . . . The word 'Jew' never came up when I was a small child." Arendt's Jewishness was constituted by anti-Semitism: "I first met up with it through anti-Semitic remarks . . . from children on the street. After that I was, so to speak, 'enlightened.' "
It stood to reason, then, that in 1948, when the State of Israel was established and the existential threat to the Jewish people had receded, Arendt rapidly disembarrassed herself of her Zionism. While she retained a lifelong interest in the fate of the Jewish state—"Any real catastrophe in Israel would affect me more deeply than almost anything else," she told Mary McCarthy—she had an equally strong distaste for its politics and for most of its citizens. Among the posthumous revelations that have done the most damage to Arendt's reputation are the letters that she wrote from Jerusalem in 1961, when she was attending the Eichmann trial. Her description of the crowd at the courthouse, in a letter to Jaspers, passes beyond condescension into outright racism: "On top, the judges, the best of German Jewry. Below them, the prosecuting attorneys, Galicians, but still Europeans. Everything is organized by a police force that gives me the creeps, speaks only Hebrew, and looks Arabic. Some downright brutal types among them. They would obey any order. And outside the doors, the oriental mob, as if one were in Istanbul or some other half-Asiatic country."
The venom of this description, like the undisguised pleasure that Arendt took in leaving Israel—"I have never before grasped the concrete meaning of 'relief' so clearly," she wrote at the end of a 1955 trip—suggests the great emotional forces at play. As she put down roots in New York City—she lived on the West Side of Manhattan until her death—and became a sought-after writer and lecturer, Arendt's ideas about self-respect, that Rahelian imperative, began to change. Now the solidarity she had once sought in Zionism began to appear not as a source of strength but as another evidence of weakness—a way of clinging to one's people because one was too weak to stand alone.
She described this phenomenon in a 1959 speech in Hamburg, where she had been awarded the Lessing Prize: "It is as if under the pressure of persecution the persecuted have moved so closely together that the interspace which we have called world . . . has simply disappeared. This produces a warmth of human relationships which may strike those who have had some experience with such groups as an almost physical phenomenon." But the price of that warmth was too high to pay: "In extreme cases, in which pariahdom has persisted for centuries, we can speak of real worldlessness. And worldlessness, alas, is always a form of barbarism." For a Jew to tell a German audience, less than fifteen years after the Holocaust, that Jews were barbarians was a shockingly effective means of reclaiming the isolation, the "interspace," that Arendt so urgently needed.
It was this refusal of solidarity, as much as any specific assertion, that led so many Jewish readers to react with fury to "Eichmann in Jerusalem" when it appeared, in five installments in this magazine, in 1963. Arendt's report from the trial of Adolf Eichmann, the chief bureaucrat and organizer of the Jewish genocide, remains one of the touchstones of American thinking about the Holocaust. But the anger that her work provoked among many Jews—according to the historian Peter Novick, she "became, for a time, American Jewish Public Enemy Number One"—has proved just as durable. At the time, Arendt's critics objected to her blanket condemnation of the Jews drafted to serve on the Judenräte—the Jewish Councils established by the Nazis to manage the ghettos—and to her apparently trivializing phrase about "the banality of evil."
Reading "Eichmann in Jerusalem" today, however, in the light of all we have since learned from and about Arendt, it is clear that these local issues were only the occasions for resentment, not the whole cause. That cause, once again, can be traced back to the "laboratory of Arendt's political thought," and to her own experience as a Jewish woman in Germany. What raised Arendt's Jewish consciousness was her recognition of Jewish helplessness, both psychological and political. But if she responded to that helplessness with an insistence on self-help, she found it hard to avoid condemning those Jews who, in her view, did not or could not help themselves. Rahel was the first of these, the members of the Judenräte the last. "To a Jew this role of the Jewish leaders in the destruction of their own people is undoubtedly the darkest chapter of the whole dark story," she wrote.
Arendt's need to distance herself from Jews, and especially from Jewish victims, accounts for the ironic tone that has always struck readers of "Eichmann in Jerusalem." Arendt's attitude toward Eichmann himself is simply dismissive: her whole characterization of him as a banal bureaucrat, oblivious of the evil he does, is a way of asserting his human and intellectual inferiority. What inflames Arendt, on the other hand, is any attempt by the Jewish witnesses to draw attention to what they suffered. "I hate, am afraid of pity, always have been," she once told McCarthy, and she mocked anything that appeared to her to be an appeal for pity. "The gist of the background witnesses' testimony about conditions in the Polish ghettos, about procedures in the various death camps, about forced labor, and, generally, the attempt to exterminate through labor, was never in dispute," she wrote irritably; "on the contrary there was hardly anything in what they told that had not been known before." She complained that "the basic mistake" of the trial was that "the Jews want to pour out their sorrow to the world"—though "of course," she granted, "they have suffered more than Eichmann has."
In this and many other places, Arendt's critics saw that the pride she so effortfully cultivated carried shame as its necessary obverse. This shame is what led a critic like Gershom Scholem—whose upbringing was similar to Arendt's but who left Germany for Palestine and took a Hebrew name—to accuse her of lacking "love of the Jewish people." It is a measure of Arendt's toughness, and of her self-knowledge, that she acknowledged the charge, in a deeply revealing letter collected in "The Jewish Writings": "You are quite right—I am not moved by any 'love' of this sort. . . . I have never in my life 'loved' any people or collective. . . . I indeed love 'only' my friends and the only kind of love I know of and believe in is the love of persons."
The Heidegger correspondence confirms that Arendt lived this principle. In 1950, seventeen years after they had last communicated, Arendt and Heidegger met again, when she went to Germany to help track down stolen Jewish cultural treasures. At times, she had been publicly critical of Heidegger's behavior during his rectorship and afterward, but the renewal of their ties banished all her suspicions. "This evening and this morning are the confirmation of an entire life," she wrote to him after their meeting. For the next two years, their love enjoyed a brief afterlife, as Heidegger wrote poems about her and told her things like "I wish I could run the five-fingered comb through your frizzy hair." Even when the jealousy of Heidegger's wife, Elfriede, brought this quasi-romance to an end, Arendt kept in touch with her old teacher. In the last years of his life, she helped get his work translated in America.
Arendt's unqualified support of Heidegger was important in establishing the convenient myth that his Nazi involvement had been, as she put it, a case of an unworldly man getting carried away by politics, and thus "finally a matter of indifference." Not until the past decade have scholars in Germany and America demolished this notion, by tracing the profound affinities between Heidegger's thought and his reactionary milieu. It is a task that Arendt herself was equipped to perform, but her loyalty to Heidegger, and to the German tradition he represented, made it impossible.
Arendt's experience at the Eichmann trial bolstered the belief that defines her political philosophy: that there must be a rigorous separation between love, which we can experience only privately, and respect, which we earn in and require for our public lives. If it is true that, as Arendt once observed, "in the works of a great writer we can almost always find a consistent metaphor peculiar to him alone in which his whole work seems to come to a focus," then her thought is certainly focussed on the image of distance or separation. A dignified individual existence, she believes, requires distance from others, the "interspace" that she described in the Hamburg speech. Compassion is dangerous, in her view, because "not unlike love," it "abolishes the distance, the in-between which always exists in human intercourse." What preserves that distance, on the other hand, is pride—the pride of equals that she finds exemplified in the political realm, the "public space."
This view of politics may help explain why, in "The Human Condition" and "On Revolution," Arendt exalts it as the highest of human activities. Politics, in her work, is not really an empirical concept—an affair of elections and legislation, still less of tax policy or Social Security reform. Everything having to do with economics, in fact, Arendt prefers to exclude from her definition of politics, relegating it to the nebulous category of "the social." Real politics is found, rather, in the deliberations of the Founders in Philadelphia, or the debates of the Athenians in their assembly. It is an affair of exceptionally talented individuals—people not unlike Hannah Arendt—arguing with one another under conditions of equality and mutual respect.
Still more revealing than Arendt's definition of politics is her explanation of why people are drawn to it in the first place. We do not enter the political world to pursue justice or to create a better world. No, human beings love politics because they love to excel, and a political career is the best way to win the world's respect. In ancient Greece, she writes, "the polis was permeated by a fiercely agonal spirit, where everybody had constantly to distinguish himself from all others, to show through unique deeds or achievements that he was the best of all. The public realm, in other words, was reserved for individuality; it was the only place where men could show who they really and inexchangeably were." Arendt recognizes that most of the people of Athens, including all women and slaves, were shut out from this arena, but she accepts that her kind of politics is necessarily an aristocratic pursuit. In yet another instance of her favorite metaphor, she defends "the bitter need of the few to protect themselves against the many, or rather to protect the island of freedom they have come to inhabit against the surrounding sea of necessity."
Nothing could be more characteristic of Arendt than the longing for respect and recognition that shines through these seemingly abstract arguments. All her experiences as a woman and as a Jew, all the hard wisdom she learned from Heidegger and from Rahel, goes into her yearning for the masculine, aristocratic freedom of the Greek polis. (Richard Wolin, one of Arendt's sharpest contemporary critics, has called this yearning "polis envy.") At times, Arendt's love of the public and the political, and her fear of the private and the psychological, becomes almost neurotically intense. As she wrote to McCarthy, "the inner turmoil of the self, its shapelessness," must be kept under strict quarantine: "It is no less indecent, unfit to appear, than our digestive apparatus, or else our inner organs, which also are hidden from visibility by the skin."
This rejection of inwardness, so constant in Arendt's work, from "Rahel Varnhagen" on, is the key to what is most valuable in her legacy, and also what is most questionable. No one has argued more forcefully than Arendt that to deprive human beings of their public, political identity is to deprive them of their humanity—and not just metaphorically. In "The Origins of Totalitarianism," she points out that the first step in the Nazis' destruction of the Jews was to make them stateless, in the knowledge that people with no stake in a political community have no claim on the protection of its laws.
This is the insight that makes Arendt a thinker for our time, when failed states have again and again become the settings for mass murder. She reveals with remorseless logic why emotional appeals to "human rights" or "the international community" so often prove impotent in the face of a humanitarian crisis. "The Rights of Man, after all, had been defined as 'inalienable' because they were supposed to be independent of all governments," she writes in "Origins," "but it turned out that the moment human beings lacked their own government and had to fall back upon their minimum rights, no authority was left to protect them and no institution was willing to guarantee them." This is exactly what happened in Yugoslavia and Rwanda, and what is happening now in Darfur. Genocide is a political problem, Arendt insists, and it can be solved only politically.
Yet the supreme value that Arendt places on individual pride and aristocratic distance, on intellect and excellence, also sharply restricts the human understanding that must be the basis for any confrontation with political evil, especially the evil of the Holocaust. Too much of life and too many kinds of people are excluded from Arendt's sympathy, which she could freely give only to those as strong as she was. If, as she wrote, "it is the desire to excel which makes men love the world," then our love for the world actually makes it harder for us to love the people who inhabit it. This is the dilemma that runs through all Arendt's writing, demonstrating that what she observed about Marx is true of her as well: "Such fundamental and flagrant contradictions rarely occur in second-rate writers; in the work of the great authors they lead into the very center of their work." ♦


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The all-night showdown over whether to allow child-care providers and home-care workers to vote on unionization turned out to be just the first act.
The Minnesota House took up the bill in the wee hours of the Saturday night-Sunday morning session and debated it for about five hours. The bill was then laid on the table and the House adjourned until noon Sunday.
The sponsor, Rep. Michael Nelson, DFL-Brooklyn Park, said the when the House returns, it will take up whatever budget bills are ready for final action.
The debate on the unionization bill will resume at some point Sunday or Monday, he said. It can be taken up for further discussion at any time. The session must end by midnight Monday.
Nelson was cheered by union activists as he left the chamber early Sunday. He said he was able to defeat all hostile amendments and continues to hope he can pass the bill and send it to Gov. Mark Dayton, who supports it.
"The plan right now is to go home and get some sleep," Nelson said after the all-nighter. "We'll resume it some time tomorrow. We've got budget bills that will be coming forward, that we've gotten back from the Senate. We'll take the priorities up first, take care of the priorities for the state of Minnesota, get our budget passed.
"At that time, when we can, we'll take up this bill again."
Asked if he could pass the bill, Nelson said, "I hope so. I wouldn't do all this work if I didn't think so."
The bill stirred the Senate to a 17-hour debate last week that broke records for length. The Senate passed the bill by only three votes.
Both sides had members outside the House chambers throughout the all-night debate, and said they would return Sunday afternoon.
Earlier on Saturday the House passed the K-12 education and environment-agriculture funding bills, while the Senate passed the environment-agriculture bills. Among budget bills still to be acted on are transportation finance, state government finance and taxes.
In the unionization bill, opposition has focused on the child-care portion because providers run their own small, private businesses, and the application of the union model to such work is a stretch even for some Democrats.
Based on years of field organizing by two unions – the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, or AFSCME, and the Service Employees International Union, or SEIU – the bill would allow union votes among two groups: In home family child care providers, both licensed and unlicensed, who care for children receiving a state subsidy; and Personal Care Assistants, or PCAs, who are employed by the person they care for, generally a relative, and who also work in the home.
Estimates of the total number of workers vary. The unions estimate the total for both groups at 21,000. The state Department of Human Services says the number of child-care providers who would be affected at 12,712 – a number that does not include affect PCAs.

subset: commoncrawl


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Deepak Chopra: What Are You Hungry for?
Deepak Chopra: What Are You Hungry for? Previous Broadcasts
KQED Plus: Sat, Aug 2, 2014 -- 10:00 AM
Features world-renowned health expert, best-selling author and educator Deepak Chopra, M.D. In this program, Dr. Chopra returns to his medical roots and lectures on the scientific, behavioral and medical basis of hunger in all its manifestations and the healthy ways to fulfill it.
Repeat Broadcasts:
- KQED 9: Thu, Aug 28, 2014 -- 1:00 PM


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Christian Dior Fall 2010: Libertine Ladies and Anna Wintour's Last Show This Paris Fashion Week
Christian Dior Fall 2010: Libertine Ladies and Anna Wintour's Last Show This Paris Fashion Week
>> With the flashing lights and soundtrack of a thunderstorm, plus thumping hoofbeats and the braying of a horse, the Dior show was off this morning. The theme? "The Seduction of the Libertine," based on the 17th century Earl of Rochester — who John Galliano came out dressed like at the end, in poet's shirt and jodhpurs tucked into riding boots — and his courtesans.
"This season Dior takes up the heroic spirit of French romanticism and Mr. Dior's beloved English riding tweeds. I was inspired by the drape, line and cut as well as the characters of the era. I wanted to create a new luxury, and new lover, in the romance of the seductive libertine of Dior," Galliano explained backstage.
Anna Dello Russo took in the cape coats and printed chiffon dresses stomping by on Coco Rocha, Jessica Stam, Chanel Iman, Ana Beatriz Barros, and Karlie Kloss while sitting on the floor, and the show appeared to mark Anna Wintour's last this Paris Fashion Week — she was nowhere to be seen later at Lanvin.


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Omaha Public Schools resource for
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Happy Friday everyone! Welcome to Day 3 of Sew it All TV's 13 Days of Giveaways to celebrate Season 5 airing on PBS beginning March 2nd! We're giving away a prize a day for the next 10 days, so stick around.
Thank you everyone for participating in yesterdays giveaway. The roll of Sulky stabilizer goes to Diane Cloyd! Congrats Diane, please email email@example.com with your mailing address to receive your prize! Diane's favorite episode from Season 4 was Pattern-Free Purse, by Ellen March. Good choice, Diane, that was a really good episode.
Today we're giving away the current issue of each of our titles to TWO lucky winners! You get the latest issues of Sew News magazine, Creative Machine Embroidery, and Volume 5 of Sew it All magazine!
Sew it All TV host Ellen March is the Editor-in-Chief of all 3 titles. Check out her episode, "Pattern-Free Purse" and get the instructions to draft your own pattern and make a lined corduroy purse.
To enter to win this prize package, answer the following question in the comment section below, "Do you read any of Ellen's three magazines?"
Check out the websites (sewnews.com, cmemag.com, sewitallmag.com) for more information on each title and to sign up for our newsletters, where you'll get info on upcoming issues and special subscription offers!
Remember, every day you enter into a giveaway, you'll also be entered to win the GRAND PRIZE, Sew it All TV Season 4 on DVD! So keep entering!
TWO lucky winners will be announced on Monday, along with the Day 4 prize! Have a fantastic weekend!


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So far the POTRBLOG team has spent approximately $2,300 for professional gamma spectrometry lab services to test key food products which may give insight into the ongoing buildup of Fukushima radioactivity in North America. We thank those who have supported this effort via donations, as of today we have received approximately $1,000 in donations to help offset these expensive tests. Anyone who has donated may email us to request copies of the lab reports (with personal information redacted).
In the most recent lab test we submitted wild black walnuts harvested from a local playground area; these trees reside in a usually muddy/swampy small bottom land area. As such, these black walnuts may make for good indicators of bio-available radioactive contamination. Our own Geiger counter tests indicated that these Walnuts were radioactive at 150% over background radiation (580 counts vs 376 counts), hence we sent these off to the professional lab for further testing.
On the good news side, heavier radioactive man made isotopes such as Cs-134/ 137 were not detected by the lab. This is good news as previously we had detected Fukushima Cesium 137 in a 2011 ground beef sample. On the negative side, the Black Walnuts tested positive for lighter weight radioactive Be-7 at 4 Bq/Kg.
Be-7 is lighter than both Nitrogen and Oxygen, it is formed via spallation when Neutrons and/or Protons slam into Nitrogen / Oxygen atoms. One possible source for the creation of Be-7 is the interaction between Fukushima Corium and the liquid (or gaseous) Nitrogen being pumped into the Fukushima 'containment'. The other possible source is from Solar Coronal Mass Ejections impacting Earth's atmosphere. The former the Nuclear Industry will likely never ever mention.
The later is a well known phenomena, and was heavily mentioned as a cause of Be-7 detections during the initial phase of the ongoing Fukushima disastor;
In the case of our Missouri Black Walnuts, we cannot rule out Fukushima as a source, but we give more credence to CME production as the majority source. Overall, as the results of our tests, we have lowered our risk mitigation threshold for MIDWEST produce grown prior to December 2012. Our risk mitigation threshold remains high for any and all food products from Canada and those food products west of the Sierra Nevada and Cascade mountains.
Our risk mitigation lowering is based on the Midwest drought and the negative bio-available detections since the initial phase of the ongoing catastrophe. On the other hand, every rain storm once again raises the long term bio-accumulation risk.
In possible future tests, the next item we would like to have tested in the professional Gamma Spectrometry lab is a Florida Key's Coconut which fell from the tree in July 2011. We believe this coconut will provide insight into the southerly range of the initial radioactive Cesium plume from Fukushima. If you would like to make this test happen please donate at the link below.
Marley and Me - This dog needed a prong collar. That pretty much sums up the whole book. "Marley and Me", by John Grogan, is not exactly a book of profound revelation, i...
10 years ago


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BL-BI-526 254nm Orange
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Friday Report: He's a rebel
Fraser, CO Colorado
Phil Spector has been in a California state prison for the last four years with 15 to go for the 2nd degree murder of Lana Clarkson. His 45 square-foot cell is a considerable downturn from his 30-room Pyrenees Castle overlooking Alhambra, east of Hollywood.
Last week, there was an HBO docudrama on Spector's murder trial starring Al Pacino as Phil. Abandoning reality, the TV movie was billed as a "work of fiction," arguing that the true killer was a one-armed man who had somehow disappeared off the face of the earth. No, actually, the movie insinuated that his conviction was motivated by an overzealous LAPD, bitter that O.J. Simpson slipped through their fingers and eager for a celebrity arrest. The movie disregarded the mountain of evidence that convicted Spector.
I have to disclaim that I did not actually watch the HBO movie. Our television died in 2007 and I keep forgetting to do something about it. Everything I know about the HBO movie is taken from Pope Francis' infallible twitter review.
By 1958, he was a regular fixture in Hollywood recording studios. His band, The Teddy Bears, raised enough money for a few hours of studio time and recorded "To Know Him Is to Love Him." The song shot instantly to number one and sold a million copies that year.
In the 1969 movie, Easy Rider, Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper and Jack Nicholson are sittin' 'round the campfire blowing through a pound of cocaine they bought from . . . Phil Spector. Spector had a wild-haired, unaccredited role as the pusher man in Hopper's epic film. A shape of things to come.
Spector quickly switched from performing to producing and for the next two decades he absolutely dominated Rock and Roll. He produced chart-topping records for the Ramones, the Beatles, the Crystals, Ben E. King, Ike and Tina Turner, the Drifters and dozens more with his unique Wall of Sound techniques, recording through dozens of microphones placed throughout the band. His labels were scorching and all the music of the '60s and early 70s was his. Or tried desperately to sound like it.
There were, however, early signs that Spector might be having personal problems, like the time he broke into Lennon's recording session waving a gun and stole all the studio tapes for an album he himself was producing. Later he held the Ramones at gunpoint and forced them to play the same opening chord for eight hours. Johnny Ramone later characterized Spector as a little man with 5-inch Cuban lifts, wigs, and four guns.
In spite of living a life overflowing with sex and drugs, swamped in Rock and Roll, it is no overstatement to say that Phil Spector had more influence on American music than anyone else, ever. And if you add his heavy contribution to the break-up of the Beatles, you could probably add Europe as well.
Spector was deservedly inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1989. At the ceremony, Spector arrived with three heavily and very visibly armed bodyguards. He stumbled to the podium, made a rambling incoherent acceptance speech and fell off the stage. His career spanned Dion and the Belmont's to Celine Dion.
In September of 2006 he married a 26 year-old aspiring swimsuit model. That has nothing to do with anything, I'm just jealous.
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BALTIMORE, Jan. 19 (UPI) -- Hall of Fame manager Earl Weaver, who took Baltimore to four World Series, died of a heart attack while on a cruise, the team said Saturday. He was 82.
Weaver managed the Orioles from 1968-1982 and in 1985-1986. His team won the World Series in 1970.
"Earl Weaver stands alone as the greatest manager in the history of the Orioles organization and one of the greatest in the history of baseball," Orioles managing partner Peter Angelos said in a written statement. "This is a sad day for everyone who knew him and for all Orioles fans."
Weaver was participating in an off-season cruise for Orioles fans when he was stricken by an apparent heart attack. He had been scheduled to take part in the team's annual Fan Fest in Baltimore Saturday, The Baltimore Sun said.
"It's a sad time, but at the same time, Earl would say I hope it won't mess up FanFest," Orioles Manager Buck Showalter told fans. "Every time I look at an Oriole now, it's going to be missing a feather without Earl."
Funeral arrangements were pending.
Weaver racked up a 1,480-1,060 record with the Orioles and managed Baltimore legends such as Jim Palmer, Cal Ripken, Brooks Robinson, Frank Robinson and Eddie Murray. With Weaver as their skipper, the Orioles won six division titles and four pennants, along with the series title. He was elected to the Hall of Fame in 1996.
His success on the field was matched by his outsized on-field persona, which included volcanic eruptions aimed at umpires whose calls had irked him. The Sun said Weaver once said he wanted his epitaph to read, "The sorest loser that ever lived."
He was ranked first among managers with an average of 94.3 victories per season, and his .583 winning percentage was 10th among all managers.
"I'm very humble to go into the Hall of Fame, where there are four Baltimore Orioles whom I managed, Brooks Robinson, Frank Robinson, Reggie Jackson and the man I had more arguments with than with my wife, Marianne, Jim Palmer," said Weaver. "I'm proud of my record and proud that I was even considered for election and I proud that I spent my entire career in one city Baltimore. I'm proud the wonderful fans of Baltimore kept me around."
Weaver spent 20 years in the minor leagues as a player and manager and never was a player in the major leagues. He became the Orioles manager in 1968 when Hank Bauer was fired during the all-star break, and managed in the days before the club drew large crowds or paid big salaries. His last season was in 1982.
He was the Orioles manager who started Ripken at third base as a rookie then moved him to shortstop. Despite Ripken's less-than-spectacular rookie start 4 for 55 and a batting average of .177 Weaver constantly assured the young player that he would not be sent back to the minors. When Ripken became the club's shortstop, he started at the position for more than 13 years, beating Lou Gehrig's consecutive game record in 1995.
Weaver was only the 13th manager to get into the Hall of Fame, joining legends Walter Alston and Casey Stengel. He spent all of 17 seasons with the Orioles and had only a single losing season in 1986 when the club's farm system collapsed.
Known among his players for his habit of cussing them out loudly and angrily whenever he felt they had miscued or played badly, Weaver argued often with umpires over errant calls and was ejected more than any other manager. At his induction, however, he praised the game's umpires and said," They made a million calls when I was there and, except for the 91 or 92 times I disagreed, they got them right."
Weaver was born Aug. 14, 1930, in St. Louis, the son of Earl Milton and Ethel Weaver. His second marriage was to Marianne Osgood on Sept. 16, 1964. He had three children by a previous marriage and another child with his second wife.


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Thursday, August 4, 2011
World of Diablo
You see, Diablo 3 is not actually the successor to Diablo 2. No, it is, in fact, World of Diablo. Now it all makes sense: the online-only DRM, the geographic restrictions, even the cash auction house. It's not an RPG, but an MMORPG. You don't pay a subscription but Blizzard does expect to turn a little profit on the side by capitalizing on this auction house. I'm sure they have other ideas on how to make even more money. Hey, I'm ok with that, as long as it doesn't impact the game.
Seeing that the game will be locked, it would have been nice if it were free-to-play. But again, I wasn't expecting that and I don't mind paying for a quality product. In fact, I was desperate for the chance to give Blizzard my money. Alas, it wasn't meant to happen.
Let me explain once again why this "stunt" that Blizzard is pulling is such a bad thing for certain people. As a case study, I will use myself. I'm European, living in the US. I might stay here for the rest of my life but there's also a strong possibility that I will go back to Europe in a couple of years.
Let's leave aside the fact that an always-online game that you want to play in single player mode is a bad idea. I will return to this point later.
Diablo 3's restrictive DRM means that:
1) I won't be able to play the game in Europe, since it is restricted to US servers.
2) If I can choose to play on US servers, by some miracle, I'm sure the lag will be pretty bad. At the very least, it won't be similar to playing in the same geographical region.
3) Even if 2) is true, meaning that I will be able to play on US servers, my friends in Europe will all have the EU version of the game. Which means... you guessed it, I won't be able to play D3 with them at our annual week-long LAN fest. Yes, we used to have these every year (they still do) and the 5 of us would play mostly... Diablo 2 for the entire week, leveling our characters from 1 to 80, subsisting on steak, wine and beer, no wives or girlfriends to distract us.
I can hear some of you saying "Wait, you're complaining about having to pay an extra $60 in the event that you move to Europe?" Well, yeah, for some more reasons:
4) I expect to buy a (SINGLE PLAYER) game once and be able to play it anywhere in the world.
5) Blizzard is planning at least 2 expansions to this game, meaning that it won't be "just" $60. Each expansion will cost the usual $40 or so, meaning that I have the potential of paying up to $150 all over again, thanks to their DRM scheme.
6) If you think that $60 is no big deal, I'll be happy to accept your $60 and I'll stop bitching instantly.
If all these reasons are still not enough, here's another one:
7) Let's say I can get over all of the above and I'm even willing to buy the game twice, just so I can play it in another country (in SINGLE PLAYER mode). BUT, all my characters will be stuck on the US server and lost forever (unless I return to the US). Has anyone even considered the implications of that? All my blood and tears and hard work leveling those characters and equipping them will be for naught and I would have to start from scratch when I go back to Europe. Just imagine if you were forced to leave all your WoW characters behind, the ones you spent a few years on. You wouldn't like that a lot, would you? But Diablo should not have been an MMO in the first place!
I should have seen this coming, what with StarCraft 2 pulling the same bullshit. But I never imagined that D3 would follow the same damn path. The devs were careful not to spill the beans on this for 3 years but all the while they gave the impression that Diablo 3 would definitely have a single player mode. While some of us suckers took this to mean that it will be playable offline, without having to go through Bnet, I guess the joke was on us.
Now here's some more food for thought: I'm sure that if Blizzard had announced, in addition to the triple bombshell, that not only Diablo 3 would be exclusively online but you'd have to pay a monthly subscription to play it, a lot more people would have bitched about it but in the end most of them would have still bought it. In fact, now that I think about it, I believe that Blizzard has really lost an opportunity to further monetize on this, seeing that D3 is now an MMO.
So once again, why is online-only SINGLE PLAYER a very bad (dare I say retarded) idea, even for those of us who have access to high-speed broadband? Here's a bunch of reasons:
- I'll start with the usual: if you're on a plane, on a beach, in a cabin in the mountains or anywhere else where there's no internet access, guess what: you can't play
- your internet goes down: you can't play
- your router or modem drops the connection or resets: you get disconnected
- a storm in the area knocks down your cable: you can't play
- Blizzard goes out of business (seems unlikely but it can happen): you can't play
- 10-20 years from now, you can still play Diablo 2 but chances are you won't be playing Diablo 3
- an important one: remember when Ubisoft/Sony/others were DDOSed? That can happen just as easily to Blizzard. Guess what: you can't play your SINGLE PLAYER game if something like that occurs.
But it's no big deal if you can't play your game a day or two right? I say it is, because it didn't have to be like that. All we ever wanted from Diablo 3 was a modern graphics engine and some tweaked skills and classes. The fan community would have been happy. I'm not against change and progress but I do oppose change which doesn't make sense and/or hurts the paying customer.
The way things are looking right now, I will hang on to my money and see how things evolve. I want to play this game badly. For those who've waited 10 years for it, you all know how it can be. But I don't want to pay twice for it, just because Blizzard decided to tighten their grip on how people can enjoy this game.
In my previous post I mentioned piracy. Let me make one thing clear. I don't advocate piracy. Blizzard's games would be the last things in the world that I would pirate, even if I supported it. Yet, I do hope Diablo 3 will be cracked by some enterprising individuals, just to stick it to Blizzard. I hope they enable the game to be played in single player mode, offline, and perhaps even patch in some form of LAN. Personally I won't touch this cracked version because I don't want to but I hope it will send a message to Blizzard that players are deserving of some respect when their money is on the line and if that respect is not forthcoming, the company doesn't deserve any in return.
One thing is certain: the genie is out of the bottle. Blizzard has chosen the dark path and it will stick to it forevermore. There's no turning back at this point and we won't be seeing any more offline games from them.
I might be overreacting. I am hot blooded, after all. Who knows, it might turn out that I can play my US version in Europe, with my friends, after all. But I'm not counting on that. Until then, I'm watching from the sidelines.
9 comments:
- Sealskjaer said...
I'm tipping that to play on a different region than the one you originally selected will take a paid transfer like the server transfers in Wow. Gotta keep the bank balance ticking over after all.
- August 6, 2011 at 9:33 PM
- Darth Solo said...
Hmm, maybe that wouldn't be too bad, though it looks like a ripoff since I should be able to play anywhere in the world...
Anyway, WoW doesn't allow you to play in another region than the one your game is registered in, even if you wanted to pay.
- August 8, 2011 at 7:23 AM
I am currently in a lovely Greek island for my holidays and I-ve just learned from your blog the latest -puke- news about Diablo III.
#Online only# is what made me feel very bad. I was 100% sure to buy the game because I loved the SINGLE PLAYER old chapters.
Online only is a NO NO for me. Too bad, damnit.
- August 9, 2011 at 10:18 AM
- Darth Solo said...
Well, I hope you will enjoy your Greek vacation! It really is sad. A lot of people will skip game thanks to this intentional oversight.
- August 9, 2011 at 9:33 PM
I just purchased one shiny,red Alfa Romeo MiTo in Italy, and I was expecting to import it and drive it here in the US. It seems it is going to cost me quite a bit of money for transportation AND for required modifications to the car. What does this have to do with Diablo 3? Not much, maybe.
- August 10, 2011 at 12:56 PM
- Darth Solo said...
@Anonymous umm... ooook... I can't say I'm a big fan on the Alfa MiTo but why didn't you find out what the costs are before buying it? Besides, it's a gamble to import a car which doesn't have a dealership network in the US. But that's just my opinion. If it makes you happy, go for it, by all means.
- August 10, 2011 at 8:14 PM
Maybe Diablo 2 came at just the right time for you and became your perfect game and no other Diablo title will ever be able to live up to that. I loved Fallout 2 and was not that happy with Fallout 3 so I sort of understand your disappointment. But I just wonder if you should you have invested so much hope in one game.
- August 11, 2011 at 2:14 AM
- Tesh said...
Online only makes sense for those participating in the RMT market.
...but I still detest it. There should be an offline mode, even if there's a clear caveat that characters created thusly can't migrate to "live" servers.
As it is, Torchlight 2 will be getting my money. Blizzard will make plenty off of other people, just not me.
- August 11, 2011 at 11:13 AM
- Darth Solo said...
@Anonymous I played Diablo 1 first, with its unofficial Hellfire expansion, before Diablo 2. So I spent at least 10 years of my life playing the Diablo series. To me, there hasn't been a game that quite compares to Diablo. That's why I had high hopes for D3.
As for Fallout, I loved both 1&2 but hated 3.
@Tesh there should be, I agree. Having more choices is always better than having less. I'm a lot more pissed that it doesn't have an offline mode at all than the fact that multiplayer is online only. Though it would have been very nice of them to include LAN.
As for Torchlight, I really didn't like the first one. I doubt the second one will be better in terms of feel, but I hope they have a demo so I can try before I buy.
- August 12, 2011 at 7:44 PM


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Don't Bite Me Patch Natural Insect Repellant - 5 Patches
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It is understood that the SPFL have agreed extensive changes to the format of the Challenge Cup for the 2016/17 season.
U20s teams from the Premiership sides will join the top two sides from the Welsh and Northern Irish leagues in what was once a competition solely for the Scottish lower leagues and Highland and Lowland leagues.
TV deals are in place for all three countries to cover the competition's latter stages with a new sponsorship deal set to be announced in due course.
Premiership U20s sides will be in the competition from the opening round while the Champions and runners-up from Wales and Northern Ireland enter in the fourth round.
The full structure will be as follows:-
First round: 12 Premiership U20s, teams placed 3-10 in League Two as well as 4 Highland League and 4 Lowland League teams
Second round: 14 winners from round one, teams placed 1 and 2 in League Two and teams placed 3-10 in League One
Third round: 12 winners from round two, 10 Championship clubs, teams 1 and 2 in League One
Fourth round: 12 winners from round three, 2 teams from Northern Ireland, 2 teams from Wales


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Friday, 23 July 2010
The launch of Going Going Bike...
What a good idea! An (ebay like) auction site dedicated to bikes and bike accessories. Going Going Bike launched this week and to celebrate I was invited to launch party at Look Mum No hands. It was a great evening and I think the beginning of a successful business venture for the founders, James and Andrew.
Instead of the predictable drinks and chat, they had the rather fun idea to make the longest ever bike daisy chain. Not a serious record breaking challenge but it definitely added a buzz to the evening.
I have often wondered how many unused bikes there are in London. The Going Going Bike team have unearthed some statistics on the matter and apparently there are more than 1.5million unused bikes in London, with 200,000 abandoned in gardens – that's almost enough bikes to make a line from London to Istanbul!
So if you do have an old bike, in need of some love. Dust it off, take a few snaps and get it up on Going Going Bike. Or if you are after a second hand bike yourself get bidding. I have already seen a rather nice ladies Peugeot on there.
Bike buddies - James, Andrew, myself and the lovely Andreas from The London Cyclists
Labels: Cyclechic Warriors
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I have been working with more start-ups and smaller businesses who have been trying to harness inbound marketing using press releases as well as other strategies. News releases still carry a lot of weight with search engines for SEO, and they can be useful for blog fodder and to feed social media channels. However, not every press release is newsworthy, although they really should be.
In the drive to promote search engine visibility, companies, or more specifically the marketing executives within those companies, have forgotten the first rule of press release writing; ask yourself, "Is it news?"
Recently I have been receiving more requests for non-news news releases, such as having a "cool" product or adding a new social video to your website. While these types of events may have great import to your company, you have to ask yourself if anyone outside the organization will find the news of interest. If not, it ain't news.
Inbound marketing is driven by good content, which means good storytelling. There are any number of formats you can use to tell a good story: a case study, blog post, opinion piece, "how to" article, etc. And while all press releases should tell a good story, not all stories make worthy press releases. Here are just some of the criteria that journalists use to determine news value:
1. Timeliness – It it's now, it's news. Events that are interesting and happening now are newsworthy. When you release a new product, for example, it's newsworthy the day you release the product, not two months later.
2. Something new – A new approach, a new standard, a new product, a new hire, a new headquarters; these are all newsworthy because they are new.
2. Conflict – Industry conflict or the fact you or your company takes a stand that is the polar opposite of an industry leader could be newsworthy.
3. David vs. Goliath – I hear a lot of clients say they want a David and Goliath story, where they want to take on the big guys and do something they can't. In the minds of the media, the David vs. Goliath story usually takes the form of fighting for the underdog. Reporters often see themselves as protectors of the truth, and the voice of the disenfranchised, so David needs to be wronged by Goliath to make the story newsworthy. If you are looking for a B2B David-and-Goliath story, then you need to prove that you did something significant that the big competitors could not.
4. Statistics – Reporters love statistics, particularly if they highlight a trend or shed light on a hot industry topic. If you have statistics that demonstrate market or thought leadership, or make a case for your market strategy, a news release is a good way to get the word out.
5. Milestones – For public companies, industry milestones such as mergers, earnings, etc., need to be disclosed to the market, and press releases are a good way to do that. For private companies, sharing insight about new customers, earnings, and business operations make you look like a public company, and often get published.
6. Something that impacts your world – If the news has an impact on your customers or industry, then it is press release-worthy. For example, a new industry standard, or a company acquisition, or even a webinar with insights about what the future might hold will be of interest to someone out there, and so it's worth disclosing.
There are a number of other events that reporters love to cover, but most of them involve scandals, disasters, and bad news that you wouldn't want to package in a news announcement (although you should be prepared with a crisis communications plan).
Remember that people don't share sales pitches, but they do share stories. Make sure your news release has a story worth hearing and worth sharing.


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Applying is easy and you can get started online.
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Your support ensures that future church leaders can pursue their call to ministry today.
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Posted by Contextual Learning on Wednesday, August 01, 2012 12:08 AM
Many of you are coming down to the wire on your internships. We trust that you are working to submit your final evaluations. Remember that, while all of the reports and evaluations can be done online, we need to have hard copies of the last pages of the evaluations with the proper signatures on them! Your internship is not complete until we have those signatures!
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The Linux Terminal Server Project adds thin-client support to Linux servers. LTSP is a flexible, cost effective solution that is empowering schools, businesses, and organizations all over the world to easily install and deploy desktop workstations. A growing number of Linux distributions include LTSP out-of-the-box.
These computers need to be fat clients. They will be used for stuff like Second Life, America's Army, etc.-tinjaw (October 23, 2009, 06:10 PM)
And thanks for reminding me about Microsoft's new AV product. I had forgotten about it.-tinjaw (October 24, 2009, 06:03 AM)
And thanks for reminding me about Microsoft's new AV product. I had forgotten about it.-tinjaw (October 24, 2009, 06:03 AM)Just check the EULA very carefully. I wouldn't be surprised if MS would insist that in your situation their corporate product be used.-Innuendo (October 24, 2009, 09:29 AM)
Why Use Comodo Endpoint Security Manager?Comodo Endpoint Security Manager (CESM) provides maximum IT security with minimum IT expense. CESM allows you to centrally and remotely manage the desktop security of dozens to thousands of networked PC's. CESM includes Comodo's award winning firewall and antivirus with Default Deny Protection™ that stops zero-day malware threats and Comodo Disk Encryption to secure business data. Deploying Comodo ESM will rapidly strengthen desktop security while centralized administration will immediately deliver significant operational cost benefits.
Page created in 0.028 seconds with 51 queries.


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You might have heard the rumors that Kansas City is about the receive the world's largest waterslide, but if you haven't seen the new drone-shot video.. you don't know how terrifying it's actually going to be.
The new ride, named, Verrückt, stands at 17 stories high (bigger than Niagara Falls!) and will send brave riders down the slide at 65 miles per hour (faster than my first car!). Did I mention that verrückt means "insane" in German? Because that's pretty much what this ride is going to be.
The world's tallest waterslide officially opens at the Schlitterbahn water park in Kansas City this Memorial Day. Good thing no one can see you sweat in the water.
Can't wait for Memorial Day? Try one of these heated, indoor waterparks near you... they're open year round!


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My dad has been telling Sadie for almost 2 years that he was going to get some chickens to raise on his little farm. Last week he said he was finally ready to bite the bullet and get a "few" chickens. Tonight at his birthday dinner, he informed us that he ordered 130 chickens! Now that is quite a bit more than "a few". (I was thinking he meant 7 or 8?!) And guess how one acquires chickens? Through the US postal service, of course. How cool is that? We can't wait to go and pick up 130 day-old chicks from the post office. It's all happening at the end of March. Aside from Miles' homecoming it's going to be the most highly anticipated event of the spring. So it's out with Papaw Johnny and in with Chicken John! Happy Birthday, Dad! We love you!
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DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. -- It had been 85 points races since Dale Earnhardt Jr. made it to Victory Lane.
The end of the drought finally came at Daytona International Speedway, in the famed No. 3 car, in race that honored his late father and stirred emotions to even the most stoic NASCAR fan.
Earnhardt raced to his first victory since 2008 on Friday night, driving a tribute car to his father in the Nationwide Series race. It was Earnhardt's first points win since his Sprint Cup Series victory at Michigan in 2008, and his first Nationwide win since Michigan in 2006.
His celebration was subdued.
"I was just relieved," he said. "Victory Lane's like when you're a little kid and you've got a tree house or you and your buddies got a clubhouse in the woods. That's what Victory Lane is to me, and I like going there. You miss it really bad, but you know it's there and you can get back there again if you try really hard.
"It's not gone, but it's very difficult to get into. Every time I win, I just soak it up like a sponge."
Earnhardt took the lead on pit road under caution with 26 laps to go Friday night in the Nationwide race. Running a No. 3 Chevrolet with a Wrangler paint scheme to honor his father's induction into the NASCAR Hall of Fame, Earnhardt brought his loyal fans to their feet for the final sprint to the checkered flag.
"I was so worried that I wasn't going to win, because nothing but winning was good enough," Earnhardt said. "If you didn't win, what a waste of time. I worked hard to try to win it, not only for Daddy, I am proud of him going into the Hall of Fame, and he would be proud of this, I'm sure.
"Just all his fans. He had so many great fans. Not just mine. This is for his fans. Hopefully, they enjoyed this."
Paul Menard's wreck with four laps to go put the outcome in jeopardy, and Earnhardt, the leader, decided not to pit under the caution. On old tires, he had to hold off Joey Logano and a slew of Cup regulars.
Tony Eury Jr., Earnhardt's cousin and crew chief, was overcome with emotion as Earnhardt crossed the finish line.
"We lost everything here," Eury said softly. "To come back with that number and do this, it means everything."
Dale Earnhardt was killed in a last-lap accident in the 2001 Daytona 500.
Earnhardt Jr. agreed to drive the No. 3, his father's famed number, with the Wrangler paint scheme that the elder Earnhardt made famous and drove to one of his seven Cup championships. The promotion celebrated last month's inaugural Hall of Fame induction ceremony and was a collaboration with Richard Childress, who owns the rights to the No. 3 and was Earnhardt's car owner, Earnhardt's widow, Teresa, and JR Motorsports.
"I was so worried that I wasn't going to win," Earnhardt said in Victory Lane. "Nothing but a win was good enough. It's emotional, I'm proud of myself, I'm proud of what I've done with this group. It was trying emotionally to put it together."
It was Earnhardt's third time driving the No. 3 since his father's death, and he said this week he wouldn't do it again -- which he reiterated from Victory Lane.
"This is it. No more 3 for me," he said.
Logano, who pushed Earnhardt on the final restart, finished second in a Joe Gibbs Racing Toyota and considered in the closing laps how unpopular beating Earnhardt would have been.
"I probably gained a lot of fans tonight by pushing the 3 to victory, but I'd much rather be in Victory Lane," Logano said. "It's cool to see the 3 in Victory Lane at Daytona. It's really neat. A lot of people thought they would never see that again."
Ricky Stenhouse Jr. was third in a Ford for Roush-Fenway Racing. Brad Keselowski was fourth in a revamped Dodge Challenger for Penske Racing, while Kevin Harvick -- the driver who replaced Earnhardt following his death -- was fifth in a Chevrolet from Kevin Harvick Inc.
Defending race winner Clint Bowyer was sixth and was followed by Kyle Busch and Ryan Newman. Brian Ickler and Steve Arpin, driving a JR Motorsports car, rounded out the top 10.
The race was the first of four this season for revamped Nationwide Series cars -- NASCAR's attempt to give the second-tier series its own identity. Ford brought back the Mustang and Dodge rolled out a Challenger, while Toyota stuck with its Camry and Chevrolet an Impala. The cars will be fully integrated in 2011.


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I'm looking for...
Shepherd's Rest is a converted cosy one bedroomed cottage. It adjoins the main farmhouse, dating back to 1650, set on a working sheep farm in the conservation village of Burton Overy in the south Leicestershire countryside.
Accommodation is all on the ground floor which keeps beautifully warm in the winter and cool in the summer. Linen, towels, electricity and logs for the wood burner are all included in the price. Also a welcome basket is provided which includes homemade bread and preservatives.
Credit cards not accepted. Children welcome from any age.
Search availability for Shepherds Rest Cottage and book online
Manor Farm Back Lane,
Burton Overy,
- Children welcome
- Radio
- Television
- Ironing facilities
- Private parking
- Dogs/pets NOT accepted
- Building of historical interest
- Central heating
- Laundry facilities
- Microwave cooker
- Linen provided
- Working farm
- WiFi or internet access
- DVD player
- CD player
- Hairdryer
- Real log/coal fires
- Barbecue
- Washing machine
Credit cards not accepted. Children welcome from any age.
Self-Assessed Accessibility Details
- Parking for Single unit properties:
- Parking space provided
- Within 50 metres approx. of entrance
- Parking for Multiple unit properties:
- Drop-off point for guests outside entrance
- Surface of the car park and pathway leading to entrance:
cobbled yard
- Route from the parking area to the entrance:
- Flat (i.e. without steps)
- Level access (no steps/thresholds) or access by ramp or lift to:
- Toilet and bathroom
- Lounge
- Kitchen
- Outdoor facilities
dining area
Bed/ Bathrooms
- Bedrooms available with non-allergic bedding (ie non-feather pillows)
- Bathrooms available with:
- Bath with shower
- Entrance is well lit
- Sink taps have lever handles
- Seating available in kitchen
- Service dogs not accepted:
because owners have farm dogs
Burton Overy is just off the A6, 7 miles from Leicester city centre and 9 miles from Market Harborough. Shepherds Rest Cottage is at Manor Farm on the corner of Washbrook Lane and Back Lane. It is situated between junctions 20 and 21 off the M1 which will take approximately 30 minutes from either junction by car.


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not too often that I resort to "hip" words
or phrases but after playing Darkwatch the one word
that comes to mind which pretty much sums up the entire
experience is "cool."
about every aspect of Darkwatch is cool. The environments
are cool, the weapons are cool, the characters are
cool and while the gameplay is not unique it's definitely
one of the best first-person shooters on the Xbox
and PS2. The controls alone are worth the price of
admission. They are so smooth, accurate and user-friendly
that they rival the ease of those of a PC and mouse.
blends gothic horror and the Old West in an unholy
union between good and evil - which isn't always easy
to distinguish between. Jericho Cross is the undead
star of the show. He's an outlaw gunslinger that has
been recruited by the Darkwatch, an ancient consortium
that has protected humans from the ravages of evil
since the beginning of time. Using period-specific
weapons, with the ability to upgrade them to Darkwatch
stature, Jericho hunts down vampires, skeletons, banshees,
ghosts and other monsters and in turn lays such unspeakable
horrors on them that they beg to be sent to Hell.
shotguns, rocket launchers and dynamite are the basic
weapons of choice. Upgrades will be required to fight
off different kinds of enemies. Although you don't
level-up the way you would in a RPG you do amass supernatural
powers and more powerful weapons. A morality system
lets you choose the path of good or evil. The powers
that you gain on the path of good will be more flexible
and ultimately more powerful than those of the evil
path. Regardless of what path you choose, it's worth
playing the game again to explore the other path.
skills such as double jumps are an excellent feature
that you will use almost as much as the weapons themselves.
The ability to jump into the stratosphere is inherited
from vampires. You almost have the ability to fly
as you take to the air over rooftops and to the peaks
of canyons. While in the air you can float and take
part in some aerial combat. It gives you that kind
of experience you usually only encounter in your dreams.
some of the best elements of games such as Half Life
and Halo, Darkwatch seems more straightforward and
easier to get into. It's non-linear and chock full
of cutscenes. There are so many cutscenes that's it's
almost impossible to follow the story since there
is so much dialog - and such little attention span
to process it. The do break up the momentum of the
gameplay and it does get a little annoying when you
sit through them and not much has been revealed in
terms of plot.
AI is well programmed. When combating an enemy you
won't be able to predict its patter as it actually
reacts to your actions. If you shoot it will dodge
your projectiles. If you're slow on the draw it will
take the opportunity to attack. Other enemies will
hunt in packs and try to surround you. The Banshees
are a particularly frightening bunch that attempt
to tear you apart with their relentless, blood curdling
has a consistent, artistic look to it. It reminds
me of the first Batman movie with Michael Keaton,
in terms of creating a mood with the visuals. The
voiceacting is also good but I could have done with
a lot less cutscenes overall. The sound effects are
well timed and reproduced loud and clear. Even though
the music is minimal it adds to the ambient eeriness.
is instantly compelling and will appeal to all gamers
that want to experience something cool during this
hot summer.
Sammy Studios continues to show off some cool looking
titles they are working on. Darkwatch is another interesting
FPS title with some added things not normally found
in this genre. The game will have gamers playing the
role of Jericho one bad dude. Of course every screen
shot I looked at that showed Jericho had the face
hidden. Of course Sammy Studios did this on purpose
since it is not known if Jericho is a dead man walking
so to speak or a vampire just like the ones he faces
in the game. It's not uncommon for a game company
to keep details until closer to the release date.
I have to admit I do not even know if Jericho is his
first name, his last name or if he is just known as
Jericho! </P>
I can tell you about this one so far is that it sure
looks interesting. The early demo and the screen shots
show an old west backdrop and the story seems to happen
in the time period. Of course the game will have a
few twists and surprises for fans of FPS games. It
is the little things that are getting attention on
this one. Take Jericho's main weapons, his six shooters.
When he shoots, you will see his other hand fanning
the trigger. This is something I have not seen in
a long time in any game. Of course while he battles
the evil vampires and other undead enemies he will
use a variety of weapons including a crossbow and
spells and powers he gets from the undead he destroys.
The game, while offering some unique settings, also
seems to borrow from a few other games. This is not
a knock since most FPS titles use proven things from
other popular games. Take the fact Jericho can absorb
the floating blood clouds from those he destroys to
absorb life or powers. It's been done before. Also,
as Jericho wields a blood shield one can't help but
think of Master Chiefs Shield.
has also not stated if there would be any online features
yet. It looks like it may not be an option. While
the game does borrow from a bit, there are some things
that will be a first in this game. There is one area
where Jericho has to chase down a train while riding
his horse which happens to have glowing eyes. At first
the whole action scene is in the third person mode.
It then switches to an awesome first person view.
This is just one of the neat things this one is going
to offer gamers.
early reports the demo had some real badass enemies.
In fact there was one battle where Jericho finds all
the enemies are armed with the very same weapon he
is using. Graphically, the game so far is looking
great with a dark and eerie look to the whole game.
From the screen shots you can see lightning fill the
screen and it looks pretty awesome. While I wish I
could give all the details, take a look at the screen
shots. Vaughn has told me a picture is worth a thousand
words. Hey he is my boss so I have not bothered to
try and prove the truth behind the saying I will just
take his word on it. Expect more screen shots and
game details as soon as we can get them. The game
will be released for both the Xbox and the PS2 early
next year.
newest and deadliest agent is Jericho Cross, an outlaw
gunslinger pulled into their ranks by an unfortunate
close encounter with a vampire lord. To save the West,
and his own soul from damnation, Jericho must hunt
the vampire through an American frontier now overrun
by his evil minions. Along the way he relies on his
deadly gunfighting skills and advanced weapons and
vehicles put at his disposal by the Darkwatch, as
well as a few surprises afforded him as a half-vampire;
superhuman abilities and a trusty undead steed.


text:
Contribute to ReadWriteThink / RSS / FAQs / Site Demonstrations / Contact Us / About Us
Home › Parent & Afterschool Resources › Podcast Series
Chatting About Books: Recommendations for Young Readers
Podcast for Grades K – 5 | iTunes Subscription
Emily Manning chats with kids, parents, and teachers about the best in children's literature for ages 4 through 11. Discussions include reading tips and fun activities to do with children before, during, and after reading.
Emily Manning
Emily Manning has a master's degree in reading education from the University of North Texas. She taught in the primary grades for several years before taking a reading intervention position that focused on working with struggling readers in grades 3rd-5th.
In 2006, Emily Manning began teaching reading education classes in an adjunct capacity at Texas Woman's University. And most recently, she has taken a position as an Instructional Specialist at Lee Elementary in Denton, Texas.
Emily is a member of the ReadWriteThink.org Advisory Board. She also belongs to several professional organizations including the International Reading Association and National Council of Teachers of English.
Episode 16 | Published July 09, 2009
Share your musical heritage with kids this summer and get inspired by four stories about family, jazz, and the relationships that last a lifetime.
Episode 15 | Published June 04, 2009
Chapter Book Series Worth Starting
Emily Manning describes some chapter book series that kids will love and chats with author Nikki Grimes about her writing philosophy.
Episode 14 | Published May 21, 2009
The Benefits of Repeated Readings
Podcast host Emily Manning and Llama Llama author Anna Dewdney chat about how to read, read, read with kids everywhere.
Episode 13 | Published March 31, 2009
Podcast host Emily Manning yucks it up with kids' humorist Mike Artell and explores three books sure to get your kids reading, speaking, and laughing out loud.
Episode 12 | Published February 24, 2009
Celebrating Women Brave and Strong
Check out these books about two exceptional but nearly-forgotten women-Mighty Jackie: The Strike-Out Queen and Brave Harriet: The First Woman to Fly the English Channel.


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rfolk necesitaba un nuevo diseño de logotipo y lanzó un concurso de diseño en 99designs.
Un ganador ha sido elegido entre 35 diseños de 18 diseñadores freelance.
We are a new land real estate brokerage firm looking for a clean, simple and professional logo.
1031 Land Group
Desired Color Scheme:
Green and Blue - 2 color logo
Desired Style:
Clean, Simple, Professional, Web 2.0. Logo should be 2 colors and have nice "pop" at small sizes. Prefer sans-serif fonts but flexible. Should also provide logo "reversed out" (all white logo on color background).
Accepted File Formats:
AI or EPS, AI Preferred
We are a new land real estate brokerage firm looking for a clean, simple and professional logo. The logo will be used across all media. Preferably, we would like to see something clean and uncluttered. Something that will be easily recognizable.
Our message:
1031 Land Group is a land brokerage firm that assists investors who seek to leverage the 1031 Exchange to buy or sell land.
What does "1031" mean or stand for?
A 1031 Exchange is one of the best strategies for investors to defer as much as 100% of their capital gains tax resulting from the sale of investment real estate. Section 1031 of the IRS tax code allows property owners to sell one or more of their properties and exchange with one or more "like-kind" replacement properties. The tax code enables a taxpayer to sell investment property with little or no tax liability on any resulting gain, thus preserving the sale proceeds for the purchase of another property.
Descubre cómo funciona un concurso de diseño u obtén más información sobre nuestros servicios de diseño de logo.