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At the start of the movie, Galaxy Quest, the main actors are bickering before they go onstage at a con. Alan Rickman's character, Alexander Dane, is bemoaning how he's reduced from Shakespeare to one stupid line of dialog. Sigourney Weaver's character, Gwen DiMarco, replies thusly. "At least you had a part, Alex. You had a character people loved. MY TV Guide interview was six paragraphs about my BOOBS and how they fit into my suit!"
Welcome to this month's installment of Galaxy Quest, or "How We're Trying So Hard to Pretend it's 1953 Over in Science Fiction Land."
As you may or may not know, the Science Fiction Writers' Association (SFWA) is embroiled in some "fun" related to both the 200th cover of the organization's official quarterly magazine, The Bulletin, and the article within it written by Mike Resnick and Barry N. Malzberg (in what I call their Two Old Guys Kvetching About Things That Happened Before Half the World Was Born column) being considered condescending, at best, and flat out misogynist, at worst and in reality, about women in the Science Fiction and Fantasy genre. Excuse me, "ladies". With lady parts fitting nicely into their bathing suits. Yes, they went there. In an industry magazine.
A lot of authors have spoken out about this, and fellow DAW author Jim Hines has put up a comprehensive list of such, in addition to his own rebuttal in the next issue of The Bulletin, wherein Resnick and Malzberg go on to accuse those who didn't like be told to act like Barbie dolls of being censoring Nazis. (Yes, they went there, both theres.)
And yet, I was going to sit this one out. Not because I'm not enraged by this (trust me, I am), but because I've been on the planet for something-something decades and I'm not shocked by it. At all. And I'm on deadline, and my books say what I think on this subject potentially more eloquently than I would.
However, that was before Slice of SciFi's executive producer discovered that my books and name were being tossed about in, as she brilliantly put it, the Boys Versus Girls SciFi Food Fight. Clearly, I needed to take more of an interest.
The Huffington Post is pro women getting to write whatever the hell they want, and Stuart Sharp appears to be quite anti, despite his explanation that he didn't really mean it, he just meant a lot of it. The gist I took away from Sharp's explanation is that he fears that women just can't have possibly read classic SF and so will be at a disadvantage and probably muck it all up. (The poor dears.) (Okay, that's my editorial addition.)
So, I guess it's time for me to defend who the hell I am and why the hell I have as much of a right to write whatever the hell I want as someone with a full set of tackle, including but not limited to Stuart Sharp, whose tackle I can neither confirm nor deny as being fully there or intact.
This, however, is the second version of this article. I originally wrote about my life and the various barriers I've broken. About the few books and comics that gave me strong females to relate to, and how more of them arrived over the years. About how I've read all the hard SF and could write it if I actually wanted to. I wrote about how disappointed I was to be asked the Galaxy Quest Boobs Question at San Diego Comic-Con last year; asked by a man who professes to know better, too. And all of that was interesting. And long. But then, if you've read any of my novels, you know I can do long without breaking a sweat.
But ultimately, I realized that while it's once again time to make a stand, I don't actually have to defend anything.
The mere fact that these men are making women around the globe feel that we have to defend our right to write in whatever genres we want is the real crime. And it's both ironic and insulting.
Actual masters of science fiction fought long and hard to be considered something other than trashy pulp writers (and, in fact, that argument still rages), and now some dudes clinging to outdated notions of what's right and proper, all of whom should have learned better long before now, are turning around and dishing out the same treatment — denigrating anyone who isn't in their perceived club, including authors who dare to have fresh voices, or take the old tropes in different directions. Oh, but only if they're women. GUYS doing this is just fine and proper. Did I say they made us defensive? They have. But what they've really made us is angry.
But you know what the best revenge is? In this case, it's getting the readers. I have as many male fans as I have female fans. I have rocket scientists who are fans, military of both sexes and all branches, homemakers, teachers, business owners, and more. My fans, unlike these male authors, have no problem with a woman writing science fiction, nor do they have an issue with strong female characters. Or strong gay characters, strong characters of color, or hot sapiosexual aliens (but I digress). Nor, I must add, do they have an issue with romance, action, or humor being in science fiction. Readers, it seems, just want to read good books, they will be the judges of what they each, individually, feel is a good book, and they don't really mind if an author mixes in more than one ingredient or genre.
Perhaps what's upsetting these men is the fact that it appears women seem to be better at writing science fiction the majority of readers want right now, which is, most likely, the real cause of all the misogynist brouhaha — girl cooties be entering the realm and stealing the readers! And, no one could read both soft and hard science fiction, let alone other genres, don'tchaknow. So these men bluster and accuse the men and women who point out that they're being dismissive, rude, misogynist, and stupid of being the bad guys. Okay, I get it — as Elton John said, sorry seems to be the hardest word.
I'd be remiss if I didn't point out that there are, of course, men out there who aren't afraid of women entering their field. Authors like the wonderful Eric Flint, Jim Hines, Joshua Palmatier, Nathan Long, Jeff Marriotte, Weston Ochse, and more besides — authors who support women with more than platitudes, and who write female characters that are fully three dimensional.
By the way, my wonderful publisher, DAW Books (owned and operated by two amazing and exceptional women), doesn't publish romance — they publish science fiction, fantasy, and horror. That many consider that I write science fiction romance is considered a plus by DAW and myself both, not a minus, but still and all, I'm a science fiction author, whether I have permission to be so from the old men who want to cling to outdated notions and hide behind bullshit rhetoric or not.
It's time to, once again, make a stand. To stand up against the Antiquated Boy's Club and share that it's six decades past 1953. To remind them that they pissed us the hell off in the 1970's and there are a lot more of us now that it's 2013. To state, plainly, that women don't need any man's permission to write whatever we choose, however we choose to write it.
And, on a personal note, the next man who asks me the Galaxy Quest Boobs Question had better be wearing an iron cup or be able to run exceptionally fast. Because I'm now once again mad as hell and, like so many of my fellow authors out there, I'm not going to take it any more.


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Did you read yesterday's New York Times article by Anemona Hartocollis, entitled "Helping Patients Face Death, She Fought to Live"?
It was about a palliative care doctor who faced her own end-of-life issues in a very different manner from the way she would have advised many of her patients.
An excerpt:
[A]s the doctors began to understand the extent of her underlying cancer, "they asked me if I wanted palliative care to come and see me."
She angrily refused. She had been telling other people to let go. But faced with that thought herself, at the age of 40, she wanted to fight on.
While she and her colleagues had been trained to talk about accepting death, and making it as comfortable as possible, she wanted to try treatments even if they were painful and offered only a 2 percent chance of survival.
It is never right to be judgmental about these matters. Each person faces this kind of situation in his or her unique way, and we have no right to dispute the choices people make.
But I was struck by how this doctor personified the public policy debate that surrounds terminally ill patients. Here's a an example of that kind of discussion from Canada (single payer, government run system!):
The high cost of dying has more to do with soaring health care costs than the aging population does, according to the Canadian Institute of Actuaries. In its submission to the Romanow commission on the future of health care, the institute said that 30 to 50 per cent of total lifetime health care expenditures occur in the last six months of life. Noting the sensitivity of the subject, the group suggested greater use of less expensive palliative care and living wills.
Dr. Pardi's experience shows how hard it is to go from a policy-level discussion of such matters to the decisions made by individual patients and their families. Without giving credence to the nasty and politically inspired debate about "death panels," the ambiguity in such situations suggests the difficulty in adopting formulistic approaches to the decisions around end-of-life care.
Besides abortion, it is hard to think of a part of medical practice that is more likely to be politically divisive and personally uncomfortable. Given that, is it worth the debate? Alternatively, how can we best have a productive discussion about it?
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Bibliography of Seattle Strikes
Berner, Richard. C. Seattle in the Twentieth Century. Seattle: Charles Press, 1991-.
Brecher, Jeremy. Strike! Boston: South End Press, 1997.
Demirel, Sinan. The Roots of Large-Scale Collective Action: Tacoma and the Seattle General Strike. M.A. thesis, University of Washington, 1995.
Frank, Dana. Purchasing Power : Consumer Organizing, Gender, and the Seattle Labor Movement, 1919-1929. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.
Frank, Dana. "Race Relations and the Seattle Labor Movement, 1915-1929." Pacific Northwest Quarterly 86 (1994-1995): 35-44.
Friedheim, Robert L. The Seattle General Strike. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1964.
Larrowe, Charles P. Shape-Up and Hiring Hall: A Comparison of Hiring Methods and Labor Relations on the New York and Seattle Waterfronts. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1955.
Levi, Margaret and David Olson. "The Battles in Seattle." Politics & Society 28(3): 309-329.
Magden, Ronald L. A History of Seattle Waterfront Workers. Seattle: International Longshoremen's and Warehousemen's Union 19 of Seattle and the Washington Commission for the Humanities, 1991.
Markholt, Ottilie. Maritime Solidarity: Pacific Coast Unionism, 1929-1938. Tacoma: Pacific Coast Maritime History Committee, 1999.
Strouthous, Andrew. US Labor and Political Action, 1918-24 : A Comparison of Independent Political Action in New York, Chicago, and Seattle. New York: St. Martin's Press, 2000.
Willis, Terry R. Unemployed Citizens of Seattle, 1900-1933: Hulet Wells, Seattle Labor, and the Struggle for Economic Security. Ph.D., University of Washington 1997.


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Grand-AM Rolex Sports Car, Continental Tire Racing
Best Digital Shots Photography brings you Grand-AM road racing photography. In the Rolex Sports Car Series see Daytona Prototype cars like Telmex Chip Ganassi Racing with Felix Sabates' car driven by Scott Pruett and Memo Rojas, Gainsco Bob Stallings Racing's car driven by Alex Gurney and Jon Fogarty, Paul Dalla Lana, Darren Law, David Donohue, Patrick Dempsey, and others. In the Continental Tire Sports Car Challenge see Grand Sport GS cars and Street Tuner Class ST cars driven by teams Turner Motorsport, Multimatic, APR Motorsport, Kinetic Motorsport and others with drivers Joe Foster, Scott Maxwell, Bill Auberlen, Matt Plumb, Ryna Eliis, Nik Jonsson and others. Many of the GRAND-AM, NASCAR, AMA, IndyCar, and other images at BestDigitalShots.com are available to accredited members of the media, licensees of the sanctioning body and authorized team representatives. Those particular photos are not available for commercial purchase.Read More


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JINAN, China—A shower of sparks and the crackle of electricity mark the beginning (or end) of a trip on a partially electrified bus in the capital of Shandong Province. "Spring City" lacks a subway system (due to its eponymous artesian springs) and so relies on buses to move its more than four million people across a city that now sprawls some 20 kilometers east to west. And those buses move thanks to everything from ammonia to electricity.
"You just want it to be convenient and cheap," says "Frank," my host and translator, noting that speed is not the main concern for buses. ("Frank" is his adopted English name, which he chose because he wants to be frank, and I have omitted his last name in case any of his frankness would get him into trouble.)
This city's fleet of alternative-fuel buses is just one part of China's 863 Program, enacted in March 1986 to stimulate the development of advanced technologies, which in recent years has focused on transportation alternatives. Such transportation alternatives do everything from cutting down on China's burgeoning greenhouse gas pollution to saving lives by preventing fatal traffic accidents. But in a country of more than one billion people, where car ownership is growing by as much as 30 percent per year, how much impact can alternative vehicles and fuels really have?
The recently constructed high-speed train network connects Jinan to even bigger cities such as Beijing or Hangzhou. As a provincial capital, Jinan seems to be a relatively popular destination, and passengers on such trains range from university students to Communist Party apparatchiks bearing bags of tea as gifts. The male travelers (but not the women) light up as soon as they exit the "green smoke-free train," as the automated announcements on board say. And why not smoke when the smog also stings the nose and prompts an incessant cough?
The good news is that the world's largest high-speed train system will restrain the continuing growth of air travel in China. More passengers travel on this new high-speed rail network on a daily basis than on board all flights in the U.S. A second-class seat on a one of these trains will set one back roughly 185 renminbi, or $30, compared with hundreds of dollars for a flight. The bad news is that, given China's continental size, continued growth in air traffic remains a near certainty, complete with the attendant increase in air pollution.
What is true of trains versus planes is also true of buses versus cars. Articulated buses that provide bus rapid transit snake through town, from outlying suburbs near old military bases to the old city center. Jinan's diesel hybrid electric bus is not quiet, screeching from stop to stop—and like the bus everywhere, it provides a cross-section of Jinan life, from pensioners to students on the way home from school in matching track suits. There are also all-electric buses, some that just use diesel and others that also burn ammonia. And then there are the long-distance buses that run on liquefied natural gas (LNG).
What such LNG buses lack in power compared with their diesel-burning peers, they make up for in comfort. Because LNG buses cannot carry as many passengers, their seats are more spacious. "You can stretch your legs," explains Frank, who takes such buses to visit a village where he sometimes works.
In fact, as the International Energy Agency notes, natural gas is the cheapest alternative fuel worldwide. As such, there are long-haul trucks burning LNG in China (an alternative some would like to see used more in the U.S.) as well as natural gas buses and taxis. There are even private cars running on compressed natural gas (CNG), thanks to not-officially-legal modifications to the vehicles. (These conversions are apparently common; I saw flyers around Shandong Province advertising such services.)
The trunk of a CNG-burning taxi is a little cramped, thanks to a canister of fuel that can cover a range of almost 200 kilometers. At a cost of 4.40 renminbi per cubic liter, CNG is roughly half the cost of gasoline per kilometer of driving. The downside is a loss of pickup and power—in Beijing, the gasoline-burning taxis are quicker and can carry more—but burning natural gas also produces less air pollution.
All of these "new energy vehicle" efforts are a bid to restrain the catastrophic air pollution in China. As Frank jokes, the smog is so thick that it can block GPS or even cell phone signals: "It's like being in a building." Even the best efforts to control air-fouling emissions from industrial sources—power plants, cement kilns, factories—fail because of the continuing growth in private vehicles. The newly rich may even have two cars—more cars than children—adding to the seemingly ever-thickening haze.
Beijing, however, has now imposed draconian restrictions on the total number of cars permitted in the capital city and requires 40 percent of newly purchased vehicles to be "new energy vehicles." There are even more than 1,000 subsidized electric car taxis in Beijing, though this fleet has struggled with charging time and range. A more popular effort to restrain smog (and traffic) in many smaller cities is to implement a schedule of odd/even days for permission to drive a private car, depending on the last digit of the license plate. It is a scheme that worked to bring down, at least temporarily, traffic and air pollution in Beijing during the 2008 Summer Olympics. Even so, car purchases are nearly impossible to control, given that buying a car has become just as much a part of the Chinese dream as the American one. As a result of that vision, it seems the Chinese will happily import any oil the U.S. does not want, whether Saudi Arabian light crude or processed tar sands from Canada.
Even in Jinan's gleaming new high-speed train station, advertisements for private cars predominate, including an actual Volkswagen sitting in the entrance lobby. Traffic jams occur even on Sundays, as the roads clog with SUVs, big sedans and other cars. The congestion can get so bad that a taxi driver can casually peruse the newspaper while stopped. And the local transportation map at Beijing's international airport is emblazoned with the phrase "traffic strategy," emphasizing the city's newly expanded subway system.
Major cities like Beijing and Shanghai have built entire subway systems in a matter of years, but no one in "Spring City" wants to mess with the springs that still provide drinking water—and swimming space, even in the chill of late autumn—for Jinan residents. The spring water is still clear and clean enough for fish to thrive, and no one here seems interested in damaging the underground water courses to enable a subway line. Then there is the cautionary sight of the river of humanity one must ford to get on or off the subway in other cities like Beijing during rush hour, thanks to a fare of just two renminbi, or roughly 33 cents.
China is in the midst of a transportation revolution, one that started with a shift from ubiquitous bicycles to ubiquitous automobiles—with attendant impacts on lifestyle, sprawl and pollution. This revolution still in process means tremendous growth in all forms of transportation, from the highly polluting to the relatively green and efficient. China will have both gasoline-powered cars and electric buses; high-speed trains and polluting flights. Nothing, short of economic collapse, can stop China's growth, so the only hope is restraint: a few more electric buses—sparks, squeaks and all—and a few less cars spewing ever more air pollution.
Proof of this "more of everything" reality, if proof is needed, is the fact that the bicycles have never gone away, and have even improved with the introduction of electric bikes—essentially pedal-powered bicycles with an electric motor assist. Such electric bicycles are very popular as a cheap transportation offering, silently weaving in and out of traffic in cities across China—often bearing more than one passenger. And there are electric mopeds too, like the one Frank just purchased with 80 kilometers worth of range in its more than 28-kilogram battery pack. It will replace the ordinary bicycle he rode six kilometers each way to and from his office daily. As he explains, an electric moped "is most convenient for ordinary people."


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All Images © Copyright, Steve Rucci. Unauthorized use or duplication is prohibited without prior written permission. All rights reserved. For usage information, please E-mail: firstname.lastname@example.com
barnboneson July 3, 2009
Quite a beautiful colorful gallery. I really enjoyed my trip through the wildflowers. Your sharpness and choice of subjects was wonderful. Terrific.


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I'd been keeping my eyes open for one of these on the street in Alameda for quite a while (we see one in a driveway behind the '50 Pontiac Chieftan, but driveway cars aren't, like, on the street), so I had the camera out and shooting before you could say "defunct automobile manufacturer" when I saw this '76 on Alameda's main drag. Not only is it a Pacer, it's the coveted X model! And in great condition to boot.
The Pacer was supposed to have had a GM-built Wankel under the hood, but The General canceled the program (after a billion or so bucks down the drain) and AMC was stuck with a car that no longer had the oddball powerplant that would have justified the crazy styling. The Pacer X was the "performance" version, though in the Malaise Era that meant tape stripes and not much else.
When I photograph these cars, I'm always careful to set the camera's zoom so that there's minimal distortion of the car's lines. However, this is absolutely impossible with the Pacer- a photograph from any angle looks like you used a crazy fisheye lens.
Your world looks like this once you've stared at a Pacer for long enough.
I was nine years old when the Pacer first appeared, and I recall having a lot of bewildered discussion with my classmates about what the hell was the deal with this crazy-looking car. We'd drone out the Pacer's advertising slogan "It's small... but wiiiiiiiide!" whenever we'd see one (which was often; the Pacer actually sold pretty well). For what it's worth, the VW Thing rated highest on our collective Cool-O-Meter at the time.
Since the later Pacer was available with a 304 V8 under the hood, a 401-powered machine should be a junkyard bolt-in. Anyone who's done this gets instant Hoon of the Day status in our book.


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This article is more than 1 year old
Samsung cameras get second screens for self-portraits
Man in the mirror?
Updated Taking self-portraits using a compact camera can be tricky: extending your arms far enough so that your nose doesn't fill the shot, for example. But Samsung may have solved the problem by building a user-facing screen onto it two latest models.
Samsung's second screen: perfect for posers?
In addition to the ST500's 3in rear-mounted screen and the ST550's slightly larger, 3.5in main display, both models have a 1.5in LCD on the front which should help ensure self-portraits are always perfectly framed.
Most compacts already have self-timers, but think of the advantages that a second screen will bring. For example, no running back to the sofa before the timer ends, no need to search for a suitable steady surface and the ability to snap perfectly framed, yet oddly angled, images.
Rear screen sizes aside, both models are similar. They incorporate a 12.2Mp CMOS sensor and support for video capture at up to 720p resolution.
Haptic feedback features on both the ST500 and ST550
They have a 4.6x optical zoom and, according to some online reports, each also features haptic feedback, suggesting the rear screens are touch-sensitive, a fact confirmed by the lack of controls on the back of the camera.
Launch dates and prices for the Samsung ST500 and ST550 haven't yet been yet.
Samsung has since told us that both models also allow you to pin-point the camera's focus by tapping a location on the LCD screen. A Smart Recognition feature even allows the camera to recognise up to 20 faces, with individual smiles and blinks also picked out.


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|Mod Options
|Integrate Feedburner RSS tools - replace the standard RSS feeds Details »
Integrate Feedburner RSS tools - replace the standard RSS feeds
Developer Last Online: Apr 2012
This modification is in the archives.
This mod has been carried over from the 3.6.x branch with the permission of the original author, mccollin.
I am frustrated with the fact that vBulletin 3.6.x does not limit the RSS feeds and so your entire posts are going out for someone to load into their site, thus eliminating the need for them to come to your site at all. Upon investigating this, I discovered FeedBurner's vast capabilities so I have tried to replace the built-in RSS capabilities of vBulletin's external.php with FeedBurner.
The modification is a simple template change, and renaming one file.
1. First you need to go to feedburner.com and get yourself an account setup.
2. Copy your /forums/external.php file to some other name such as /forums/feedburner.php. (you will eventually want to hide external.php, so this is a preliminary step)
3. Next go into AdminCP and print out a list of all your forums. Then, by using the "hover" over the names of the forums, record the forum IDs from the URL in the browser's status window on your list.
4. Create a new feed at feedburner.com using the url of
(where /yourforumurl.com/yourforumdirectory/ is the path to your forum, and feedburner.php is what you copied external.php to).
5. Using the tools at Feedburner.com to create links to your feed, determine the url to your Feedburner feed and make a note of it. It will most likely be something like this...
6. Test the feed to make sure it works.
7. Now you will need to manually create a new feed for any forum which you want to have a feed fore. Go into Feedburner.com and the new feed dialog. Re-enter the url used above to create another feed, and append to the end of it the code for forumid. Use the chart you created and start at the top. You will need to create a feed for each forum you wish to have a feed to. The url for forum ID 47 would be
Feedburner should create the title of the feed for you based on your forum title, and I recommend you don't change it here. The reason is that if you have a lot of forums, you will have a lot of feeds and your only easy way to identify them is by their names. You want them to match. Another tip is that for parent forums, I used the feature of external.php to aggregate forumids with commas. In these cases, I would list all the child forums into one feed.
8. Repeat this process for all forums you wish to have feeds for, making sure that the url used in each case is exactly the same except for the forumid. This is very important. For example, if your feed url provided in Step 5 by FeedBurner is http://feeds.feedburner.com/yourforumurlcom, then the url used when creating each subsequent forum feed needs to be http://feeds.feedburner.com/yourforumurlcom-xx (xx being the forum id).
9. Now to integrate this into your forum, you need to make a change to the headinclude template. Find the following code:
And replace it with the following code, replacing the urls with the ones that feedburner created for your feeds. Note that you replace the forumid part of the url with $foruminfo[forumid].
10. Once you are sure that its working, you can rename external.php to something else. If you ever want to reverse this, you simply need to replace your old template, and rename external.php back.
There are literally hundreds of things you can do with your RSS feeds once they are being provided by FeedBurner. Here is a good article to start with:
How and Why to Use Feedburner
Download Now
Only licensed members can download files, Click Here for more information.
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|Similar Mod
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|[3.0.0 Gamma, RC1, RC2] Moderator Thread Tools/Admin Tools behavior change
|vBulletin 3.0 Template Modifications
|26 Jan 2004 15:12
|[3.0.0 Gamma, RC1, RC2] Moderator Thread Tools/Admin Tools behavior change
|vBulletin 3.0 Template Modifications
|26 Jan 2004 15:12
I don't really understand, I have feedburner on my forums already
Love and support one another #vote2020
I offer Managed IT Services in Kansas
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my forum is limited to guests (so they cant see anything) and i cant get any rss feeds. How do i fix this?
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I think you need to rewrite your instructions from Step 7.
I see what you're trying to do, but it's not very clear.
For example, one of your code examples mentions fbget.php but you previously named the script feedburner.php.
You also didn't mention when creating the second (and subsequent) feeds on feedburner for the individual forums what they should be named. From the example you give, http://feeds.feedburner.com/yourforumurlcom-$foruminfo[forumid], obviously they need to be yourforumurlcom-xx ?
I like the idea, I wish it was a bit simpler, my forum has about 40 forums within it. It'd be nice if there was an easy way to get all the IDs, mabe a simpe script which outputs a list of all of them which are in use.
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EG: In FireFox, if you click on the RSS button in the URL bar it will 'find' the stock vBulletin external.php script but his change will instead 'find' your FeedBurner URL instead.
In short, you're hiding the default vB script and are using FeedBurner instead for all of your outgoing feeds that people can subscribe to.
Sci-Fi Forum / The Walking Dead & Horror Forum / CinVin
(Sorry, but I am no longer developing for vB; please do not PM. So long, and thanks for all the fish.)
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Thank you for the feedback and for a catching a couple of inconsistencies. I believe I have corrected them all now. I also clarified step 8 a little more.
This mod is more for the "advanced" forum operator who wants more control over their RSS feeds and wants to do things like publicize and monetize their RSS feeds.
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Ok, I get my account with FeedBurner.com but before to proceed to the integration, is this the final version? no more Modifications?
give me a green light and I will proceed
. █│║▌│█│║▌║│█║▌│║║█║
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It's final - no additional modifications.
Go for it!
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I don't understand why you have to change it from external.php to feedburner.php. It looks like you are replacing the links in the style anyway, right?
Xbox 360 Mods
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I find the explanation of integrating a group of forums into one feed lacking in both the 3.6 version and this one.
Can you please explain what you mean when you say you can link external.php?type=RSS2&forumid=33,44,46,37 to just one feed since your replacement code for the template obviously takes just one forumid (not a comma separated list)
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installed and uninstalled immediatly ..
cause :
i am sharing my content with a site that have higher page rank than mine .. so my content are added "untrimed" with good backlinks pointing back to my site as deep links ..
using feedburner .. will give pagerank from those links in profit to feed burner as links to threads that appear in threads are pointing to the feed burner website not to mine ..
for my self .. i just changed my rss original feed name " hiding it " and only giving its path to my friendly site wich we collaborate togheter ..
thanks ..
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What would I need to do if I wanted to have a separate feed for each forum in the edit for the site's headerinclude template?
Click here to visit my NFL forum
My Mods: [ Links To Zoints Thread Tags In Posts ] [ Pre-Defined Topic Tags for Zoints Thread Tags ]
[ Define Order Of News Shown With Frontpage Slideshow ]
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Seem the author left the thread without any responses.
I have just applied for my forum vb4 and it works as well.
Originally Posted by Brandon SheleyIf you registered with feedburner, go there and add any sub forums to it and start using from step 7 as the guide above
Demo? you can have a look on my forum http://www.webmastersun.com, click on rss icon you can understand how it works.
Originally Posted by CasparianRight, you need create urls in feedburner correstpond to forum id on your forum to make urls works when it gets auto links from your forum.
Originally Posted by KW802I agree with you but I won't use this way because we have to create all urls according to feedburner and some can be broken if we miss them.
Originally Posted by AzzidReignSome SEO guys think that it's better for on-page SEO if we use feedburner on our sites/blogs. For me, just added it yesterday and I need a little time to see it effective or not.
Originally Posted by SBluemanYou go feedburner and create urls like this feeds.feedburner.com/yourforumcom/yoursubforum
for example I created
But I stopped from step 9 of the author and using redirection for better purposes.
the link above will be redirected to feedburner
Hope that helps!
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text:
Thirty years ago, Apple unveiled the Apple Lisa, a pioneering machine that introduced the mouse-driven graphical user interface to a wide audience and opened a new chapter in personal computer history.
The Mac borrowed heavily from the Lisa, and the Mac went on to great things while the Lisa floundered. As a result, it's tempting to treat the Lisa as merely a footnote in the history of Apple. But as anyone who has used a real Lisa knows, Apple's first GUI-based computer played host to many distinctive quirks and traits that tend to get overlooked in the history books.
The machine's 30th anniversary is as good a time as any to take a look at a handful of both odd and useful features that truly made the Lisa something unique.
Extreme copy protection
At the factory, Apple assigned every Lisa a unique, unchangeable serial number permanently programmed into a chip on the motherboard. The first time you ran an application from a floppy or copied it to the Lisa's hard disk, the machine "serialized" the application by writing its serial number to the application program. From then on, you could run the application only on that particular Lisa machine.
All software bought for a particular Lisa was locked to that machine, destroying any ability to sell the software used, and negating any future use of the software in the case of a massive hardware failure.
If the Lisa had become more popular (and if it had hosted more than about seven major applications), it's likely that users and the press would have objected strongly to this feature. Ironically, today's DRM, which links software to a certain account or piece of hardware, hearkens back to Lisa's copy protection mechanism.
Document-Centric approach
To open a document on the Mac, you can run an application first and then load the document from the Open command, or double-click on the document icon in the Finder to load the document in its application.
In the Lisa Desktop Manager (its Finder equivalent), you see application icons, but they just let you copy the application between disks. To create a new document, you "tear off" a blank document from a virtual stack of paper associated with an application. You can then double-click that document to open it, which automatically loads the proper application.
In this way, Lisa OS is document-centric rather than partially document-centric like OS X; iOS is application-centric in that it never lets you handle documents outside of applications on the system.
Duplicate file names
On the Mac, you can't create two files with the exact same name in the same folder. Makes sense; if the computer stored two files with the same name, how would it know which one to open?
Amazingly, Lisa OS is one of the only operating systems in history (if not the only one; research pending) to allow duplicate file names. Each file was assigned a physical file name that represented the file on the disk, and a virtual file name provided by the user that showed up in the Lisa interface.
That way, two files could appear to be named "Bob's Secret Recipes" in Lisa's Desktop Manager, but the machine would know how to handle them on a lower level hidden from the user.
The Y1995 problem
In 1999, American media delighted in speculating on the possible Y2K doomsday. Imagine the media ruckus if those machines had been saddled with the same limitation as the Lisa, which would accept only year dates between 1981 and 1995.
This bizarre restriction stems from the Lisa's use of a primitive real-time clock chip that stored the year as a 4-bit integer—an integer from 0 to 15. Lisa hardware development solidified around 1980, so that became the base year (year 0), and 15 years after that was 1995. Why Apple forced the starting date one year ahead to 1981 is a mystery.
To keep time when the Lisa was unplugged, the Lisa clock chip depended on a four AA-cell NiCad battery pack that held a charge for only a few hours. These battery packs often busted, leaking corrosive acid over most remaining Lisas, ruining the circuit boards. (If you have a Lisa in your closet, take out the batteries now!)
Soft shutdown
On the lower right corner of the front of every Lisa sits a small white power button that becomes illuminated when the system is active. But this button does far more than power the system on or off. In fact, the button is a soft switch, which means its function is determined by software rather than a simple electrical connection.
The switch tells the Lisa to wake up from a very low power mode and restore to the screen from memory the previous computing session. The Lisa OS presents open windows and documents that you were working on before the "shutdown."
A tap on the power button began a process that shut down the system gracefully, saving all open documents and storing window and application positions for later use.
The original Mac never tried to duplicate this feature. Only now has Apple come back to the idea, as it introduced a similar function with OS X Lion in 2011. The Lisa was ahead of its time.
Top photo: Steven Stengel/ Oldcomputers.net


text:
College of William and Mary
|College of William and Mary
|Williamsburg, Virginia
|baseball, basketball, cross country, field hockey, football, golf, gymnastics, lacrosse, soccer, swimming and diving, tennis, track and field, volleyball[1]
|green and yellow
The College of William and Mary is a Virginia publicly supported university, founded in 1693,[2] per orders of the Virginia Company.[3] The school ranked #33 in US News's 2008 "National Universities: Top Schools" list.[4] The 2008 student-faculty ration was 12-1.[2]
Logo Controversy
As part of a review of more than 30 schools' logos that began in 2004,[5] William and Mary's logo was ruled "hostile and abusive" to the Native American community due to the presence of feathers.[6] William and Mary's appeal of the ruling was denied.[7] College president Gene R. Nichol responded to the ruling with outrage, saying, "I am compelled to say, at the outset, how powerfully ironic it is for the College of William & Mary to face sanction for athletic transgression at the hands of the NCAA," Nichol wrote. "The Association has applied its mascot standards in ways so patently inconsistent and arbitrary as to demean the entire undertaking."[7]
Notable alumni
- John N. Dalton, Virginia governor from 1978 to 1982
- ↑ http://www.tribeathletics.com/
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 About William and Mary: At A Glance (English). College of William and Mary.
- ↑ 1618 - 1699 (English). College of William and Mary.
- ↑ National Universities: Top Schools (English). US News.
- ↑ William and Mary Announces New Logo (English) (2007-12-06).
- ↑ Bill Walker (2005-11-03). 'Tribe' refers to community Nichol states in a report sent to the NCAA. W&M News.
- ↑ 7.0 7.1 William & Mary to change athletic logo featuring Indian feathers (English). Associated Press (10/10/2006).


text:
/ Source: NBC Sports
SAN DIEGO (AP) The first NFL game to be blacked out locally this season will be Sunday's matchup between the AFC North-leading Cincinnati Bengals and the San Diego Chargers.
The Chargers say more than 5,300 tickets were still unsold at Thursday's deadline, meaning the game won't be televised in Southern California.
The Chargers had four blackouts last season, including a loss to the Bengals.
The Chargers were spared the embarrassment of a local TV blackout of a Monday night game against the Indianapolis Colts earlier this season after ESPN and some local sponsors guaranteed the purchase of approximately 8,500 tickets.
Online: http://pro32.ap.org/poll and http://twitter.com/AP-NFL


text:
01 Mar 2000 School Choice Gives Hope, by Lee Hubbard
A New Visions Commentary paper published March 2000 by The National Center
for Public Policy Research, 501 Capitol Ct., N.E., Washington, DC 20002, 202/543-4110, Fax 202-543-5975, E-Mail [email protected], Web
http://www.nationalcenter.org. Reprints permitted provided source
is credited.
for Public Policy Research, 501 Capitol Ct., N.E., Washington, DC 20002, 202/543-4110, Fax 202-543-5975, E-Mail [email protected], Web
http://www.nationalcenter.org. Reprints permitted provided source
is credited.
Just before the holidays last year, the aspirations of thousands of Cleveland schoolchildren were put on hold when federal judge Solomon Oliver ruled that a Cleveland school choice program was a violation of the separation of church and state and was therefore unconstitutional.
That's a shame because Cleveland's four-year-old voucher program gives needy families with children in kindergarten through sixth grade up to $2,500 in tuition vouchers.
At issue is that most of the 3,543 children enrolled in the Cleveland program are in religious schools. Oliver said that because nearly all the 56 participating schools were religion-based, the program had "the effect of advancing religion through government-supported religious indoctrination." While Oliver ordered the program shut down, he agreed to let it continue until an appeal could be heard. School choice supporters said they would appeal the decision to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit.
And they should, as Oliver's decision raised more questions than it answered.
One question: If the Cleveland school choice program violates the separation of church and state, what would Oliver say about similar programs of long standing such as the G.I. Bill and federal Pell Grants that people use to attend the public or private universities of their choice? Oliver's contradictory decision highlights the complexities of school choice programs, where families are given vouchers for state funds to spend at a school of their choice.
First proposed by economist Milton Friedman after the United States Supreme Court outlawed school segregation in 1954 in Brown v. the Board of Education, "school choice" was used by white parents to circumvent Brown and send their children to all-white private schools. That practice was ruled unconstitutional in the late 1950s, but the concept of school choice would forever change education. And it did in 1989, when African-American activists, parents and politicians pushed forward a voucher plan of their own in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
It remains the only publicly-financed voucher program in the nation and has withstood an onslaught of legal challenges from the American Civil Liberties Union, teachers unions, People for the American Way and the NAACP. The Cleveland program was modeled after Milwaukee's. Florida is also embarking on a statewide school choice program.
Teachers unions, civil libertarians and many, if not most, liberals see school choice as a diabolical plot to destroy the public school system. Political conservatives, on the other hand, see it as a way to improve public schools through competition.
The battle for school choice points up the failure of the public school system in urban America. Parents in these school systems are tired of the vast array of excuses used to justify school failures – such as the broken home theory, racism or social-economic status. These parents don't want to hear excuses and they want to see results. School choice gives them an option.
A recent Gallup poll showed that people surveyed favored school choice 51 to 47 percent. Among African-Americans, support for school choice is off the charts, in spite of opposition from most black leaders (many of them, coincidentally, send their own children to private schools) and the NAACP. A 1999 poll by the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, a Washington D.C. think tank, found that 60% of blacks in total favored school vouchers, while 70 percent of young blacks between the ages of 26 and 35 favor vouchers.
Blacks supporting school choice see it as a way to save a generation of black students now attending public schools with 30 to 40 percent dropout rates and collective grade point averages below 2.0. The push for school choice among blacks can be seen in the new book Not Yet Free at Last by Mikel Holt, the editor of the black weekly Milwaukee Community Journal newspaper.
Holt compares the battle for school choice in Milwaukee and the nation with the battle to desegregate schools in the 1950s. But while the battle to desegregate the schools was fought against Southern segregationists, Holt writes that the battle for choice will be fought against liberal special interest groups like the People for the American Way and teachers unions. "While condemning school choice, the left offers no real solutions for the abysmal failure of the public school system and the harm it has caused millions of minority and poor children," writes Holt. He has a point.
While it isn't perfect, school choice is the only certain solution that will break up the educational status quo and ensure greater educational opportunities are available for the people who need them most. If this happens, then maybe the public schools that aren't working will be able to reform themselves for all.


text:
Kodak's move will see a focus on the printer business
Kodak will stop making cameras in the first half of this year, bringing an end to cameras, pocket video cameras and digital picture frames from what used to be the world's largest camera-maker.
The company, which
filed for bankruptcy protection in the US last month, said that it
will instead seek to expand its brand licensing program of its print business.
It's a sad day but an inevitable turn: The company that made the digital sensor just never got its camera business off the ground, as other companies generated high-end, sought-after products that Kodak never competed against.
Full press release:
Eastman Kodak Company (the "Company") (OTB: EKDKQ.PK) announced today that, as a result of its ongoing strategic review process and commitment to drive sustainable profitability through its most valuable business lines, it plans to phase out its dedicated capture devices business – comprising digital cameras, pocket video cameras and digital picture frames – in the first half of 2012. Kodak will instead expand its current brand licensing program, and seek licensees for cameras. Following this decision, Kodak's Consumer Business will include online and retail-based photo printing, as well as desktop inkjet printing.
Kodak has contacted its retail partners, and is working closely with them to ensure an orderly transition. Kodak will continue to honor all related product warranties, and provide technical support and service for its cameras, pocket video cameras and digital picture frames.
"For some time, Kodak's strategy has been to improve margins in the capture device business by narrowing our participation in terms of product portfolio, geographies and retail outlets. Today's announcement is the logical extension of that process, given our analysis of the industry trends," said Pradeep Jotwani, President, Consumer Businesses, and Kodak Chief Marketing Officer.
In addition to its Consumer Businesses segment, Kodak has a Commercial Businesses segment that includes the Digital and Functional Printing, Enterprise Services and Solutions, and Graphics, Entertainment and Commercial Films units. Kodak's digital businesses now comprise approximately three-fourths of total revenues.
Kodak continues to have a strong position in the personal imaging market. While photos are increasingly taken on multi-function mobile devices, Kodak technology makes it easy for consumers to produce a broad range of photo products, anywhere, anytime – from prints to photobooks, photo greeting cards and personalized calendars. These items can be made on Kodak products, with Kodak quality at retail, at home, and ordered for delivery to home.
Kodak's continuing consumer products and services will include:
· Retail-based photo kiosks and digital dry lab systems, a market in which Kodak is the clear worldwide leader. Kodak pioneered the retail-based kiosk market, and the company now has more than 100,000 kiosks and order stations for dry lab systems around the world, with some 30,000 of those units connected to the most popular photo-sharing sites.
· Consumer inkjet printers, where Kodak has outpaced overall market growth for several years. Kodak consumer inkjet printers provide consumers with high-quality output and the lowest total ink replacement cost. Consumers can send documents and photos to Kodak printers from anywhere, using any web-connected device.
· Kodak apps for Facebook, which make it easy for consumers to obtain photo products using photos from their Facebook albums.
· Kodak Gallery (www.kodakgallery.com), a leading online digital photo products service. Kodak Gallery enables consumers to share their photos, and offers product and creation tools that enable people to do more with their photos.
· The Kodak camera accessories and batteries businesses. These products are universally compatible with all camera brands, and extend into other consumer product segments such as charging units for smartphones.
· The traditional film capture and photographic paper business, which continues to provide high-quality and innovative products and solutions to consumers, photographers, retailers, photofinishers and professional labs.


text:
Why Is Obama Having Trouble with White Catholics?News at Home
A puzzled Chris Matthews turned to the camera. He had just finished grilling two guests on his TV show, "Hardball," about voting patterns in the recent Pennsylvania primary. Yet the behavior of one group still seemed hard for both he and his experts to explain. Its members' motives, Mathews sighed, were as inscrutable as "a tribe in New Guinea."
The group whose behavior seemed so inexplicable? Matthews's ( Holy Cross College class of 1967 and Blessed Sacrament parish) own, white Catholics, whose support for Senator Hilary Clinton was as impressively large and consistent as almost any other definable demographic or cultural group in the voting public during the primary season.
The Clinton Catholic vote first emerged in New Hampshire, where in her unexpected comeback Clinton won 44% of the Catholic vote to 27% for Obama. That spread was noticeably higher than her support among Protestants or voters claiming no religion. Her high Catholic percentages continued in states she won, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New York, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, and some she lost, such as Connecticut. She did not win the white Catholic vote everywhere, more or less breaking even or losing in Wisconsin, Missouri and Maryland (and probably Iowa, but exit polls did not record it). A string started on the Clinton Catholic vote on the Catholic magazine Commonweal's blog on February 6; the New York Times noticed the Clinton Catholic trend on February 8, "Catholic Vote is Harbinger of Success for Clinton"; and NPR, the New York Sun and the Pew Forum among others addressed it directly over the succeeding months. It also became a staple of broader analyses of the primaries in the Washington Post, Newsday and a host of other newspaper and magazine articles and political blogs.
Yet as Mathews found out, it has been easier to document the presence of this Catholic vote than to explain it. Scores of pundits, even some of the most secular of Democrats, have recently paid homage to the critical importance of religion in politics. A spate of books, E.J. Dionne, Amy Sullivan and others, and a blizzard of articles have lectured the Democrats on how to speak to religious groups. Yet the focus has been on what we think we learned from the last campaign: that the world is divided between believers (people who attend church regularly) and unbelievers (people who do not) and it really does not matter what it is that the believers believe. Catholics who go to church, according to this analysis, are not any different than Methodist churchgoers.
Confronted with this year's stunning new Clinton Catholic phenomenon, some observers insisted on trying to parse out differences between Clinton and Obama on the "religious" issues like abortion or gay rights to explain it. Yet the differences between the positions of the two candidates on such issues were so slight that that effort seemed more a pavlovian instinct than the pursuit of a promising explanation (What would members of the Catholic hierarchy have said about Hilary Clinton as an embodiment of Catholic moral values?) We are so used to discussing religious voting in terms of those issues that we assume they must somehow have been at the root of this voting pattern too. But if differences over the "religious issues" don't explain, what then has provoked the sudden appearance of this powerful Catholic Clinton bloc?
One explanation is that this was not a Catholic vote at all, but a blue collar one, and it just so happens that most of the white blue collar voters in the northeast and Midwest are Catholics. Yet was the Clinton primary vote a class vote? workers voting their class interests? Though the two Democratic party candidates would have objected heatedly, the differences between them on economic policies of interest to blue collar voters seemed, like those on "religious issues," minor. John Edwards might have argued that he had a stronger claim to be the champion of blue collar whites than either Senator Clinton or Senator Obama and he got knocked out in January. Senator Clinton had diehard support among white women, but as some observers have suggested, it is not clear that she understood that Catholics or even blue collar whites were "her" voters before the primary campaign began. They seemed to find her in New Hampshire before she found them and her "voice."
There are other problems in thinking the Catholic vote was "really" just a blue collar vote. In some of the primary elections, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and New Jersey for example, the percentage of the Catholic vote for Clinton actually exceeded her take of the blue collar or less well educated vote, and in other states, such as Pennsylvania, more refined statistics revealed that her Catholic vote topped her Protestant vote at every socioeconomic level.
More important, this isn't the 1930s or 1950s or even the 1970s. If Catholic voters in these primaries really were clearly poorer than Protestants and non believers, than we have to rethink one of the principal themes in American Catholic history and the mountain of evidence that seems to prove it: that white Catholics' social and economic progress has been extraordinarily rapid over the last half century and has brought them abreast or even ahead of white Protestants. Have Catholics really not slipped so easily into the American middle class and not yet "assimilated" as we all assumed?
Perhaps the simplest answer to why Catholics voted so strongly for Hilary Clinton is the race of her African American opponent, Barack Obama. This would not surprise historians. Irish Catholics' embrace of "whiteness" -- identification as white and support of white supremacy -- has been a major theme in the writing of American history for more than two decades. So much so that, as one historian has said, it has become a "cliché." This year's political observers and participants have picked up on the theme: The Washington Post reported, for example, on the burning of green Obama signs on St. Patrick's day in Scranton. Even Reverend Jeremiah Wright spoke darkly, if obliquely, about Irish American whiteness -- "Hear that O'Malley, O'Reilly?" -- in his speech at the National Press Club.
Yet historians have also documented a particularly fierce racist resistance to neighborhood integration by Catholics of all ethnic groups, not just the Irish, through the latter half of the twentieth century. That resistance, often vile in its rhetoric and violent in its practice, appeared to be stronger than among Protestants and Jews, because Catholics seemed more strongly rooted in their urban communities than others. So intense did such resistance become, David Leege has argued effectively, that race not "moral" or "social" issues appears to have been more important in creating the Catholic Reagan Democrats of the 1980s.
Some have argued that white Clinton voters, including white Catholics, feel threatened by African Americans today as they did then. Matt Bai of the New York Times and others has suggested that Obama did best in primary states with large Black populations, where huge African American majorities carried him to victory, or in states with few Blacks, where whites had little fear of African Americans and thus of an African American presidential candidate. In the remaining states, Black populations seemed just large enough to provoke white fears and votes for Clinton. While this contention makes sense in theory, and may have applied to votes in some states like New Jersey and Pennsylvania, it did not fully explain the voting behavior of whites generally, and white Catholics in particular, during the Democratic primary. In Wisconsin white Catholics voted for Obama, but in Massachusetts they voted overwhelmingly for Clinton, even though the percentage of African Americans is the same in both states. In Rhode Island, with an even smaller Black population than either Wisconsin or Massachusetts, white Catholics also gave Clinton heavy majorities. Lest we think white Catholics in New England are simply more conservative than those in Wisconsin, a recent Democracy Corps study concluded just the opposite.
As important, the issues that stoked Catholic and other whites' hostility towards African Americans in the 1970s and 1980s, busing, affirmative, action, neighborhood integration, welfare "reform," and crime have had very little recent resonance. Few white Catholic neighborhoods even exist today, and those that do in the Northeast and Midwest, have suffered more recently from invasions by white brokers, bankers and advertising executives than from African Americans. SS. Peter and Paul Church in the Irish Catholic, once anti busing bastion of South Boston, for example, is now a luxury condominium and Charlestown, Boston's other old Irish Catholic stronghold, boasts a thriving youth lacrosse program. One could argue that simply having a Black man at the top of the ticket is threat enough, but why then, in 2006, did a majority of white Catholics in Massachusetts vote for African American Deval Patrick for Governor, while white Protestants in the Bay State voted for Kerry Healey (born Murphy and with a degree from Trinity College, Dublin)? The difference between white Catholics and white Protestants in the Patrick – Healey election was nineteen percentage points.
The second major explanation for Clinton's Catholic success versus Obama is Obama's alleged elitism. During the primaries, numerous political commentators compared Obama to John Kerry, whose apparent timidity in the face of scurrilous attacks, fluency in French and taste for wind surfing marked him as a snotty wimp to some voters in the presidential campaign of 2004. Worse, perhaps, many political observers compared Obama to the alleged father of recent Democratic snobbery, Adlai Stevenson. Obama was thus seen in some quarters during the primary season, and still is seen among many, as distant, aloof, unconcerned, consumed by his own moral superiority, and not very manly to boot.
The senator from Illinois is puzzled by this and deservedly so, given his modest origins and current athletic skills (except in bowling), unmatched by almost any other presidential nominee in memory. Stevenson, on the other hand, really was something of an American aristocrat and couldn't have taken anyone one on one on the basketball court.
Yet as sweet and soaring as Obama's rhetoric has seemed to many, maybe to even most, Democratic voters, there is something in his speeches and manner that seemed to strike the wrong chord for many Democrats, particularly many Catholic Democrats. During the Democratic primary season, Catholics as diverse as the editor of Commonweal, Margaret O'Brien Steinfels, and Ohio blue collar workers and their wives expressed some discomfort with Obama's talk. They wondered how realistic and tough he was: "Doesn't he sound a little naïve. He stands up there so optimistic… preaching hope and change. It sounds great and everything, but come on." Worse he conjured up images of old Protestant moral reformers. Steinfels complained "there is something of the Protestant preacher [Baptist?] in Obama. Though it can inspire, there are times when my eyes glass over," and a woman in Ohio said much the same thing: "I just don't like the preaching that he's doing. He sounds like an old bible thumper to me. I like being talked to. I don't like being yelled at."
Historians over the last few decades have paid less attention to the question of anti-elitism than to racism in American history. Though the class divide between Obama's and Clinton's vote seems obviously relevant to the question of Obama's elitism, the historic Catholic - Protestant conflict is pertinent too. In the nineteenth century, politics in the northeast and middle west often pitted Catholic politicians, glorying in their plebeian origins, against Protestant patricians, confirmed in their righteousness. The secularization of reform and the growing importance of race changed but did not eliminate this fundamental divide. For example, while most political scientists in the 1950s, and many historians since, assumed that Catholic votes against Adlai Stevenson in 1952 and 1956 reflected either the inevitable turn of upwardly mobile Catholics to the Republicans or the Catholic hard line on the Cold War, there was something in the way Stevenson talked and carried himself that was at work then too. When the then young political scientist Lawrence Fuchs went out to survey Boston Irish Catholic neighborhoods after Stevenson's crushing defeats in 1956, he found that people there, rich and poor, seemed bothered as much by Stevenson's effete preachiness as his policy positions. Robert and Jack Kennedy felt the same way about Stevenson, ridiculing him even as he worked for them as prissy and weak. To their Catholic opponents in the Democratic Party, Adlai Stevenson and his "Amateur Democrats" thus seemed but another incarnation of these old elite moral reformers. John Kerry, war service or no, and practicing Catholic or not, seemed to be perceived in the same way, and fared very poorly among Catholics in his 2004 campaign for the presidency, even in his home state. After twenty years as a Massachusetts senator, Kerry barely won the state's Catholic vote in 2004, 51% to 49%, though he won three-fifths of Massachusetts' Protestant voters.
Robert Frost once famously urged John Kennedy to be more Irish than Harvard, but Obama may not find a solution to white perceptions of his elitism in his African American heritage. If emotional and stirring, the Protestant cadences of African American speech, for example, resonate with a kind of moral uplift that seems alien to some Catholics. The moral earnestness in Martin Luther King's talk sometimes made Bobby Kennedy cringe, for example. Not just too academic and cold, then, Obama may also be too emotional and "hot," for Catholics who appreciate gritty ironies and earthy skepticism. Obama's race may also complicate his ability to project an alternative masculinity to the charge of being the new effete Stevenson or Kerry. Racially charged controversies and conflicts over proper styles of masculinity have been principal points of contention in American popular culture since Muhammad Ali and Sylvester Stallone. Arguments pitting Black athlete's alleged expressive exuberance against a white ethnic athletic ideal of silent stoicism have been staples of sports talk radio for a generation. It is no coincidence that Senator Clinton happily named herself the new Rocky Balboa.
In the end, Obama may suffer the double whammy of being an almost perfect embodiment of "top-bottom" coalition politics, the alliance between white reform elites and minorities that goes far back into American political history. In a unique way, because of his race and his manner and rhetoric, he seems representative of both the top and the bottom.
What then will all this mean for the Catholic vote in the general election? National polls conflict: Time magazine had McCain carrying Catholics by fourteen points early in the summer, but a Democracy Corps study from about the same time, suggested that Obama was doing "well enough" among white Catholics -- running seven percentage points ahead of Kerry. A Pew poll in early August found Obama and McCain tied among white Catholics but a Quinnipiac poll a few weeks later reported that McCain led Obama by eight points among the same voters. State polls have not clarified this much. Obama has been running behind McCain among Catholics in Florida and Colorado, ahead in Wisconsin, ahead but barely in Minnesota, and about even in Pennsylvania and Connecticut, but the state polls seem to change every day.
There may be another way to look at the Catholic vote in the current election cycle. It may not help us predict any better, but it may be more revealing.
Obama lost to Clinton by over thirteen points in eight states. In all of those states, blue collar voters were critical to her victories. Recent polls suggest that Obama is now also behind – in most cases far behind - McCain in five of those states: Arkansas, Kentucky, Tennessee, Oklahoma and West Virginia. The Illinois senator is ahead in three of them: New York, Massachusetts and Rhode Island.
New York was Clinton's home state and the size of her victory there was understandable as is, given its New York's longtime liberalism, the state's current support for Obama in the general election.
Rhode Island and Massachusetts may be more interesting. Clinton had no home state advantage in them, but they, too, are among the most liberal states in the Union and by many measures -- except for an occasional Republican governor -- more Democratic than New York, indeed, perhaps the most Democratic states in the union, the bluest of the blue states. In Rhode Island Democrats outnumber Republicans 60 to 15 in the state legislature's house and 33 to 5 in the State Senate. In Massachusetts, it is 141 to 19 in the House and 35 to 5 in the Senate. Obama's success here should also be expected.
The volatility of the swing from the primary vote in the two states to current polls is, nonetheless, very interesting: in Massachusetts there have been spreads of as much as thirty five points from Clinton's victory margin in the primary to Obama's recent lead in some polls, and in Rhode Island a few spreads have been even larger. Such swings are especially impressive when matched against the other strong Clinton states, mainly in the southern border states, where McCain is thumping Obama about as badly as Clinton did.
Rhode Island and Massachusetts are the most Catholic states in the union. Indeed Catholics are a clear majority in Rhode Island and a near majority in Massachusetts. Catholics made up 43% of the voters for president in Massachusetts in 2004 and 57% of the voters in Rhode Island that year. By contrast, voters in the five Clinton states where McCain is beating Obama are overwhelmingly Protestant. No one, of course, believes that Massachusetts and Rhode Island are so strongly Democratic simply because they are so heavily Catholic, much less, so liberal for that reason. Still consider this: replace white Catholic voters in Rhode Island and Massachusetts with white evangelical Protestants (or Irish Catholics with Scotch Irish Protestants) and think what their politics would be like.
So what can we say about the Catholic vote in 2008? Probably few predictions but some points.
First, Catholics remain a distinct people, not necessarily in all or even most elections, but in the right contexts. In the primaries they were distinctly different than Protestants and "secular" Democrats and critically important to Clinton's victories in places like Massachusetts where high tech industries, high education levels and above average wealth seemed to create an electorate made for Senator Obama. If they were distinct from other Democrats in their own states such as Massachusetts and Rhode Island, however, they also now differ from Clinton Democrats in the South.
Second, what separates Catholics from other voters is not always their church's doctrine. Religious issues were not important in the primaries, and in the general election, if they were the only issues, McCain would be running much better in the two most Catholic states in the union than he is now. This does not mean doctrine does not matter in Catholic politics; it does mean that Catholic voters (like other voters) are not just the sum of their church's dogma – they are also products of their history's experiences. Those histories vary, in some cases significantly – they are not the same for Catholics in Massachusetts and Rhode Island as they are for Catholics in New Jersey or Pennsylvania – and they are complicated. For some reason, Catholics in Massachusetts and Rhode Island did not leave the Democratic Party, or at least not in the same numbers, as their co-religionists in the Middle Atlantic states did. Perhaps political observers need to start considering not why so many Catholics have left the Democratic Party, but why many, in some cases, very many, have stayed in it. After all, the Al Smith election was a long time ago.
Finally, among the most important historical legacies for America's white Catholics are racial conflict and battles with reforming elites. These two experiences also vary significantly among Catholics by region or state, but they are also more or less present among them everywhere in the nation. That racism pushed some white Catholics to Clinton in the primaries and now is leading others to McCain is undoubtedly true. At the Pew Forum's Biannual Faith Angle Conference in May, William Galston suggested "We can't rule out the possibility that older Catholics are simply less comfortable with the idea and the possibility of an African American President than are older Protestants."
Yet Galston worried about this explanation, "Having said that I can't quite tell a story that convinces me as to why that should be the case." With Catholic neighborhoods washed away and tangible racial "threats" to them like busing and housing integration reduced in any case, it is hard to see the persistence of any clear differences between white Catholics and white Protestants on this issue now. It has never been clear that white Catholics had any greater commitment to the ideology or ideal of white racial supremacy than white Protestants in the twentieth century. Indeed, in the mid twentieth century, even as white Catholics in northern cities violently attacked blacks who attempted to find homes in their neighborhoods or even simply seats in their churches, Catholic Democratic politicians routinely backed Civil Rights legislation in Congress, hoping to reap the benefits of northern Black votes. In 1937, for example, the anti-lynching bill introduced into Congress was known as the Gavagan bill, after the name of its sponsor, J. Joseph Gavagan of New York, proud member of the Knights of Columbus and a Democratic regular. Angry Southern Democratic opponents of the bill railed against Gavagan in the House debates over the bill, accusing him of trying "to make Harlem safe for Tammany Hall."
Galston suspected that rather than race some variation on reform versus the regulars was really at the heart of the differences between Catholics and others in the Democratic primaries. Clinton's primary strengths and McCain's surprising viability also seem to suggest that conflicts between reform elites and "regular guy" regulars may be at least as important as race in recent Catholic voting. Suspicion of elites is about economic class but not entirely; it is also about historic religious and ethnic resentments. It thus can be about policy, issues and programs, but it can also be about the way people talk, their sense of humor, even gestures – the distinction as that woman in Ohio said between talking with or for and talking at. Barack Obama still needs to figure out how Hilary Clinton morphed from being a hectoring school marm' to Rocky Balboa against him in the primaries, and how the McCain campaign, more recently, has so successfully transformed him, even if it was only for a few weeks, into a Hollywood prima donna, girlish, pretentious and self absorbed. This is not just his problem. It has been a Democratic problem since Stevenson and cost the party dearly in elections in 1988 and 2004. But it is his problem now. Such anti-elitism is also not a specifically Catholic attitude, but Catholics, as noted, have long histories of battles between outside "goo-goo" reformers and inside resisting, tough guy, heroes. More important, white Catholics are strategically located. They form powerful blocs in states Obama needs and can win; those white Protestants who may be just as suspicious of reform elites are far more numerous in states where Obama has no chance.
Obama needs Catholics and seems to know it, part of the appeal, clearly of considering the scarcely known, first term, Catholic Governor of Virginia, Tim Kaine, or second term Catholic Governor Kathleen (Gilligan) Sibelius of Kansas as possible Vice Presidential candidates, before finally settling on Irish Catholic Senator Joseph, " Joey," Biden, once of Scranton, now of Delaware.
Yet if Obama knows the problem does he know the answer or have the solution? The Democratic Convention hinted that he might.
The Clintons, of course, buoyed him at the Convention, but the choice of Biden seemed to immediately pay off. At the very beginning of his acceptance speech, Senator Biden channeled his mother (ne Finnegan of Scranton) to enunciate the core of the American Catholic egalitarian political credo: "No one is better than you. You are everyone's equal, and everyone is equal to you." (Chris Mathews nearly wept – "I had a mother like that.")
Yet Obama himself seemed different that week. He may have learned that he does not have to mimic Catholic "regular guys" or others suspicious of elite reform – he doesn't have to bowl. He appears to have learned that he needs only to be able to speak plainly and directly to them, and perhaps even more important, to be strong, tough, unafraid, without being arrogant. (He also told ESPN earlier in the week that he is a White Sox, not a Cubs fan, heartfelt for a Chicago Southsider probably, but also a sound choice of regular guy grittiness over effete enthusiasm.)
Nevertheless, it is still early, and if white Catholics still seem as inscrutable to Barack Obama and his campaign in November as they did to him as well as Chris Mathews in February, then ….
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Carol Vanderveer Hamilton - 9/14/2008
Mr. Pendleton, you need a hypen in "old-fashioned," and your second sentence is a comma splice (two independent clauses joined by a comma).
I agree, however, about the accusative. It's misused a lot.
Carol Vanderveer Hamilton - 9/14/2008
I'm also reminded of JFK, and if he sounded like a Baptist, that would turn me off.
Carol Vanderveer Hamilton - 9/14/2008
That's not what the article says. It says they don't like the Protestant cadences and style of his speeches.
He didn't live "a cushy lifestyle"--certainly not compared to Bush or McCain.
Carol Vanderveer Hamilton - 9/14/2008
The left and liberalism only overlap if you divide the political spectrum in half. The true left does not regard liberalism as part of it, because the true left is anit-capitalist, while liberalism originally fostered and still supports capitalism.
If you divide it into three sections, with centrists in the middle, there is a long area to the left of liberalism, namely, socialism, communism, and anarchism. The last of those rejects government absolutely.
If you look at the political spectrum in Europe, you will see how much larger it is. On the right there are straightforwardly authoritarian (fascist) parties. On the left there are communist parties, socialist parties, the Labor Party, and the Green Party. In the UK, for example, there is the Labour Party and the Liberal Democrats, two different and rival parties.
Carol Vanderveer Hamilton - 9/14/2008
I'd ask you, R.R., to show evidence that Bush's grades & test scores were what you say. I read that both Kerry & Bush graduated from Harvard with Gentlemen's Cs. I'm certain from my own teaching experience that Obama must have tested high on his SAT and LSAT scores. Bush answers questions so poorly; he probably had tutors, or classmates who wrote his papers for him.
I agree with Dennis Slough that too many people may be intimidated by the likes of Obama, Gore, and Kerry--all of them well-educated, well-spoken, nice-looking, and tall.
A friend of mine who went to Columbia at the same time as Obama showed me a college newspaper for which Obama had written a piece. It was, like his other written work, very well-done.
Wm W. Pendleton - 9/13/2008
I am sure it is old fashioned, but, please use 'him' after both. Mathews seems to have missed the lessons on the accusative case, we do not all need to follow.
W W Pendleton
R.R. Hamilton - 9/11/2008
How any half-way informed person could honestly say that Obama is a "leftie" is enough to baffle the curious.
Maybe because he was rated the most liberal Senator of 2007 using objective measurements?
R.R. Hamilton - 9/11/2008
I wonder if it's not because Obama and Kerry and Gore "think" they are better than us, but because they *are* better than many (most?) of us.
These guys are incredibly accomplished, brilliant under pressure, driven toward increasing levels of perfection at whatever they attempt, eloquent, and quick on their feet, which can be very intimidating.
What objective evidence to you have for any of this? Even Bush (who I think you will agree is not a very high standard) had grades and test scores were higher than Kerry's or Gore's. Maybe we should ask Obama for his SAT and LSAT scores.
bill farrell - 9/9/2008
I am Irish Catholic. I voted for Obama in the New York primary. I admit that the magic of his 2004 Keynote speech escaped me, but I thougt that both his speeech on race and his speech on Super Tuesday were excellent speeches.
The Super Tuesday speech ended with his comment that we are who we have been waiting for. I loved that ending. It reminded me of the Jesuits who taught me in high school. To me, in effect, it seems close to a Jesuit motto from my high school years: "A man for others." Both stress that we have obligations to people beyond ourselves. In essence, it is communitarian.
I would argue that idea is strongly Catholic. Sociologists (notably Andrew Greeley and some others) have found eveidence that US Catholics are much more communitarian than most white US Protestants. (African-American Protestants tend to be more communitarian than their white counter parts.)
Frankly, neither speech reminded me of the more famous examples of African-American sermons and preaching. Both speeches remind me more of JFK than Martin Luther King. (I did alot of ethnic history in college and grad school.)
For the sake of full disclosure, I was at Columbia when Obama was there. I graduated from Columbia College in 1981. I then went to graduate school in American history at Columbia for two years. Then I went to Columbia Law, graduating in 1986. Obama was Columbia College Class of 1983, but he transferred into Columbia for his final two years. We did not know each other, however. (By the way, I believe that the largest religious affiliation in my class at Columbia was Catholic.)
But that leads to another point. My Jesuit high school was very proud of its success in getting students accepted into Ivy League and other elite schools. I believe that it is safe to say that the majority of parents of my high school classmates would have their sons to get into those schools. (I wrote sons because my high school was and remains male only.) Therefore, I am dubious that US Catholics dislike Ivy grads in general.
Nancy REYES - 9/8/2008
Pretty accurate analysis.
Obama preaching like a Baptist black preacher ight indeed be part of the problem:
Until he worked as a community organizer, Obama never had much contact with the black inner city community.
In contrast, despite racial friction, many Catholic ethnics did have intimate contact with these communities, and might see him as a fake, pretending he "suffered" from racial injustice when he actually lived a cushy lifestyle, and went to elite universities.
Jim Good - 9/8/2008
Do you have evidence that Obama has "failed to launch"?
Dennis Slough - 9/8/2008
I wonder if it's not because Obama and Kerry and Gore "think" they are better than us, but because they *are* better than many (most?) of us.
These guys are incredibly accomplished, brilliant under pressure, driven toward increasing levels of perfection at whatever they attempt, eloquent, and quick on their feet, which can be very intimidating. Do white Catholics carry around some sort of historical baggage that makes them more prone to be intimidated by these high achievers? More ready to embrace the serial failures of a dullard?
From my perspective Obama listens to "regular folk" very well. He's taught me a few surprising things about them/us and I think it's because his mind and heart have for a long time been more open than most people to their/our concerns.
By-the-way, just because these candidates are better at certain things doesn't automatically make them more valued, except for leadership jobs like President. Or, at least it should be that way.
How did Americans lose the ability to appreciate the next guy who happens to have a brilliant intellect and who works hard? I hope the next generation of Americans shakes this national character flaw.
Bill McWilliams - 9/8/2008
How any half-way informed person could honestly say that Obama is a "leftie" is enough to baffle the curious. BTW - I'd bet money that the right-wingers here see hypocrisy in supporting the most recent Government bailouts of the two F's.
Why anyone who actually believes and puts into practice what the Catholic religion teaches, yet votes against their own economic self interest, is equally baffling.
This country's voters really do get the kind of government they deserve. And that includes those elections that are honest, not rigged. And yes, there are such elections. I guess.
Douglas Cremer - 9/8/2008
An excellent, multi-faceted analysis that explains well my own ambivalence towards Obama as an Italian-American Catholic. Especially the notes about his style and rhetoric: the cadences of the Protestant pulpit combined with how he appears often to be lecturing 'down' to his audience (while he also always seems to be looking 'up' to the heavens) that hints he really does think he's better than us (and that his clearly Protestant take on the world is better than our Catholic one).
And I'll admit as well to a suspicion abut elite reform, about change that does not appear to come from the bottom-up, but the top down (as well as being thoroughly market-tested). Perhaps he needs to reveal how many of his ideas come not from his biography (which does make him look self-absorbed) but from his conversations and experience with "regular folk," as his recent rolled-up shirt-sleeves appearances suggest. That would certainly help move this white Catholic towards a more open support of his candidacy.
Michael Davis - 9/8/2008
I love all the hand wringing by the lefties out there concerning Obama's failure to launch.
Maybe, just maybe, it's related to his left of center ideology. Then again, lefties can never believe the middle and lower classes wouldn't agree with them on economic issues. That would be "voting against your self-interest."
I guess it will take a President McCain to convince the left that they will never win elections tacking to the left.
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text:
Ingenieur Gudang to buy industrial land in Puncak Alam for RM30.45 mil
01 Aug 2022
Ingenieur Gudang Bhd (IGB), formerly known as Dynaciate Group Bhd has proposed to acquire 9.32 acres of leasehold industrial land for RM30.45 mil in Bandar Puncak Alam, Selangor.
In a filing with Bursa Malaysia, IGB said its wholly-owned subsidiary, Magnitude Resources Sdn Bhd, has entered into a conditional sale and purchase agreement (SPA) with Yuwang Development Sdn Bhd (YDSB) and Global Bloom Sdn Bhd (GBSB) for the acquisition.
IGB intends to develop the said land into warehouse storage space targeting the courier and logistics market players in view of the strategic location of Puncak Alam.
The proposed acquisition is subjected to the approval of shareholders and is expected to be completed by the third quarter of 2024.
IGB executive director Melvin Lim said the group is aggressively looking to make headways into the property investment market as it has stronger demand and commands better margins.
"IGB is continuously sourcing new land banks or properties at accessible locations that have development potential.
"In the future, we hope to generate good profits for the group from a combination of recurring rental income as well as property appreciation value," he said in a separate statement.
Bursa Malaysia, in a statement, said IGB's securities will be traded and quoted under the new name with effect from Aug 3. The company's stock code remains unchanged.
Source: The Star