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|Harry Alford
National Black Chamber of Commerce
The Evil Ways of Environmentalists
The Environmental Movement has been around since the days of naturalist John Muir (late 19th century) who is the founder of the Sierra Club. Back then it had high credibility and did great work to promote and preserve our natural beauty such as national parks, lakes and rivers. Sometime in the 1950's it started straying into scare tactics. A popular claim was Global Cooling – we were going to freeze to death via our polluting ways. Then it turned to the opposite claim of global warming after a few warm years.
President Nixon used this cause to divert our attention from the Civil Rights Movement and the anti-war furor over Vietnam. He proclaimed Earth Day as an annual event and enlarged the Environmental Bureau into a separate agency, the Environment Protection Agency, EPA. This worked and today the EPA has become one of the most meddling entities in the federal government. It is a friend of the environmentalists and is often used as a weapon for their advocacy.
Under the Clinton Administration the environmentalists started an outrageous claim. They accused corporate America of seeking Black communities to dump their waste, poison the water and render the land toxic. They summed it up by calling the mythical activity "Environmental Racism" and persuaded (funded) local civil rights groups to join in the fight and demand "Environmental Justice". This died down after about ten years.
One of the current activities of the environmentalists is the assault on coal. They want to kill the coal industry. New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg donated $50 million to the Sierra Club for the sole purpose of killing off our coal industry. Right now they have the EPA planning to shut down over 31 coal fired utility plants by way of a "Rule". Rules are like executive orders whereby it avoids congressional approval. With the blessing of the President they just do it as if it were voted legislation. This will wreck our economy and destroy our personal worth if we don't fight back and stop the action. Think of the many thousands of jobs that will be lost and the rising cost of electricity we will all be stuck with.
Another tactic by the environmentalists is a legal proceeding known as "Sue and Settle". This is done by collusion between the environmentalists and pro-environmentalist bureaucrats. These groups will file a massive lawsuit against the EPA, Department of Interior, Bureau of Land Management, Fish and Wildlife Services, etc. The problem is the "deal" has already been made. Thus, the agency being sued will quickly sit down and settle with the environmentalists. In the end, it is like a wish list for the suing environmentalists as the federal agency gives them just about everything they want.
According to Marita Noon, Executive Director, Energy Makes America Great Inc., "In 2011, the Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) entered into a massive settlement of a lawsuit filed by environmental groups in which the agency promised to address more than 250 candidate species it had previously found warranted protection but were precluded from listing due to a backlog. As a part of the behind-closed-door agreement, the FWS also pledged to review hundreds more species proposed for listing." According to Senator David Vitter (R-LA), "It is the sue-and-settle agreements. This future regulation could prohibit many beneficial uses of tens of millions of acres of private property.
All this was set in motion while no affected landowner or other stakeholder was given any opportunity for input". You can't "break ground" on land that houses a registered endangered species – factual or not. Just like that millions of acres will be denied any development or growth. Economic opportunities and millions of jobs will be put on "ice" so that the environmentalists can have their way. This sue-and-settle racket is growing in use and we and Congress must stop this mockery. In effect, it is a conspiracy to behave in such a matter within the court of law.
The National Black Chamber of Commerce spends an inordinate amount of time fighting these environmentalists who come after our communities in so many ways. They lie, cheat and deceive in so many ways. Internationally, they have a collective treasury of over $8 billion to push their agenda. What is that agenda? To stop growth and positive change as Commerce is their enemy. Jobs, commodities, manufacturing, etc. are bitter items to them. Funny, most of these groups are made up of very wealthy people who got their wealth through plain American style capitalism. They now want to prevent the rest of the population from having a chance to do the same. They will continue their evil ways and we will continue to fight them. Free Enterprise is our mission. (NBCC)
Mr. Alford, co-founder, President/CEO of the National Black Chamber of Commerce®. Website: www.nationalbcc.org. Email: firstname.lastname@example.com


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InuYasha CosplayInuYasha is a Japanese manga series written and illustrated by Rumiko Takahashi. The story centers on Kagome a time-traveling middle school student, a half-demon, a lecherous monk, a fox demon, a demon slayer, and a nekomata during the Sengoku period who seek to find all the fragments of the Jewel of Four Souls (Shikon no Tama) and to keep them out of the hands of evildoers, especially Naraku.
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subset: commoncrawl


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Tesla's Simplicity Coming June 10th!
sim·plic·i·ty noun \sim-'pli-s?-te, -'plis-te\
: the new album by TESLA
: the quality of being easy to understand or use
: the state or quality of being plain or not fancy or complicated
: something that is simple or ordinary but enjoyable
Check out the debut single "So Divine…" here!
Simplicity is something we all strive for in a modern world filled with technology and stress, it is also the title of the new album by TESLA, and it describes the formation of the music it contains.
The band locked themselves away for weeks in isolation with long time co-producer and A&R man Tom Zutaut's on his 150 acre ranch in the woods of Virginia. There the band discovered and wrote the music that was still inside their imagination and quickly allowed the ideas to flow, transforming those ideas into 14 powerful tracks filled with emotional, powerful subjects relevant to the band's current state.
From the opening track "MP3" to the explosive "TIME BOMB," the music takes the listener on a journey with its songs about the ups and downs of life. The lighthearted "CROSS MY HEART" tells the story of a musician on the road proclaiming his commitment to love, while the songs "RISE AND FALL" and "SO DIVINE" speak of the supernatural and the loss of special friends.
The tracks "FLIP SIDE" and "LIFE IS A RIVER" give a lyrical look at the dualities in life, one being humorously about hippies smoking weed for medication, and the other being almost spiritual, suggesting that we just "Let it Flow…"
TESLA immediately jumped into the Brian Wheat's Sacramento recording studio after returning from Zutaut's ranch to record one song a day. The idea was to capture the moment rather than spend weeks overdubbing after the fact.
As soon as the band had something recorded, guitar textures and vocals were added. The music was then sent to the legendary mixing engineer Michael Wagener (Metallica, Skid Row, Motley Crue) to put the final touches on the final product.
Ultimately the process of making the album was very simple on a production level, but complex emotionally as the band and co-producer Tom Zutaut poured every ounce of passion and thought into the process during the two month period. This resulted in hours and hours of listening and collaborating over every detail but usually ending up being the most obvious choice; the simplest thing was always the best.
SIMPLICITY: the new TESLA album.


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Fraud from abroad
Pyramid schemes. Advance-fee swindles. Religious-affinity-loan scams. Look what the Web dragged in.
Vaughn Nelson had done well as an investor in the 1990s, regularly racking up annual returns of 23-to-25 percent in both his 401(k) and his outside investments.
Then a longtime business associate offered Mr. Nelson an even better deal: 23-to-25 percent monthly returns from loaning money to big, though unnamed, banks in Europe. The friend added that he had $120,000 of his own in these "offshore investments."
So the Salt Lake City businessman plowed $6,000 into the venture. It quintupled in a matter of months. With returns coming through as promised, he tapped his retirement plan for $50,000. That money was lost.
Nelson now says the associate lied to him and has since been convicted of securities fraud in connection with a "prime bank" scheme; a swindle that authorities estimate annually pulls $1.75 billion from the wallets of people nationwide.
From bank-loan scams to Nigerian advance-fee swindles to good old pyramid schemes, fraud is alive and well in America.
One top fraud-buster, Alabama Securities Commissioner Joseph Borg, believes the economic downturn from which the US appears to be emerging has boosted the flim-flam industry. With the stock market generating little income for investors, more and more people grab deals that they might have considered too risky in the past, he maintains.
"They're still looking for someplace to put money," says Mr. Borg. Because people became used to 20 percent yearly returns in the mid-1990s, propositions offering even greater riches haven't set off the alarm bells they once did.
Borg, who also is chairman of the North American Securities Administrators Association (NASAA), says people who steered clear of the stock market are vulnerable, too. If they had money in certificates of deposit, they've felt cheated the past year as they rolled over accounts earning 8 percent into ones gaining 2 percent or less.
Embarrassed victims don't tend to step forward, so accurate records on the numbers of people swindled, and amounts taken, are impossible to come by.
However, Ashley Baker, a spokesman for NASAA, says that in recent meetings of group members "everyone was seeing more of this, not less."
Some of the scams are twists on old standards, such as "gifting" programs that cite Internal Revenue Code that allows anyone to give anyone else $10,000 yearly, tax-free. Sometimes called Season of Sharing, or Women Empowering Women, the cons target women and are, in fact, illegal pyramids that have prompted warnings from the IRS for violating gifting statutes.
The US Secret Service has set up a task force to combat the Nigerian fee swindle. In this ruse, a letter arrives at home or work one day postmarked Nigeria, Togo, or some other West African country.
The letter writer claims to be working with Nigeria's national oil company, for instance, in such a high-level capacity that he or she has been able to siphon off tens of millions of dollars from contracts.
The executive has no way to get the funds out of the country, unless the American would kindly provide his or her bank account number so that the money can be transferred.
Of course, the American will get a fat percentage of the take. And, of course, anyone falling for this will have his or her banking accounts looted in the blink of an eye.
This African-based scam has taken to the Internet to reach a wider audience. "Any crook who doesn't use the Internet ought to be sued for malpractice," jokes Alabama's Borg. Not all online swindlers operate from abroad. His state is prosecuting a Phenix City, Ala., businessman who, working from a storefront with just computers and no other advertising, convinced 33,000 people from all 50 states and 32 foreign countries to send him $300 each in a loan program during a four-month period in 1999-2000.
The Alabama case was part of one of today's faster-growing swindles: religious affinities.
Hustlers will often direct their work toward members of a certain religion and tell them, for instance, that they have developed a loan program based upon Christian principles and are in need of seed money, or loans that promise quick and profitable repayment.
Officials in Florida are still trying to find much of the $500 million that the self-proclaimed Internet missionary church Greater Ministries International, of Tampa, Fla., swindled from people in what has been called a classic Ponzi scheme.
Its operatives have been given long prison terms for bilking some 27,000 victims worldwide; Amish and Mennonites of Pennsylvania were favorite targets.
Offshore investing is another popular way of extorting money. Here, the bad guys rely upon ignorance on behalf of the investors.
Ms. Baker of NASAA has a videotape of a crook telling victims that European checking accounts pay 20 percent interest per year.
Would-be investors should ask themselves: "How much do [I] know about the German banking system?" says Baker. "The common sense detectors should go off on that."
Unless they speak German or know which sources to talk with overseas, the average investor really can't easily check these claims, she adds. So a heaping dose of skepticism is needed.
Vaughn Nelson was offered promissory notes and insurance policies to entice him into prime-banking loans.
He got them, but they were phonies. And he admits that he should have done some more checking to ensure that both the security provider and the seller had registered with state securities commissions.
If you find the regulators in the dark about a deal, Nelson says, "don't [just] walk away from it. Turn your back and run."
SEC website alerts people to various investment scams including "prime banks" and Nigerian swindles. Site also provides advice on how to protect yourself.
National Association of Securities Dealers website is another good place to visit before opening your checkbook.
www.dbf.state.fl.us/alerts. html
Florida Office of the Comptroller gives a good rundown on a number of scams.
A virtual encyclopedia on everything from money laundering to chain letters to telemarketing fraud.
www.scambusters.com Rundowns of the latest scams, such as this season's "tax audit" e-mail. It claims to be from the IRS and demands you give your Social Security and bank account numbers. (Sorry folks, the IRS already knows this information.)


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Popular Science
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Home Page Chess Life Online 2009 August Rising Stars vs. Experience Starts Tomorrow
|Rising Stars vs. Experience Starts Tomorrow
|August 19, 2009
The NH Rising Stars vs. Experience tournament begins tomorrow in Amsterdam and goes from August 20-31. U.S. Champion Hikaru Nakamura leads the Rising Stars team while 33-year-old Peter Svidler (the veterans are getting younger!) leads the Experience team. Other members of the Rising Stars are Italian-American Fabiano Caruana, Jan Smeets and Daniel Stellwagen from the Netherlands and Hou Yifan. The Experience team also includes Peter Heine Nielsen (Denmark), Alexander Beliavsky (Slovenia), Loek Van Wely (The Netherlands) and Ljubomir Ljubojevic (Serbia).
The games begin at 7:30 AM EST, and you can watch them at the official website or on the Internet Chess Club.
Look for exclusive on-site CLO reports by GM Ian Rogers. Also follow chess.fm and Hikaru Nakamura on twitter, for more news from the scene.


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Tucked inside of his 2015 "austerity"-ending budget request the White House will release next month, President Obama plans to propose a big change in how the federal government pays to fight wildfires — a move that, administration officials all too gladly contend, reflects the ways in which climate change is making those fires riskier and costlier than ever. Via the NYT:
The proposal will ask Congress to pay the costs of fighting extreme wildfires in the same way it finances the federal response to disasters like hurricanes and tornadoes, the officials said. When unpredictable events like Hurricane Sandy are destructive enough to be declared disasters by the president, the Federal Emergency Management Agency is authorized to exceed its annual budget and draw on a special disaster account. The account is adjusted each year to reflect the 10-year average cost of responding to such events.
Mr. Obama's budget proposal would create a similar exception for the Interior and Agriculture Departments, which have agencies that are responsible for wildfire response. In recent years, as wildfires have become more frequent and intense in the Western United States, the cost of fighting the fires has soared.
In real dollar terms, adjusted for inflation, the Forest Service and Interior Department spent an average of $1.4 billion in annual wildfire protection from 1991 to 1999, according to a report by Headwaters Economics, a nonprofit research group. But that spending has more than doubled — from 2002 to 2012, the agencies spent an average of $3.5 billion to fight wildfires.
As they NYT notes, the measure is likely to garner a heap of bipartisan support, as there are already similar bills floating around the House and Senate, and an outside coalition of environmentalists, sportsmen, and timber producers have all been lobbying in favor of the idea. Indeed, the government's fire-fighting budget has been coming up woefully short the past few years, as forest fires have definitely been getting "more frequent and intense" — but not at all for the reason President Obama wants us to believe as he continues his campaign to make it look like he's Doing Something about climate change. In environmentalists' rush to classify any hint of "extreme" weather or any natural or ecological disaster as the dire evidence of anthropogenic global warming, they are completely and willfully misdiagnosing the real and glaring problem here.
For most of the 20th century, the federal government's forest fire policy on the one-third of the surface area of the United States it now owns was dominated by suppression tactics that have resulted in overly dense forests choked with too many trees and too much vegetation, all competing for precious water resources. Fire is just nature's way of thinning out trees, curing blights, and maintaining generally healthy ecosystems, but for decades the Forest Service actively prevented this cyclical light burning. Throw a match or a lightning strike into any of dense, dry forests today, and of course it's going to explode into a massive runaway fire.
Nutshell version: Through environmentalists' misguided land management policies, the federal government directly created a gigantic, terrible problem, and now they need more of our tax dollars to try and solve it. Perfect.


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It's been 11 years now. And they keep going back.
In the middle of March, during the week of spring break, a team of volunteers from Homer's Glacier View Baptist Church packs their work clothes and heads to Mexico. Destination: San Vicente, a small town on the Baja Peninsula where approximately 20 women and 60 children call the mission, Casa del Pastor, home.
This year, four friends from California joined the team, bringing the total to 40 — 23 of them between the ages of 13 and 18; the rest of the team are older adults.
Joel DeBlaay, associate and youth pastor at Glacier View, leads the team, and local contractors Jeremy Young, Todd Martin and Jerry Vantrease lend their combined knowledge of construction to the various work projects.
"I go to help people," said Martin, an excavation contractor. "It helps keep me centered and on track with what's really important."
Martin added that he uses a shovel, rather than an excavator, when he's there.
The Vantrease family has three children, ages 15, 18 and 24, who have each been on multiple trips.
"We just feel, as a church, that our kids do better when they see that there's something worth working for besides more stuff," said Vantrease.
Although the first two trips were spent building houses in Tijuana, the past nine trips have all been to Casa del Pastor, a home for women and children who have been abandoned or abused.
At the home the women are taught job skills such as sewing, cooking and fruit harvesting. Once they start working, they save money to buy a plot of land, where volunteers will build them and their children a house.
This year the team cleaned and repainted a 15-foot-by-16-foot room for a mom and her seven kids to live in as they move through the program. The team also worked on a small house for another one of the moms at the home. And they built an entire playground.
Linda Reinhart joined the team for the first time this year. Although she is nearing 80, Reinhart had a special reason for going.
Reinhart's husband, Jim, passed away in August of 2012. Her husband had a lifelong interest in children — as well as the outdoors, said Reinhart, so it occurred to her to do something special for the kids at the mission with memorial money she had received.
As Reinhart mentioned her idea to friends and family, they asked to contribute as well. The amount increased tenfold. Reinhart said originally she thought to buy a swing set, but instead there was enough for a whole playground.
"There are so many levels on which it was stirring," she said. "It was a lot of fun to do a lot of hard work where they really appreciate it."
Reinhart said she was impressed with the "marvelous adult leadership," as well as the quality of the young adults on the team.
"You hear a lot of things, but the fact is we have an awful lot of splendid young people," she said. "Parents are doing a wonderful job of raising their children. It's really encouraging to see that happening."
Luzma Alcaraz also traveled to San Vicente for the first time this year. Although she doesn't attend Glacier View, a coworker invited her to join the team. Born in Mexico, Alcaraz is fluent in Spanish and English, and volunteered to be one of two translators.
In addition to translating, she joined in working on the house and playground.
Alcaraz said she met a lot of really good people whose job is to maintain the mission.
"It's like they were born to do it," she said, "they manage it so well."
Alcaraz said one teenager, who had been raised at the mission, told the group how grateful he was that they came there — instead of going to some beach in Mexico.
"I wouldn't trade that trip for a trip to the Bahamas," she said. "If that was the only vacation I could take, I would definitely go back."
Toni Ross is a freelance writer who lives in Homer.
In their words:
"The first team here is Glacier View Baptist, from Homer Alaska. This is a hardworking team with lots of construction experience, that has accomplished an incredible amount in the short time they've been with us this week. The roof and interior supports for Ceci's house were completed in only a few days, and they have also been hard at work building a new playground for the kids. A huge new swingset has been installed, as well as an new play area connected to the original big toy. They've also built an airplane, a boat, and even a climbing wall! The amount of love and attention they have put into every detail is impressive, and the kids love the new additions. Thank you Lord for Glacier View!"
—From the Casa del Pastor online update (http://www.casadelpastor.com/


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I can see it in this postcard, mailed one hundred years ago today, November 18, 1910, by Josef Gärtz to his sweetheart, Elisabeth Ebner (ABEner) to celebrate her Name Day. Josef was twenty-one. Elisabeth was twenty-three. Within a year they would marry and eventually become my grandparents.
But I didn't always know about the love expressed in language as flowery as the blue-bedecked bicycle pictured on the front. In fact, before last year, I didn't know this postcard existed.
It was one of scores of missives my grandmother had saved for almost seventy years. "Trash or treasure?" My brothers and I debated, in a frenzy of sorting after my mother's death. We squinted at the illegible writing, written in an ancient German script that most present-day Germans can't read much less a German major like me. We decided to keep them, but I figured they'd languish for years in "Box 14, Gartz Correspondence" and end up summarily tossed.
Enter fate.
My brothers and I traveled to Transylvania in 2007 on a family roots-finding mission. In Sibiu (called Hermannstadt by the Germans), we met Professor Uli Wien who was researching the history and immigration of Siebenbürgen Germans -- people like our grandparents. Uli asked for our email addresses.
Serendipity had begun its subtle work.
I forgot all about Uli until the summer of 2009, when he emailed me. "Do you by any chance have any letters to or from your grandparents?"
Did I have letters! My heart leapt at what this meant. Perhaps Uli could help me decipher the inscrutable writing! That put me on a mission to look at the letters closely for the first time in the fifteen years since Mom's death -- and I began to tease out some authors' names.
F[räulein]Elise Ebner
Reisper Gasse [Street]
c/o Mr. Ji[c]keli [the family my grandmother worked for]
(yet another name for Hermannstadt / Sibiu: Nagyszeben is the Hungarian name)
I recognized my grandfather's signature: "Josef Gärtz," and I knew I had a treasure.
Printed under the bicycle on the front:
Herzlichen Glückwunsch zum Namenstag. "Heartfelt Good Wishes for your Name Day."
I sent a xerox of the writing to Uli, and he deciphered into modern German those words written one hundred years ago today. I translated Josef's sincere, flowery note into English, its tinges of 19th century formality not diminishing its sweetness:
Yours faithfully,
J[osef] G[ärtz]
Neppendorf, November 18. 1910"
I know love when I see it.


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Followers of The Frustrated Gardener will already know that I am an inveterate plant collector. If I've not seen or heard of a plant and it looks vaguely attractive I'll want to try growing it. Once I've established that I am capable of doing so (normally a quick Internet search will suffice) and I have my hands on it, there is no going back.
The winter provides some relief from this expensive and space-hungry addiction, although of late I have turned my attention to houseplants and am quickly running out of room for those too. But a trip to Cornwall is not complete without a visit to at least one nursery, and since it was also my birthday nothing was going to prevent me dropping into Hardy Exotics en route from Penzance to St Ives. Hardy Exotics is a small nursery brimming with unusual and unexpected plants. It has a special place in my affections since it's where I began buying tender and subtropical plants some ten or twelve years ago.
Having admitted that I tend to buy now and research later, I am hereby committing to describing this year's purchases on my blog, both as an aide memoire and a confessional. I might think twice about buying so many plants if I know I then have to write about them … although I feel this is unlikely!
On entering one of Hardy Exotics' slightly dishevelled and algaefied polytunnels, the first plant that caught my eye bore a handsome rosette of elongate green leaves atop a fleshy stem. Each leaf had a burgundy-red reverse with raised veins. I instantly recognised this as an impatiens, but was not sure which. The label read 'Impatiens balansae'. I have found almost nothing written about this species, apart from that it hails from China and Vietnam. Pictures online show shoals of jazzy little flowers resembling goldfish with big red lips. They swim elegantly over and between the foliage, poised on wiry stems. Lack of information generally serves only to pique my interest further. I shall let you know how I get on with the mysterious Impatiens balansae in due course. My first challenge is to get the plant through the remainder of the winter without an attack of red spider-mite, which so often cripples my impatiens when they come indoors.
Mindful that The Beau might not appreciate me filling his car with plants (I'm still sussing him out in that respect) I decided that I should only purchase one more on this particular excursion. Hopefully it won't be long until we've graduated to full-boot, roof-down, plants-wedged-between-the-legs adventures. Finding it difficult to choose, I plumped for another unknown, based purely on its resemblance to Sparmannia africana, a large, felty-leaved shrub that I find indispensable inside and out. It turns out that Entelea arborescens is quite closely related to sparmannia, as well as being an only child – it's the sole species within the genus. The leaves resemble a lime or a mulberry, with their large size and silky lustre suggesting 'tropical' and 'vigorous'. In its native New Zealand, Entelea arborescens is called whau and is prized for its very light wood, rivalling balsa (Ochroma pyramidale). The wood is pithy and unlignified, which means it has very little weight and no distinct growth rings within it. The Maori used whau to make rafts, floats and marker buoys, naming Auckland's Mount Eden 'Maungawhau' meaning 'Mountain of the whau tree'.
As you will see from the lead image, the flowers bear a close resemblance to those of rubus, superficially at least, and are borne in large clusters during spring and summer. They are, apparently, scented too. After flowering, spiky green fruit capsules appear, eventually turning blackish brown to resemble Mediaeval instruments of torture. Entelea arborescens is not considered hardy in the UK and does not appreciate cold or drought. However it does root very easily from cuttings, so I shall be taking several this summer as an insurance policy. In its natural habitat whau is a pioneer species living around ten years, so it benefits from constant rejuvenation and replacement. Whau might also make a handsome houseplant for a bright room, provided one has the space to let it grow and flower.
No doubt these intriguing plants are the first of many additions to the garden at The Watch House this year. How I will fit them all in I don't know. Stay tuned to find out! TFG.
Lead image: Whau Flower (Entelea arborescens) – Wikimedia Commons / Avenue
Categories: Beautiful Strangers, Cornwall, Flowers, Foliage, Musings, Plants, Trees and Shrubs


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Wrath of the Gods—Earthquake in Turkey
The night was too sultry for sleep. So at 3 a.m. on August 17, 1999, restless townspeople in Gölcük, Turkey, strolled in the park. They walked along the waterfront on the Gulf of İzmit, easternmost arm of the Sea of Marmara, and perhaps some talked of the many jumping fish spotted on the coast in recent days—or of the mysterious appearance of dead crabs and jellyfish. But İsmet Koyun and six other members of a local soccer team reminisce about past games as they sat on benches beneath a willow tree.
"Let's go home," İsmet recalls saying. "I've got to work today." As he stood, an explosion boomed over the gulf. "The earth came alive with shaking," he says. "The sky turned red, a sword of light flew out of the sea, and a wave as tall as a ship thundered toward us."
A great crack opened along the waterfront, and "like a drunk man trying to run," İsmet leaped over it and raced inland. Three of his friends climbed trees. A blinding storm of dust from collapsed buildings rose over the town and swept down toward the shore.
When the dust settled, İsmet found himself knee-deep in water. Looking back, he saw that a vast section of the former waterfront, including the park, had slumped into the gulf, sinking 30 feet (9 meters) or more. The lower floors of two seven-story buildings had crumbled and plunged into the gulf, killing 50 men who had been gambling in an ground-floor café.
Like everyone I met along the sea of Marmara in the days after the earthquake, İsmet Koyun still seemed stunned as he sat on his bicycle and looked out at the submerged trees and lampposts now well offshore. "Many bodies remain out there under the water," he said. "Also many vehicles, including a police car with two policemen inside."
Gölcük lies near the epicenter of one of the most punishing earthquakes of the past century. The magnitude 7.4 catastrophe created headlines worldwide. Tens of thousands dead. Some 250,000 homeless. And billions of dollars' worth of damage to Turkey's industrial heartland.
Istanbul, a city of more than seven million people about 50 miles (80 kilometers) northwest of the epicenter, was violently shaken. Although the heart of the megalopolis remained intact, the quake destroyed several dozen buildings in Avcilar, a neighborhood built in recent decades on the western edge of the city. And thousands of people, too frightened after the quake to sleep indoors, camped in open spaces with tents thrown together from sheets, towels, and blankets.
"This tragedy has directly touched almost everyone in the country," said my Turkish friend Aydin Kudu. "Hundreds of thousands of people from all over Turkey had moved here for jobs. We've all lost someone."
The earthquake began just east of Gölcük, about ten miles (16 kilometers) underground along a buried rip in the Earth's crust known as the North Anatolian Fault. Extending from eastern Turkey to Greece, the thousand-mile-long (1,609-kilometer-long) rip is very similar to California's infamous San Andreas Fault. Like its American counterpart, the Anatolian Fault is actually a network of smaller fault segments that divide two tectonic plantes—in this case Eurasia and the much smaller Anatolian block, which carries most of Turkey on its back.
The edges of the two plates are locked together, but geologic forces are driving the Anatolia plate westward toward Greece at the rate of 8 or 9 feet (2.4 or 2.7 meters) a century, building pressure along the juncture. When enough pressure builds, one or more fault segments unlock in a violent jerk. If a small segment breaks, the ensuing earthquake might be magnitude 6 or less. But when the segment beneath Gölcük snapped, the energy released triggered ruptures along three adjacent segments—to both the east and the west—creating a much larger event.
Three days after the earthquake struck, I drove with Aydin toward the epicenter, reading the morning headlines. The official death count had reached 6,800. Three provincial governors—unable to coordinate initial relief efforts—had been replaced. Rescue workers, including at least 2,000 foreigners, were giving up hope of finding anyone else alive in the wreckage. In the city of Adapazari 963 people had been buried in a mass grave. The Turkish government was ordering 10,000 more body bags. The destruction of the infrastructure of one of the most industrialized regions of the country was "complete," said the general secretary of the Foreign Investors Association.
When we reached the edge of İzmit, the largest city hit by the earthquake, the smell of petroleum pervaded the air. Black smoke still billowed up from the Tüpras refinery complex, Turkey's largest. People walked the highways with suitcases. Relief workers carried corpses to an ice rink that had been converted into a morgue.
We came to an immense pile of broken concrete—the remains of a six-story apartment building. Carpeting, bedspreads, and splinters of furniture protruded from the rubble. A rescue team working with a large backhoe picked away at the debris pile.
Clustered around the collapsed building were scores of people, their eyes red, their faces weary. Many clutched photo albums or stared at pictures of loved ones, hoping against all odds that they might still be breathing beneath the concrete.
A shout arose from the rescue team—a body. The workers carefully extracted the corpse of a woman; people crowded around. No one recognized her.
"It's hard," said a bystander. "The faces are so swollen and black."
I felt intrusive and helpless. "What can I say to these people?" I asked Aydin. " Geçmiş olsun ," he replied. "May it be over."
An older man with bandaged head and arms arrived, and people rushed to greet him. He was Mustafa Çifttepe, one of seven people who had survived the collapse of the building. His wife and son had not. He was just back from the hospital.
"He was trapped for 17 hours," said his son-in-law, Ersin Güzey, who lives in New York City. As soon as they heard of the catastrophe, Ersin and his wife had caught the first flight available to Istanbul.
Ersin translated his father-in-law's story: "I was in bed with my wife on the second floor when the shaking began. My wife said 'Get up! Get up!' Then a large chest landed on her. A wall fell toward me, stopping two inches (five centimeters) from my nose. I was afraid to move, afraid that if I did, everything would collapse and crush me. I just prayed and called for my son."
His son, a neighbor named Vedat Aktaş told me, was found in the next room, his pants pulled halfway up his legs.
Vedat cursed the contractor who built the apartment. "This building had only half the steel it should have had," he said. "And this is supposed to be concrete," he said, dropping a chunk and watching with disgust as it shattered into bits. "It's more like sand."
Vedat's anger echoed across Turkey as the death toll mounted. The dire need for housing during recent rapid urbanization had encouraged fast, shoddy construction in thousands of new buildings. Many contractors, either through corruption or negligence, ignored building codes designed for earthquake resistance. It was those newer buildings that took the greatest hit.
As we left, I turned to the bandaged old man: "Geçmiş olsun." He nodded, his eyes filling with tears.
We headed deeper into the destruction zone, giving a ride to a man bound for Gölcük. His niece and her husband had died there, and he wanted to search for other missing relatives. The sun blazed. The air sweltered. And everywhere I looked I saw the heaped remains of countless shattered stores, mosques, and apartments. Most of the buildings still standing teetered on the brink of collapse. Traffic inched past bulldozers working to clear debris. Thousands of sweating, overworked rescue workers attacked concrete rubble with jackhammers. The smell of death filled the air, and, like most of the people we saw, we put on surgical masks to filter the dust, odors, and microorganisms.
Aydin and I stopped to let our hitchhiker out and met two schoolteachers—a husband and wife—sitting in a field surrounded by an upholstered couch, a dining room set, and various other pieces of furniture they had retrieved from a nearby apartment building. They pointed to where they had lived.
"We were on the fifth floor," said Gönül Güzel. Now it's the third. The top floors fell into the first two. Everyone on the bottom died."
"We have no idea what will happen to us," said his wife, Yücel. "People bring us food, but we have no desire to eat."
At the resort town of Yalova we met a friend of Aydin's named Hakki Akyazi. His eyes were swollen, and in a soft, slow voice he told us he had just buried his sister, a medical doctor who had lived in a new apartment complex there. The two had been on vacation together on the Aegean. She had decided to extend her stay and had returned to Yalova for the night to pick up more clothes.
When Hakki heard of the earthquake, he rushed to her building, which lay in ruins. No rescue teams had reached it. He figured out where her apartment would have been and for 12 hours worked alone to get inside her bedroom. When he finally did, he found her dead.
At dusk we took a ferry from Yalova back to Istanbul across the Sea of Marmara. As we left the dock, I watched dump trucks pull up to the shore and empty the rubble of so many lost lives into the water. There was no other place to put it. Our boat was packed with mourners, and the setting sun turned the water deep red. It seemed as if we had been to a thousand funerals all in one day.
The next morning we visited Istanbul Technical University to speak with geologists struggling to understand exactly what had happened along the North Anatolian Fault.
"We knew that the Gölcük area was where the fault was likely to break next," said Rob Reilinger, an American geophysicist from MIT. Reilinger uses the satellite-based global positioning system (GPS) to track deformations or swellings of the Earth's surface that indicate where pressure is building underneath. "We just didn't know when this earthquake would happen or how much of the fault would break."
Scientists are able to explain some earthquake phenomena that puzzled the people of Gölcük. The flash of light that İsmet Koyun saw over the Sea of Marmara may have been methane gas exploding as it was released from sediments in the gulf. The dead crabs and jellyfish seen at Gölcük could have been killed by radon gas seeping from rock in the Earth's crust into the water just prior to the rupture.
But there is much the scientists still do not understand, and much that disturbs them. This earthquake, explained geologist Aykut Barka, was part of a sequence that began along the North Anatolian Fault in 1939 near its eastern end. Historically each section of the fault in Turkey breaks on average every several hundred years. Before this earthquake the only stretch of the main fault that had not broken in the 20th century extended from the city of Bolu, about 90 miles (185 kilometers) east of Gölcük, to the western end of the Sea of Marmara—a distance of about 220 miles (354 kilometers). The four fault segments that broke on August 17 account for only about 70 miles (113 kilometers) of the 220 (354) at risk. This earthquake probably pumped additional strain into unbroken segments.
Most worrisome are about a hundred unbroken miles (161 kilometers) of the fault that lie deep beneath the Sea of Marmara, passing less than 15 miles (21 kilometers) from Istanbul. Scientists do not understand well the structure of that obscured stretch, but they know it poses dangers. Nicholas Ambraseys, a specialist in historical earthquakes at Imperial College in London, notes that 40 earthquakes of magnitude 7 and above had hit the Marmara region since the first century A.D. In 1509 and again in 1766, great earthquakes destroyed much of Istanbul. Both may have been part of a 250-year rupture cycle. Some experts now argue that one or more events at least as large as the August quake will occur in the sea south of Istanbul in coming decades.
How bad might the next Istanbul quake be? That depends in part on how far the epicenter is from the city. It also depends on whether the fault segments beneath the Sea of Marmara break together or independently. Together they could create an earthquake as strong as magnitude 7.8—about four times stronger than the August earthquake.
A week after the earthquake I received permission from the Turkish Navy to walk where the North Anatolian Fault did some of its most spectacular damage: the Gölcük Naval Command Center, the largest naval base in Turkey. When the quake tore through the Gulf of İzmit, it devastated the compound, toppling buildings and killing hundreds of people.
"I've been in many earthquakes, but nothing like this," recalled Ercüment Doğukanoğlu, a naval captain. "When it hit, I felt helpless—like being thrown every which way in a frying pan."
Heavy rain fell as a young second lieutenant, Selçuk Poyraz, led us across the ravaged base. "The rain is nice," said Selçuk. "It washes away the smell of death, which gets into everything. I have to put cologne in my car, on my clothes."
He walked us to a green lawn and pointed at what looked like the burrow of a gigantic mole cutting across the base, creating a scarp several feet high. In its path lay the ruins of an officers' club, where scores died in their sleep.
We followed the burrow until it opened into a crack so wide I had to jump to cross it. We reached a place where the crack had split a stone wall, thrusting the south end eight feet (2.4 meters) to the west in the middle of the street it once bordered. The same crack also pushed an entire apartment building across the street several feet closer to Greece.
As the earthquake faded from the world's headlines, its miseries persisted. I returned to Turkey in late October. The official death count stood at just over 17,000, but the real toll may have been twice that. Winter was setting in, and although people were being fed adequately by organizations such as the Red Crescent, warm clothes remained in government warehouses undistributed. With more than 85,000 buildings destroyed or uninhabitable, about 40,000 families were living in 168 tent cities. Few tents were winterized.
Psychological problems were mounting. Many men remained jobless and idle. Many of the neighborhood coffeehouses they relied on for socializing were gone, replaced by scattered coffee tents. Children played and attended school in several overcrowded tents. So many teachers died in Adapazari that in one district only two remained to look after 2,000 children.
As a group, the women displaced from their homes may have been suffering the most. "They have no place to go to be together," said Mebuse Tekay, a relief coordinator for 128 nongovernment volunteer groups.
Despite the crisis, Mebuse pointed to positive changes the earthquake brought.
"It has collapsed some taboos," she said. "Many Turkish people thought they had no friends in the world except other Turks. But so many foreigners came to help us, we now must see a new reality. Even the Greeks proved not to be our enemies. Television showed a Greek team crying after they rescued a little girl.
"Also many of the people rushing to help were from arts groups. Now many traditional Turks have had to change their biases toward men who have long hair or earrings and women in miniskirts. It was those people who showed up first."
On November 12 the North Anatolian Fault struck again. Stress from the August quake triggered a rupture along a segment of the fault east of the earlier break. The second quake measured magnitude 7.1. It hit a much less populated region but still killed more than 800 people and injured at least 5,000.
In the town of Kaynaşli, Özgür Akbulut's father and older brother had just left evening prayers at the mosque when the temblor hit. As most of the town's buildings buckled, the mosque's towering minaret crashed down on the two men, crushing them to death.
On a cold and drizzling December morning I met 15-year-old Özgür in the nearby village of Handanoğlu, where he was living in a tent with surviving relatives. As I talked with the men of the village in the parlor of a farmhouse that had survived the quake, Özgür sat silently by the stove, warming his hands. He smiled occasionally but mostly stared vacantly ahead.
"These earthquakes are tests from God, said Memet Bayindir, a wizened 92-year-old. "We should build houses the old way—from chestnut wood. They don't collapse."
His grandson Hüseyin agreed. "I accept that this was a geologic event, but it can be taken as a warning. In seconds, billionaires can become penniless. So you must have values that you can't lose—a good heart and honesty."
Although smaller, Kaynaşli looked like Gölcük all over again—streets lined with shattered buildings and mournful people struggling to rebuild. I headed back to Gölcük, about 80 miles (129 kilometers) away, to see how people there had coped in the intervening months.
The nightmare hadn't gone away. Bulldozers had cleared most of the piles of rubble, and temporary prefabricated houses had risen rapidly outside the town. But Gölcük itself was still a city in shambles. I found İsmet Koyun again in a coffeehouse by the waterfront.
"There's not much else to do," he said as we drank tea with his friends. "Gölcük is dead. Most people have left. The government hasn't decided whether the city should be rebuilt."
At dusk, İsmet took me to the water's edge, where he had watched his city collapse. We clambered over twisted rebars and mud-caked chunks of concrete to the seven-story building where the 50 men had perished in the sunken café. We watched the water lap into what had been the building's third floor.
"Thirteen bodies were never found," he said. Darkness fell, and I could only think of one thing to say: "Geçmiş olsun. May it be over."
What's in National Geographic magazine this month? Find new articles, maps, photos, and more online.


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Irina Arkhipova (1925-2010)
Celebrated Bolshoi theatre contralto dies aged 85
Irina Arkhipova, former Bolshoi opera singer, died last Thursday after suffering a cardiac arrest at Moscow's Botkin hospital, according to the director of the Arkhipova Foundation.
Arkhipova rose to fame during the late 1950s playing the mezzo-soprano roles of Carmen in Bizet's opera, Marina and Marfa in Musorgsky's Boris Godunov and Khovanshchina, and Helene in Prokofiev's War and Peace. Outside of Russia, she reached international fame during the 1960s and 1970s, making acclaimed appearances at major opera venues throughout Europe and the US, including London's Covent Garden and La Scala in Milan.
After graduating from the Moscow Architectural Institute in 1953, Arkhipova switched to singing and studied with Leonid Savransky at the Moscow Conservatory. She made her operatic debut in 1954 at the Sverdlovsk Opera, before joining the Bolshoi theatre two years later, making her debut as Carmen. Such was the impact of her emotionally driven, intense performances, that a year later she was awarded the title of 'People's artist of the USSR'. In her latter years her voice settled into a true contralto type.
A committed educator, Arkhipova taught at the Moscow Conservatory from the mid-1970s. In 1993, she set up the Arkhipova Foundation with her husband and former Bolshoi tenor, Vladislav Piavko, committed to the support and promotion of the next generation of opera stars.


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The Voyage of the Dawn Treader
The Voyage of the Dawn Treader
|Trade Discount
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A beautiful hardcover edition of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, book five in the classic fantasy series, The Chronicles of Narnia. The full-color jacket features art by three time Caldecott award winning artist David Wiesner and black-and-white interior illustrations by the series' original illustrator, Pauline Baynes.
A king and some unexpected companions embark on a voyage that will take them beyond all known lands. As they sail farther and farther from charted waters, they discover that their quest is more than they imagined and that the world's end is only the beginning.
The Voyage of the Dawn Treader is the fifth book in C. S. Lewis's classic fantasy series. For over sixty years, it has been captivating readers of all ages with magical lands they never dreamed existed for over sixty years. This is a novel that stands on its own, but if you would like to continue to the journey, read The Silver Chair, the sixth book in The Chronicles of Narnia.
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New member
For the new guys that pop in time to time wanting bigger arms and then get chagrined when we tell them to deadlift and squat.
The Tight Tan Slacks of Dezso Ban: Bigger Arms - Bill Starr
The Tight Tan Slacks of Dezso Ban: Bigger Arms - Bill Starr
Bigger Arms
by Bill Starr
There is another way to guarantee bigger, fuller, more powerful arms, and here it is.
The number one reason why men start training with weights is to have bigger and more muscular arms. Sure, some guys also want thicker chests or trimmer midsections; nevertheless, big arms are also high on their wish list. Somehow an idea has evolved in the male psyche that big arms equals sexual prowess and overall strength. Whenever a man hits a pose to display how fit he is, he will always flex his biceps. The pose and the gesture are simply a part of our culture.
As a result the novice firmly believes that, in order to gain the big arms he so desperately wants, he must put most of his energy into exercises that hit the biceps and triceps directly. Often his entire weight- training program revolves around upper-arm exercises. Those for the back and legs are done with token weights almost as an afterthought. After all, the only bodypart that matters is the arms.
The problem with the above approach is that type of training for the arms doesn't work. True, if the beginner puts in a great deal of work, he may in fact increase the shape of his arms. However, seldom does he add any noticeable size to them. Giving the arms priority while neglecting the other bodyparts will also result in a comical physique. Large arms on a proportioned physique are admirable, but they are not on a person with skinny legs and a flat, undeveloped back.
Another problem exists for those who only focus their training on their arms. These individuals do far too much specialized work on the arms, and in most cases, do so before a strong enough foundation has been built to handle all the substantial stress to muscles, tendons and ligaments. The result is sore elbows or shoulders or both from overtraining.
I used to visit a nice gym located just across the Mason-Dixon line in Pennsylvania whenever I was on vacation from school. One time I was on my Christmas break and I made the scenic drive north. I got to the gym early to beat the rush and found only two others working out – high school boys doing leg presses. By the time I finished warming up they were doing straight-bar biceps curls. With nothing else to do, in between my sets I watched these guys. They did a half-dozen curls with the straight bar, moved to the EZ-curl bar and did 6 sets, and then concluded with 10 sets of dumbbell curls. Next, they started in on their triceps: French presses, skullcrushers and pushdowns on the lat machine. I didn't bother trying to count all the sets, but these guys did a lot of them.
I did my hour and one-half workout, and they were still hitting their triceps when I left. I must admit these individuals were determined to attain bigger arms; however, I also knew they were going about their goal the wrong way. I decided that if I ran into them again, I would break my rule about offering unsolicited advice and talk to them. I didn't see them again until spring break. They were hammering away on EZ-bar curls when I stepped into the gym. Both wore tank tops, and I took a look at their arms to see if they had made any progress. One of them had his elbows wrapped. I concluded their arms were more shapely than before but I swear I didn't see any increase in arm size
I went over and introduced myself. The one with the wrapped elbows was Jerry, and the other was Bert. Bert recognized my name from some articles he had read in MuscleMag and this fame was useful because it gave me some weight as an authority. At least they would listen to what I had to say. Understanding that no one of any age likes to have his program criticized, I tried to be diplomatic. "Would you two like some advice on your program? Or are you happy with what you're doing?" I asked. They glanced at one another, and then Jerry answered, "We were just talking 'bout that. We're kinda stale right now. We might switch to Scott [preacher] curls and maybe some pulley curls. Whaddaya think?"
"I have a suggestion a bit more drastic in mind. I'm assuming your main goal for being here is to get bigger arms, right?"
"Yeah," they said in unison.
"Is what you're doing now working?"
This question threw them for a moment. Then Bert replied, "Somewhat, I guess." He flexed his biceps muscles. While his arms did have excellent definition, some female members in the gym had bigger arms than him.
"Where did you get your routine?"
Jerry reached in his gym bag and pulled out several articles on arm development along with photos of the authors. I scanned the articles and photos, handed them back and said, "You know, boys, these guys are very advanced bodybuilders, and the odds are they're using steroids and most likely some other stuff. What they're doing just doesn't apply to you right now."
Their mouths dropped open, and they wore stunned expressions. Bert said "Are you saying these guys are wrong?"
"Not at all. Their advice is very useful to those in the same category as they are. That category includes only very advanced and professional bodybuilders. What they recommend doesn't fit your category. You're beginners and need to take another approach if you want bigger arms. Now I understand that arms are the main focus of your workouts, but would you mind if your legs, back and shoulders got bigger too? Or if you put four or five inches on your chest?"
Their eyes lit up as they imagined such a transformation. Jerry gushed, "No, that would be great. We wanted to get our arms big first and then concentrate on some other bodypart – probably the chest."
"Well, I've got some good news for you. You can get all your muscles, including your arms and chest, bigger at the same time." I paused as their grins grew wider. Then I dropped the bomb. "But you're going to drop the curls and those triceps exercises you're doing now."
"How are we gonna get our arms bigger if we don't do curls?" blurted Bert.
"You're going to get bigger arms by making your entire body bigger. Once you pack on some bodyweight and establish a solid base of strength, you can go back and use curls to shape your biceps, but doing hour after hour of both curls and triceps work isn't getting the job done for you right now. What you need is more mass, to get bigger."
I gave them a few moments to let this sink in and then added, "What I'm talking about is a program built around concentrated hard work on the large muscles. The small groups such as the biceps and triceps will take a back seat for a while."
"You talking 'bout doing heavy squats and deadlifting – stuff like that?"
"I am."
"But we're not interested in a strength routine. We're bodybuilders. We're not powerlifters."
"Well, being a powerlifter isn't such a bad idea, but that's not where you're heading – unless you want to later on." Anticipating after our prior encounter that I may run into this pair again, I had packed some old Strength & Health magazines in my gym bag. First I showed Bert and Jerry some photos of Tommy Kono and Bill March when they won Mr. Universe titles in conjunction with the Olympic-lifting world championships. "Great upper-arm development, don't you think?"
"Yeah, I think so," admitted Bert. Jerry nodded agreement.
"Neither of them did any bodybuilding at all. They were champion Olympic weightlifters. They got their amazing arm development from doing heavy overhead presses, jerks and pulls – no curls whatsoever."
"That's amazing," muttered Bert.
I opened another magazine and showed them a photo of Phil Grippaldi flexing his huge triceps. "Here's another national-champion Olympic lifter: Phil Grippaldi from New Jersey. His arms got so big from doing the Olympic lifts that he had to do exercises to tone them down. They were preventing him from racking his cleans."
Jerry chuckled. "I never heard of anybody wanting to make his arms smaller."
"Well, he's the only one I ever heard about."
While they were most impressed, Bert voiced his objection. "But I still don't see how we're gonna gain size on our arms by squatting."
"How much weight have you gained since you started on this program?"
They looked at one another. Then Jerry provided, "Two to three kilograms."
"Where do you think the additional muscle for your upper arms is going to come from? You can't shift bodyweight from your glutes or your midsection to your arms."
Jerry argued, "We didn't want to put on a lot of weight because we figured some of it would end up on our guts. And we didn't want that."
"I fully understand, but in order to gain size in any area of your body, you have to pack on more bodyweight. You can get stronger while staying at the same bodyweight and you can certainly shape your muscles. However, you cannot get bigger muscles. Granted, not all of the new bodyweight will be where you want it, but you have to give a little to get a lot. This strategy is how all the top bodybuilders go about adding new muscle. First, they bulk up, and I guarantee you all the added weight is not where they want it to be either. Once they get to their target bodyweight, they start to cut back and get rid of unwanted kilograms. They may gain 15 kilograms and lose all but five of them as they prepare for competition."
"What's the point of getting bigger if you're just going to turn around and lose it?" contended Bert.
"Good question. In the process of getting heavier, the top bodybuilders also get considerably stronger. Their muscles, tendons and ligaments adapt to the new stress and are able to handle much heavier weights on all exercises as well as allowing the bodybuilders to sustain training at a more intense level for longer sessions. This staying power really gives these guys a big edge when the time comes to trim down, and they don't lose all the weight they gained. They are now five kilograms heavier than they were in their last cycle."
"I'm still not sure I understand how getting bigger will help us get bigger arms if we're not working them hard."
"You will be working them hard. Much harder than ever. Now for anyone to curl 225 kilograms is impossible, but both of you will be capable of shrugging that much and doing high pulls in excess of 130 kilograms in a few months. Much of the work done on those two exercises is done by the biceps and the prime movers of your upper arm – the brachioradialis and brachialis. If you increase your strength levels by 50 percent or more during a strength phase, when you come back and start in on more specific exercises for your arms, chest or any other bodypart, you're going to be able to use more weight than before. How much are you using for your straight-bar curls?"
"40 kilograms," said Bert. "For 15 reps."
"All right. Let's say you work hard and increase your bodyweight and add weight to all the primary lifts by a considerable margin – maybe to where you're doing twice as much in the high pull and shrug as when you started out, and to where you increase your squat by a 45 kilograms and your bench press by 20. When you come back to the straight-bar curls, you'll be able to use a great deal more weight than before. How would your biceps respond to using 60 rather than 40?"
Their faces beamed at such a prospect – curling an Olympic bar with two 20 kilograms plates.
"The same notion applies to your triceps. If you really work your flat benches, incline benches and weighted dips as you pack on bodyweight, I can assure you that your arms are going to grow because your triceps are going to grow." The two made eye contact with one another. Bert nodded, and Jerry said "All right. I can't see what we have to lose by trying out your program. Lay it out."
"First, you both have to agree to stick with it for at least two months. Second, you have to do exactly what I tell you. No more, no less. No slipping in some of your own exercises on the sly. If you do, the results will not be nearly as positive. As I mentioned earlier, you will not be doing any curls or those triceps exercises I've seen you do. Both French presses and skullcrushers are really stressful to your elbows. Some advanced athletes can get away by doing them, but not beginners. Instead of curls you will do chins, which I consider a great biceps exercise, that also gives an added bonus of helping you build a broad back. The only specific exercise you will do for your triceps is the straight-arm pullover. It's not at all stressful to the elbows and hits the long head of the triceps. Still interested?"
"Sure," said Bert on their behalf. "Lay it on us."
"Since you may not know how to do some of the exercises, I will go through the program with you all this week – today [Monday], Wednesday and Friday. Then you'll be on your own till the end of the semester." They nodded in agreement, and I said "Go do a set of crunches, or situps, and 25 back hyperextensions. We'll start out with squats."
On that Monday we did
full squats, 5 x 5
clean-grip high pulls, 5 x 5
bench presses, 3 x 5, 3 x 3, plus a back-off set of eight reps
chins, 4 x max
incline dumbbell bench presses, 2 x 20.
As we trained I found out these guys had already been squatting, but only with 100 kilograms. They also did some pulls in the seated lat machine. I didn't push the numbers up but I primarily taught them how to go low in the squat. I also gave them pointers in the high pulls and bench.
Bert remarked, "I can see where heavy benching might help get the triceps bigger and how those high pulls can help the biceps, but how do squats fit in? I mean, they aren't connected to the arms at all."
"Well, in a way squats are connected. Squats are included in your program because they are the very best exercise to do if you want to add bodyweight. They stimulate growth in the entire body. The squat is the key exercise in this program."
Even though Bert and Jerry had been doing some back and leg work previously, the squats and high pulls dug deep into those large muscle groups. When I arrived on Wednesday, I found two very sore pups waiting for me. However, the soreness was like a tonic to them. They couldn't wait to get started. I had them spend additional time warming up and then we did
incline bench presses, 5 x 5, plus a back-off set of 8 reps
light squats, 5 x 4
good mornings, 4 x 8
straight-arm pullovers, 2 x 20
weighted dips, 4 x 8.
I told them, "You have to up your caloric intake if this program is going to work. Muscle can't be formed out of thin air. You have to eat a lot more. Your body has to have extra fuel because you're working a great deal harder than you were before and you need some excess to pack on bodyweight. Eat lots of small meals throughout the day and night. Drink a protein milk shake right after you complete your workout and drink another at bedtime. Many bodybuilders used to carry hard-boiled eggs around with them and would eat those eggs periodically throughout the day – an excellent way to maintain a positive nitrogen balance. Be sure to stretch out tonight. Stretching will help you get rid of some of your soreness."
By Friday the soreness in their tarps and legs was gone, but the good mornings had been hell on Bert's and Jerry's lower back. Bert confessed he had difficulty getting out of bed the next morning. I informed him, "That pain you feel is why good mornings are often referred to as tomorrow mornings."
We did
full squats, 3 x 5, 2 x 3, and a back-off set of 8
flat benches, 4 x 8
shrugs, 5 x 5
straight-arm pullovers, 2 x 20
chins, four sets of as many reps as we could do and then three sets of free-hand dips.
"How are you guys doing on your diet?" I asked.
Jerry replied, "Well, we drank a shake at the dairy bar after we finished on Wednesday but we haven't yet put together enough money to go to the health food store and buy some protein powder. That stuff ain't cheap."
"I'm very aware of the cost of commercial protein powder. Here's what you can do. Go to the supermarket and buy some dried milk. A one kilogram carton will run you about eight dollars. A cup of the dried milk will provide 32 g of protein. Add in some ice cream, milk and maybe some yoghurt, and you'll have 50 g of protein. That amount is all your body can assimilate at one time anyway."
"Eight dollars we can manage," Jerry said as he wrote in his training book. I had insisted they keep accurate records of all the exercises they did, as well as sets and reps and weight used, and they complied readily.
While they recorded their numbers for the last few exercises, I said "Every other week, substitute bent-over rows for clean-grip high pulls. Other than that, keep every aspect of the program the same. One final rule is you have to get a lot of rest. This routine is a demanding one. If you're feeling droopy when you get out of bed in the morning, get more rest the next night. Eat like a starving Viking. Train hard and get plenty of rest."
I had already taught them how the progressions on the various lifts should go and I helped them set some realistic goals for the next two months. I gave them my phone number and said they could call me if they ran into any problems. Jerry called twice, mostly to brag, but also to ask about proper weight selection for a few of the exercises.
Ten weeks passed by before I saw them again. They were at the squat rack. Jerry and another gym member were spotting Bert, and I was pleased to see Bert was handling 150 kilograms for his final set of five. My pupils' physiques had altered rather remarkably in such a short period of time. They maintained erect postures, proudly displaying bulging tarps, pecs and quads with pride.
My students were glad to see me and couldn't wait to show me all the improvement they had made. Bert had gained seven kilograms. He increased his squat by 40 kilograms and his bench by 30. Jerry was five kilograms heavier. He had added 35 kilograms to his squat and 15 to his bench.
"How about your arms?" I asked with a grin. Their arms were noticeably larger. "An inch bigger," beamed Jerry, and Bert offered, "Almost an inch."
"That's great. You boys did good. Now you can go back to your beloved curls if you want. You kept your end of the deal."
Jerry looked at Bert. They laughed, and then Jerry said "Nah, we're gonna stick with this routine a bit longer. You don't get big arms doing curls."


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HONOLULU -- Guinness World Records is acknowledging a 44-year-old Hawaii pro surfer for catching a 78-foot wave off the coast of Portugal, saying the November run beats a 2008 record by more than 1 foot.
Big-wave surfer Garrett McNamara of Haleiwa, on Oahu's North Shore, told The Associated Press that the ride of his life was a fluke.
He said he originally didn't want to attempt the waves that day after wiping out numerous times on even bigger swells in the same spot, above an undersea canyon known as one of the biggest wave-generators on the planet.
"I was really beat-up that morning," he said. "This day, I did not want to get out of bed."
He changed his mind at the urging of friends, once they got into the ocean and he helped others catch a few waves.
"Everything came together," McNamara said Thursday. "Everything felt right."
Video of the run shows a minuscule 5-foot-10-inch McNamara against a wall of water as he lets go of a tow rope and begins riding down the wave at Praia do Norte. He briefly disappears into the break about 10 seconds into the run, then speeds up and remerges from the wave's tube as the swell quickly dissipates.
"I knew it was big, but I didn't know how big," he said.
McNamara said he didn't care at first about whether the wave was a record, but was urged by the townspeople in Nazare, Portugal, to get some kind of confirmation. He said he sent the footage and pictures to surfing legend and Billabong judge Sean Collins, who guessed the wave was 85 to 90 feet tall. Collins died in December.
The official record comes after McNamara was awarded $15,000 for the ride at the Billabong XXL Global Big Wave Awards in California last week.
Judges for the awards, considered the official arbiters of big-wave surfing, pored over footage and high-resolution still images from several angles to calculate a more accurate estimate, event director Bill Sharp told the AP.
They used McNamara's height in a crouch and the length of his shin bone to help compare it to the wave's top and bottom, Sharp said.
"You can't deny how big it was for that moment," Sharp said.
Sharp said surfers don't often get a chance to catch waves so big. He put the achievement on par with other infrequent athletic feats like four home runs in a game -- which Texas Rangers outfielder Josh Hamilton achieved this week -- or a perfect game.
"But add to that the fact that the stadium could collapse on you at any second," he said.
McNamara, who began surfing at age 11 and went pro at 17, said the achievement became more important to him when he realized it could help him urge more people to follow their passions.
"The world would be a much better place if everyone was doing what they wanted to do," he said.


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Shenandoah National Park
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Shenandoah National Park, preserve of 311 square miles (805 square km) in the Blue Ridge section of the Appalachian Mountains, in northern Virginia, U.S. The park was authorized in 1926 and established in 1935.
The park is noted for its scenery, which affords some of the most spectacular panoramic views in the eastern states. Skyline Drive, 105 miles (169 km) long, runs the length of the park from north to south, winding among the peaks and through valleys and gaps. This accessibility to the crest of the Blue Ridge is because of the great age of the granitic and metamorphosed basaltic mountains, which have been rounded and worn down by millions of years of erosion.
Except for a few grassy meadows, the park is heavily forested with both hardwoods (hickory and oak) and conifers (pine). From spring to autumn a succession of brilliant wildflowers bloom. Wildlife includes deer, bears, foxes, squirrels, and other mammals, along with numerous birds, some of which migrate south in the winter. The park is a unique example of an area that was overused—in this instance by mountain farmers—and was allowed to return to its natural state. The Appalachian National Scenic Trail roughly parallels Skyline Drive through the park.


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When Mary O'Malley became Prudential's environmental task force chairperson in 2007, she found that the company's IT department was already focused on being green.
"A lot of their work was focusing on facilities, renewable energy investments and employee volunteer efforts around conservation and stewardship," says O'Malley, vice president of local initiatives at Prudential Financial.
Prudential's technology folks have accomplished much more since then, and in the past year, IT has continued to lead projects that yield green benefits.
For example, IT is working to virtualize the company's data centers, shifting approximately 1,000 servers into a virtual environment last year. Prudential officials expect more servers to be virtualized as the project moves ahead.
IT has also focused on using alternative energy sources for its data centers. It is working with the facilities team to install solar panels to provide some of the power needed to run its Roseland, N.J., data center, a project that is expected to be completed this year.
Meanwhile, IT has spread the word about sustainability throughout the organization. Employees have responded by significantly reducing the amount of paper they use for printing.
"We've been pushing toward a paperless world," says Jeff Harrington, a vice president in the IT group. He says IT has provided alternatives, such as e-fax systems and printing applications that help users find ways to minimize their page count when they do need to print.
In addition, IT has helped employees take advantage of electronic tools when communicating with one another and with customers, O'Malley says.
Harrington says additional IT efforts to reduce the use of power and other resources include expanding the deployment of mobile devices, providing support for telecommuting and investing in telecommunications equipment.
Michael Mandelbaum, also a vice president in the IT group, points to IT's deployment of cart-based videoconferencing equipment that can be moved from room to room. The introduction of these mobile units has led to an increase in the use of videoconferencing for meetings because employees have found that using the carts is easier than booking meetings in specially equipped conference rooms.
Mandelbaum says the IT team focuses on delivering the technology that people need to do their jobs, while at the same time meeting Prudential's fiscal goals and green objectives. That's key to getting support for green IT, he says.
"You have to base decisions on economics and functionality to be green," says Mandelbaum. "That's how we approach everything, which means we can continue to do better because we can point to a track record of serving the shareholders while serving the broader community through sustainability."
Next: No. 12: JM Family eliminates more than 1,400 servers


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Type of organization: Super PAC
Supports candidate: Mitt Romney
Founded: Oct. 8, 2010
Website: restoreourfuture.com
Social media: YouTube channel, Facebook page
- Carl Forti (co-founder): Romney's 2008 political director. Adviser to American Crossroads and Crossroads GPS. Co-founder of Black Rock Group, a strategic communications and public relations firm.
- Charles Spies (treasurer): Romney's chief financial officer and counsel in 2008.
- Larry McCarthy (co-founder): Member of Romney's media team in 2008. President of McCarthy Hennings Media, Inc.
- Steve Roche (fundraiser): Former top fundraiser for Romney in 2008 and until August 2011.
During the 2012 election cycle, no other super PAC raised as much money as Restore Our Future, which collected nearly $154 million thanks to a network of deep-pocketed individuals, companies and parnterships.
In all, nearly one-third of the money Restore Our Future raised came from individuals and organizations in the financial sector, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. And nearly half of the early money raised by the pro-Romney group was from financial industry sources, with especially large contributions coming from hedge fund and private equity managers.
Restore Our Future's staff includes Larry McCarthy, known for the infamous "Willie Horton" ad that helped sink Democratic presidential nominee Michael Dukakis in 1988. The group ran attack ads in Iowa that were widely credited with undermining former Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich's popularity and boosting Romney to a very close second-place finish in the Iowa caucuses.
In fact, during the GOP presidential primaries, more than 93 percent of the nearly $43 million the group spent was on negative ads, according to the Sunlight Foundation.
With its lush bank account, it dramatically outspent Romney's rivals and their allies and helped carry Romney to victory over Gingrich and former GOP Sen. Rick Santorum, who were both substantially aided by super PACs during the extended primary fight.
Romney attended several of Restore Our Future's fundraising events, including a dinner in New York on July 19, 2011. The dinner was also attended by one of the PAC's million-dollar donors, John Paulson, the hedge-fund manager who made billions betting against the housing market. In addition to his contribution to the super PAC, Paulson was also a leading fundraiser/bundler for the Romney campaign and hosted a money bash at his home in the Hamptons during the summer of 2011, as the Center for Public Integrity previously reported.
Several big-dollar contributions to Restore Our Future came from obscure businesses suspected of being shell corporations to mask the identity of the actual donors.
On multiple occasions, Restore Our Future refunded corporate contributions and then accepted the same amount of money from individual donors instead. Two of these situations involved former employees of companies that Romney himself used to work for.
Additionally, in February, the group refunded a $100,000 donation from the Rod and Leslie Aycox Foundation, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization that was legally prohibited from donating to the super PAC.
Among the super PAC's early donors were two other mysterious corporations, which each invested $1 million in Restore Our Future's success: F8 LLC and Eli Publishing, which share an address in Provo, Utah. They are connected to prominent Mormon businessman Steve Lund, the vice chairman of the board of nutrition and cosmetics company Nu Skin, and former Nu Skin lawyer (and Lund son-in-law) Jeremy Blickenstaff.
Another Mormon business executive, Frank VanderSloot, has used a network of corporate accounts connected to his cleaning products, cosmetics and vitamins company, Melaleuca Inc. — which has been accused by some of being a pyramid scheme — to give $1 million to Restore Our Future in August of 2011. VanderSloot also personally gave the super PAC $100,000. And thanks to the U.S. Supreme Court's Citizens United ruling, Melaleuca further directly spent more than $200,000 on pro-Romney television and radio advertisements by Election Day.
Notably, Restore Our Future also received $2 million from the sons of hotel magnate John Willard Marriott, after whom Romney is named: J.W. "Bill" Marriott, Jr., and Richard Marriott, both influential Mormon businessmen, have each contributed $1 million to Restore Our Future. Romney previously served on the board of directors of the Marriott hotel chain and after his loss in November, he rejoined the company's board.
In August of 2012, Restore Our Future received a $1 million contribution from reinsurance company OdysseyRe of Conn., a "wholly-owned subsidiary" of Canadian insurance and investment management giant Fairfax Financial Holdings Limited. While officials with both companies maintained that the transaction complied with all U.S. campaign finance laws, Paul S. Ryan, an attorney at the Campaign Legal Center, told the Center for Public Integrity that OdysseyRe's donation raised "some legal red flags."
Restore our Future spent exclusively to aid Romney during the GOP primary. After becoming the Republican presidential nominee, the super PAC nicknamed "Romney's Death Star" turned its sights on President Barack Obama, spending about $100 million during the general election, according to the Sunlight Foundation.
See more data on Restore Our Future at OpenSecrets.org, or more background information at FactCheck.org.
- Restore Our Future's anti-Gingrich ad, ran in Iowa just before the primary.
- The "Right Experience" ad attacked Santorum with several misleading claims, Factcheck.org reported. It ran in Tennessee, Oklahoma, Alabama and Mississippi.
- The "Reagan" ad run in Florida said that despite Gingrich's constant Reagan name-dropping, Gingrich "is no Ronald Reagan."
- The anti-Santorum ad "Values" aired in Michigan.
- Another anti-Santorum "Own Words" ad aired in Ohio, Oklahoma and Tennesee. It went after Santorum for voting for bills that included support for Planned Parenthood.
- "Doing Fine" was part of a summer campaign taking advantage of a quote by Obama saying, "The private sector is doing fine."
- "Disappearing" refers to those who have dropped out of the workforce and criticized Obama for the economic recovery.
- For more ads, see Restore Our Future's YouTube channel.
Last updated: Jan. 17, 2013
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Academic Catalog
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2022-23 Academic CatalogClick to view the Course Catalog
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|Feb 06, 2012
Smallest tools could give biggest results in bone repair
|(Nanowerk News) When William Murphy works with some of the most powerful tools in biology, he thinks about making tools that can fit together. These constructions sound a bit like socket wrenches, which can be assembled to turn a half-inch nut in tight quarters, or to loosen a rusted-tight one-inch bolt using a very persuasive lever.
|The tools used by Murphy, an associate professor of biomedical engineering and orthopedics and rehabilitation at University of Wisconsin-Madison, however, are proteins, which are vastly more flexible than socket wrenches — and roughly 100 million times smaller. One end of his modular tool may connect to bone, while the other end may stimulate the growth of bone, blood vessels or cartilage.
|An experimental growth-factor method developed by University of Wisconsin-Madison biomedical engineer William Murphy for securing implants to bones produced strong, healthy bone as it healed around a metal implant in an animal model (right). The implant on left was performed with conventional surgery techniques and produced less bone and more scar tissue (white areas). Implants are the large black areas.
|On Feb. 4th and 6th, at the Orthopedic Research Society meeting in San Francisco, Darilis Suarez-Gonzalez and Jae Sung Lee of the Murphy lab are reporting that orthopedic implants "dip-coated" with modular growth factors can stimulate bone and blood vessel growth in sheep.
|For many years, medical scientists have been fascinated by growth factors — proteins that can stimulate tissues to grow. But these factors can be too effective or not specific enough, leading to cancer rather than the controlled growth needed for healing.
|Murphy wants to start applying the manifold benefits of the modular approach to healing or regenerating bone, tendon, and ligaments, and in particular to replacement surgery after an artificial joint has loosened or failed. Temporarily stimulating bones to grow by placing growth factors near the new implant could shorten healing time and ensure a good, tight fit.
|The approach could also be used for reattaching ligaments to bone after sports injuries and healing large bone defects during spinal fusion, facial reconstruction or trauma. In this work, Murphy collaborates with two associate professors of orthopedics and rehabilitation at the School of Medicine and Public Health. "Ben Graf focuses on knee injuries in sports medicine," he says, "and David Goodspeed, a lieutenant colonel in the Army who has seen blast injuries during multiple tours in Iraq, is working on the kind of major traumatic wound we think is potentially treatable using this approach."
|The working end of the modular structure may feature a fragment of a growth factor, but not the entire protein. "Often, you just want the specific regions that activate the signaling pathways, because that can reduce the chances of stimulating unwanted growth, even cancer," he says.
|At the other end, Murphy may place an anchoring molecule that binds to the bone and prevents the modular structure from migrating away from the wound.
|With the modular approach, he says, "you might be able to stimulate bone formation without the side effects. We are trying to decrease stimulation outside of the bone defect, trying to design these molecules to specifically generate new bone in a defect, and to stay there."
|Animal tests, performed in collaboration with Mark Markel, a professor of veterinary medicine, have shown that the bone is denser around the implant, and that the union between the implant and the bone is stronger than produced by state-of-the-art orthopedic techniques. The added growth factors have not been detected elsewhere in the animal, Murphy says.
|Engineering each section of the molecule separately allows their properties to be tailored as needed. "We can take similar protein structures and modulate them," Murphy says. "If we want a molecule that binds very strongly to the surface of a bone graft, we can do that. If we want one that releases over controllable time-frames, we can do that as well."
|Moving from the lab to the clinic is a major step, and Murphy knows that many hurdles remain. "We have shown that this can work in a large, clinically relevant animal model, but realistically, I don't see this being used in the clinic within the next five years."
|Murphy says his approach is inspired by biology without trying to exactly duplicate normal communication between cells and tissues. "We are not interested in specifically mimicking a particular structure or function, but nature uses a variety of fundamental mechanisms during development and regeneration, and we are taking lessons from them and designing synthetic systems to achieve similar outcomes. We are not repeating nature, but we are inspired by nature."
|Source: By David Tenenbaum, University of Wisconsin-Madison


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So, I've been obsessed with Instagram since last summer. Could you tell?
After I made my photo collage last month, I decided I wanted to make magnets out of my favorite Instagram photos. The best part about this project is it's cheap, easy and you get to upcycle old boxes and magnets.
Let's make a few together.
First, we need to print out our favorite pictures. I use PowerPoint again since I don't have Photoshop. Shocking I know:)
I set the page to be 12 x 18 because I knew I wanted to print my finished picture as a 4 x 6.
I imported the pictures and made them each 6 x 6 so I could fit 6 pics on one picture. Then I saved it as a jpeg and uploaded it to shutterfly so I could have it printed as a 4 x 6 at Target. You could have it printed anywhere or even print them yourself at home. If you do it this way, each picture will measure 2 x 2 when printed.
Once your pictures are printed, gather the rest of the supplies:
- old business card magnet
- cereal box or any piece of cardboard
- double sided tape
- scissors
- pictures
Cut each of your pictures out. Then cut your cardboard and magnet into 2 x 2 squares.
Now take your double sided tape and tape each layer together. I started by taping the cardboard to the magnet and then taped the picture to the cardboard. Just make sure you don't tape the cardboard on the side of the magnet that attracts to the magnetic surface. (I almost made this mistake)
Aren't they cute?! I'm going to take a few to work to put on my filing cabinet so I can look at my boys while I'm at work. I'm also going to make a few for the grandparents! They will make great gifts.
|An Instagram picture of my Instagram magnets
This is a super easy project to make. And it's always fun to recycle some old cereal boxes. Remember you don't have to use Instagram photos; you can use any of your favorite pictures! This project cost me 38 cents to make 12 magnets because I only had to buy the pictures. All the other supplies I already had around my house.
I hope you have fun making your own photo magnets. I'd love to see any that you make so please come back and leave a comment if you make some.


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Rapid testing of systems thinking facilitation techniques for farming communities in Cambodia
|The three goals of this project are: 1) Develop a training plan and materials that will enable the communications officer stationed at WWF Cambodia in Kratie province to lead a training exercise with Ministry of Environment and WWF staff in facilitating systems thinking discussions with farming communities in contexts of low literacy, poverty and high reliance on natural systems and 2) Develop a training for Ministry of Environment and WWF colleagues in Cambodia so that in a 2 hr slot, they are introduced to the basics in using systems thinking approaches with farming communities in contexts of low literacy, poverty and high reliance on natural systems. 3) Support WWF communications officer in delivering training and facilitating discussions with farming communities in Kratie province.
Pilot study on systems modeling for market transformation
National strategy for adaptation to climate change in Burkina Faso
Systems mapping and modeling workshops
|The complexity of food and other socio-ecological systems makes policy analysis, governance design, evaluation, and learning challenging. These challenges suggest that a systems approach might be of particular value in understanding and shaping desired system outcomes. We facilitate qualitative systems mapping workshops as well as quantitative system dynamics modeling trainings, both with a special emphasis on multi-stakeholder involvement. Past projects include:Capacity building workshops in system dynamics and Threshold 21 modeling for Millennium Institute (millennium-institute.org).Systems mapping workshops for the United Nations Industrial Development Organization and in various sub Saharan African countries.