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Winter classes
Registration is under way for winter session classes offered by Anne Arundel Community College at the senior activity centers operated by the county Department of Aging and Disabilities. Classes begin the week of Jan. 7. For a class schedule, go to the senior center you wish to attend or visit aacounty.org/aging and click on a senior center for its list of courses.
Tuition is waived for those 60 and older, but there is an administrative fee of $80 payable to Anne Arundel Community College. Those ages 55-59 must pay the $80 administrative fee plus $40 per course. A tuition waiver form must be certified by the Social Security Administration to exempt permanently disabled seniors from paying the $40 fee per course, but they are still responsible for the $80 administrative fee.
Winter sessions
Registration for Anne Arundel Community College's winter sessions is under way for the four- and six-week sessions beginning Dec. 17. The two-week session starts Jan. 3. Information and registration: 410-777-2243 or go to aacc.edu/recreg.
Jump Start classes
Anne Arundel Community College and North County High School are working to bring college courses to the high school's students and the surrounding community. Eligible students are encouraged to enroll in AACC's Jump Start classes this fall at the Arnold campus or at Arundel Mills.
Jump Start classes will be offered at the high school in the spring. In addition, AACC will offer evening classes at North County this fall to help students who are at least 16 years old and have dropped out of high school, and for adults in the community who want to get started in a new career, complete general education requirements or boost their learning skills so they can be successful in college.
Most classes meet one or two nights a week. Sessions include Basic English 1 and 2, Composition and Introduction to Literature 1, Participatory College Reading, The Critical Reader, Business and its Environment and Adult Basic Skills. Other courses are Certification in Sanitation for the hospitality industry and Prep Prax1: Math Skills for Aspiring Teachers. New students enrolling in a credit course must submit an admission application.
Information about tuition, financial aid and academic advising can be found at aacc.edu or by calling 410-777-2222. Students interested in the adult basic skills class should call 410-777-1823 to make an appointment to assess their skills before starting class.
Tuition aid at AACC
Financial aid is still available at Anne Arundel Community College. In addition, the college has a no-fee, interest-free payment plan that allows the cost of tuition be spread throughout a term. Payment plans are also available. For information about financial aid, call 410-888-2203 or go to aacc.edu/aid. Students can also meet with a financial aid representative on a walk-in basis at the Arnold campus, Glen Burnie Town Center, AACC at Arundel Mills or the Fort Meade Army Education Center.
Cybersecurity scholarship
Barrett and Anne McKown of Edgewater have established a $25,000 scholarship fund at Anne Arundel Community College to help offset tuition and educational expenses of county residents who enroll in cyber-related studies. The couple set up the Barrett and Anne McKown Scholarship for Cybersecurity Study as a fund to allow contributions from the community. Preference will go to a U.S. citizen living in Anne Arundel who is attending a cybersecurity studies program, is enrolled full time and has at least a 3.0 GPA. To apply: aacc.edu/aid/scholarships. Those interested in contributing to the fund or establishing scholarships can contact the AACC Foundation Inc.: 410-777-2515, firstname.lastname@example.com or aacc.edu/foundation.
Internship program
Anne Arundel Community College invites employers to participate in its internship program. Students from a broad range of disciplines want real-world experience and mentoring from leaders in business, industry, government, and nonprofit agencies and organizations. For information on how the internships work or to offer an internship, contact the college's internship office at aacc.edu/foundation or aacc.edu/internships.
Nursing scholarships
Through 2014, three Anne Arundel Community College nursing students will receive $3,000 scholarships through a program set up by Johns Hopkins HealthCare. The scholarships will benefit county residents enrolled in the college's registered nursing associate's degree program who demonstrate financial need as established by the AACC financial aid office. Information: 410-777-2515 or aacc.edu.


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John U needed a new logo design and created a contest on 99designs.
A winner was selected from 101 designs submitted by 23 freelance designers.
Breaking off successful energy business with current partner. My vision of for the new company differs from old vision. My new partner is my wife who is very intelligent and successful.Together we will bring much needed services for the high end home owner.
Targeting the elite homeowners of lower Westchester NY and coastal CT.
Homes will be multi million dollar dwellings with high energy bills.Our company will make their homes energy efficient,improve air quality(healthier), improve comfort and reduce their carbon footprint in an effort to make our planet better for generations to come.
Our products range from green cellulose insulation,soy based spray foam insulation,High efficiency heating and cooling systems(up to 97%),Mechanical ventilation,lighting and more.
Keep in mind we are targeting the discreet,highend homeowner.
We are looking for a bold and fresh design. We are open to colors but remember we are a GREEN company.
Our name DraftLess came from our ways of improving home energy efficiency we actually reduce or stop drafts throughout the home to improve performance of insulation products.
No cartoons but open to all other designs.
The files we will require are:
Print file format - .ai (CMYK)
Web file format - .jpg and layered .psd (RGB)
Please do not use any stock images or clip art in the logo
Find out how a design contest works or learn more about our logo design services.

subset: commoncrawl


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You can create a Shell tool in one of two ways:
Meta+X Shell
in any Editor window (or any other window based on an editor, such as the Listener).
Figure 24.1 The Shell tool
The Operations menu contains the following commands which send UNIX signals to the shell process. These only work on UNIX/Linux/FreeBSD/Mac OS X.
Choose Operations > Interrupt to send a break signal to the shell process. This stops the current task and returns control to the UNIX command line in the Shell tool, if necessary.
Operations > Suspend
to send a suspend signal to the shell process. This suspends the current task so that you can continue entering commands at the UNIX command line. To resume the task, type
at the UNIX command line in the Shell tool. Alternatively, type
at the command line to force a task to run in the background.
Choose Operations > Eof to send an EOF signal to the process.


text:
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text:
For over 30 years the leading pallet and sawmill magazine in America.
Read What's Related:
Thinking AheadLetter from Chaille: The Dangers of Trying to Create a Safety Culture
Whatever your situation, you already have a safety culture, and it is important to identify what is working well, and what is not.
By Chaille M. Brindley
Date Posted: 7/1/2014
Safety Culture
Is creating a safety culture the smart way to solve workplace concerns?
Workplace accidents affect productivity, damage morale, impact worker health and could end up costing you a bunch in fines or higher insurance rates. Nobody wants workplace injuries or even worse deaths. Yet running a safe operation does cost money and requires intentional behavior that seeks to limit hazards and properly train employees. A lot of the safety publications and educational material trumpets the advantages of creating a safety culture. On the surface this sounds like a great idea. But the problem is human nature and the way that most companies execute this strategy.
For starters, you already have a safety culture. This is true even if your company does very little to keep workers safe. Your culture allows people to do the bare minimum and focus on speed or production at all costs. Other operations have detailed practices and measure safety-related actions to identify hazards and fix them. Most pallet and lumber companies are somewhere in the middle. Maybe your workers do a good job of wearing personnel protective equipment. But they tend to remove saw guides or take shortcuts when it comes to storage of dangerous chemicals and flammables materials.
Whatever your situation, you already have a safety culture, and it is important to identify what is working well, and what is not. If you strive to build a safety culture, it is easy to overlook the innate attitudes that will be working against your efforts. The goal of building a safety culture typically fails because management responds with the latest popular program or a new approach every few months. Cultures are the ultimate sustainability mechanism. Safety programs and processes work in the long run due to or in spite of the culture.
Cultures are the results of the beliefs and value systems held by an organization. Many times these are unspoken and just things that people know to be true even if it goes against what is in the employee manual. You can shout culture shift all you want. But until attitudes really change, it is a futile exercise. So how do you really assess the state of a culture and find ways to improve upon it?
For starters, you have to look at what you are doing right and ask, "Why do we find this easy to do?" How did this become a habit for our workers? It may have something to do with repetition because the more you talk or reward a behavior, the more likely it will become second nature. You also have to identify problem spots and see why employees shy away from doing it especially if it is something they know they are supposed to do according to the rules. Line employees may simply not like a policy or think it slows them down.
One big reason why safety programs fail is the way they are structured, especially the related reward system. People tend to follow rules that are being monitored, and respond in ways to maximize rewards and limit penalties. If your company awards safety bonuses or perks based on no loss time incidents, this may discourage reporting of real incidents and lessen the focus on identifying problem behaviors. People may sweep things under the rug to get that extra reward. All the while a dangerous situation persists.
Safety experts instead suggest establishing a reward system that encourages specific behaviors that will lead to improved safety practices not rewarding desired outcomes. This might include rewarding employees who come up with ways to make processes safer or workers who pass a certain number of spot safety checks associated with specific actions, such as locking out a powered machine for repair.
Another common problem is the way safety records are measured. Companies may only track the basics, such as the number of days since a lost time incident or attendance at a safety meeting or training. But what about tracking reported issues and fixes, the areas with the most hazards, or follow up to suggestions made by employees?
The key to building a safety culture is not a quick fix or one big push on a program. It takes time and focus as management encourages workers to speak up and take action to identify hazards. Management can't shoot the messenger either. It must support them and reward them for brining hazardous situations to their attention. Otherwise, employees will get the message that management would rather not be bothered with these concerns. You want to encourage forward-looking accountability that acknowledges hazards and seeks to find solutions as well as assign responsibility for completing the fix.
Coming up with great solutions is worthless unless people are assigned to remedy the situation, and are held accountable and monitored to ensure continued compliance. Any new safety focus should have some measurement attached to it for at least the first 3-4 months if not longer.
The goal is to create an environment where anybody can speak up and be recognized to identify hazards including politely telling other employees who are engaging in unsafe behaviors.
Safety expert, Aubrey Daniels, encourages that companies seek to find solutions not place the blame for problems. She wrote, "No one is blamed for near misses or incidents. Instead, systemic causes are pursued. Often when people engage in at-risk behaviors that lead to incidents, there are organizational systems and practices that inadvertently encourage those at-risk practices. It is important to uncover those and establish accountability for making the changes to the systems and practices to encourage safe behavior."
Oh, and the best way to create a safe workplace is to reward desired behavior, identify and fix hazards and repeat this formula with company-wide sensitivity and focus on the issue. That doesn't come slowly. It happens one day at a time. And everyone has to contribute.
While creating a safety culture is a good idea, poor execution tends to make it a hard reality for many companies to achieve. Start out with a good process of analyzing your current practices. See the list of important safety questions on page 30. This is a good place to start your self-analysis because you do have a safety culture of some sort, even if it is not the right kind of safety culture that management ultimately desires.


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Winter 2010/2011
According to the CDC, the majority (72%) of new HIV cases in young people are among men, and most of those (85%) are attributed to male-to-male sexual contact. Most new HIV cases among women are attributed to heterosexual contact. For both young men and women, the vast majority of new infections occur among minority youth. In the U.S., African-Americans and Latinos account for 87% of all new HIV infections among 13- to 19-year-olds and 79% among 20- to 24-year-olds. Yet together they make up only about 32% of people in this age group in the general population.
Men who have sex with men (MSM) are the only risk group in which the rate of new infections has increased steadily each year since the 1990s, even as it has decreased among other populations. Each day, nine young African-American men are diagnosed with HIV.
Young people aged 15 to 24 are the group most likely to experience sexually transmitted infections (STIs), a risk factor for HIV. The CDC has estimated that young people account for up to half of the nation's 19 million new STI infections each year. These rates are even higher among minority youths. In 2006, young African-American men between 15 and 19 years of age had 39 times the rate of gonorrhea compared with white men in the same age range. A recent study of STIs among young women aged 15 to 19 found that 48% African American women in this age range had an STI, compared with about 20% of white women.
Many young people engage in behaviors that put them in danger. For example, 39% of all high school students say they didn't use a condom the last time they had sex, while 46% of young MSM had unprotected anal intercourse in the last year. Sexual relationships with multiple partners that overlap in time increase many young people's risk for HIV. Studies have found that because of medications that allow HIV-positive people to live longer, some young people may be taking more sexual risks as they become less fearful of HIV. This includes unprotected sex with untested or known HIV-positive individuals.
Young people face barriers to HIV testing, including stigma, confidentiality concerns, or fear that their parents may be informed. In addition, many young people are unaware of their HIV status. Nationwide, only 13% of high school students have been tested for HIV. In one nationwide study, 10% of young MSM tested positive, and 69% of those who did had previously been unaware that they had HIV. Another study revealed that young black MSM had a nearly seven times greater chance of having unrecognized HIV infection as young white MSM.
Especially among racial and sexual minority youth, having older partners means young people are even more likely to be exposed to HIV and STIs. Compared with black and Latina peers whose first sex occurred with a male of their own age, young women whose partner was older were significantly less likely to use condoms during first sex, and to have used them consistently since becoming sexually active. One study of young MSM found that the odds of HIV infection increased significantly as the age of their sexual partners increased. People in the study whose partners were five or more years older had twice the odds of getting HIV as study participants as a whole.
Among young women, dating violence and sexual assault also play a role in HIV transmission, and 20% report experiencing dating violence. Women who experience violence are less likely to use condoms than those who do not, and they feel more uncomfortable negotiating condom use. In one study, half of girls who reported HIV or STIs had been physically or sexually abused.
A common misconception is that young African-Americans are simply not as careful as whites in protecting their sexual health. But research has shown that even when risk factors are equal, sexually active minority youth face a higher risk of HIV and STIs. The people in their "pool" of sexual partners are more likely to be HIV positive or have an STI, raising the odds of infection. But why?
Several linked issues contribute to higher infection rates among African-American young people. Racism is the most significant contributor, especially for those living in the South. Racism is intertwined with underemployment and unemployment, decreased access to medical care, and with incarceration.
Almost 25% of African-Americans live in poverty, compared with 11% of whites. Those who live in poverty are more likely to commit crime, especially drug-related crime. They are more likely to live in unstable neighborhoods with higher rates of crime and more liquor stores. Poverty also contributes to problem alcohol use, which leads to unemployment and unstable relationships. Unstable relationships can lead to unprotected sex if partners are afraid that insisting on condoms will endanger the relationship.
Meanwhile, strict sentencing laws around drug-related crime have resulted in the incarceration of millions of African Americans, especially men. More than one in four are incarcerated during their lifetime. Certainly, unprotected sex in prison is one way HIV can be transmitted. Men in prison have less sex overall, but more risky sex than men who are not incarcerated. Another effect of imprisonment is strained relationships with long-term partners or wives. This can lead to concurrent partnerships.
Those living in poverty also have less access to medical treatment and may go for long periods of time either unaware they have HIV or an STI or without treatment.
In addition to racism, the social stigma surrounding homosexuality also adds to health issues. Men who are secretive about same-sex behavior may have decreased access to medical treatment. They may be less likely to seek treatment and may be diagnosed later than those who are openly gay.
For young people of color who become sexually active, the deck is stacked against them in terms of maintaining their sexual health. HIV prevention efforts, which teach healthier behaviors like using condoms, are still vital, but are only a part of a successful prevention strategy. Addressing other factors which contribute to the spread of HIV is important.
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text: Vincent Diepeveen wrote: > [...] > Supporting a thing like openmosix requires a lot more than 1 guy who in > order to modify 3 bytes needs 1000 dollar. Hello, Vincent. I've been involved in the openMosix project from the start, and I still use it. My comment about the $1,000 for 'updates' concerned the cost an 'academic' update and support subscription to MOSIX2, which has nothing to do with openMosix. I think that is quite a reasonable cost, actually, and I dodn't criticise people who want to pay for support. It's not the cost that bothers me most, but the restrictions of the MOSIX2 licence. > [...] > In itself it would be GREAT if there is 1 open source project there, as > that joins forces more. My hope is that open-ssi > will work great for highend nic's also and slowly get to a phase that > all features work great. OK, maybe I should have another look at the most recent OpenSSI... > OpenMosix nor openssi could migrate processes that work with shared > memory, a nerd feature i like personally a lot. Actually there is a version of openMosix that can migrate programs using shared memory. Unfortunately, when I tried it, processes would migrate away from the 'home' node but wouldn't migrate back! This is a problem for openMosix, because processes have to migrate back to the 'home' node to make system calls. One of my (small) contributions to openMosix was to patch it to avoid migrations just to read the time. This is slightly relevant to another thread on the Beowulf list, because reading the time locally on a node to avoid the process migration overhead requires that the nodes all run NTP otherwise you get problems with clock skew... > Just claiming that they use 'stolen' features like page migration is > like claiming that linux stole multithreading from unix; > it is a bad attempt to smear dirt just to earn a 1000 dollar. > > It is not a reason to not use it. It is a bad attempt to spit at these > guys who donate time and their money without asking for payment. Sadly, there was a lot of bad feeling between the openMosix and OpenSSI communities and I should not have tried to make light of it. In fact it is a compliment to openMosix that the load-balancer algorithm was used in OpenSSI, not an insult, and BTW I'm one of those guys who donated their time without asking for payment. I did put a wry smile after my comment ;-) Tony. -- Dr. A.J.Travis, University of Aberdeen, Rowett Institute of Nutrition and Health, Greenburn Road, Bucksburn, Aberdeen AB21 9SB, Scotland, UK tel +44(0)1224 712751, fax +44(0)1224 716687, http://www.rowett.ac.uk mailto:ajt at rri.sari.ac.uk, http://bioinformatics.rri.sari.ac.uk/~ajt


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Weekend Confession: Pity Parties & Refocusing for Fall
Dear Reader,
It's been a week and a half since I last confessed, sliding in late has been my summer way, but it's the end of the August with summer slowing down and autumn beginning to show in the red leaves, so let's begin--
I confess I've been a little emotional lately, a little overly-dramatic.
I've been trying to figure out what's causing this--life, hormones, not enough sleep, too much summer--but I've found myself in this wah-wah space not counting my blessings, but instead wanting to scream: I'm broke and everyone is eating my candy!
Yes, welcome to the pity party version of my life.
Truth be told, I am not broke, it just feels as if there's this open window and all the money in my hand keeps blowing out through it (completely missing the savings account). However when I feel "broke" I have to remind myself of the fact that if you are currently living in the US right now and making over $25,000 a year: Congratulations, you are one of the richest 1% of the people in the world. Seriously.
This is why I hate it when I get all cranky and poor-me-ish. I just want to tell myself to shush up.
But it's so weird when you know you're *not* supposed to feel a certain way (rationally), but you still do emotionally.
So, I'm thinking about fall, thinking about my upcoming projects and making plans (I like to make plans)--
Here's what I'm focusing on this fall:
Will continue Confession Tuesday
(and hopefully, *on* Tuesday, none of this any-day-of-the-week summer nonsense)
Will focus my Thankful Thursday posts on books & authors I love and have read
Will be publishing a book of poetry exercises called The Daily Poet with Martha Silano in late 2013
Finish up edits for Hourglass Museum, a book of poems by White Pine Press
We'll be putting out Dear Alzheimer's: A Caregiver's Diary & Poems in eBook edition by Esther Helfgott this November.
There is so much good in the world. I can forget it when I'm feeling slumpy. When my guardian angel is saying, Hey babe, settle down...
Sometimes I need to just sit down, count my blessings, and put life in perspective.
And well, everyone is not eating *all* my candy, but I didn't really want to share my meltaway mints. Still learning, I am... still learning.
~ Kells
~ Don't Miss a Post ~ Subscribe to Book of Kells by Email


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Starsky ft. Myss Kryss - Dont Cost A Thing [PicturePerfect/Bottom Music Submitted]
Take a Stroll With Starsky As He Walks Us Through Musics Late & Greats While Telling Us Why He Loves This Thing Called Music And The Lovely "Myss Kyss" Serenades us, In His Upcoming 'The Bruce Wayne Effect' Project Due Out Soon!!
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text:
IDC: Business Value of Slack
Departments of all kinds are finding value in adopting Slack, whether it's a salesperson closing more deals or a recruiter finding their ideal candidate, quicker. In this study, IDC measures the value of Slack across Marketing, Sales, HR, Customer Support, and Engineering.Download The Report for IDC: Business Value of Slack
Slack Handbooks
Learn the ins and outs of streamlining your team's work in Slack.
Software Development Teams and Slack
A quick look into how teams can use Slack to ship code, resolve incidents, and iterate more often.
Sales Teams and Slack
From assigning leads to celebrating deals, here's a snapshot into managing entire sales pipelines in Slack.
Marketing Teams and Slack
Gathering great ideas is just the start. See how you can track and optimize campaigns all in Slack.
Intelligent Automation for the Modern Marketer
How can marketers harness the powers of machine learning and artificial intelligence? We'll show you 28 tools that use automation to make your daily work more efficient.
Customer Storybook
A collection of stories about how different companies use Slack to make working life simpler and more productive.
Independent Reports
See what industry analysts have to say about the impact of Slack
GARTNER SWOT: Slack, Worldwide
Teams at enterprise companies are doing more of their daily work — from communicating with one another to searching for information across the company — in shared workspaces like Slack. Gartner calls this product category "Workstream Collaboration" (WSC).Read the Gartner report


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The cost of state's justice system
"What part of justice do you not want us to do?" That was the question former Chief Justice Eric Magnuson asked four years ago when Minnesota was facing a huge budget shortfall. This year, the Minnesota Legislature must once again pass a budget while it considers how to handle a $1.1 billion shortfall.
If you don't think this affects you, think again. Do you want to wait to have a trial on your divorce because there isn't a judge available to hear it? Should you wait to have your speeding ticket processed through the system? If you're eligible for a public defender, do you want an attorney who is also handling 50 other cases at the same time?
The Minnesota judicial system represents less than 2 percent of the entire state budget. Over 85 percent of the budget pays for personnel costs. The court budget was not cut as severely as other parts of the budget over the past four years. However, with increased costs not under the control of the judicial system, cuts have been made.
For example, the cost of employee health insurance is expected to increase 9 percent in 2013 and 9.5 percent in 2014. This means the court system must find money to pay for the increased cost with limited resources.
The employees of the court system have not received on-going pay increases since July 1, 2009. The salaries of judges have been frozen for over four years. Minnesota trial court judges rank 31st in the nation for pay. Some large legal firms pay first year associates (attorneys who have just graduated from law school) $30,000 more per year than Minnesota trial judges receive in compensation. In some Minnesota counties, the county attorney or some assistants earn more than a Minnesota district judge.
Just as important to the ongoing court needs is the lack of funding for the public defender system. In the Sixth Judicial District (Carlton, Cook, Lake and St. Louis counties), the public defender complement has fallen by nine attorneys. Currently, there are eight full-time and 19 part-time attorneys on the public defender staff. The American Bar Association recommends each full-time defender handle 150 cases per year. In the Sixth Judicial District, full-time defenders average between 250-300 cases and part-time attorneys handle between 175-210 cases per year.
Civil legal services, such as Legal Aid Service of Northeastern Minnesota, has suffered some of the worst cuts to their budgets. Legal Aid probably assists only one out of three people who need their help.
The judicial system has requested and Gov. Dayton has recommended increases in the court, public defender and civil legal services budgets. What can you do? You can contact your legislator and ask for the courts to be funded at its requested amount. You can tell them you want the public defender system to have enough resources to help all of the people who are eligible for their services. You can write to your representative about the need for civil legal services. Only time and the Legislature will tell whether the budget requests are fulfilled.
At a bottom line, you can tell your elected officials you don't want the court system, public defenders or civil legal services to have to decide what part of justice will not be done.


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A degraded sensualism deprives this life of its grace and refinement, the next of its dignity and sanctity. The fact that in Mohammedan law every woman must belong to some man as his absolute property, either as a child, a wife, or a concubine, must delay the final extinction of slavery until the faith of Islam has ceased to be a great power among men.
Individual Muslims may show splendid qualities, but the influence of the religion paralyses the social development of those who follow it.
No stronger retrograde force exists in the world.
Far from being moribund, Mohammedanism is a militant and proselytizing faith. It has already spread throughout Central Africa, raising fearless warriors at every step; and were it not that Christianity is sheltered in the strong arms of science, the science against which it had vainly struggled, the civilization of modern Europe might fall, as fell the civilization of ancient Rome." - Winston Churchill; (Source: The River War, first edition, Vol. II, pages 248-50 London)
The later rise of other Asian economic powers brought only reproach. The proud heirs of ancient civilizations had gotten used to hiring Western firms to carry out tasks of which their own contractors and technicians were apparently incapable. Now Middle Eastern rulers and businessmen found themselves inviting contractors and technicians from Korea—only recently emerged from Japanese colonial rule—to perform these tasks. Following is bad enough; limping in the rear is far worse.
By all the standards that matter in the modern world—economic development and job creation, literacy, educational and scientific achievement, political freedom and respect for human rights—what was once a mighty civilization has indeed fallen low. "
This practice, which has been prohibited in the Judeo-Christian tradition since the days of Moses, was sanctioned by Muhammad and has been going on now for 50 generations (1,400 years) in the Muslim world.
This practice of inbreeding will never go away in the Muslim world since Muhammad is the ultimate example and authority on all matters, including marriage.
The massive inbreeding in Muslim culture may well have done virtually irreversible damage to the Muslim gene pool, including extensive damage to its intelligence, sanity, and health.
According to Sennels, close to half of all Muslims in the world are inbred. In Pakistan , the numbers approach 70%. Even in England , more than half of Pakistani immigrants are married to their first cousins, and in Denmark the number of inbred Pakistani immigrants is around 40%.
The numbers are equally devastating in other important Muslim countries: 67% in Saudi Arabia , 64% in Jordan and Kuwait , 63% in Sudan , 60% in Iraq , and 54% in the United Arab Emirates and Qatar.
...Lowered intellectual capacity is another devastating consequence of Muslim marriage patterns. According to Sennels, research shows that children of consanguineous marriages lose 10-16 points off their IQ and that social abilities develop much slower in inbred babies.
The risk of having an IQ lower than 70, the official demarcation for being classified as "retarded," increases by an astonishing 400 percent among children of cousin marriages." - Muslim Healthcare Study
In an attempt to navigate between faith and rationality, Averroes argued that what may be true in the realm of religion may be contrary to what is true in nature. Thus, the Quranic maxim, "there is no compulsion in religion," (Sura 2:256) can be entirely true from a religious sense; but in the real world and in the course of jihad, compulsion may not only be required, but entirely justifiable. The dual-truth theory was vigorously rejected by Aquinas, and eventually both Roman Catholic, and later, Protestant theology acknowledged both the authoritative nature and the necessary agreement between special revelation (Scripture) and general revelation (nature).
It is impossible for the Most High to determine an act as obligatory or forbidden... for the sake of any objective, since all acts are equal in that they are his creation and production. Therefore the specification of certain acts as obligatory and others as forbidden or with any other determination takes place by his pure choice, which has no cause. Intelligibility has no place at all in it rather it can be known only by revealed-law sharīa. (quoted in Joseph Kenny, Islamic Monotheism: Principles and Consequences)
Some of the understandings that exist in our society today of the Imams . . . or even of the concept of God are not particularly compatible with an accountable state and do not allow society to grow and develop in the modern-day sense."
The pope has raised a very volatile question: Is, in fact, the God of Islam without reason, or above it? Is the Muslim God unreasonable? Is Islam, therefore, based upon a theological deformation? The pope's allusion to the teachings of eleventh-century Islamic philosopher Ibn Hazn—"God is not bound even by his own word"—suggests that possibility. However, it is more than a possibility. It is a core teaching of one of the predominant strains of Islam, if not the predominant strain. Has this always been so? How did such a conception of God develop? Is it still possible to talk about this without threats of murder? Benedict is trying to start a conversation with Islam, and it is the only one really worth having.
The pope's remarks require a good deal of explication in the context of Islamic philosophy and theology. They need to be understood within the broader perspective of a struggle that has taken place since Islam's inception over the status of reason and revelation. Benedict has essentially taken sides in the most fundamental debate that has ever been held within the Islamic world, and that is why his words generated such vehemence.
According to the pope, making either reason or revelation autonomous leads to a distortion of what each is. Reason raises questions that it cannot answer, and revelation's answers cannot be understood without reason. Divorcing reason from faith, or faith from reason, leads to catastrophe; they must be in partnership. Benedict speaks of dehellenization—meaning the loss of reason, the gift of the Greeks—as one of the West's main problems. Less well-known is the dehellenization that has afflicted Islam—its denigration of and divorce from reason. This took place over an argument, already begun in the seventh and eighth centuries, about the status of reason in relation to God's omnipotence, and decisively affected the character of the Islamic world. The struggle had its roots in a profound disagreement over who God is.
The side in this debate most easily recognizable to a Westerner was the Mu'tazilite school, composed of the Muslim rationalist philosophers who fought for the primacy of reason. The Mu'tazilites held that God is not only power; He is also reason. Man's reason is a gift from God, who expects man to use it to come to know Him. The status of reason determines man's relationship to revelation. God, being reason, would not expect man to accept anything contrary to it. Through reason, man is also able to understand God as manifested in His creation. God's laws are the laws of nature, which are also manifested in the Sharia (the divine path). Therefore, the Mu'tazilites held that the statements in the Qur'an must be in accord with reason. This means that the Qur'an, a document revealed in history, is open to interpretation. If this sounds familiar, it should: It reflects the same powerful influence Greek philosophy had upon Islam as it had upon Christianity, and which carried within it the impetus to reconcile reason and revelation.
The Mu'tazilite advocacy of reason succeeded to the extent that the teaching of a created Qur'an was enshrined as a state doctrine, proclaimed in 827 under Caliph al-Ma'mn. The Mu'tazilites fought for the primacy of reason and actually required religious judges to swear an oath that the Qur'an had been created. Their opponents, who believed in the primacy of power and the uncreated Qur'an, were punished and imprisoned. However, after the reign of Harun al-Watiq, the tables were turned on the Mu'tazilites by Caliph Ja'afar al-Mutawakkil (847–861), who made holding the Mu'tazilite doctrine a crime punishable by death. This did not end the Mu'tazilite school of thought (some fled to the more hospitable Shia areas), nor did it prevent the flourishing of the Greek-influenced faylasufs (philosophers) who followed them, such as al-Farabi, Avicenna, and Averroes. However, the long process of dehellenization and its resulting ossification had begun.
The victorious view developed a theological basis for the primacy of power by claiming that the revelation of Mohammed emphasizes most particularly one attribute of God—His omnipotence. Although all monotheistic religions hold that, in order to be one, God must be omnipotent, this argument reduced God to His omnipotence by concentrating exclusively on His unlimited power, as against His reason. God's "reasons" are unknowable by man. God is not shackled by reason; He rules as He pleases. He is pure will. There is no rational order invested in the universe upon which one can rely, only the second-to-second manifestation of God's will.
God is so powerful that every instant is the equivalent of a miracle. Nothing intervenes or has an independent or even semi-autonomous existence. In philosophical language, this view holds that God is the primary cause of everything, and there are no secondary causes. Therefore, what may seem to be "natural laws," such as the laws of physics, gravity, etc., are really nothing more than God's customs, which He is at complete liberty to break or change at any moment. As Benedict points out, this is called "volunteerism."
The consequences of this view are momentous. If creation exists simply as a succession of miraculous moments, it cannot be apprehended by reason. Other religions, including Christianity, recognize miracles. But they recognize them precisely as temporary and extraordinary suspensions of the natural law. In fact, that is what defines them as miracles. One admits to the possibility of a miracle only after discounting every possible explanation of its occurrence by natural causes. In this school of Islamic thought, there are no natural causes to discount. As a result, reality becomes incomprehensible. If unlimited will is the exclusive constituent of reality, there is really nothing left to reason about, and the uncreated Qur'an is not open to interpretation.
The early–tenth-century thinker Abu al-Hasan al-Ashari elaborated a metaphysics for the anti-rational view by using early Greek atomistic philosophy to assert that reality is composed of atoms. The configuration of these atoms at any given moment makes things what they are. In Islam in the World, British analyst Malise Ruthven explains: "The Asharis rationalised God's omnipotence within an atomistic theory of creation, according to which the world was made up of the discrete points in space and time whose only connection was the will of God, which created them anew at every moment."
For example, there is a collection of atoms that is a plant. Does the plant remain a plant because it has the nature of a plant, or because Allah wishes it to be a plant from this moment to the next? The Asharites said it is only a plant for the moment. For the plant to remain a plant depends on the will of Allah, and if you say it has to remain a plant because it has the nature of plant, this is shirk—blasphemy.
The catastrophic result of this view is the denial of the relationship between cause and effect. In The Incoherence of the Philosophers, Abu Hamid al-Ghazali (1058–1111), perhaps the single most influential Muslim thinker after Mohammed, vehemently rejected Greek thought: "The source of their infidelity was their hearing terrible names such as Socrates and Hippocrates, Plato and Aristotle." Al-Ghazali insisted that God is not bound by any order, and that there is, therefore, no "natural" sequence of cause and effect, as in fire burning cotton or, more colorfully, as in "the purging of the bowels and the using of a purgative." Things do not act according to their own natures but only according to God's will at the moment. There are only juxtapositions of discrete events that make it appear that the fire is burning the cotton, but God could just as well do otherwise. (This doctrine is known as occasionalism.) In other words, there is no continuous narrative of cause and effect tying these moments together in a comprehensible way. In attacking the Mu'tazilites, the Asharites, in the words of Mohammed Khair, wished "to free God's saving power from the shackles of causality."
Equally as damaging to the status of reason, al-Ghazali wrote in Moderation in Belief that reason is so infected by man's self-interest that it cannot know moral principles; they can only be known through revelation. Since reason is not a source of moral truth, concludes al-Ghazali, "No obligations flow from reason but from the Sharia [the divinely ordained path]." With this, he despatches Aristotle's Ethics and all other moral philosophy.
To outsiders, this capricious dimension of Islam was clear as long ago as the Middle Ages when the great Jewish philosopher Maimonides (1135–1204) spoke of his experiences in Cairo to illustrate the way some Muslims think. Every morning the caliph rides through Cairo, and every morning he takes the same route. However, said Maimonides, tomorrow he could take a different route. Why? Because he is the caliph and he can do as he wills. Every morning the sun rises in the east and sets in the west. It has happened for years; it happened today. But tomorrow it might rise in the south and set in the north. That depends on the will of Allah, and there is no saying that it will not. As the Qur'an states, "Dost thou not know that God has the power to will anything?" (2:106). Maimonides concluded that "the thing which exists with certain constant and permanent forms, dimensions, and properties [in nature] only follows the direction of habit . . . . On this foundation their whole fabric is constructed."
This conception of God directed man's relationship to the Almighty in a specific way. A God who has no reasons cannot be known by reason. This view can and did lead to a rich vein of mysticism, most especially in the Sufism of al-Ghazali, but it also presents a problem. How should one behave toward an unreasoning God? Ibn Taymiyya (1263–1328), a medieval Muslim thinker who profoundly influenced the founder of Wahhabism and who has been resuscitated by the Islamists today, answered: Man's task is not to know God. God is unknowable; do not even try to know God. Man's job is not to love God. Man cannot love what he does not know. Man's job is to obey. Submit. Reason plays no role, and free will is denigrated. In his attack on philosophy titled Kuzari, Judah ha-Levi, a Jewish follower of al-Ghazali, reached the logical conclusion as to how man ought to approach the revelations of such a deity: "I consider him to have attained the highest degree of perfection who is convinced of religious truths without having scrutinized them and reasoned over them." (One wonders how one becomes "convinced" of something without having thought about it.) There could hardly be a more radical rejection of what Benedict calls "the reasonableness of faith."
Compare this relationship to the standard definition of a Christian vocation, which is expressed in this logical order: to know, to love, and to serve God. First, knowledge of God is required. How can one love what one does not know? Of course, it is assumed that a finite creature such as man can only comprehend a small part of an infinite God, but he can know enough to inspire love. God is knowable. If one knows God, then one loves Him because God is goodness. In turn, the impulse of that love is to serve. One is naturally drawn to serve what one loves. The expression of this vocation is internally coherent and logically ordered. It is based upon a certain view of who God is and how man is capable of freely responding to Him through the use of his reason and free will.
To understand the ultimate significance of the Asharite and al-Ghazali's teaching of an unreasoning God, it may be helpful to contrast it to the Christian teaching that was similarly tempted to such extremes, but resisted them. Why, for instance, did this exclusive preoccupation with God's omnipotence not afflict Christianity, which is also monotheistic? Christianity holds that God is omnipotent and the primary cause of all things, as well. In fact, as Benedict pointed out in Regensburg, there were strong tendencies within Christianity to move in the very same direction, including in the teaching of Duns Scotus. The anti-rational view was violently manifested in the millenarian movements of the Middle Ages, and within the movement that was known as fideism—faith alone, sola scriptura. In its most radical form, this school held that the Scriptures are enough. Forget reason, Greek philosophy, and Thomas Aquinas. However, the anti-rationalist view in its more extreme forms has never predominated in Christianity, and it was considered broadly heretical.
As Benedict makes clear, the reason Christianity was insulated from an obsession with God's omnipotence was the revelation of Christ as Logos in the Gospel of St. John. If Christ is Logos—if God introduces Himself as ratio—then God is not only all-powerful, He is reason. While the Mu'tazilites claimed something similar, they had no scriptural authority to confirm their position, while their opponents had many to oppose it.
In addition, Christian revelation claims that everything was created through Christ as Logos. Since it was through Logos that all things were created, creation carries the imprint of its creator as reason. Nature bespeaks an intelligibility that derives from a transcendent source. Benedict recently reiterated this view when he referred to the "world as a product of creative reason." The laws of nature are not a challenge to God's authority but an expression of it. Reason and Christian revelation are compatible.
Ultimately, this theological view developed into the realist metaphysics of Thomas Aquinas, which then became the foundation for modern science, as Rev. Stanley Jaki, a Hungarian theologian and physicist, has explained in his voluminous writings on the origins of modern science. He has laid out the reasons modern science was stillborn in the Muslim world after what seemed to be its real start (see his extraordinary monograph, Jesus, Islam, Science). No one offers a more profound understanding of the consequences of the view of God as pure will than Father Jaki has.
The metaphysical support for natural law not only laid the foundations for modern science, but also provided the basis for the gradual development of constitutional government. The primacy of power in Islamic thought undermined a similar prospect. If one does not allow for the existence of secondary causes, one cannot develop natural law. If one cannot develop natural law, one cannot conceive of a constitutional political order in which man—through his reason—creates laws to govern himself and behave freely. Because democracies base their political order on reason and free will, and leave in play questions that Islamists believe have been definitively settled by revelation, Islamists regard democracies as their natural and fatal enemies.
The curious thing is that it does not matter whether one's view of reality as pure will has its origin in a deformed theology or a totally secular ideology, such as Hegel's or Hobbes's: The political consequences are the same. As Rev. James V. Schall has shown, the notion of pure will as the basis of reality results in tyrannical rule. Disordered will, unfettered by right reason, is the political problem.
Radical Muslims translate their version of God's omnipotence into a politics of unlimited power. As God's instruments, they are channels for this power. Once the primacy of force is posited, terrorism becomes the next logical step to power, as it did in the 20th-century secular ideologies of power: Nazism and Marxism–Leninism. This is what led Osama bin Laden to embrace the astonishing statement of his spiritual godfather, Abdullah Azzam, which bin Laden quoted in the November 2001 video, released after 9/11: "Terrorism is an obligation in Allah's religion." This can only be true—that violence in spreading faith is an obligation—if, as Benedict said in Regensburg, God is without reason.
The problem today is that the side of reason in Islam lost. The ultimate consequences of the rejection of reason and the loss of causality are playing themselves out across the Muslim world. As Fouad Ajami recently observed, "Wherever I go in the Islamic world, it's the same problem: cause and effect; cause and effect."
It is not that the side of reason is not still there—there are some extraordinarily intelligent Muslim scholars who would like to see a neo-Mu'tazilite movement within Islam, a restoration of the primacy of reason so that they can re-open the doors to interpretation and develop some kind of natural-law foundation for humane, political, constitutional rule. According to Iranian thinker Abdolkarim Soroush, "Some of the understandings that exist in our society today of the Imams . . . or even of the concept of God are not particularly compatible with an accountable state and do not allow society to grow and develop in the modern-day sense." Reformist Tunisian-born thinker Latif Lakhdar calls for a revival of "Mu'tazila and philosophical thought that subjected the holy writings on which the religion is based to interpretation by the human mind." There are Muslims who will say these things, but many of them, like Soroush and Lakhdar, are in the West for their own protection.
Is there a constituency within the Muslim world that can elaborate a theology that allows for the restoration of reason, a rehellenization of Islam with Allah as ratio? It is idle to pretend that it would take less than a sea change for this to happen. If it does not, it is hard to envisage upon what basis the dialogue with Islam could take place. There are many Muslims (in Turkey and in the developing democracies of Indonesia and Malaysia, to say nothing of the democratic life followed by the huge Muslim population in India) who want to enter the modern world—with its modern science and modern political institutions—and also keep their faith. Unfortunately, the ideas gaining traction today are not theirs. That is the crisis, which is now spilling over into the West. In order to meet it, Benedict is telling us we have urgent reason to regain our own faith and to raise these all-important questions with them.
Pope Benedict's criticism of Islam is taken further in this excellent article by Rebecca Bynum , excerpts below (my emphases):
"...It is my contention that where there is conflict between the will of man and the will of Allah, the will of Allah always triumphs in Islamic philosophy because the power of Allah is thought of as absolute: he does not curtail or restrain his power in any way. In other words, Allah does not respect the free will of man, in fact, human free will is illusory at best.
By this logic, all three thousand people who lost their lives on September 11, 2001 as a result of jihad action would have died at that hour regardless. And furthermore, because Allah did not intervene, it was Allah's will that it happened. The jihadis who perpetrated this act, were only puppets on a stage, obeying the will of Allah according to a pre-written script. They did not cause all those deaths and all that destruction; rather, according to Islamic logic, Allah caused it as punishment for our sins, the sins of America as a collective entity.
This further reduces to: everything that occurs in the reality of the material world we live in is a direct result of Allah's will. Human will is but an instrument of the will of Allah and therefore does not have an independent existence in the overall trend of Islamic thought. Even though the concept of "testing" is present, Allah's will is never subservient to human will.
I contend this is the equivalent to asserting not that everything is God's will, but rather that nothing is God's will, or even that there is no God, because there is no distinction between what is and what is not God's will in the reality of the material world: the good and the evil deeds of man are both equally and ultimately the result of the will of God.
In this view, as the Pope pointed out, God's purpose is so transcendent as to be unknowable, which is to say, God is unknowable to the individual. And again there is no practical difference between that and the assertion that God does not exist, for His will, and therefore God himself, according to Islam, cannot be known. This is equivalent to saying that the difference between good and evil cannot be known, and this is so regardless of the existence of a list of accepted and prohibited actions put forth as "God's will" by Islam on the basis of Muhammad's example as the ultimate arbiter between truth and error. Goodness and Truth do not have an independent existence in Islam; they are entirely dependent on the Islamic creed.
Furthermore, according to Winston Churchill, the Muslim belief in predestination engenders a "fearful, fatalistic apathy" which "paralyses the social development of those who follow it," for Allah's will is fixed in a one-size-fits-all pattern and is not unique to the individual believer. The individual's relationship to Allah is bound completely by the believer's obedience to Islam. Therefore, believers in Islam are actually barred from the greatest adventure known to man, that of finding God (goodness, truth and beauty) as an individual experiential reality. This is so because Allah's will is so transcendent as to be incomprehensible. Thus the "testing" of the believer is reduced to a test of conformity to the creed rather than a testing of the ability to discover what is right and true uniquely for himself.
This is equivalent to Allah is Dead. The most heinous acts, collective and individual, can be rationalized as "Allah's will" and this of course is a prescription for social chaos. The violence and attitudes that the canonical texts of Islam naturally give rise to are repeatedly demonstrated wherever Islam is suddenly unconstrained, as with the removal of Saddam Hussein's regime, or the pseudo-nationalism of the PLO and its many security forces, as is clearly observed in Iraq and Gaza today. Then consider Condoleeza Rice's wishful and bizarre comparison between the "Palestinians" and America's Founding Fathers.
According to Richard Weaver the endowing of cultural forms with the idea of immanence historically gives rise to social cruelty. It is the deification of a cultural system, such as the deification of the Church during the years of the Inquisition, or the deification of a political system such as communism, that creates conditions in which human sacrifice, often on a massive scale, becomes justified. In this view, the cultural structure essentially replaces the concept of a living God (dealing directly with autonomous human beings) and thus human freedom, happiness and ultimately lives are sacrificed to the cultural form in proportion to the fanaticism engendered by the belief in it..."
"...Another bedrock problem lies in the failure of Islam to recognize God as a self-limited or self-limiting being, at least in so far as He acts within the material world of time and space (both obviously limiting factors separating the finite from the infinite). The existence of natural law is further evidence of this. Christianity recognizes a God who is not whimsical, who has set his laws in motion and does not violate them. Thus, these laws may be discovered by His reasoning creature and therefore science, and all that flows from science, becomes possible because it is conceivable.
Another limitation of God is the divine respect evidently given to human free will. Indeed, in the western world at least, if someone claims to be coerced by God, ("God made me do it") we consider that person to be of doubtful sanity. However, according to Islamic thought, Allah is not limited by natural law, or by reason, or even by goodness and truth...."
".... Allah demands unquestioning obedience and total sacrifice, including the sacrifice of the ability to know good from evil as an individual, private matter, for the will of Allah is not a personal experience. The Islamic system has totally usurped the place of the living God for the believer: worship and obedience are one..."
"... But when religious forms, in their arrogance, become a substitute for God, then the potential for evil and the cruelty of cultural coercion rapidly ensue. In order for cultural progress to occur, man must be free to distinguish the greater from the lesser. For example, which is the greater evil: adultery itself, or the stoning as punishment? Jews and Christians answered long ago: the stoning is the greater evil. Muslims, on the contrary, and despite their modern protestations that "this is not the true Islam," are forever barred from making such a judgment, because the will of Allah is absolutely transcendent and unreachable through the mind.
Therefore, what western reason would deem psychopathological murder/suicide, Islam calls the "martyrdom of the sainted" without guile. The reason of Islam exists entirely within the bounds of Islam. A bridge of reason simply does not exist between our two worlds, as it does not exist between the individual Muslim and the will of Allah.
And reason cannot compromise with unreason without destroying the basis for its existence. By the same token, unreason cannot become reasonable without destroying itself as well. There is simply no way the hoped-for "reform" of Islam by way of reason would not end in Islam's ultimate destruction, but this is not an outcome to be feared. It should be welcomed."
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Kwame Anthony Appiah with Annette Gordon-Reed: The Lies That Bind | 9-17-2017
NYPL Author Talks | Recorded live at the New York Public Library, Celeste Auditorium, on September 17, 2018.
From the bestselling author and renowned scholar of philosophy and law comes a revealing exploration of how the identities that shape our world are riddled with contradiction. Who are we, and what are we? How do we choose to self-identify? In his latest book, The Lies That Bind, Kwame Anthony Appiah explores the nature and history of the collective identities that define us—creed, sexuality, race, religion—and the role they play in our increasingly polarized world. Appiah shows how our contemporary thinking is disproportionately influenced by affiliations that draw us together as much as they tear us apart. He argues that there is no way to dispense of identities altogether, but suggests that, by gaining a deeper understanding, we can reconfigure them.
Richard Powers: The Waterstones Interview
'This book is about taking the non-human seriously. It's about realising that we are not alone on this earth and the rest of creation is not there simply to be a resource to us.' Longlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2018, The Overstory by Richard Powers is an intricate novel about and indeed structured very much like a tree. We decided to sit beneath the canopy of one to discuss why a closer appreciation of trees might just change your life for the better. Contains a stiff breeze at times!
Ben Okri discusses political poetry on National Poetry Day (with Waterstones)
[Note: The description below is taken from the Youtube channel of Waterstones, which interviewed Ben Okri] "Rise Like Lions is an anthology of political poetry compiled by Ben Okri. With a sweeping range from Basho to Bob Marley this is poetry that inspires, informs and rings true from generation to generation. For National Poetry Day, we asked Ben to tell us more about the hallmarks of political poetry, whether it can effect change and why poetry is enjoying a resurgence of late".
Bethany McLean | Saudi America
The technology of fracking in shale rock — particularly in the Permian Basin in Texas — has transformed America into the world's top producer of both oil and natural gas. The U.S. is expected to be "energy independent" and a "net exporter" in less than a decade, a move that will upend global politics, destabilize Saudi Arabia, crush Russia's chokehold over Europe, and finally bolster American power again.
Or Will it?
Investigative journalist and bestselling author Bethany McLean digs deep into the cycles of boom and bust that has plagued the American oil industry for the past decade, from the financial wizardry and mysterious death of fracking pioneer Aubrey McClendon, to the speculators who are betting on America's ascendance and the collapse of OPEC in the great game of geopolitics. McLean finds that fracking is a business built on attracting ever-more gigantic amounts of capital investment, while promises of huge returns have often not borne out. Overeagerness in partaking in a boom can lead to all types of problems and just as she did with the Enron story, in Saudi America McLean points out the reality and the risks of the inflated promises of the fracking boom.
Anand Giridharadas with Joy-Ann Reid: Winners Take All | Author Talks
NYPL Author Talks | Recorded live at the New York Public Library, Celeste Auditorium, on September 5, 2018.
An award-winning journalist travels to the inner sanctums of the new gilded age to chronicle the global elites who are setting out to remake the fight for equality and social justice in their own images. Around the planet some of the world's richest and most powerful citizens lead passionate campaigns to solve the manifold social and political problems that divide the haves and the have nots. Anand Giridharadas, journalist and winner of the Library's Helen Bernstein Book Award, asks whether those who have profited from "our highly inequitable status quo" are the best candidates to narrow the divides that have benefited them the most. When are their solutions democratic and universal, and when do they reflect and support the biases that introduced the inequity in the first place?
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These two once debated online at a religion site, but I was taken back on encountering this comment in a recent Sullivan column at Daily Beast. I thought Sam had behaved like a prince and that both of them were civil and appeared to have parted on good terms. Yet here is Sullivan: "Sam Harris (e.g.) is a materialist, or physicalist. He believes only in things for which there is an identifiable physical process that can be observed via scientific means. While a materialist will surely be an atheist, an atheist is not necessarily a materialist. Many of us find the smug dogma of Harris' materialism to be just as off-putting as the righteous dogma of biblical literalism."
Golly, one of the points Mr. Harris made in their debate was that jerks like Sullivan are, to use A.A. terminology, enablers for the bull moose loonies, guys like Dr. John Hagee, who claimed that Katrina was God's vengeance on New Orleans for its sinfulness. If anyone smugly pushes dogma it is cop-out believers like Sullivan. Both he and Hagee appear to be followers of the same God. They may never come to terms with the logical impossibility of a good God who is omnipotent.
Views: 227
I've seen Sullivan a couple times on Bill Maher. Put simply, he's a jerk. Or, if you want to get a touch more specific, he's a self-important jerk.
Isn't this the disease of the Catholic apologist intellectuals: he's only a queer version of William F. Buckley, after all. You and I can remember when Sullivan's former employer had his TV convention booth debate ending with Gore Vidal saying something tacky to the effeminate, mannered, totally phony Buckley, and then the latter responding, "Listen you queer, I'll sock you in the face and you'll stay plastered." I saw it as a couple of queens going at each other after falling out over a mutual boyfriend, but then Sullivan wasn't even born when that occurred, was he?
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Morse Field Hockey 2010
Thank you Morse Field Hockey for the opportunity to work with you. And here you are! The shots are lined up in order of uniform. If you pre-ordered I will be placing orders soon and will get the photos to you as soon as I get them! If still want to order, it's not too late! You can do so directly from the website, but if you'd like to save some money and get a package, you'll have to use the order form you received from Coach. Some of you have several action shots - these, and any photos, can be made into a collage so if you want to get creative, email email@example.com and we'll get to it! And... every image is available for LEGAL download for internet and email use for ONLY $5! So you can have you on FB, now! Good Luck with the rest of your season and I'll see you soon! ~wendy.jungRead More


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A city run by one of China's incoming political leaders that has billed itself as a future international financial center is instead becoming the country's internet censorship capital.
Tianjin, whose Communist party secretary Zhang Gaoli is one of the seven men most likely to get a seat on the new politburo standing committee due to be unveiled at the 18th party congress starting on Thursday, is developing a replica of Manhattan to which it aims to attract global banks.
But local government officials explaining a mock-up of Yujiapu, the new district on the site of a former fishing village, last week said they did not know of any foreign bank that had committed to coming. Meanwhile, some of China's leading internet firms are relocating their censorship operations to Tianjin as they battle soaring labor costs.
Tianjin's tale illustrates China's rapidly changing economic landscape but also puts a question mark over the reform and economic policy credentials of the country's incoming leaders.
(Read More: China's New Leaders—the Lineup)
Mr. Zhang has been characterized as a financial reformer, mainly because he served in the southern province of Guangdong, known for piloting economic reforms. Two people familiar with the party's discussions over leadership posts said Mr. Zhang could receive an important economic portfolio in the team that will rule China for the coming decade.
But while Tianjin, which he has run since 2007, has failed to boost Mr. Zhang's credentials, it has become the first choice for internet companies as they follow textile, toy, and electronics manufacturers away from larger cities in pursuit of lower wages.
Youku Tudou, China's largest online video company by revenue, is considering moving its censorship operations from Beijing 170km to the coastal city of 10m people.
"We're talking 300 to 400 people, and there's no reason these people need to be in Beijing or Shanghai where salaries are going through the roof," said a person familiar with the company's plans.
The Chinese government requires the private companies that run internet services such as search engines and social media to censor. Censorship has intensified ahead of the party congress in an effort to muzzle discussion of the party's internal power struggle and corruption.
The censorship departments of Sina Weibo, China's leading Twitter equivalent, and the online video website Sohu have already been moved to Tianjin.
When users of Sina Weibo post content deemed offensive or subversive, a virtual "little secretary" deletes their posts, blocks searches for keywords or admonishes them to back off.
"Censorship is a low-end, labor-intensive kind of work, so these operations are easier to relocate to lower-wage locations," said Li Zhi at Analysys, a Beijing-based internet research firm.
According to jobui.com, a Chinese job search website, the average monthly salary for internet censors in Beijing is Rmb4,081 ($653), in Shenzhen Rmb3,714, and in Tianjin Rmb2,998.


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On one big jump I started to swing back towards my kite and, for some reason (panic?) never brought the kite forward in time and so I fell on my back, w back of my head hitting the water pretty hard. I usually tuck my legs up to help prevent swinging backwards, but I kindof lost it when I caught a 2nd gust in the air.
2 German paragliders/kiteboarders watching said I was as high as my kite, I don't know, probably not that high (20 meter lines), but anyway high, and I lost control and came down the wrong way. I was surprised that I only suffered a bit of whiplash type soreness in my neck and forehead.
Anyway, one of them pointed out that if I had fallen with my head to the side I could have possibly blown out one of my ear drums, and that is why he wears a hoody over the ears even in a warm climate. (Bahia de Salinas, CR)
Anyone else thought about this? and are there other ways to protect the ear drums?
I'm pretty serious about this as I work in sound and I enjoy being able to hear in stereo.


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A New Generation of Meal Replacement Shakes
Isagenix recently unveiled its next generation of IsaLean Shakes in Natural Creamy Chocolate and Natural Creamy Vanilla. The new shakes utilize maximum nutritional benefits from the highest quality grade of undenatured proteins and a complex blend of rare trace minerals that are exclusive to Isagenix.
The comprehensive meal replacement shakes have 23 grams of IsaPro Complex containing the highest quality whey and casein protein from the world's largest dairy group in New Zealand, whose standards exceed the Department of Agriculture's organic standards. As a result from this new, proprietary technology, the shakes contain lower lactose levels and a superior amino acid profile for easier digestion.
The shakes, containing only 240 calories and six grams of fat per serving, have an exclusive blend of more than 70 supercharged rare Earth minerals from its proprietary Ionic Alfalfa to help keep the body running at peak performance.
IsaLean Shakes are part of the Isagenix Nutritional Cleansing systems and are designed as healthy meal replacement options that deliver maximum nutrition with less calories and fat to assist with weight-loss or management.


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savagejim needed a new logo design and created a contest on 99designs.
A winner was selected from 56 designs submitted by 26 freelance designers.
Savage and Associates, http://www.thequickbooksguy.com
Small-medium size business support for QuickBooks, networking and accounting support.
Small medium size business users of Intuit products and those that are considering Intuit products.
High tech feel showing company name (Savage and Associates) with emphasis on web address (http://www.thequickbooksguy.com). Try to use Intuit color scheme and high tech looking font.
Find out how a design contest works or learn more about our logo design services.


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Bluestockings Zine Reading Extravaganza
From ZineWiki
Revision as of 11:17, 12 April 2007 by InvisibleFriend (Talk | contribs) (Wikifying)
The Bluestockings Zine Reading Extravaganza is a periodic event in which zinesters get together to read their work at Bluestocking Books. The first extravaganza took place on March 25, 2007, and featured 10 zinesters from NYC, upstate NY, and NJ. The next reading is scheduled to take place in June.
Zinesters Who Have Read
- Jenna from Lower East Side Librarian Winter Solstice Shout Out
- Jim from Jersey Beat
- Liz from My Brain Hurts
- Melody from The F-Word
- Rose from Old Weird America
- Steph from Suburban Blight
- Andy from Captain Sissypants
- Jacinta from I Do Not Want You to Leave
- Jessica from The Long Walk Back to Myself
- John from Lost Positives
- Miss from Escape from Special


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Falconstor/Sun wins speediest dedupe race
So who's suffering from ingestion?
Comment: The fastest deduplication on the planet is performed by an 8-node Sun cluster using Falconstor deduplication software, according to a vendor-neutral comparison.
Backup expert W Curtis Preston has compared the deduplication performance of different vendors' products. He uses suppliers' own performance numbers and disregards multi-node deduplication performance if each node has its own individual index.
Preston says that a file stored on one with no previous history would not be deduplicated against the same file stored on other deduplication products in the same set of systems, because each one is blind to what the others store.
A Data Domain array is an example of an array of deduplication systems that do not share a global index. Preston says: "NetApp, Quantum, EMC & Dell, (also) have only local dedupe... Diligent, Falconstor, and Sepaton all have multi-node/global deduplication."
Nodes in a 5-node Sepaton deduplication array, for example, share a global index and the nodes co-operate to increase the deduplication ratio. In this situation a multi-node deduplication setup acts as a single, global deduplication system.
Preston compares the rated speeds for an 8-hour backup window, looking at the data ingest rate and the deduplication rate. As some vendors deduplicate inline, at data ingest time, and others deduplicate after data ingestion, known as post-process, these two numbers may well differ.
He compared deduplication speeds from EMC (Disk Library), Data Domain, FalconStor/Sun, IBM/Diligent, NetApp, Quantum/Dell and Sepaton/HP. (HP OEMs the Sepaton product.)
The Falconstor/Sun combo topped the ingest scores at 11,000MB/sec using an 8-node cluster and Fibre Channel drives. It was followed by Sepaton/HP with 3,000MB/sec and then EMC with 1,100MB/sec. Quantum/Dell ingested at 800MB/sec with deduplication deferred to post-process and not run inline.
NetApp was the slowest, ingesting data at 600MB/sec. The configuration was a 2-node one but each node deduplicated data on its own. Quantum/Dell would ingest at 500MB/sec if deduplication was inline
The fastest deduplication engine was the Falconstor/Sun one, rated at 3,200MB/sec. It was followed by Sepaton/HP at 1,500MB/sec, then by IBM/Diligent at 900MB/sec, Data Domain at 750MB/sec with EMC trailing at 400MB/sec. Preston couldn't find any NetApp deduplication speed numbers.
Preston also looked at the numbers for a 12-hour backup window. If vendors have an ingest rate that is more than twice their deduplication rate, they would need more than 24 hours to ingest and then deduplicate 12 hours worth of ingested data. This means their effective ingest rate for a 12-hour backup run can only be twice their deduplication rate.
He also has a discussion of restore speeds for deduplicated data, known as inflation or rehydration. The sources for his numbers and the products used are listed on his blog.
This is the first comprehensive and vendor-neutral deduplication speed comparison, and is well worth a look. ®
Sponsored: Becoming a Pragmatic Security Leader


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James "Whitey" Bulger was indicted on 32 counts, alleging he participated in a racketeering enterprise from the 1970s to the 1990s that raked in money from drug trafficking and extortion of bookmakers, drug dealers, and businessmen. One of the racketeering counts alleges that Bulger committed 33 criminal acts, including 19 murders, six extortions, and conspiring to sell marijuana and cocaine. By law, jurors only had to find Bulger guilty of two of those acts, that occurred within 10 years of each other, in order for him to be convicted of racketeering. After the prosecution and defense presented a total of 72 witnesses over 35 days, the jury, made up of four women and eight men, found Bulger guilty of counts.
Below is a summary of the evidence federal prosecutors introduced during the trial. The count numbers reflect the verdict slip the jurors used during their deliberations. Some of the counts were removed from the verdict slip because they involved charges against other defendants. Click on each charge for related Globe articles and an explanation of what each charge means.
Source: Globe staff reports
Joanna S. Kao for The Boston Globe and Anica Butler, Gabriel Florit / Globe staff


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Use of cookies by SourceCode Technology Holdings, Inc. We use cookies to deliver our online services.
Details and instructions on how to disable those cookies are set out
Learn how K2's cloud–based platform helps you build any process visually.
See K2's platform in action with a personalized demo from a process automation expert.
With K2, you can build workflows visually - saving significant time.
How is Rogers scaling process automation? By empowering people outside of IT.
From opportunity registration to enablement or training and certification, we have the
tools and marketing resources you need to to help your business grow.
K2's SmartAssist technology now provides more intelligence in the design phase to make
development easier and more efficient.
More than 1.5 million users in over 84 countries, including 30 percent of the Fortune 100,
use K2 to save money, reduce risk and grow revenue.
Course overview: Building K2 applications in SharePoint 2013 with K2


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How to draw
Online games
Speed reading
Play and fun this free mleko rhinoceros how to draw online flash games.
You can download this
free mleko rhinoceros flash movie in to your computer.
Detailed instruction on how to draw the human figure with graphics showing proportions of the human body, chiaroscuro and foreshortening.
Describes exhibits at this museum in australia. also includes online dinosaur activities for children and fact sheets on paleontology subjects and.
Actually, you can format any line and change it into an arrow or vice versa but well cover how to format drawing objects in another lesson.
Get free drawing lessons from bob weber, jr. and slylock fox and comics for kids.
Visiting artist jeanine jackson drawing lesson abstract connect kids is the official kids website for the state of connecticut and provides information b.
Dinosaur interplanetary gazette ultimate online dinosaur magazine, dinosaurs in the news, dinosaurs in the media, dinosaur history, dinosaur movies, .
Drawing video lessons. how to draw and paint quickly and easily sketch accurate wheels without complex calculations this tutorial shows a simple method of.
In this lesson, you will use the pen tool to draw and define curved paths, and learn techniques to draw lines that abruptly change direction.
Having trouble pronouncing those long names? want to know what they mean or who named them? ben creisler has compiled an excellent listing of the names and.
Valigntop idmbbdinosaur state park has one of the largest dinosaur track sites in north america, displaying early jurassic fossil tracks made million years ago, scriptvar mbmanybox.register, mrpyjuuwkj, , f, map ofnbsp west st, rocky hill, ct scriptdiv idmbf.
This page located here http://ababasoft.com/how_to_draw/
Copyright © 1998 -


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Elaine Judith 'Judee' Fox, age 68, of Cape Coral, FL, passed away on Wednesday, November 9, 2011 in Tampa, FL.
She was born December 15, 1942 in Bellevue, PA, a child of John and Helen (Laughlin) Welch and lived in Aliquippa, PA, and Madison, OH. She was a graduate of Hopewell High School and attended Robert Morris University. She was an active member of the Ft. Myers Beach Yacht Club and a member of the Fort Myers Beach Moose Lodge. Throughout her life she volunteered at her children's schools, was active in her communities at the Rabbit Run Theater and Garden Club in Madison, Ohio, taught Driver's Education, and was an avid boater, both on Lake Erie and in Southwest Florida.
She is survived by her daughter, Lorie (Philip) VanWinkle of Ft. Myers, FL and a son, Lloyd Edward (Tracy) Fox of Mentor, OH; her stepfather, Carl 'Ed' Haught of Fort Myers, FL and five grandchildren. She was preceded in death by her beloved husband of 45 years, Lloyd E. Fox, Jr., who passed away January 30, 2011.
Services will be private. Family and friends may sign the guest register by visiting www.horizonfunerals.com.


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Photos by Dennis Dow/Woodland Park Zoo
Guntur, the infamously over-protective otter dad, has finally let the newest pups take their first steps outside!
The four pups—three girls and one boy born in January—have only had a few tiny adventures outdoors so far. Though they step out for only a few minutes at a time, the good news is that dad seems to be getting more comfortable each time.
It helps a lot that the pups' have a dedicated family that also includes mom and four older brothers to show them the way.
Sometimes that means moving the pups around…
…and sometimes that means letting the pups figure out their own way.
The pups aren't yet the most coordinated little movers, but they're quite capable of planting themselves into prime snacking position, which we learned when keepers gave them some grubs outdoors.
Keep in mind if you're planning a visit that the otters' time outside is still quite irregular. Though we provide outdoor access, it's ultimately their choice whether to go out and how long to spend out there. We ask for your patience for a few more weeks as the family gets settled!


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One final reminder, if you were interested in participating in helping Guinness the stout get into Guinness the book, this is your last chance. (Remember, too, you'll help me earn a little money and possibly win a trip to Ireland.) To find a pub near you, check out the Guinness Pub Finder, on Facebook.
Here's what you do:
- Go out to the Guinness site.
- After you click through the age-verification screen, you'll be invited to "Join the Party." Click that link.
- Next, you can choose to enter your name and zip code, or log in with your Facebook account. I would love it if you entered your name and zip; if you use Facebook, you won't be able to pledge.
- I would also love it if you entered the word DASH when prompted for an optional code. This is how they track the traffic from my site. If you don't enter the code, your pledge won't count toward my totals.
- Finally, you will then — and I'm sorry for this — have to jump through a Captcha hoop.
This pledging system only works within the United States. Sorry, foreign devils!