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Online Account: Immediate Opening!
Do you need an account with IBAN in Germany right away? No problem. The account opening of this online account is done in 2 minutes!
You receive your new account number right away
The main features:
- Online current account with a Prepaid MasterCard
- Cash withdrawals are possible around the globe
- Transfers possible within the whole SEPA-area
- Secure online banking (with mTAN)
- No creditworthiness check (no Schufa query, no Schufa entry)
- Monthly account fee Euros 9.90 plus activation charge
- Account opening possible for German- or English-speaking people abroad
(Legitimating via PostIdent or VideoIdent!)
Go directly to the offer ⇒ www.onlinekonto.de/mainpage.
How to open the online account
1. Fill in the online application for account opening
Use this link to go directly to the page with the online form ⇒ www.onlinekonto.de/registration/.
2. Submit the online application
Everything done? Good, then click on Bestellung abschließen (Submit Order). The order confirmation (Bestellbestätigung) will appear immediately on the screen:
The order confirmation was also sent to your e-mail address. Please log into your e-mail inbox and click on the confirmation link.
3. Online account was opened
After clicking on the confirmation link, you will be forwarded to the website of the online account. Once there, you simply enter the password and your new account in Germany is opened. Your account number will immediately be shown:
Congratulations! The account has been opened. It can now receive money.
As of now, money can be transferred to the account!
"Open your online account in just 2 minutes"
… success guaranteed!
Step by Step: Please open your account now! The next article shows you how to make the legitimating and how to further set up the account (including shipping of the MasterCard).
59 Responses to "Online Account: Immediate Opening!"
Hi Gregor,
Does this account contain Steuernummer? To have a Steuernummer i need to open a business account or i can go with personal account?
Thank youVA:F [1.9.22_1171]
If i receive money through the IBAN, and if my debit card hasnt still arrived will i be able to use the funds or transfer to another bank without receiving the debit master card?VA:F [1.9.22_1171]
Can you explain the identification process a little bit more, because the fast 2 minutes to register can turn into days of horror asking for all kind of documents etc.
I am highly interested in this account if it is simple verification, and if i can use it even without receiving the mastercard only through ebanking.
Thank you!VA:F [1.9.22_1171]
I am not in Germany but I will visit the country after 7 month and in this month I will transfer 1500 EUR every month to the account or more from my country is it possible? I am leaving in KSA and every year I travel to UK and this time I want to visit Germany, and if the bank accept me how I will receive the Credit card.VA:F [1.9.22_1171]
Hi, need to open an account with iban et debit card for my uk ltd company. Is it possible? RdsVA:F [1.9.22_1171]
Hi Gregor,
I am from Bulgaria and I would like to open an online account. Can you tell me for sure if I can complete the verification process at the postal office only with my bulgarian ID, or I need an address in Germany? (I don't want to travel in Germany and get a refuse at the postal office.)
Also, can you tell me excatly what are the limits to receive money for this online account: daily / weekely / monthly / year. (ex. let's say: today I receive 14.500 EUR in my account and then I will transfer this amount into my bank account from Bulgaria. My question is: Can I receive in the very next day another 14.500 EUR in my online account and then transfer this ammount again into my bulgarian bank account?)
Thanks in advance for your answer.VA:F [1.9.22_1171]
hi, i´m Portuguese and live in Portugal now, so my question is: can i open a account with you?? And what is exactly the online identification process? what do i need? documents??
thank youVA:F [1.9.22_1171]
I have applied for an on line bank account and it was successful, I was just wondering if I can get a card sent to my address? and how can I do that?
Kind regards,
JinalVA:F [1.9.22_1171]
Hi if the card identification/legitimating is not been made at postal office and receive 900 euro/month in my german account i can transfer to other account using my online identification?VA:F [1.9.22_1171]
Hi. You can receive money immediately after opening your account online. You are informed about the IBAN immediately after sending the online application for the account. But you can only transfer money from that account after the legitimization at the post office. For the time being, this PostIdent method is what is required in Germany. The indentification via video is still in the planning stage but is supposed to come this year, but we don't know the exact date yet.VA:F [1.9.22_1171]
Hi, I am looking for an EUR bank account. Do you know any bank which I can open a account online being a Brasilian guy and send money by transferwise to Europe? I really need this information, Nemea bank is not working. If I can't open being in my country, which bank I can do it going to Europe in the easier way?VA:F [1.9.22_1171]
I need this account be able to transfer money by transferwise and make SEPA transfers in Europe. ThanksVA:F [1.9.22_1171]
Hi, Philip,
You can open this account from almost any country in the world. The account online account opening does not take longer than 2 minutes, and your IBAN account number will be available for you right away. These are the positive aspects. 🙂
The challenges:
– You can transfer money immediately. From a Non-SEPA-Country we recommend using Transferwise for the transfer https://www.deutscheskonto.org/en/transferwise/, since this online account is solely a SEPA account.
– Till the complete legitimization is finished, you can only deposit money into it, but not withdraw it. Currently, the sole legitimization offered in Germany is via the post office. "PayCenter", that's the name of the account-holding institute, is working on a video solution for identification, but details are not known yet. If you want to, you can take your time (up to several months) between opening the account and finishing the legitimization.
– Currently, the online banking is only available in German. They are working on an English language version. The customer service (e-mail, telephone) already works in English.
In case this account is an option for you, despite the mentioned challenges, I wish you much success with opening your own account.VA:F [1.9.22_1171]
Ok, but opening the account online, I will be able to transfer the money which is there to others bank accounts in Europe? If not, exist another bank which I can do this?VA:F [1.9.22_1171]
Do you think this account would work as a Sperrkonto for an international student?
Would they be able to block the account with the parameters needed for the visa? (having a minimum balance every month)
best,VA:F [1.9.22_1171]
I am from Egypt but I live in Germany now. My visa is only for 2 months and I want money to pay for another course. Can I open an online account and my father send me money from Egypt? How much is it to transfer 1000 euro. Thanks.VA:F [1.9.22_1171]
Yes, an account opening should be possible.
Please keep in mind, that Onlinekonto (online account) is solely a SEPA account for Euro. Trans-fers from abroad in different currencies cannot be processed there.
Customarily we recommend to our readers TransferWise, if they want to receive payments from abroad, because in 99% of the cases this is less expensive than a bank transfer, and because the TransferWise payment will be transferred to your account like a national transfer in Euro.
Regrettably, Egypt is not connected to TransferWise yet. Maybe you'd like to have the money sent to Germany via Western Union?VA:F [1.9.22_1171]
Hi there. I started working for a Germany based company in January. I live in South Africa though and travel a lot for work. I'm interested in this account as it would make my salary payments easier. I don't know when I'll be in Germany next to verify anything at a branch. Can I open the account online and do video authentication, get my Mastercard for withdraws and online banking for account payments? Is there a link to the fees charged for online payments, withdraws and card swipes?VA:F [1.9.22_1171]
Hi. Yes, those are very good questions, and I also need to apologize: Last year I had stated in a reply further above that VideoIdent would work end of 2016, and the English language version as well. This was the information I had received from the provider.
Regrettably, there has been a delay. Currently, both is supposed to go live during the first half of this year – the background probably being extensive testing. The German provider probably does not want to go live with a 80%-solution!
Currently, after the online account application you still need to legitimize yourself at the post office in Germany in order to use the account to its whole extent.
You can find our detailed description regarding the functions and prices here: https://www.deutscheskonto.org/en/account/online/ – but please do keep in mind that this is an account which was developed for the den regional SEPA area. You will not find fees regarding transfers to other continents, because you cannot make them. For transfers to South Africa I recommend to use TransferWise. This saves costs, and is quick and safe. I love this transfer provider and often use them myself.VA:F [1.9.22_1171]
Congratulations! That was the frist step. The legitimization is of course statutory with all financial institutes within the European Union (and most other countries as well). With an online account, you have six weeks time to do that, currently still via PostIdent at every local branch of Deutsche Post. In the course of this year, the VideoIdent procedure will be implemented as well, which will make it even easier to not only open the account from abroad, but also to unlock it.VA:F [1.9.22_1171]
Can I open and dispose of an account to which a German pension payment is sent to? I would receive this pension in Euros, therefore I am interested in an account opening in Germany. I ask for your kind answer.VA:F [1.9.22_1171]
I followed the order of the article and unfortunately i didn't receive the IBAN number. But this message:
IBAN nicht freigeschaltet.
Handynummer bestätigen.VA:F [1.9.22_1171]
this seems to be quite interesting and also the opening of a business account should be possible, even if the company is registered abroad. On the application form, one can fill this nicely, but then it says that the company must be registered in Germany and one cannot continue.
Well, I am a German citizen, have my company abroad (Europe) and also need an account in Germany, but for the company, not privately. I can perform the PostIdent without problems in Germany, but how can I get a business account for my abroad registered company? Many thanks in advance.VA:F [1.9.22_1171]
Hi- am I correct in thinking that I would get charged 0.5 EURO for every transaction after the first of the month? I am looking to open an account as I am moving to Dusseldorf on 17th May 2017 and I want to set up internet and utility services to my apartment. Would I be charged a fee per direct debit payment of these bills?
ThanksVA:F [1.9.22_1171]
Hi Sophie,
according to their current price list, the first five INCOMING transfers in a month are free of charge – the 0,50 Euro start with the sixth transfer in a month.
Regarding the utility bills, you'd have to check the terms of the respective providers. Some might require direct debiting, but you can often simply pay the incoming bills by doing the transfers yourself.VA:F [1.9.22_1171]
Monthly account maintenance fee 9,90
setup fee 39,00
What is "setup fee"? Could I use this 39 Eur after payment? Or its for bank 🙂VA:F [1.9.22_1171]
I am interested in opening an account with guys but I live outside Germany. Can I still open, is that accepted?
Because I need an account that I can use to receive, also make bank transfer.VA:F [1.9.22_1171]
An account opening for an individual account with a residence within the European Union (e.g. Italy) is easily possible online. Currently, the legitimization in Germany has to be done six weeks after the account opening at the latest. This process is supposed to be possible via VideoIdent, starting December.VA:F [1.9.22_1171]
Hi. Is the VideoIdent process now available which will mean I don't have to come to GermanyVA:F [1.9.22_1171]
I am living in Brazil. I never visit Germany before. Can I open account. Private account.VA:F [1.9.22_1171]
That is a case-by-case decision of the provider. They do not advertise abroad for their account in Germany, and if all circumstances fit, the online account opening might work out. We don't have enough experience regarding the VideoIdent Identification yet, the system just having started last week. Currently we have to say: One can try it, but there is no guarantee for doing it from abroad. Accounts with residence within the European Union can be opened in any case.VA:F [1.9.22_1171]
To complete an account form for Comdirect I have to fill in an IBAN number, but I am from the US and my bank accounts don't use IBAN numbers. What should I fill?
DankeVA:F [1.9.22_1171]
If you want to make a transfer from the USA to Germany, we recommend the provider Transferwise. They debit at ACH from the US Checking, exchanges the money for a fair rate and transfers to the German bank account.VA:F [1.9.22_1171]


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If your company ships enough goods to qualify for full truckload (TL) shipping, you may think that your shipping situation can't be improved. After all, TL shipping offers the advantage of shipping goods directly to their destination without the hassle and expense of warehouse stops. Yet, because the cost of shipping also includes the cost of the logistics function, companies should also question whether their logistics source is working for or against their shipping process in terms of cost.
Traditionally, companies either hire an in house logistic expert or outsource their logistics needs to a third party logistics (3PL) provider, either of which can be too expensive for smaller companies, especially when they need a comprehensive approach to the TL (truckload) shipping process. Today, however, companies have the option of implementing affordable TL logistics software instead of hiring an expert or outsourcing to a 3PL provider.
TL logistics software is geared toward companies that need TL shipping arrangements (i.e. where a carrier transports full semi trailers of goods on a regular basis). After implementing the software, a company selects its TL shipping arrangements from among ranked TL solutions that are presented on a user-friendly interface. When a company implements logistics software, it essentially becomes its own logistics provider, which brings three basic advantages: a wider range of shipping options; the possibility of integrated shipping solutions; and the removal of the middleman (3PL) from the logistics function. After implementing logistics software, studies show that companies lower their shipping cost by 10 percent within the first year alone.
To understand how logistics software achieves its impact, it helps to understand how companies overpay for logistics when they an in house expert or contract with a 3PL provider. When a company hires an experienced logistics expert, it can expect to pay between $75,000 and $90,000 in annual salary. Also, the shipping arrangements devised by the expert, although well researched, rarely result from the consideration of all possible shipping arrangements-a task that logistics software can perform in a matter of minutes.
Similar to hiring an expert, hiring a 3PL provider brings unnecessary cost from the beginning. And unless the provider is customer developer, which manages a company's shipping process while developing new shipping solutions-the prospect of TL shipping being integrated with other shipping solutions (e.g. air and rail) is remote at best. Although 3PL has long been the logistics option for companies that don't have logistics departments, that TL logistics software performs the work of a 3PL, except with better results, makes it the superior choice.

subset: commoncrawl


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invitrogen Lipofectamine 2000 Reagent is a proprietary formulation that facilitates highly efficient delivery of Invitrogen Stealth RNA molecules, short interfering RNA (siRNA) or plasmid DNA to mammalian cells for RNAi analysis (1, 2). This reference provides General guidelines and a procedure to cotransfect plasmid DNA and an RNAi molecule (i.e. Stealth RNAi, siRNA, shRNA plasmid or miRNA plasmid) into mammalian cells using Lipofectamine® 2000 Reagent are described in this section.
Guidelines for Transfection
Follow these general guidelines when using Lipofectamine 2000 to cotransfect your plasmid DNA and the RNAi molecule of interest into mammalian cells.
- Use low-passage cells, and make sure that cells are healthy and greater than 90% viable before transfection.
- Transfect cells at 80-90% confluence.
- Do not add antibiotics to the medium during transfection as this reduces transfection efficiency and causes cell death.
- For optimal results, use Opti-MEM I Reduced Serum Medium to dilute Lipofectamine 2000, DNA, and dsRNA oligomers prior to complex formation.
- Stealth™ RNAi duplexes or siRNA are generally supplied as a 20 µM stock solution. If you are performing transfection in a format smaller than a 6-well dish (e.g. 24-well format), we recommend diluting the 20 µM stock solution 10- to 20-fold in DEPC-treated water to prepare a 1-2 µM stock solution, as appropriate. Use the 1-2 µM stock solution for transfection. Store the 2 µM stock solution at -20 ° C.
Example: To prepare a 2 µM stock solution, dilute 2 µl of the 20 µM siRNA or Stealth RNAi stock solution in 18 µl of DEPC-treated water.
* To increase accuracy and reduce assay variability, we recommend performing triplicate transfections for each sample condition.
You should have the following materials on hand before beginning:
- Mammalian cell line cultured in the appropriate growth medium
- Plasmid DNA (0.1-3.0 µg/µl in sterile water or TE Buffer, pH 8.0)
- Stealth RNAi or siRNA of interest (20 µM stock in 1X RNA Annealing/Dilution Buffer) or shRNA or miRNA expression plasmids of interest (0.1-3.0 µg/µl in sterile water or TE Buffer, pH 8.0)
- RNAi controls
- Lipofectamine 2000 Reagent (Catalog nos. 11668-027 or 11668-019; store at +4°C and mix gently before use))
- Opti-MEM I Reduced Serum Medium (pre-warmed; Catalog nos. 31985-062 or 31985-070))
- Appropriate tissue culture plates and supplies
Transfection Protocol
Use this procedure to cotransfect your plasmid DNA and the RNAi molecule into mammalian cells using Lipofectamine 2000. Refer to the table in Suggested Reagent Amounts and Volumes for the appropriate reagent amounts and volumes to add for different tissue culture formats. Remember to include the proper positive and negative controls in your experiment.
- One day before transfection, plate cells in the appropriate amount of growth medium without antibiotics such that they will be 80-90% confluent at the time of transfection.
- For each transfection sample, prepare DNA-RNAi molecule-Lipofectamine 2000 complexes as follows:
- Dilute the DNA and RNAi molecule in the appropriate amount of Opti-MEM I Medium without serum. Mix gently.
- Mix Lipofectamine 2000 gently before use, then dilute the appropriate amount in Opti-MEM I Medium without serum. Mix gently and incubate for 5 minutes at room temperature.
- After the 5 minute incubation, combine the diluted DNA and RNAi molecule with the diluted Lipofectamine 2000. Mix gently and incubate for 20 minutes at room temperature to allow complex formation to occur. The solution may appear cloudy, but this will not impede the transfection.
- Add the DNA-RNAi molecule-Lipofectamine 2000 complexes to each well containing cells and medium. Mix gently by rocking the plate back and forth.
- Incubate the cells at 37°C in a CO2 incubator until you are ready to harvest cells and assay for your target gene. Removal of complexes or media change is not required; however, growth medium may be replaced after 4-6 hours without loss of transfection activity.
Tip: We recommend harvesting cells 24-48 hours after transfection.
The table below lists the range of recommended reagent amounts and volumes to use to transfect cells in various tissue culture formats. As a starting point, use an amount of plasmid DNA (see column 4), dsRNA or RNAi vector DNA (see column 5), and Lipofectamine 2000 (see column 7) that falls around the mid-point of the recommended range, then optimize conditions for your cell line by varying reagent amounts within the recommended range. If you wish to perform transfection in 96-well format, see the additional guidelines in Guidelines for Transfection in 96-Well Format, next page.
Example: We typically useInvitrogen products such as 150 ng of plasmid DNA, 5 pmol of Stealth RNAi, and 1 µl of Lipofectamine 2000 to transfect GripTite 293 MSR cells in 24-well format.
Tip: 20 µM dsRNA (i.e. siRNA or Stealth RNAi) = 20 pmol/µl.
|Culture Vessel
|Relative Surface Area (vs. 24-well)
|Volume of Plating Medium
|Plasmid DNA (ng)
|dsRNA (pmol)/ RNAi vector (ng)1
|(ng)1 DNA/RNA Dilution Volume (µl)2
|Lipid (µl) and Dilution Volume (µl)
|100 µl
|10-100 ng
|0.1-1 pmol/150-300 ng
|25 µl
|0.2-0.5 µl in 25 µl
|200 µl
|50-100 ng
|0.5-5 pmol/150-300 ng
|25 µl
|0.3-0.8 µl in 25 µl
|500 µl
|100-200 ng
|1-10 pmol/300-600 ng
|50 µl
|0.5-1.5 µl in 50 µl
|2 ml
|500-1000 ng
|5-50 pmol/1.5-3 µg
|250 µl
|2.5-6 µl in 250 µl
1dsRNA = siRNA or Stealth RNAi; RNAi vector = shRNA-containing plasmid or miRNA-containing plasmid
2Dilute the plasmid DNA and the dsRNA or shRNA DNA into this volume of Gibco Opti-MEM I.
Potent RNAi Molecules
Note that for highly potent RNAi molecules (i.e. RNAi molecules inducing > 90% target knockdown), the amount of dsRNA or RNAi vector required to obtain effective knockdown may be less than the amounts specified in the table (Suggested Reagent Amounts and Volumes, above (see column 5). This needs to be determined empirically for each cell line.
You may perform the screening experiment in 96-well format, if desired. Note that in this format, the results obtained from the screening experiment are much more sensitive to well-to-well variability caused by differences in cell density, transfection efficiency, and reagent amounts used. If you are transfecting cells in 96-well format, significant optimization of transfection conditions may be required. Follow the guidelines below to cotransfect mammalian cells in 96-well format:
- To address potential problems caused by well-to-well variability, we recommend performing more replicates for each sample condition; we generally transfect each sample into 6-7 individual wells.
- When plating cells, make sure that cells are evenly distributed over the surface of each well. As with the other tissue culture formats, transfect cells at 80-90% confluence.
- Use the range of recommended reagent amounts and volumes listed in the table above and optimize accordingly.
- We recommend harvesting cells and assaying for your target gene 24 hours after transfection.
1. Gitlin, L., Karelsky, S., and Andino, R. (2002) Nature 418, 430-434.
2. Yu, J.Y., DeRuiter, S.L., and Turner, D.L. (2002) Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 99, 6047-6052.


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Excel Academy Enrollment Page
We are thrilled to be working with students from Excel Academy. Thanks for using this page to enroll your students in WriteAtHome courses. We hope it makes the process quick and painless for you.
Enrollments should be completed only by administrators or authorized personnel from Excel. If you are a parent or a student, please contact the school for assistance.
If you have any questions or concerns, please contact us via our Contact Page!


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This family was strongly associated with the Clan Ross. It was originally known as the Clan Siol Andrea, meaning the race of Andrew. However, from about the year 1100 the Andrews moved south to the Dumfriesshire area of southwest Scotland. Duncan Andrew, Chief of the Clan, rendered homage to King Edward I of England in 1296. [1]CITATION[CLOSE]
Black, George F., The Surnames of Scotland Their Origin, Meaning and History. New York: New York Public Library, 1946. Print. (ISBN 0-87104-172-3)
Some of the family were found further south in England, specifically at Shotley in Northumberland where "Shotley Hall is said to have been built by Dr. Andrews, physician to the first royal Duke of Cumberland." [2]CITATION[CLOSE]
Lewis, Samuel, A Topographical Dictionary of England. Institute of Historical Research, 1848, Print.
Sir Edmund Andros (1637-1714) was born in London and rose to become an English colonial administrator in North America. The 1689 Boston revolt was directly attributed to his actions in New England.
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All images used in demo site did not included in the final product file that you buy. Images in live demo used for demo purpose only.


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A few months ago, Van Jones, the founder and president of a group called Green for All, went to visit New Bedford, Massachusetts. His first stop of the day was the public library, where someone had assembled an audience of about thirty high-school dropouts. They leaned back in their chairs, hands in the pockets of their oversized sweatshirts. A few appeared to be stoned.
Jones, who is forty, is tall and imposing, with a shaved head and a patchy goatee. He wears rimless glasses and favors dark clothing. On this particular day, he was wearing a black turtleneck, black jeans, black boots, and a charcoal jacket. He was introduced by a community organizer and aspiring rapper, who described him as "a leader with answers," a "genius from the hood, similar to our own," and a youthful version of Barack Obama. When it was his turn to speak, Jones rejected the lectern that had been set up for him, saying that it reminded him too much of college.
"I love Barack Obama," he said. "I'd pay money just to shine the brother's shoes. But I'll tell you this. Do you hear me? One man is not going to save us. I don't care who that man is. He's not going to save us. And, in fact, if you want to be real about this—can y'all take it? I'm going to be real with y'all. Not only is Barack Obama not going to be able to save you—you are going to have to save Barack Obama."
Jones went on to discuss the crisis on Wall Street, the federal budget deficit—"We're going broke by the second"—and how annoying it can be to listen to people who use a lot of fancy words. "People who know a lot talk weird," he said. "So you can spend a lot of time listening to people who are educated, and all you get is frustrated, because what they're saying doesn't actually land with you. Well, boohoo. Get over it."
A hundred and fifty years ago, New Bedford was the whaling capital of the world. "Nowhere in all America will you find more patrician-like houses; parks and gardens more opulent, than in New Bedford," Melville wrote. Today, the town is filled with empty factories. Its long list of problems—failing schools, high unemployment, gang violence—make it just the sort of place Jones likes to work in. The logo of Green for All, which is based in Oakland, California, is a sun rising over a crowded cityscape. The group's goal is to broaden the appeal of the environmental movement and, at the same time, bring jobs to poor neighborhoods. Jones often says that he is trying to "green the ghetto."
In the library, a few of the kids had started to lean forward in their seats. Others had taken their hands out of their pockets. Some were still staring, dazedly, into the middle distance. Jones brought his talk around to the subject of energy.
"I don't want to offend anybody. I might be too radical for you. Are you with me?" he asked.
"Just being real," a young woman called out.
"They can now put up wind turbines—almost like a windmill, but this is not your mama's windmill, it's like a big jet engine sitting up there—and make power," Jones said. "Somebody's going to make a billion dollars deploying that technology. I think it should be you.
"They have this thing called solar panels," he continued. "A solar panel is a piece of glass almost. Right now wealthy people can put that on their homes. And it costs money to put it up there, but once it's up the sunlight hits it and it turns it into electricity and powers the house. So you're paying electricity bills, but somebody else is kicking it. Somebody's going to make a million dollars figuring out a way to get those solar panels made and deployed in our hoods. I think it should be you."
After he was through, Jones made his way out into the nearly empty downtown. "That was my street rap," he told me. "You get to hear my élite rap later on."
The modern environmental movement is sometimes said to have begun in the eighteen-nineties, when John Muir founded the Sierra Club, and sometimes in the nineteen-sixties, when Rachel Carson published "Silent Spring." Muir and Carson saw themselves fighting narrow, private interests on behalf of the public in the broadest possible sense—all people, including those who had not been born. But stop by a meeting of any of the major environmental groups, and you will see that the broad American public has yet to join up. Chances are that most of the attendees will be white, and the few who aren't will be affluent and middle-aged. A 2006 study commissioned by Earthjustice, a nonprofit environmental-law group, found that the "ecological base"—defined as Americans who report the environment as being central to their concerns—is "nearly ninety percent white, mostly college-educated, higher-income, and over thirty-five."
"Your goal has to be to get the greenest solutions to the poorest people," Jones told me. "That's the only goal that's morally compelling enough to generate enough energy to pull this transition off. The challenge is making this an everybody movement, so your main icons are Joe Six-Pack—Joe the Plumber—becoming Joe the Solar Guy, or that kid on the street corner putting down his handgun, picking up a caulk gun."
After leaving the New Bedford public library, Jones went to talk to Scott Lang, the city's mayor. Lang began the meeting by tossing a few sheets of what looked like plastic on the table. These turned out to be thin-film photovoltaic cells, of the sort that could be sewn into a backpack and used to power a laptop. The Mayor explained that the company that manufactures the cells had recently decided to open a factory in New Bedford, and that the factory could eventually provide a hundred jobs. Jones brightened.
"This could really be something that brings people together, across the lines of class and color," Jones said. He suggested that Lang set up some sort of program to take teen-agers like the ones he had just met and guide them into some of the jobs at the factory. (Many of the teens were working toward high-school-equivalency degrees as part of a program in which they were also supposed to be learning carpentry skills.) Lang, a former prosecutor, said, "Anything we try and do in the city right now is geared toward everyone being involved." But he didn't seem terribly keen on Jones's idea of a program exclusively for teens. Jones pressed him. The teen-agers, he said, "feel not seen. I think they need special encouragement. I would love to see a mayor's initiative to get those young people into this green economy." The Mayor tried to steer the discussion in a new direction. Jones pressed him again.
"I'm willing to meet people halfway or more," Lang finally said. That evening, at another event, Jones ran into the young man who had introduced him at the meeting in the library. Jones told him that the Mayor was interested in working with him. When I mentioned to Jones that this was not my impression of what the Mayor had indicated, he said, "I'm not looking for the points of difference. I'm looking for the points of commonality. I've trained my mind so that people can say twenty-seven things that might be objectionable, but as soon as they say one, that twenty-eighth thing, that's in the right direction, that's where I'm going to go in the conversation. I think that's really important in a country as diverse as ours, to listen. So this guy, he says, I don't want this, I don't want that. But he says, I want everybody to be included. Well, that's all I need. Dayenu."
Van Jones, born Anthony Jones, grew up in Jackson, Tennessee, a small town about ninety miles east of Memphis. His father was a junior-high-school principal and his mother was a high-school teacher. His grandfather was the leader of the Christian Methodist—formerly Colored Methodist—Episcopal Church. As a child, Jones was, by his own description, "bookish and bizarre." When his parents gave him Luke Skywalker and Han Solo action figures, instead of arranging them to fight he would have them run for imaginary public offices. His twin sister, Angela, remembers him as "the stereotypical geek—he just kind of lived up in his head a lot." During the summers, Jones accompanied his grandfather to religious conferences, where he recalls sitting "in these hot, sweaty black churches," listening to the adults talk, all day and into the night.
After high school, Jones enrolled at the University of Tennessee at Martin. The first day of his freshman year, he decided that he needed a new identity, or, at least, a new name. Anthony Jones was dull. He chose Van because, he told me, "it has a little touch of nobility, but at the same time it's not overboard." Jones majored in communications and political science and, thinking that he wanted to become a journalist, interned for a couple of newspapers. The experience convinced him that he was on the wrong career path. In 1990, he enrolled at Yale Law School.
While he was living in New Haven, Jones saw a lot of things that disturbed him. One was the video of the Rodney King beating, which took place during his second semester. Another was crime. "I was seeing kids at Yale do drugs and talk about it openly, and have nothing happen to them or, if anything, get sent to rehab," he said. "And then I was seeing kids three blocks away, in the housing projects, doing the same drugs, in smaller amounts, go to prison." Upon graduating, Jones moved to San Francisco and set up the Bay Area PoliceWatch, a hot line for complaints of police misconduct. It was soon receiving fifteen calls a day.
In 1996, Willie Brown became San Francisco's first African-American mayor. Most of the city's black leaders had spent years working with Brown, and wanted to support him. Jones, as he put it, "didn't know Willie Brown from a can of paint, and didn't care." Sensing an opening for someone "young and entrepreneurial," he founded a civil-rights organization, which he named for Ella Baker, who helped form the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.
In its early years, the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights consisted of a closet-like office and a computer that Jones had brought from his apartment. John Anner, who later became the chairman of the center's board of directors, recalls going to visit the operation one day and discovering that "it was really just Van." The first case the center took up was that of a young black man named Aaron Williams, who had died in police custody. (Williams, a burglary suspect, had been kicked and beaten by a group of cops.) One of the officers involved in the incident had a history of complaints against him. Jones led the fight—eventually successful—to get the officer fired.
Looking back at that time, Jones describes his modus operandi as "traditional activism, the politics of confrontation and outrage. I was proud to be hated by the city fathers on both sides of the Bay." He was constantly seeking an opportunity to hold a news conference or stage a protest, and, more often than not, managed to find one. California has a sprawling—and, by many accounts, inhumane—juvenile-incarceration system; Jones argued that the state should be putting more money into schools and community programs, and less into prisons. His arguments were compelling enough that by 2000 the center was able to hire five more full-time employees.
That year, Jones learned about a plan to construct a five-hundred-and-forty-bed juvenile-detention center some twenty miles east of Oakland, in Dublin. The new center was being billed as a way to improve conditions for youthful offenders; Jones thought that it would simply result in that many more (mostly black) teen-agers being locked up. The official name for the project was the Alameda County Juvenile Justice Center. Jones concluded that the way to block the project was to give it a new name. He began to call it a "superjail for kids." The campaign to "Stop the Superjail" soon took off. A meeting of the California Board of Corrections was derailed by several dozen teen-agers who performed raps opposing the project. Another meeting, of the Alameda County Board of Supervisors, was disrupted when a group of teens sat down in front of the dais and refused to leave. ("If I hear those kids one more time chanting 'Books not bars,' I'm going to scream," one member of the board complained.)
Gavin Newsom was elected mayor of San Francisco in 2003. He remembers meeting with Jones and other community leaders shortly after he took office, to discuss recent incidents of police brutality. Jones left the meeting early, but before doing so he told Newsom off. "I will never forget being infuriated by him—totally outraged—and completely mesmerized," Newsom recalled. "It was quite a performance. Arguably, that's his genius. He's successful at getting into the minds or under the skin—depending on how you want to analyze it—of politicians. And the only way you can do that is there's got to be some truth in the critique."
Around this time, as Jones was winning the "superjail" fight, he began to suffer a crisis of confidence. The crisis was not just professional; some days, he felt barely able to get out of bed. "Nobody does this stuff for pure reasons," he told me. "You may eventually wind up with a more pure outcome, like a Gandhi or a Mandela, but no young radical is running around with pure motives. I certainly wasn't motivated only by love for the people. I was trying to find some kind of community, or some kind of sense of belonging, or some sense of redemption through heroic deeds. I wasn't being honest with myself about it, and it all just proved to be incredibly fragile."
One day, in this bleak mood, Jones learned about an appearance by Julia Butterfly Hill. Hill had spent two years trying to protect a giant redwood tree by living in its branches, and she was going to speak at a San Francisco bookstore. By this point, Jones had been living in the city for almost a decade, but he realized that, except for the places where he had held protests, he didn't know where anything was. He left himself an hour and a half for the trip to the bookstore, which turned out to be a few blocks from his office.
Listening to Hill that evening, Jones found his gloom lifting. "She was just radiant," he recalled. "She talked about seeing all these trees cut down. She talked about the helicopters they put up, trying to blow her out of the tree. She talked about the timber workers whom she befriended from her perch. And how she won. And what was remarkable was there was not a trace of bitterness in her for these people who had destroyed this forest, and whom she had to spend two years of her life—not two weeks, not two days—putting her body on the line to fight.
"It's great to win these things," he went on. "But there was no guarantee she was going to win, day after day. I was always looking for clever things I could game out, and she just stepped out on faith, and did it. And I was, like, This is a remarkable person. I made a commitment in my own mind that I wanted to do my work like she had done her work. Before that, I was, like, Dr. King? Wimp! But I thought, She's right. That's the only thing that's going to work. And I also knew I had no clue how to get there. I didn't have the internal capacity. So she became this possibility out there."
Jones and Hill eventually became friends. "We fit together like pieces of a puzzle," said Hill, who, after saving the tree, founded a nonprofit group called Circle of Life. "I brought the piece that we are not separate from this planet. His piece was we need to uplift everyone. We were committed to seeing how those pieces fit together." First, the two spoke together in private; then they began to appear together publicly. Sometimes, when Hill was invited to lecture at a college campus, she would ask Jones to come along.
"We could see underneath all of it was the idea of disposability," Jones told me. "The idea that you've got disposable people, a disposable planet. We would just kind of go around and talk about this. People would listen and they would come to one conclusion: they must be sleeping together. We weren't, but it was the only thing anybody got out of it. It was very frustrating."
A few months ago, Jones published a book titled "The Green Collar Economy: How One Solution Can Fix Our Two Biggest Problems." In it, he argues that the best way to fight both global warming and urban poverty is by creating millions of "green jobs"—weatherizing buildings, installing solar panels, and constructing mass-transit systems. A percentage of these jobs—Jones is purposefully vague about how many—should go to the disadvantaged and the chronically unemployed. "The green economy should not be just about reclaiming thrown-away stuff," he writes. "It should be about reclaiming thrown-away communities." Jones's book was slated to appear in 2009, but during the Presidential campaign, when several of the candidates began talking about "green jobs," he decided to advance the publication. The jacket of "The Green Collar Economy" features endorsements from, among others, the talk-show host Tavis Smiley; House Speaker Nancy Pelosi; the journalist Thomas L. Friedman; and former Vice-President Al Gore.
"I love Van Jones," Gore told me. "I love his work. I love his heart and his commitment and his intellect. I love his mission. He has wisely picked a part of this set of interwoven challenges that should have been addressed much more forcefully by me and others long ago."
"Van is a visionary," Smiley said. "My grandmother had an old saying, 'It's just too much like right.' What Van is saying is just too much like right. It just makes too much sense for us not to do it."
"I think Van Jones is a big part of the future of environmentalism," Gus Speth, the dean of Yale's School of Forestry and Environmental Studies and a co-founder of the Natural Resources Defense Council, told me. "He, more than anyone else, is bringing together a concern about the environment and a concern about social justice. And, if I had just one thing to say, it is that we in the environmental movement cannot fail Van Jones."
Jones lives in Oakland with his wife, Jana Carter, an employment lawyer, and their two young sons. About half the time, though, he is on the road, trying to build support for his organization and, more recently, his book. A couple of weeks after the trip to New Bedford, he took the red-eye to Washington, D.C., to speak at the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank founded by John Podesta, who heads Obama's transition team. More than a hundred and fifty people—mostly white and middle-aged—had showed up to hear him; the room wasn't big enough, so many had to stand in the hall.
Jones began by talking about the financial crisis. "The floor has been torn out from under the American people," he said. "That's the bad news. People are losing their jobs, their homes, their pensions, their 401(k)s. But I know from my personal life sometimes something really bad has to happen before something really good can happen. It's when you get dumped or fired or fail that test that you have to look at yourself and figure out, What am I going to do now? And we're at that moment. Sometimes a breakdown can lead to a breakthrough."
When Jones gives a talk, something he does at least two or three times a week, he likes to begin by checking out the crowd; if he can, he will sit in the audience beforehand, absorbing the mood. He spends a lot of time listening to speeches—the way most people download Coltrane or Mozart, he's got Churchill and Martin Luther King on his iPod.
"Ronald Reagan I admire greatly," he once told me. "You look at what he gets away with in a speech—unbelievable. He's able to take fairly complex prose and convey it in such a natural and conversational way that the beauty of the language and the power of the language are there, but you stay comfortable. That's very hard to do."
At the Center for American Progress, Jones offered several proposals for creating green jobs. Most were the sort that have been circulated recently in position papers by liberal groups like CAP (where Jones is a senior fellow) and the Apollo Alliance, a coalition of labor and environmental organizations (where he is a founding board member). One proposal involved a federal revolving-loan program to make buildings more energy efficient.
"You have construction workers who are idle, and they're going to be idle for twelve months, twenty-four months, thirty-six months," he said. "They're not going to be able to build anything. Let them rebuild everything. We have people coming home from wars, coming home from prisons, coming out of high school with no job prospects whatsoever. Let us connect the people who most need work with the work that most needs to be done."
Another proposal involved upgrading the nation's electrical grid, to allow power generated, for example, by wind turbines in the Midwest to be transmitted to population centers in the Northeast.
"You say, We can't do it," he observed. "And I'm going to say, Au contraire, mon frère, and I'll prove my case. We used to have a country, allegedly, but you couldn't drive across it, because all we had was a bunch of old dirt roads. Somebody, in the name of national security, said, 'Hold on a sec. What if we get invaded on the West Coast, how can we get troops from the East Coast?' So we created an interstate-highway system that connected the country to itself."
He lowered his voice to a grumble: " 'Oh, we can't afford to do it! This is insane!' We couldn't afford not to do it. Because the minute you did that the economy went through the roof. It was such a good idea that we did it again. In the name of national security, people in the Pentagon said, 'If we have one big communications tower, and somebody knocks it out, then we're blind, deaf, and dumb. We've got to figure out a way to distribute our information system.' So they came up with the idea of the information superhighway—for you young people, that's what we call the Internet. 'We can't afford to do this!' We couldn't afford not to do it. The minute we connected the country to itself, the economy went through the roof. All we're saying is, let's do it again. But this time, instead of connecting the country to itself to move bodies and vehicles or data around, let's connect the country to itself so we can move clean-energy electrons around. Then you've got the strongest economy in the world."
About five years ago, Jones, thinking about the notion of "disposability," proposed that the Ella Baker Center broaden its agenda. His new idea was for a program that he named "Green Jobs, Not Jail." Just about everybody else associated with the center opposed the scheme.
"My concern was that it was something that was just wonderful in a speech, but was it anything we could deliver on?" John Anner, who was then the chairman of the center's board and now heads a foundation that provides aid in Vietnam, told me. "I knew that there was not a soul at the Ella Baker Center that I would trust to build a birdhouse. They were advocates, not implementers. My job was to guard against mission drift: 'Oh, we're a civil-rights organization.' 'Oh, we're an environmental organization.' Well, what's next? Are we going to also explore outer space?"
Jones refused to be dissuaded. He began contacting environmental groups. Most were so eager to shed their all-white image that, knowing next to nothing about him, they invited him to speak to their members and put him on the programs of their conferences. He also began applying for grant money, which he planned to use to bring green jobs to Oakland. In 2004, he persuaded a New York-based philanthropy called the Nathan Cummings Foundation to give him two hundred and fifteen thousand dollars.
"We called all these community meetings, did these retreats, and at the end of the day we had some great photographs, a couple of pamphlets, and not one job," he recalled. "It was a complete and utter failure." Jones went back to the foundation and asked for another two hundred and fifteen thousand dollars, which he got.
"Then we wasted it all again," he said. "Because we still didn't know what we were doing." Gradually, Jones came to see that businesses weren't going to locate in Oakland because some well-meaning nonprofit asked them to. Instead of doing freelance economic-development work, he began to think that he should focus his efforts on public policy.
In February, 2007, Nancy Pelosi, who had recently become Speaker of the House, scheduled a meeting in San Francisco to discuss measures to combat climate change. Jones was one of forty or so people who were invited to attend. A few days before the session, he received an e-mail about the agenda. Everyone, it said, would be given a chance to briefly introduce himself. "It was like capital-letters 'briefly,' bold, italics, underlined—'briefly' introduce yourself," he recalled.
At the meeting, Jones was seated near Pelosi, and he was the first person asked to speak. "My introduction was 'My name is Van Jones. I'm from the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights. We work to get kids out of jail and into jobs,' " he said. "I figured, that's pretty good. It would be very hard to get more brief than that. Then the next person says, 'Madame Speaker,' and I think, I kind of left that part out. That's not so good. He got me. That's probably better. And then he just starts talking and talking. The guy talks for two or three minutes. I'm looking around like, this guy can't read or something. And then the next person talks for five minutes and each person is talking longer and longer, and by the time we get back around the meeting's over." Jones could see that Pelosi had a sheet of paper in front of her with all the attendees' names listed on it. Next to every name except one, she had taken copious notes. Next to his name, the sheet was blank.
"I knew I had to do something to get the room back," Jones told me. Pelosi said that they had to leave for a press conference. Were there any last questions? Jones raised his hand. "I said, 'My question is: Will you say four words at the press conference?' And she just kind of looked at me. So of course at this point everybody in the room started to lean away from me.
"I said, 'If you say these four words, I guarantee you that you'll keep the Democratic majority in the House for the next twenty years. If you say these four words, you'll expand the coalition around global warming in a way that nobody even thinks is possible. If you say these four words, you'll give help and hope to people who haven't had any for a long time.' Finally, she said, 'Well, what are the four words?' I said, 'Clean Energy Jobs Bill.' "
A little while later, at the press conference, Pelosi called Jones up to the microphone. "We'll say it together," she said. "Clean Energy Jobs Bill!"
From that point, the Clean Energy Jobs Bill progressed much along the lines of, as Jones put it to me, "an after-school special." Jones had had only a vague idea what the four words meant; Pelosi's interest inspired a rush to get legislation drafted. In June, 2007, a measure authorizing the U.S. Department of Labor to spend a hundred and twenty-five million dollars to train workers for green jobs was introduced in the House. The bill, now called the Green Jobs Act, provided targeted funds for low-income trainees. A few months later, the bill was incorporated into a much larger piece of legislation, the Energy Independence and Security Act, and was approved by Congress and signed into law by President Bush in December, 2007. Around this time, Jones left the Ella Baker Center to found Green for All. The organization now has a staff of twenty-five and an annual budget of four million dollars.
Since Pelosi's meeting, the notion of green jobs has become a commonplace. Not only did it keep coming up in last year's campaign but it has been embraced by a growing number of unions (in December, the Service Employees International Union announced that it was joining a coalition of labor and environmental groups called the Blue Green Alliance), by the heads of many major corporations, and by an ever-expanding list of politicians. Obama has said that as President he wants to generate five million such jobs, and his stimulus package is expected to contain billions of dollars for this purpose.
Still, the mechanics of creating green jobs—or even what jobs should qualify for the title—have yet to be worked out. At the same time that the President-elect has said that he wants to promote "green" economic growth, much—perhaps most—of the stimulus package is likely to be devoted to projects, like highway expansion, that will have precisely the opposite effect. In the days that I followed Jones around, I heard several people who ran training programs in green professions complain that once their students had graduated they couldn't find work. (Jones's response was that they ought to lobby for more federal support.) And though Congress approved the Green Jobs Act, no money for job training has been appropriated.
Meanwhile, the basic premise of Jones's appeal—that combatting global warming is a good way to lift people out of poverty—is very much open to debate. Economists generally agree that the key to addressing climate change is to raise the cost of burning fossil fuels, either directly, through a carbon tax, or indirectly, through a cap-and-trade program. Low-income families are the ones that would be hardest hit by such a cost increase. They could be compensated through some kind of rebate, or a cut in other taxes; it's been proposed, for example, that revenues from a carbon tax could be used to reduce the payroll tax. But it's not at all clear that the number of jobs created by, say, an expanding solar industry would be greater than the number lost through, say, a shrinking coal-mining industry. Nor is it clear that a green economy would be any better at providing work for the chronically unemployed than our present, "gray" economy has been.
When I presented Jones's arguments to Robert Stavins, a professor of business and government at Harvard who studies the economics of environmental regulation, he offered the following analogy: "Let's say I want to have a dinner party. It's important that I cook dinner, and I'd also like to take a shower before the guests arrive. You might think, Well, it would be really efficient for me to cook dinner in the shower. But it turns out that if I try that I'm not going to get very clean and it's not going to be a very good dinner. And that is an illustration of the fact that it is not always best to try to address two challenges with what in the policy world we call a single-policy instrument."
Matthew Kahn, an economics professor at U.C.L.A.'s Institute of the Environment, noted that public-works programs have a history of inefficiency. Why would an environmentally oriented public-works program be any different? "How do we make sure this isn't just a giant green boondoggle?" he asked.
Jones's response to such critiques is, in effect, to do them one better. Yes, it may be difficult to address climate change and poverty at the same time, he says, but it's even harder to do so separately. "You've got to have a holistic, integrated set of solutions or you're going to wind up with half your energy being used up to fight 'Drill, baby, drill!' " he told me. "People say, 'Oh, we'll take a shortcut.' Well, those shortcuts are a lot longer than they look."
"I know as much as anybody what a long walk this is," he said at another point. "We have a long way to go. You can pass all the bills you want to; you can appropriate all the bills you want to. You can even start retrofitting buildings. But if I go there and the people who are doing the retrofits are just the people who used to have jobs anyway, and they're mostly all one color and mostly all one kind of people, then I'm not going to be satisfied. So I'm going to be the last person in America who's happy. Everybody's going to win before I do."
The day after Jones appeared at the Center for American Progress, he flew to Boston for a conference known as Greenbuild. On the way, he stopped at Boston's city hall for a meeting with Mayor Thomas Menino, and then at a job-training agency that was offering a fourteen-week course in hazardous-waste remediation. Several students in the course had copies of Jones's book open in front of them; one, I noticed, had highlighted practically every passage in bright yellow. The student, Luis Santos, told me that he had done time, and was looking for a career that would allow him to make a positive contribution. "This man is great," he said of Jones.
"Van is the Martin Luther King of the green-jobs movement," the agency's executive director, Gary Kaplan, said. "You need a leader who convinces people we've just got to do this, because there are always going to be a lot of obstacles."
By the time Jones got to Greenbuild, at the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center, it was lunchtime. Crowds of people were milling around the cavernous exhibition hall, eating sandwiches and peering at displays of water-saving toilets, recyclable carpets, soybean-based insulation, low-energy lighting, and counters made of reused concrete. Greenbuild, which is held every year in a different city, is part trade show, part educational seminar; the program included sessions on straw-bale design, building-integrated wind turbines, and "high-performance renovations." Jones was ushered into a meeting room where nearly a thousand people—architects, engineers, construction managers, city planners—had gathered to hear him.
Jones started out by speaking about the election—"It's not that we have a President who's black; it's that for the first time we have a President who's green"—and soon moved on to the idea of a revolving-loan fund to retrofit buildings.
"It may be very hard for many of you to build all the things you want to," he said. "We may not be able to build anything, but we can rebuild everything. And you have knowledge. You have the wisdom to take the biggest bite out of carbon and to fuel the job creation that we need."
He went on, "If we come together and get this done, we will have achieved something quite extraordinary. We will have achieved something greater than Barack Obama has. What gave him the audacity of hope? You did. Even when the government wasn't interested in green buildings, even when your local city council didn't know what you were talking about, you had the audacity to keep pushing anyway, to keep raising standards anyway, to keep trying to make a difference anyway. He saw that audacity in you."
After the speech, the audience rose to its feet, clapping. As Jones left the hall, dozens of people trailed after him, all wanting to talk. ♦


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The 2012 Second Annual Country Coach Friendship Rally drew 170 highline motorcoach owners to the Junction City, Ore., community for the July 24-28 event. According to a press release, the rally was presented by Country Coach Friends Inc. (CCFI), an international chapter of Family Motor Coach Association (FMCA).
During the rally, the group donated $9,600 dollars to Junction City Local Aid and God's Storehouse in Harrisburg. Money was raised through raffle ticket sales and a live auction. Last year, the rally attendees donated over $8,000 two these organizations which provide emergency assistance to families in need. The presentation of the $9,600 in total monies raised to the two food banks will take place later this week at the Junction City Local Aid.
Many of the 170 motorcoachers have extended their stay in the Junction City community, enjoying the south Willamette Valley. The annual CCFI Club Rally event returns to Oregon each year for the Friendship Rally, which is in close proximity to the former manufacturing headquarters for Country Coach Inc.
Due to the growth rate of the club, other venues in Eugene and Albany area are being explored for 2013's rally site.


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Chicago Restaurant Promotion Gives Twinkies Away to Customers
(CHICAGO) -- Thousands of Hostess fans showed up at two restaurants in south suburban Chicago on Wednesday for Twinkies.
The restaurants were handing out the sweet treats to customers with every purchase, reports ChicagoTribune.com.
The Baby's Cheesesteak & Lemonade restaurants in Orland Park and Country Club Hills had approximately 12,000 Hostess Twinkies and Cup Cakes to give away.
How did Baby's get all of those golden cakes? Well, Baby's owner Hani Sughayer went to a Hostess and Wonder Bread bakery outlet the week after Thanksgiving to get some Twinkies for himself. However, when Andres DeLeon, Baby's social media director, joined him at the outlet, the pair decided to buy out the store's entire Twinkie supply to generate some media buzz about their restaurant.
The men left with about 10,000 Twinkies and 2,200 Hostess Cupcakes.
Copyright 2012 ABC News Radio


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As the seat of the government and official residence of the Royal family, as well as home to the International Court of Justice, The Hague, capital of the Haaglanden region on the West Coast, has often been referred to as the "legal capital of the world" and thus presents legal, judicial, and political career opportunities. Other industries for expats include the oil and gas industry, aerospace, media, software design, science, research, and telecommunications. Obtaining a work permit can be complicated for those from outside of the EU, so check our guide on working in The Hague for more details. Cuisine in The Hague takes advantage of the city's multicultural nature, with international food sold at the Haagse Markt and Chinese dishes available in nearby Chinatown. Traditional Dutch Cuisine is typically made up of vegetables, meat and fish. Cheese and bread are breakfast staples and Snert, a thick pea soup, provides a comforting defense against chilly winters. The Hague is also known as the number one Dutch festival city; take advantage by attending the spectacular International Fireworks Festival and enjoy dancing to Jazz on the Canal festival. Shopping Night sees fashion shows and large discounts throughout the city until midnight, and for local color go along to Vlaggetjesdag, a festival celebrating the arrival of the first herring to the city.
InterNations is the largest global network for expatriates, with communities in 420 cities across the globe. Get to know fellow internationals in your city, before you're moving, or when traveling somewhere and never feel like a stranger. InterNations makes it easy for you to stay in touch with your expat friends, both online and offline, so you can grow your network of friends and contacts from all over the world. Whether they live in Shanghai or Khobar (Eastern Prov.), InterNations allows you to be close to them even if they are miles away.
Finding new friends when relocating can be both tricky and intimidating, but InterNations helps with a variety of events and groups for expats in The Hague. Our members like to meet up to enjoy music, dance, jogging, the outdoors, snooker, and nightlife, to name just a few activities, so you are bound to find like-minded friends. Our community has been established to solve as many problems as possible, so you can confidently move forward to becoming another happy expat in The Hague.


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News, blog posts, etc
European Commission, 'EU Cybersecurity plan to protect open internet and online freedom and opportunity' (press release, 7 February 2013). Marking the release of a new strategy and proposed Directive (download both of them here) on this topic. The interesting bit about this is how it's framed – legally speaking it's an internal market measure (not crime!); strategically, it follows up on the many comments about 'trust' in the Digital Agenda documents of the last couple of years. While most of the operative provisions of the Directive are about national authorities for infrastructure and cooperation between them, there is an interesting (proposed) obligation for member states to regulate 'market operators' in terms of security and also notification of breaches. (Incidentally, is this category of 'market operator' a new one? It has two sub-categories – information society services 'which enable the provision of other' ISSes (examples in an Annex are cloud computing platforms, app stores, search engines, social networks), and operators of certain types of critical infrastructure. Art 14 doesn't apply, in essence, to telephone/mobile/broadband providers, because the electronic communications directives already occupy the field. (It also doesn't apply to certain players in the much-maligned electronic signatures field – although I read that exclusion as being broader than those entities contemplated in the 1999 Directive). (The 'open internet' etc language of the strategy and press release is slightly overstated, I think).
John Brodkin, 'Wi-Fi "as free as air"—the totally false story that refuses to die' (Ars Technica 8 February 2013). This is most curious. The (interesting and potentially significant) work of the FCC on what to do with UHF 'white spaces' – spectrum formerly used or left as a buffer for TV broadcasting but becoming available for other uses – has been of interest in IT law for some years now. Then seemingly from nowhere, a normal development in the regulatory process became the basis for an article about free wifi. This is not to say that white spaces and Internet access are unconnected; clearly, it's one of the reasons that people beyond spectrum gurus talk about it. (I wrote about it in passing in this 2009 article, in section 5.5). But the licensing process does not deliver a free service by any means (even if, as is being discussed, the regulatory model would not include a license fee for spectrum use). Nor has anything particularly interesting happened in recent weeks – as Brodkin's deconstruction points out, the interesting stuff either happened a few years ago (when the opening up started) or will happen in the future (if new services are launched).
Simon Fodden, 'Edwin Mellen Press's Curious Case' (Slaw 10 February 2013). A comment, with plenty of links, on the developing (and worrying) story about the huge defamation claim (the applicant seeks the equivalent of over £2m!) against a librarian (who wrote some quite critical things about a publisher, informed by his knowledge of the field) and his university employer. I would certainly not have anything to do with this publisher as a result of its actions in this case (whatever about the underlying allegations themselves!).
Alexander Hanff, 'The murky world of privacy advocacy' (10 February 2013). A new blog and a rollicking start, with a detailed analysis of corporate funding for tech-related NGOs. It's about time. Given the field I'm working in, I've seen quite a few of these organisations (and indeed, their close cousins, the consultant reinventing themselves as an NGO/think-tank with no membership, no membership and often nothing to add). I think the post by Hanff demonstrates a very honest attempt to understand the weaknesses of the lobbying system and reminds us all to think about the motives as well as the contents of interventions.
'Virtual currency and virtual property revisited' (Technollama 11 February 2013). An overview of recent developments on virtual £££ and IP and other things, prompted by a piece in Forbes which mostly about virtual property). See also this nice PBS video on Bitcoin, etc.
Academic articles
Nina Mendelson, 'Should Mass Comments Count?' (2012) 2 Michigan Journal of Environmental & Administrative Law 173 (SSRN). This is a response to the author's earlier work (and a debate about it), but reading the article covers much of what before quite neatly. The issue is a controversial one – how, when public consultation happens, to deal with different forms of participation (particularly one-click or template methods).
Michael O'Flaherty, 'Freedom of Expression: Article 19 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the Human Rights Committee's General Comment No 34' (2012) 12 Human Rights Law Review 627-654 (£, link). The author of this article was the rapporteur work on this General Comment and discusses the comment as well as some of the cases and stories it relied upon. Watch out for the interesting discussion of article 19 and emerging technology, too.
E Tarantino, 'A simple model of vertical search engines foreclosure' (2013) 37 Telecommunications Policy 1 (£, link). The new volume of this journal (mix of law, business, economics, etc) starts off with one of the topics of the year, competition law and search engines.


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A SMALL ACT – The Little Things Count/
Guest post by filmmaker Jennifer Arnold. How much do the little things count when it comes to staying visible?
My first documentary feature, A SMALL ACT (www.asmallact.com ), opens at the Quad Cinema in New York today. I started the film three and a half years ago with very few resources. DIY filmmaking is hard. We all know that. You have small budgets. You have small crews.
So how can you stand out when you have very little? The biggest lesson I learned while making this film is to leverage any small triumph into something bigger. Use every resource and relationship you have, no matter how small they are. Eventually, all those small things can add up.
Trust me, I started out with nothing, but this film has already been seen by almost a million people and it's actually changed some of their lives. As this blog points out, there are well over 38 (are you up to 76?) things wrong with indie film today, but that shouldn't stop any of us. Indie film is daunting, but you can still start small – who knows where you'll end up.
I promise I'm not going to make this post into a big ad for the film, but the plotline sort of parallels our distribution journey, so bear with me for a moment. A SMALL ACT follows Chris Mburu who was the top student in his Kenyan village, but without money for school fees he had little hope of a future – until a total stranger, Hilde Back, sponsored his early education through a "sponsor a needy child" campaign. She paid roughly $15 dollars a term to keep Chris in school and unbeknownst to her, this tiny contribution paved the way for Chris to go all the way to Harvard Law School. Today he's a human rights officer for the United Nations. Chris decides to find his sponsor and thank her by starting his own sponsorship program to educate a new generation of kids in his village. There's a lot more to the story than that, but the core idea is that it only takes one small act to completely change the course of your life (or your film) and there are programs out there that can give us DIY filmmakers a real chance.
We started production as a crew of two. I wrote, directed, did sound and produced. Patti Lee shot the film, produced, did on-set assistant editor work and also cooked lunch for the postproduction crew everyday. We had two great investors, Jeffrey Soros (producer) and Jane Huang (executive producer) but we were still editing the film in the garage with no idea how to get the film done, let alone distributed, and then we got our first (of many) lucky breaks.
We got into IFP's Spotlight on Docs, which is part of Independent Film Week. I think people probably know what that is, but just in case, it's a market where filmmakers pitch unfinished projects to distributors, sales agents and other helpful people. It was here that we met Lisa Heller from HBO (another lucky break) and Louise Rosen our foreign sales agent. We wanted the film to be theatrically released, but we also wanted maximum eyes on the project – we got both. I should also mention that the first time we applied for Spotlight on Docs we were rejected, so for anyone out there who hasn't gotten into this (or any of the other programs out there) – keep trying!
We got a lot of momentum from Spotlight on Docs; we also started making pre-sales (to HBO and ABC Australia), which allowed us to finish our budget. Originally we hadn't planned on applying to Sundance that year, but with the little momentum we had, we decided to give it a shot. Not only did we get in, we premiered in documentary competition and once again we were the little guys. There were 16 films in competition, I think half of the other filmmakers had won or been nominated for Academy Awards. They all seemed like massive big shots to me. But we had HBO behind us, something that was leveraged from a short meeting at Spotlight on Docs. We had good word of mouth; yes, I asked all my friends to please spread the word about the film. We ended up with standing ovations. Bill Gates and George Soros both showed up to screenings. Roger Ebert wrote a wonderful piece about our film and WAITING FOR SUPERMAN and – the most exciting thing of all – audience members, though totally unsolicited, started handing over donations to the education fund featured in the film.
Over the course of Sundance (10 days) $90,000 dollars was donated to the fund. This was our next lucky break. A lot of people started talking about the impact the film made. Sundance Documentary Fund (which had given us a grant) invited me to attend the Skoll World Forum and talk about film and social impact. A trailer for the film was shown at a TED event. HBO helped launch a major outreach campaign. Each good thing led to the next.
We did a limited theatrical release in April and a HBO broadcast in July. Viewers donated $400,000 dollars to the Hilde Back Education Fund and pledged another million for new students as the fund expands. This got even more people talking, and little by little, we decided to broaden our release into something bigger.
We're launching the "What's Your Small Act Campaign?" which is a mix of community screenings and a slow rollout in traditional theatres. We're starting with the Quad and if our numbers are good we'll expand. Once again we're the little guys. There are a lot of great films out there right now and we've got no P&A money and no team of people. But being little has worked so far. We'll see how it goes this week!
A SMALL ACT has been selected by the NYTimes as "Critic's Pick". You can view the trailer here.


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My family of 10 LOVES this meal! Since it serves 12 or so, it is perfect for large families or for serving to company.
I got this recipe from my mother-in-law more than 25 years ago and have been serving it ever since. I have seen similar dishes called "Mexican Stack" or "Taco Salad" but she called it "Mexican Mess" and so do we.
One of the great things about this dish is its simplicity! I can whip it together in under half an hour, and if I'm planning to be away from home during my usual late afternoon dinner prep time, I can put this together in the Crock-Pot (I believe you Yankees call this a "slow cooker") and let it simmer on low for a couple of hours until we are ready to dive in.
Mexican Mess
Yield – 12 servings
Preparation Time – 10 minutes
Cooking Time – 25 minutes
- 2 lbs. ground beef
- 1 chopped onion
- 2 15 oz. cans pinto beans
- 2 15 oz. cans tomato sauce
- 2 sm. cans chopped green chiles
- Doritos
- Shredded cheddar
- Shredded lettuce
- Diced onions, jalepenos, diced tomatoes, guacamole, and any other toppings you like
- Brown ground beef and onion. Drain.
- Add beans, tomato sauce, and chiles.
- Season to taste with salt and pepper. Sometimes I throw in some taco seasoning if I'm feeling racy.
- Simmer 15 minutes or longer.
- Serve on top of Doritos.
- Top with cheese and desired toppings.
- Enjoy!!!


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For some reason, I think some of you might wish to do just that... because (gasp) I am here!
Not a Baptist, but am a Christian. I enjoy hearing various opinions & ideas. One of my favorite local preachers is Baptist. I drive almost 40 miles to hear Dan preach, from time to time.
I am from the Phoenix, AZ area (81° today) and love a variety of things.
I do know this...
How to start an argument online
1. Express an opinion
2. Wait
With that in mind, I will avoid offering opinions until I get the feel for this community.


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DOC Westland Tai Poutini National Park Visitor Centre
Start your journey through New Zealand's stunning landscapes at a Department of Conservation (DOC) Visitor Centre. Information about conservation areas, as well as DOC's 14,000 km of tracks, 10 Great Walks, and network of 950 huts and 324 campsites.
1 / 4
Acerca de
Visitor centres are staffed by DOC rangers who have firsthand, in-depth local knowledge about:
• Walks and hiking - short walks, multi-day hikes, Great Walks
• Track conditions, weather, and safety
• Hut and Campsite bookings
• Heritage sites
• Cycleways
• Maps
• Marine reserves
• Conservation projects
• Local stories, legends and history - our nature, our people
• Westland Tai Poutini National Park
• Franz Josef Glacier
• Fox Glacier
Nov-March 8:30am-6:00pm daily
April-Oct 8:30am-4:45pm daily
Dirección física
DOC Westland Tai Poutini National Park Visitor Centre, 69 Cron Street , Franz Josef Glacier, West Coast, 7856, New Zealand.


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put (one's) head down(redirected from putting your head down)
put (one's) head down
1. Literally, to place one's head on a surface, such as a pillow or a table or desk, to rest or take a nap. I feel a little woozy. I think I just need to put my head down for a few minutes.
2. To put forth effort on a task that involves reading or writing. If you just put your head down, you'll finish your paper much faster.


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Read answers to common questions about WeChat
To find answers to questions about WeChat, open the app and tap Me > Settings > Help and Feedback.
Read answers to common questions about QQ
To find answers to questions about QQ, follow these steps:
- Open the app and tap the icon in the top-left corner.
- Tap the gear in the bottom-left of the screen.
- Go to About Help with QQ.
Read answers to common questions about Spam Blocking and Identification of Tencent Mobile Manager
What are the requirements of using Spam Blocking and Identification of Tencent Mobile Manager?
- Make sure your iPhone has iOS 10 or later.
- Download and install the latest version of Tencent Mobile Manager from the App Store. Then turn on Enable Spam Blocking in this app.
How do I turn on Spam Blocking?
- On your iPhone, go to Settings > Phone > Call Blocking & Identification. Choose the app to block or identify spam calls, like Tencent Mobile Manager-Block Spam Calls. Then open Tencent Mobile Manager and tap Spam Blocking. Choose your location and download the spam number library.
Visit the website or call the hotline
You can get help on Tencent's support website for WeChat and QQ.
In China mainland, you can call Tencent for help with WeChat, QQ, and Tencent Mobile Manager:
- WeChat payment issues: 95017
- WeChat and QQ account safety issues: 0755-83765566


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I have written recently about baseball's Infield Fly Rule, including a general defense of, and rationale for, the rule itself. I plan to come back to it more fully in the spring, after I get through some current and future projects. I want to write a fuller piece on the cost/benefit analysis underlying the IFR and why that cost/benefit balancing both justifies IFR and why, given that balance of costs and benefits, the infield fly situation is unique not only in baseball but in all sports. There simply is no other situation like it.
This will expand on The Atlantic piece. In that essay, I identified four features of the infield fly situation that justify a special rule: 1) The fielding team has a strong incentive to intentionally not do what they are ordinarily expected to do in the game (catch the ball); 2) the fielding team gains a substantial benefit or advantage by intentionally not doing what is ordinarily expected (this is the prong I want to flesh out in economic terms of optimal outcomes, costs incurred, and benefits gained for each team); 3)the play is slow-developing and not fast-moving, so the player has time to think and control what he does; and 4) even doing what is ordinarily expected of them, the opposing players are powerless to stop the play from developing or to prevent the team from gaining this overwhelming advantage.
As I said, I believe the infield fly is the only situation in all of sport that possesses all four features. But in conversations with friends and readers, one situation keeps getting brought up: The kneel down (or "Victory Formation") at the end of football games.
The players on both teams know the game is over and that the kneeldown is coming and the defense won't do anything to challenge the play (although the play is alive and the defense could contest it, even if the practice is frowned upon). The defense's only hope in this situation is to somehow get a turnover; taking a knee is designed to avoid that risk by only snapping the ball to the quarterback and not having a handoff or other exchange that may go wrong.
Taking a knee shares all four features of the infield fly: 1) the offensive team is not trying do what we ordinarily expect--move the football forward--and is intentionally losing a couple of yards in exchange for running out the clock and avoiding the risk of a turnover; 2) the offensive team gains a substantial benefit (time runs off the clock, no turnover), imposes a substantial cost on the defensive team (time running out, no opportunity to make a play), and offers no benefit at all to the defensive team; 3) the offensive team entirely controls the situation; and 4) the defensive team can do nothing to stop the kneeldown and the running of the clock (it could try to be aggressive on the snap and force a turnover, but, again, that is frowned upon).
If the kneeldown does contain all four features, it means that I am wrong about the uniqueness of the infield fly. The question is what to do; here are some options:
1) Eliminate the Infield Fly Rule. If the situation is not unique and if there are similar situations that do not enjoy a special rule, maybe (as a number of readers have argued to me) that special rule is unwarranted here. I like the IFR, so this is the least acceptable option for me.
2) Outlaw taking a knee. My colleague Alex Pearl suggests a requirement that a team at least make an effort to move the ball forward, even if just by a quarterback sneak; by keeping the play truly live, it gives the defense a chance to force a turnover or otherwise make a play. The problem is that this adds more plays in which players are going to be hitting one another; given the genuine need to do something concussions and other injuries, the sport should not be looking for more hitting. Plus, such a rule requires a tricky determination of intent--how hard does the team have to try to move forward, since lots of plays go nowhere.
3) Recognize the effect of the clock in a timed sport such as football, as opposed to baseball. Football is not all or always about gaining the maximum yardage; in many situations a team runs plays that are likely to gain less yardage, but with the benefit of winding down the clock and bringing them closer to the end of the game and the win. In taking a knee, the offensive teams loses yards but gains in time. In other words, we're tweaking how we understand what a team ordinarily is expected to do on a play; it is not only about gaining yardage, but also about managing the clock. The response is that running a play still is different than taking a knee because of prong 4--the ability of the defense to oppose the kneeldown. So running out the clock by simply handing the ball off and running into the line is OK because teams are still running true plays, trying to gain yardage, and the defense has a real chance to force a mistake. But simply taking a knee is different.
4) Adjust my four features to add a fifth--the game must still be genuinely contested. A team takes a knee only when the outcome is, at least as a practical matter, no longer in dispute.