text:
It is impossible to say anything new about Magna Carta, unless you say something mad. In fact,
- Giles Fields
- 3 years ago
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1 Magna Carta then and now Address to the Friends of the British Library Lord Sumption 9 March 2015 It is impossible to say anything new about Magna Carta, unless you say something mad. In fact, even if you say something mad, the likelihood is that it will have been said before, probably quite recently. So you must not expect any startling new line from me, least of all in a centenary year in which something portentous is said about Magna Carta every day. Historically, there have been two schools of thought about Magna Carta. The first can conveniently be called the lawyer s view, although it is held by many people who are not lawyers. This holds the charter to be a major constitutional document, the foundation of the rule of law and the liberty of the subject in England. The other is the historian s view, which has tended to emphasise the selfinterested motives of the barons and has generally been sceptical about the charter s constitutional significance. There are obvious reasons why lawyers should have taken the lead in extolling Magna Carta. There have been periods in our history when law has acquired an intensely ideological flavour. One of them was the first half of the seventeenth century, when lawyers provided much of the leadership of the Parliamentary opposition to Charles I, and the law courts themselves became an important political battleground between absolute and limited monarchy. Another is our own age, in which government is once again held in low regard and law is invoked as a source of nobler, more liberal and more principled values than mere politics. 1
2 English law has a long, distinguished and comparatively unbroken history. Its practitioners have a natural tendency to legitimise their ideals by asserting their antiquity. But they have, on the whole, been bad historians. This is because with a few honourable exceptions they have treated the history of law as a self-contained and self-sufficient discipline based almost exclusively on the study of legal texts. They have been much less interested in the social and cultural context in which law is made. Yet, like any system of customary law, English law has adapted itself to reflect the values of each successive generation. Manifestly, the values of the early thirteenth century were not the same as our own. The chief sinner, and by far the most influential, was Sir Edward Coke, one of the leading opponents of the early Stuart Kings and the man who more than any other individual was responsible for inventing the myth of Magna Carta. I shall return to this interesting and rebarbative figure later in this lecture. At this stage I simply draw attention to Coke s principal defect as a historian. He was only interested in legal sources: charters, statutes and the year-books which served as the law reports of the middle ages. He read them entirely without regard to their context, as if they had been addressed to seventeenth century gentlemen like himself. He did not think that there was any point in understanding the mentality of those who wrote them, which he assumed to be the same as his own. It never occurred to him that legal historians had anything to learn from the chronicles and records of the past. His advice to general historians was to keep out. Let them meddle not with any point or secret of any art or science, especially with the laws of this realm, he wrote. Historians were once content to adopt the myths of the lawyers. It suited the patriotic view of English exceptionalism, which was for many years the stuff of historical writing in England. It was not until the beginning of the twentieth century that historians dared to suggest a more sceptical view. In 1904 Edward Jenks, an Oxford academic lawyer, published a famous article entitled The 2
3 myth of Magna Carta. This was followed the next year by W.S. McKechnie s Magna Carta. McKechnie was, like Jenks, an academic lawyer. He was a Scottish solicitor and a lecturer in constitutional law at Glasgow University. But Jenks and McKechnie were also formidable general historians. McKechnie in particular subjected the charter to a minute and immensely learned exegesis, for the first time putting each of its clauses into their historical context and in the process exposing a number of misconceptions. His theme was taken up by Maurice Powicke, the future Regius Professor of history at Oxford, in a distinguished contribution to a collection of essays published to mark the last centenary of Magna Carta in There is no doubt that the lawyers have been more successful in propagating their views than the historians. Maitland, the great historian of English law, set the tone by declaring Magna Carta to be a sacred text. It was, he wrote, the nearest approach to an unrepealable fundamental statute that England had ever had, even though much of it had in fact already been repealed at the time he wrote these words. These sentiments persist into our own day, and have been uncritically adopted by politicians and journalists. In her famous, or if you prefer infamous speech at Bruges in 1988, Mrs Thatcher referred to the charter as the origin of representative government. The current prime minister, armed with a copy of an Edwardian illustrated text-book for children, has called it the document that paved the way for democracy, equality and the rule of law, the foundation of all our laws and liberties. Some of the more specific claims made for Magna Carta in the centenary year are even more extraordinary. In his column in the Daily Telegraph, Peter Oborne recently described the European Convention on Human Rights as a document which entrenches the principles of Magna Carta in international law. Others have come forward to suggest that the partial abrogation in 2014 of a legal aid system which was first created in 1949 was contrary to Magna Carta. Recently, a Global Law Summit in London, which was essentially an international marketing opportunity for British lawyers, described itself on its website as grounding the legacy and values of Magna Carta in a firmly 21st Century context. 3
4 Now I have nothing against the liberty of the subject, the rule of law, the Human Rights Convention, legal aid, democracy, motherhood and apple pie or even international marketing opportunities for lawyers. But I do have a problem with the distortion of history to serve an essentially modern political agenda. Claims like those which I have just cited are high-minded tosh. They represent the worst kind of ahistorical Whiggism. They encapsulate the view mocked a generation ago in a famous essay by Herbert Butterfield, that the past can be viewed as an accidentprone but on the whole persistent march towards the manifest rightness of our own values. The first thing that we need to do, if we are to appreciate the historical significance of Magna Carta, is to understand the world in which it was created. Contrary to common belief, the middle ages was not an age of absolute monarchy, either before or after Magna Carta. It never could have been. Medieval societies generated very small surpluses over and above the basic cost of subsistence. Governments had limited resources of money and manpower. They could not govern without the tacit support of their subjects, and the active support of at least the most powerful of them. Medieval governments depended for their survival on an unstable mixture of sentiment, legitimacy and bluff, in the same way that most governments did until comparatively modern times. This meant that kings could not afford to act in a way that defied the contemporary consensus about how a king should behave. One of the key elements of that consensus was that the King should act in accordance with law. The great English political theorist of the generation before Magna Carta was John of Salisbury, who wrote his major work, the Policraticus, in the 1150s. He believed that the difference between a King and a tyrant was that a king ruled by law. Kings, he taught, were subject to legal constraints which protected the liberty of the individual from arbitrary government. These constraints the King could not simply change at will. By comparison a tyrant had no greater authority for his acts 4
5 than physical force. Now, I cite John of Salisbury not because his views were particularly original, but because they were entirely commonplace. He was the most articulate exponent in his time of the conventional view of the state. The barons at Runnymede had certainly not read the Policraticus. It is unlikely that they had even heard of it, although their spokesman Stephen Langton, the Archbishop of Canterbury probably had. But the middle ages was an intensely law-minded age, and the barons had a developed notion of fundamental law. They knew perfectly well that the King could not do as he liked, either in theory or in practice. But where did this law come from? John of Salisbury answered that question by saying that it came from God. The baronage would have given a different answer. They would have said that it came from immemorial custom. In twelfth century England, people spoke of the laws of King Edward the Confessor. The exact content of the laws of Edward the Confessor was a matter of some doubt. Edward the Confessor is not known to have issued any code of laws, although various spurious codes bearing his name were written and circulated during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. What people really meant by the laws of Edward the Confessor was not so much an ascertainable body of law as an ideal state of law belonging to an imagined golden age before the Norman conquest. Medieval men were deeply pessimistic about the capacity of mankind to improve itself. They did not expect a progressive amelioration of the human condition, as we do. They looked for their golden age in past, and saw history as a tale of the decline and corruption inseparable from human affairs. Medieval kings did not, as the Roman Emperors had done, make law in the plenitude of their power. With the aid of counsellors and wise men, they derived it from the revelation of existing law, whose authority came from its antiquity. The most that could be done was to define it, to express it in better words. Their view could not have been more different from our modern assumption that our destiny lies in our own hands and that the golden age lies ahead of us. 5
6 At the time of his coronation in 1100 Henry I swore an oath to observe the laws and customs of England. He defined what was meant by this in a famous charter in which he undertook to abstain from various illegal acts which had been practised by his predecessor William Rufus. Rufus s practices, Henry said, had not been law. On the contrary, they had unjustly oppressed the law of England, and he (Henry) would correct this by restoring the laws of Edward the Confessor. Henry s successors also issued coronation charters, which were either directly modelled on Henry I s or else simply confirmed it. These charters were in reality bids for their subjects support, without which a newly crowned King could not govern. There is plenty of evidence in the records and chronicles of the period that people knew about these promises and sometimes justified resistance to the King s demands by reference to them. They regarded them as law. Henry I s charter was produced by Stephen Langton during the negotiations for Magna Carta, and the drafting of the final version of the charter was based in part upon it. So, it is true that Magna Carta stands for the rule of law. But it is not true that Magna Carta was the origin of the principle. The English Kings had doubtless broken the law quite frequently before Magna Carta, and they continued to break it afterwards. But the idea that the King was subject to law had for a very long time been part of the orthodoxy of medieval constitutional thought both in England and elsewhere. The barons did not invent it at Runnymede. Their object was to define what the law was. No one doubted that whatever it was, the King was subject to it. This, however, does not mean that twelfth century Englishmen were constitutionalists before their time. The law which governed the King s relations with his lay subjects was of a very limited kind. It was closer in spirit to a private contract than a constitution. It was concerned almost entirely with the King s feudal rights and obligations. These rights and obligations related to the terms governing the holding of land, at a time when land was the main source of wealth and the sole source of status apart from royal or ecclesiastical office. By virtue of his ultimate dominion over 6
7 land, the King had an obligation to administer justice to his direct tenants (usually called tenantsin-chief ). He had a right to require them to serve in his courts and councils, and within limits to serve him in war. He had rights, for example to take control of the lands of those who could not preform military service because they were minors or women. He was entitled to levy premiums known as fines when heirs entered into their inheritance. He could levy a tax known as scutage in lieu of the vassal s obligations of military service. He could charge fees for litigation in his courts, which was the only way of establishing a contested title to land. These rights were matters of great moment to baronial families as well as to their own vassals who had a similar relationship with them. They critically affected the finances of landowners and their standing in society. But they had nothing to do with the machinery of government and were hardly the stuff of what we would call constitutional law. There was another problem about regarding the various charters regulating feudal rights as a kind of precocious constitutionalism. There was no institutional mechanism for enforcing the King s obligations on him against his will. Magna Carta certainly did not provide one. The King s judges were the King s, in fact as well as in name. It would be several centuries before any recognisable concept of judicial independence emerged. And, although there was a general convention that the King should take the advice of his leading subjects, nothing recognisable as a representative Parliament existed before the second half of the thirteenth century. The only remedy against abuse was defiance, a technical term for the formal renunciation of the feudal bond which was the sole source of the King s authority. Defiance released both parties from their obligations, and legitimised rebellion. The outcome then became a matter of force, not law. This is what happened in The essential problem of the Angevin Kings of England was that there was no system of national taxation. Henry II, Richard and John, all fought expensive wars against domestic rebels, mainly in their French domains. So they took advantage of the indefinite 7
8 character of their feudal rights to extort money to fund the cost of warfare. For example, they disposed of wardships and heiresses, not for conventional sums but for whatever the market would bear, which was often a great deal. The husbands whom they found for them were likely to be rich, but were not always quite the lady s cup of tea. They imposed heavy scutages in lieu of military service. They took advantage of their vassals delinquencies to dispossess them. They withheld justice from those whom they regarded as having placed themselves beyond the law. John was no different in these respects from his brother and father. But his financial needs were greater, for he faced not just rebellion in his French dominions but a full scale invasion of his French domains by Philip August King of France. He therefore pressed his rights further than they had. A large faction within the baronage, mainly from the north of England, responded by defying him, and waging war against him. They captured London and forced him to submit to their demands at Runnymede. The framers of Magna Carta would be surprised to learn of their posthumous fame. Its famous title, the Great Charter, was only acquired later in the thirteenth century. Even then the title was not intended to refer to the greatness of its contents, but only to distinguish it from the smaller charter of the forest issued two years afterwards. Magna Carta, properly so-called, was a deeply conservative document. It sought to enforce on the King conventions which were profoundly traditional, and obligations which he and his predecessors had acknowledged for more than a century. There are no high-flown declarations of principle. No truths are held to be self-evident. Indeed, there are hardly any provisions that can be called constitutional at all. On the contrary, its contents are rather mundane. There are clauses to protect the interests of the barons and their chief allies, the Church and the city of London. These are followed by a large number of highly technical provisions about the feudal incidents of land tenure. They are essentially about money. The charter is a long catalogue of the ways in which John and his brother 8
9 and father had abused their rights as feudal superiors in order to extract money from their subjects. There was nothing new about any of this, except that the more indefinite obligations of the King were defined more exactly, for example by putting figures on what the King could charge by way of entry fines. The charter was a classic appeal to legal tradition, combined with an attempt at definition which was all that contemporary sentiment expected of legislation. This is especially true of what is undoubtedly the most famous of Magna Carta s clauses, Articles 39 and 40: No free man shall be arrested or imprisoned, or dispossessed, or outlawed or exiled, or otherwise destroyed, nor will we proceed against him, or send others to do so, except by the lawful judgment of his peers or by the law of the land. To no one will we sell, or deny, or delay justice or right. This was directed to a specific grievance of the barons against King John. It is a technical subject on which scholars are not agreed. In summary, since the 1160s, the King s justices had enjoyed exclusive jurisdiction over all disputes between free men about title to freehold land. But in the case of disputes between the King s tenants-in-chief, essentially the baronage and the richer knights, the King enjoyed a personal judicial competence which was inherent in his position as their immediate feudal superior. John had been in the habit of giving judgment personally in such cases, with only his lowly household knights and officers present instead of the great men who could ordinarily have expected to attend on such occasions. There was a large political element in many of his decisions. He had unquestionably sold justice, by demanding large sums, known as proffers in return for access to his court. And on occasions he had denied justice. The baronage therefore found themselves squeezed. Their own tenants had unrestricted access to the King s justices for their claims, but they themselves were dependent on the vagaries of the King s will for their claims against each other. This was what Articles 39 and 40 were about. They imposed on 9
10 the King himself the same standards of justice as were already required of his professional judges. Certainly, Articles 39 and 40 were nothing to do with trial by jury. In 1215, juries had been used for certain special purposes for about half a century, but criminal trials were decided by ordeal or battle, not by the verdict of a jury. Juries only gradually came in in the course of the thirteenth century, as a result of the prohibition by the Church on the clergy participating in the more primitive methods of finding facts. Nor were Articles 39 and 40 the origin of habeas corpus. This was developed by the King s courts long after Magna Carta, although writs to much the same effect had sometimes been issued under Henry II, half a century before. Article 39 prevented the arrest of a subject without legal authority, a swipe against King John use of the machinery of the law to destroy his enemies, like the former royal favourite William de Braose. But this part of Article 39 was a weak reed, for it did not say what constituted legal authority. Every medieval and every Tudor King exercised a right of arrest, either personally or through his ministers, generally in order to incarcerate people for reasons of state. The King s warrant was regarded by the courts as a sufficient answer to a writ of habeas corpus until the seventeenth century. So why do we single out Magna Carta as the origin of the rule of law? We might equally have celebrated the 800 th anniversary of the coronation charters of Henry I, King Stephen or Henry II, if we had thought of it in time. The answer is that what was special about it was not the ideas which it embodied, which were perfectly conventional, but the dramatic circumstances in which it came into existence. Custom in by definition uncertain. It is only when the existence of a customary obligation is challenged, so that it can really be tested. John s challenged his barons view of the law and failed. His obligations were enforced against him. Moreover, they were enforced with a fanfare of spectacle and drama that could never be matched by a coronation charter or a legal treatise. 10
11 The life of the original Magna Carta was extremely brief. Within ten weeks, the Pope, Innocent III, denounced it as not only shameful and base but illegal and unjust. He declared it to be null and void, and forbade the King to observe it on pain of excommunication. John died in October 1216 and was succeeded by his nine year-old son Henry III. Nothing could be permanently settled while he was a minor, and it was not until 1225 that the status of Magna Carta was finally resolved. In that year, Henry reissued the charter in a revised form. The new text left out a number of the provisions which imposed constitutional limitations of the King s power to govern. It left out Article 61 of the original text, which created a permanent council of twenty-five barons to enforce the charter on the King. It left out the provisions of Articles 12 and 14 which prevented the King from levying taxation unless by the common counsel of the realm. In other words it left out anything which might have created an alternative source of constitutional authority, able to challenge the King. According the Barnwell chronicle, the King conceded the revised Magna Carta benigne et hilariter, graciously and cheerfully. In return, the baronage consented to a heavy new tax. Taxpayers were told that unless they paid they would not enjoy the liberties which the King had conceded. Copies were distributed throughout England, to the counties and the larger towns. When, later in the thirteenth century, the Charter was formally confirmed by Henry III and his son Edward I, it was the text of 1225 which they confirmed, and it was this text that was recorded on the statute rolls as the authentic instrument, not the earlier versions. Between 1258 and 1265, there was a prolonged baronial rebellion against King Henry III. The barons justified this step by reference to Magna Carta. They claimed that Henry III had acted against the terms of the charter by oppressing the Church, despoiling heirs and disparaging heiresses, and so on. In particular he had exploited the feudal rights of the Crown, to raise money without consent. In other words, their basic grievances were the same as they had been under King 11
12 John. They were complaining about the abuse of the King s feudal rights for financial purposes. Their problem was that there was no way of making him observe the charter in these respects without imposing some kind of permanent control over his government. The Provisions of Oxford, which were imposed on King Henry III in 1258, therefore took the government of the kingdom out of his hands by imposing on him a council drawn from the ranks of the baronage, on whose advice he was bound to act. They did this in the name of the rule of law. The Song of Lewes, the famous latin poem of 1264 which expressed the rebels ideas, put it very pithily. Lex stat, rex cadit. Let the law stand, though the king falls. The baronial rebellion against Henry III exposed the weakness of Magna Carta, which was that it was not a constitutional document but merely a code of feudal law. The fundamental problem was that far from being a blueprint for future constitutional development, Magna Carta was really the last gasp of the old order that was passing away. In the three centuries which followed the scene at Runnymede, changes occurred in English society which made the sort of issues that the charter dealt with less important. In the first place, Magna Carta had been directed mainly to protecting the financial interests of tenants-in-chief, a very small group of perhaps 150 to 180 men. It provided for tenants-in-chief to make the same rights available to their own feudal subordinates. Only the unfree, the tied peasants who constituted perhaps half the population of England, were left out. But with the prolonged agricultural boom of the thirteenth century, the rapid increase of England s population, the expansion of the cash economy, and the growing turnover of land, these categories became increasingly meaningless. The traditional feudal hierarchy no longer provided a mechanism for the exercise of power. Secondly, lawyers invented ways of evading the more burdensome obligations associated with feudal tenure. This applied particularly to the rights of the Crown which arose on the transmission 12
13 of property to a man s heirs, which had been at the heart of the disputes between King John and the barons. The lawyers most fertile invention was the use, or trust, which was devised by lawyers at the end of the thirteenth century and became extremely popular with landowners over the next two hundred years. The use worked by vesting the property in a continuing body of trustees, so that the landowner never died. As a result, the landowner never died. Thirdly, the Kings no longer depended on feudal obligation to recruit their armies. The last English King to make extensive use of the feudal military obligation was Edward I, who died in The last summons of feudal host was in From the middle of the fourteenth century, the wars of the Kings of England were fought by volunteers who served for honour and wages. Their obligations were based on contract and on money payment, and not on the tenure of land. Increasingly soldiering became a professional career, whose connections with the structure of English society were casual and accidental. Finally, and perhaps most important of all, the creation of representative Parliaments in the second half of the thirteenth century put the dealings between the King and his subjects onto a different footing. Parliament represented a wider spectrum of the population than those whose interests had been protected by Magna Carta. It provided a much more effective way of ventilating grievances against the King s government. Above all, it brought into existence a precocious system of national taxation on moveable property, which did not depend on feudal obligation but on the consent of the Parliamentary Commons. Future constitutional struggles, under Edward II and Richard II were not about feudal incidents. They were about mechanisms for making the King responsible to the wider community. Under Edward II and again under Richard II and Henry VI, the great issue was control over the 13
14 membership and powers of the royal council, which emerged in the late middle ages as the nerve centre of the King s government. These were things about which Magna Carta had nothing to say. Gradually, the English forgot about Magna Carta. Citations of the charter in the Year Books become progressively more infrequent. Parliamentary petitions for the charter to be confirmed, which had once been routine, disappear after Sir John Fortescue, a former Chief Justice of King s Bench, wrote the first general account of the English constitution in the 1460s. But although he was a firm believer in limited monarchy and the rule of law, he derived it from Aristotle and Aquinas, not from Magna Carta. Tudor England cared even less for Magna Carta than the late middle ages. The period witnessed a considerable expansion of the King s prerogative power and the growing use of special conciliar courts like Star Chamber which declined to be bound by the common law. Much of this was politically controversial. But Magna Carta was rarely mentioned. Sir Thomas Smith, whose book The Commonwealth of England, was written in the 1560s, does not mention it. It does not feature in Shakespeare s King John. On the rare occasions that it was invoked, it was usually in the context of disputes about the Crown s control over the church. It is one of the ironies of the period that catholic traditionalists of the 1530s and the Puritan opponents of the religious policies of Queen Elizabeth both appealed to the 1 st article of Magna Carta, which protected the liberties of the Church, although the Church was by now a nationalised industry of which the monarch was the non-executive chairman. Where is now become the Great Charter of England, obtained by so many difficulties?, asked the Puritan lawyer James Morice in the Parliament of It was a good question. Magna Carta as we know it was reinvented in the early seventeenth century, largely by one man, the judge and politician Sir Edward Coke. A man of prodigious learning and bilious disposition, Coke rose to become Chief Justice of King s Bench. He fell out with King James I as a result of James s interference in the working of the courts. Coke objected to this, as a result of which he 14
15 was dismissed in November For the remaining eighteen years of his life, he was to be a determined opponent of the pretensions of the Stuart monarchy. Coke transformed Magna Carta from a somewhat technical catalogue of feudal regulations, into the foundation document of the English constitution, a status which it has enjoyed ever since among the large community of commentators who have never actually read it. In their final form, Coke s views about Magna Carta were embodied in the second book of his Institutes of the Laws of England most of which was written between the Parliament of 1628 and his death in In this remarkable treatise, Coke read almost the whole common law of England into the text of Magna Carta. Coke described Articles 39 and 40 as pure gold, every syllable of which was to be studied. He regarded it as the origin of the writ of habeas corpus and of trial by jury. More generally, Coke took the provisions of the charter which protected a man s liberties, which actually meant his privileges and immunities, and treated them as referring to the liberty of the subject. This meant, according to him, that all invasions of personal liberty by the Crown were unlawful. He even suggested that Magna Carta was the origin of Parliamentary sovereignty, although no Parliament existed for half a century after it was sealed. He asserted that it prevented the exaction of money by the Crown without consent, although the only clauses dealing with taxation in the charter of 1215 had in fact been removed in subsequent reissues. In short, said Coke in the debates which preceded its passage of the Petition of Right through the House of Commons, Magna Carta was a charter for limited monarchy. Magna Carta, he famously declared, is such a fellow that he will have no sovereign. Many people who revere Magna Carta have never heard of Sir Edward Coke. Yet he has had an extraordinary influence over our perceptions of the charter. Coke s Institutes were regarded as a work of high authority until the 19 th century. His analysis of Magna Carta was swallowed wholesale by the early American colonists. The framers of the US Constitution and the federal and state Bills 15
16 of Rights, deployed Magna Carta against the government of George III, just as Coke had deployed it against Charles I. The due process clause of the fifth and fourteenth Amendments, is based on Article 39 as interpreted by Coke. In 1991, it was calculated that Magna Carta had been cited in more than 900 decision of state and federal courts to date, generally in support of propositions that would not have been recognised by the barons at Runnymede. It had been relied upon in more than sixty Supreme Court decisions in the previous half-century. The safeguards of due process of law and the equal protection of the laws, wrote Justice Frankfurter in his judgment in Malinki v New York 324 US 401, 413 (1945), summarise the history of the freedom of Englishspeaking peoples running back to Magna Carta and reflected in the constitutional development of our people. As recently as 2004, Justice Stephens, delivering the judgment of the majority of the Supreme Court in Rasul v Bush 542 US 466 (2004) which allowed habeas corpus to prisoners in Guantanamo Bay, cited Article 39 of Magna Carta in support of his conclusion. Ironically, Magna Carta has not fared as well in the courts of the country in which it was born. Currently only three clauses of Magna Carta remain on the statute book. Even they have a certain archaic ring. They are the clause protecting the privileges of the Church, the clause protecting the privileges of the City of London and the 29 th clause of the 1225 charter, which reproduces Articles 39 and 40 of the 1215 document. Magna Carta has been cited in nearly 170 judgments of the superior courts in England since In almost every case, the reference has been to Article 39 of the 1225 Charter. In almost every case, it has been largely rhetorical. On the rare occasions when the courts have been presented with a case in which it might actually make a difference, the judges have shied away. Quite recently, a case was decided in the Appellate Committee of the House of Lords in which it might have been decisive. The case was R v Secretary of State for the Foreign and Commonwealth Office ex parte Bancoult [2009] 1 AC 453. The facts were that the Crown had a prerogative power to make 16
17 laws for British colonies. It exercised this power 1971 by making an ordinance expelling the entire population of the British island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean so that it could become a US military base. Colonial laws were valid only so far as consistent with English law. So the issue was whether the ordinance was consistent with the 29 th clause of the 1225 version of Magna Carta. The House of Lords held the ordinance to be valid. Lord Hoffmann, speaking for the majority of the committee, acknowledged that Magna Carta forbade exile unless authorised by law. But, he said, it did not curtail the power of the lawmaker to make whatever laws it saw fit. In his view the right which it created was not so fundamental that the Crown could not take it away in the exercise of its prerogative power to make law. Sir Edward Coke would be turning in his grave. But Lord Hoffmann was actually right. Magna Carta guarantees very little. Yet Magna Carta matters, if not for the reasons commonly put forward. Some documents are less important for what they say than for what people wrongly think that they say. Some legislation has a symbolic significance quite distinct from any principle which it actually enacts. Thus it is with Magna Carta. It has become part of the rhetoric of a libertarian tradition based on the rule of law, that represents a precocious and distinctively English contribution to western political theory. The point is that we have to stop thinking about it just as a medieval document. It is really a chapter in the constitutional history of seventeenth century England and eighteenth century America. Ultimately, one s attitude to political myths of this kind depends on where one situates one s golden age. Those who created the myths that surround Magna Carta located their golden age in the past. Their ideal was the recapture of an imagined paradise lost. To Coke and his generation it really mattered that the common law as they understood it in the seventeenth century should have existed in much the same form since the days of King Alfred or the legendary Brutus the Trojan. It really mattered that it should have been encapsulated in Magna Carta. The authority of their legal programme depended in large measure on its supposed antiquity. Otherwise, they would have 17
18 been mere revolutionaries and not the respectable English gentlemen that they believed themselves to be. Today, the pendulum has swung the other way. Medieval has become a synonym for barbarous. We are frighteningly ignorant of the past, in large measure because we no longer look to it as a source of inspiration. We are all revolutionaries now, controlling our own fate. So when we commemorate Magna Carta, perhaps the first question that we should ask ourselves is this: do we really need the force of myth to sustain our belief in democracy? Do we need to derive our belief in democracy and the rule of law from a group of muscular conservative millionaires from the north of England, who thought in French, knew no Latin or English, and died more than three quarters of a millennium ago? I rather hope not. 18
40. To no one will we sell, to no one deny or delay right or justice
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text:
Attention A T users. To access the menus on this page please perform the following steps. 1. Please switch auto forms mode to off. 2. Hit enter to expand a main menu option (Health, Benefits, etc). 3. To enter and activate the submenu links, hit the down arrow. You will now be able to tab or arrow up or down through the submenu options to access/activate the submenu links.
Contact Us
VA » Locations » Veterans Health Administration » Oklahoma » Oklahoma City Vet Center
Oklahoma City Vet Center
6804 N. Robinson Avenue
Oklahoma City, OK 73116
Phone: 405-456-5184 Or 877-927-8387
Fax: 405-456-5125
Hours of Operation:
- Monday: 8:00 am - 8:00 pm
- Tuesday: 8:00 am - 8:30 pm
- Wednesday: 8:00 am - 4:30 pm
- Thursday: 7:00 am - 8:30 pm
- Friday: 8:00 am - 4:30 pm
- Saturday: 7:00 am - 3:30 pm (3rd Saturday of the month)
- Sunday: Closed
In an effort to better serve the veteran and family members, upon request Vet Centers will provide services after normal work hours and/or on weekends.
For assistance after hours, weekends, and holidays call: 1-877-WAR-VETS (1-877-927-8387)

subset: commoncrawl


text:
Infinite Campus is a popular School Information System (SIS in eduspeak terminology). In addition to the production server that everyone sees and uses, there are two additional servers that are used for various types of testing tasks.
Staging and Sandbox
The Staging site is a separate server that can have a software release installed that is different than the production server. Date from the production can be copied to the Staging server in a process known as a "Refresh". This arrangement allows you to test your current data against a new release without effecting your production server.
The Sandbox site always runs the same software release as the production server. Production data can be copied to it using the "Refresh" process. This allows you to test procedures on your current data and release and observe the results without effecting the production system.
Each time a "Refresh" is done, all data is copied from the production system to the system you requested the refresh for. This copies over all existing data and replaces it with the current data from the production system. Custom header information is also copied over.
Here are the steps to update your custom headers for your Staging and Sandbox sites:
Here are some of the images I use:
https://www.box.com/shared/static/ywffcvlcn3w1ckwp31zm.gif Staging logotype
https://www.box.com/shared/static/6atusc2tx0vd6ldk1p0w.gif Sandbox logotype
https://www.box.com/shared/static/118g0j61jfdrsylpoxjw.png Sand pail image
Refresh your screen to see the changes.
Mac - Command-F5
PC - Control-F5
Check your work and make any needed changes.
You can refresh your screen to see the changes by using these keyboard commands:
NOTE: Remember that this needs to be done every time you refreash your data on either the Staging or Sandbox site.


text:
The pursuit of perfection underscores every major religion on earth, yet perfection has virtually never been defined in a way that is pragmatically sensible from a logical point of view. It is only in the years following the end of World War II that such a definition might even have been a practical possibility, since prior to this it would never have been thought possible that humankind might come to threaten the balance of Nature itself on a global scale. Now we know differently and as I sit here hammering out this article in 2015 the discussion of perfection takes on the question of sustainability more than at any time in human history. Avoiding the consequences of global warming would amount to a practical application of perfection! Reversing the damage done to our environment and restoring Nature's rich bounty would amount to a caliber of perfection requiring a miraculous change of events in human behavior, not at all likely to occur. Suddenly perfection is adopting a very real and a very urgent definition.
Religion, generally, has maintained a pretty dismal view of Earth, portraying it over and over again as something to be disparaged and escaped. Called the Realm of Exploitation, both Hinduism and Buddhism have portrayed Earth as a place of unspeakable suffering, the only solution of which was to quit the cycle of birth and rebirth that draws us to it time and time again. While not universally viewed in this way in Judaism, distortional spin-off religions have generally followed suit with this view of the world so that perfection has been viewed as a matter of successfully escaping its clutches by one means or another. So long as Earth is viewed as the enemy of perfection there is very little chance of including it in any plans that share an imagined perfection with the Earth itself. If it turns out that either Heaven or Hell are internal states and not external places then the possibility of realizing Heaven on Earth is decidedly disadvantaged by this grim outlook of Earth.
The most noteworthy exception to this anti-earth attitude is Qabbalah which defines Earth simply as Kingdom and does not assign characteristics of good or evil to it. East-Asian Yin/Yang philosophy also does not succumb to this notion of an inherently evil Earth where Earth is viewed as the Yin Principle opposing Heaven as the Yang. Tantricism, with its emphasis on the balancing of opposites, does not hold with the idea that Earth must be subdued in order for Heaven to prevail. Heaven out of balance is just as detrimental to our collective well being as Eath run amok, so this notion of Earth as an inherently bad place is not universally held to but has become a kind of fetish among the proponents of apocalypse for whom the path to perfection has become synonymous with the suppression of Earth. The exaltation of Life, Light, Love and Liberty are viewed as universal qualities generated internally where man himself is the right and proper focus of this miraculous attainment. The thing for us to stay attuned to is the how with respect to the pursuit of perfection. Thus Pythagoras advocates To Know Thyself as the root of philosophical inquiry. Without a keen sense of who we are on a cosmic scale we cannot hope to achieve a balancing of opposites that has any enduring meaning. This means staying abreast of new knowledge that emerges and constantly updating our esoteric knowledge to attune itself to exoteric knowledge about ourselves and our environments. This is why the creation of maps plays such an important role in the ongoing pursuit of perfection. The cross-referencing of ancient maps with modern knowledge yields new maps better geared to the knowledge we have on tap – knowledge that is bought and paid for through the dedicated labors of our best minds over extended periods of time. These new maps put us in a position of strength pertaining to the ancient goals which do not really change so much in themselves. Rather, what changes are the strategies which our new maps reveal.
The following chart demonstrates how the four bigrams (two line structures) pair against guanine (G), cytosine (C), thymine (U) and adenine (A) to give us a new and revolutionary system of 64 hexagrams that 5,000 years of Chinese assignments could not have given us. This eventually leads us to a new kind of binary hexagrams, the possibilities of which are as startling as they are universal.
This next chart redefines the Lo Shu diagram with its 9 ternary bigrams that gives us the elemental properties of its 9 internal chambers. This has never been accomplished before until now and would not be possible without the syncretic nature of Mutational Alchemy. Staying abreast of all available knowledge at our disposals is what qabbalah is all about.
Qabalistic philosophy is inherently syncretic in nature which puts more on its plate than most since it is constantly cross-referencing everything that comes before its view. This is the only way that important new knowledge can be identified and adjusted. In 1953 a body of new knowledge was introduced that will forever change the way we look at geomantic magick. Franklin, Watson and Crick and their publication of the DNA code language was not intended to advance the state of 21st century alchemy but clearly does so notwithstanding.The binary nature of the YiJing had already been identified in the 1600's by Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz but what could not have been known was the stunning similarities between the YiJing and DNA. Several important books and dozens of scholastic articles have been written on this subject since but my purpose here is to hyphenate how unexpected breakthroughs in scientific understandings can radically impact our sense of spirituality and perfection.
For an informed qaballist, the Tree of Life is divided into 32 Paths of Wisdom. The 64 binary hexagrams have always been paired into 32 complementary opposites. Once we know that the 64 DNA templates are a direct parallel to the traditional 64 YiJing hexagrams, we only need some way to align the hexagrams to the Tree of Life to give us a map sufficient to assert perfection against the Tree. We also need a word or method to exercise this assertion. It happens that Mutational Alchemy answers to all of these issues and more. Thus we have every good reason for a high level of confidence that Mutational Alchemy puts us squarely on the road to Perfection, though in truth there are still certain mysterious elements lacking. These have to do with the external environment, a very difficult thing to control with exact precision. This is one of the reasons some practitioners confine their work to special caves deemed suitable for visualization work. Others establish and maintain temple space reserved for visualization practice. Though not 100% crucial, controlling one's external environment is a routine protocol in the ongoing pursuit of perfection. We need more capable individuals working along lines that can actually succeed instead of wasting their lives away on fantasy projections which cannot, or following in the footseps of frauds and dinosaurs who have no earthly idea where perfection lies or how it can be secured.


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Oil Painting the Figure in Limited Palette Jr Wells
Arlington Heights | Website
This event occurred in the past.
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This two-day workshop includes instruction and hands on walk-through in the techniques of: determining value structure and use of limited palette for color. (An hour break is provided, but lunch is on own.) The cost includes the model fee but does not include materials. A special discount for materials at The Blick Arts & Crafts Store in Schaumburg by the Woodfield Mall.


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Fidencio Martinez Legalities of Being
Palos Hills | Website
This event occurred in the past.
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Chicago-based artist Fidencio Martinez exhibits "Legalities of Being" at the Robert F. DeCaprio Art Gallery. Martinez also exhibits Double Valance in the Fine and Performing Art Center's Atrium. A reception will also take place from 2:30-4 p.m., Aug. 26, with an artist talk at 3:30 p.m.


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In reviewing Education Week last week I ran across an article: Grading of Teacher Colleges to be Revamped which is about how US News and World Report is changing the way it ranks colleges of education in the annual list it publishes. There is quite a bit of controversy surrounding this move and both the article, and the comments which follow it amply describe this debate. What I found interesting was the actual criteria they are using in grading colleges which can be found by clicking on a pdf. in the article.
What is interesting to me is not what is in these criteria, but what is missing.
The criteria primarily deal with curriculum, subject mastery, and evaluating effectiveness in these admittedly important areas, but there is really not much attention given to how you might organize your efforts as a teacher. There is nothing about collaboration, nothing about how students should be organized, nothing about how the teacher should be interacting with students, nothing about techniques for individualizing teaching... you get the idea. In short these very controversial new criteria seem just a different way to measure practices that themselves have not changed at all.
Teachers are under a lot of pressure to perform these days and to improve student outcomes. A considerable amount of thought has been given to preparing students to compete in the 21st Century and there are many similar approaches that require not so much a change in the subject knowledge teachers' possess, but a change in how students acquire the knowledge, attitudes and skills they will need after they graduate. From what I can tell there is little in these criteria that address these important aspects of education, so teachers are starting their careers at a disadvantage in doing the precise job for which they were hired.
This matters to me because as an architect, one of the things I can enable through my designs is the transaction between student and teacher. I know how to design a classroom that enables the teaching of 21st Century skills, but with few exceptions this is not the type of school that teachers and administrators (who also were trained in colleges of education) will let me design. Instead the demand is for new buildings that enable an old model.
There is still hope for change, but it will take the efforts of all of us in continuing to challenge the status quo and advocate for both the teaching and environments that will let students succeed in the 21st Century.


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Big brother is watching - and reporting every light switch flip and ounce of water pouring out of your faucet to the government. The California water drought is being used to push, once again, for smart meter installation into every American home.
Smart meters utilize wireless technology and instantly tell power companies how much electricity a home is using, and even can report on the power usage by individual appliances. Smart meters supporters generally feel that the high-tech electr... Continue Reading →


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I've resorted to referring to Google Calendar as most of the stuff we do are usually scheduled. I've also thought of logging everything on a text file and have pelican publish this to my website.
Meantime, my reading list for the day as I decide on a workflow that will allow multiple teams to work on the university website:
- http://www.sitepoint.com/one-click-app-deployment-server-side-git-hooks/
- http://stackoverflow.com/questions/425692/what-is-your-preferred-php-deployment-strategy
- https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-automate-php-app-deployment-process-using-capistrano-on-ubuntu-13


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Torres Introduces North Korea Follow the Money Act
WASHINGTON, DC – This week Rep. Norma J. Torres (D-CA), a member of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, will introduce the North Korea Follow the Money Act, a bill aimed at making sanctions against North Korea more effective in preventing the advancement of their nuclear weapons program by more accurately determining the regime's revenue sources.
"The recent ballistic missile test launched by North Korea is undoubtedly a cause for concern for the global community and should compel the world to take action to stop this threat," said Torres. "My bill will make sure that any sanctions imposed by Congress or the administration apply meaningful financial pressure to the North Korean regime and inhibit their ability to move forward with their increasingly aggressive actions."
The North Korea Follow the Money Act would require the Director of National Intelligence, in coordination with the Secretary of State, to produce a national intelligence estimate of North Korean revenue sources. The estimate would include information regarding North Korean funding sources, financial and non-financial networks through which North Korea accesses United States and international financial systems, and global financial institutions that assist North Korea with financial transactions.
"While targeted sanctions might be an appropriate response to address the North Korean threat, such sanctions will only work if we're able to specifically identify where North Korea obtains the revenue to fund their weapons program," continued Torres. "North Korea's actions pose a threat to U.S. interests and global stability, and it is critical that we not only take action but that we are certain that the actions we take are as effective as possible."
Torres has also offered this legislation in the form of an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act. The House Committee on Rules will determine Tuesday evening if Torres's amendment will proceed to the House floor for a vote. The full text of the bill can be found HERE.


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casion for such a suit cannot arise, as the new board are in full possession, the old board having surrendered, and neither the complainant nor anyone else asks that they be removed. That the second prayer for an injunction against the appointment of a proxy in behalf of the state cannot be granted, as the former proxy has resigned and vacated the office, because the charter makes it imperative that the interest of the state be represented by proxy at all general meetings of the company. The fourth section of the amended charter gives the appointment of the proxy to the governor. That so much of the prayer for injunction as seeks to prevent an enforcement of the act of 25th February, 1897, entitled "An act to am,end an act entitled an act to incorporate the Atlantic and North Carolina Railroad Company and the North Carolina and Western Railroad Company," or to adopt and accept the same without the consent of the private stockholders, should be granted. Let an injunction be prepared in accordance with this opinion. The bill, as against D. L. Russell, governor, Z. B. Walser, attorney general, and the board of internal improvements, iadismissed Let it be retained as to all the other parties.
AltIERIOAN FREEHOLD LAND-MORTGAGE CO. OF LONDON. Limited, 1'. WOODWORTH.
(Olrcult Oourt, N. D. New York. August 18, 1897.) No. 8,178.
CoRPORATIONS-CREDITORS' SUIT AGAINST STOCKHOLDER ERSHIP. EFFECT OF RECEIV-
Under the statute of Kansas giving a judgment creditor of a corporation the right to proceed by action to charge the stockholders with the amount of the judgment, such a creditor of a Kansas corporation may maintain an action In a federal court against a stockholder In another state, though the corporation Is In the hands of a receiver.
This was a suit in equity by the American Freehold Land·Mortgage Company of London, Limited, a judgment creditor of an insolvent Kansas farm-mortgage company, against Chauncey B. Woodworth, to enforce defendant's liability as a stockholder in the Kansas corporation under the Kansas statute. The cause was heard on demurrer tQ the bill. P. Tecumseh Sherman and W. Pierrepont White, for plaintilf. William F. Cogswell and William N. Cogswell, for defendant. COXE,District Judge. When this demurrer was first before the court it was decided that the action could be maintained upon the judgment alone without alleging or proving the original indebtedness. 79 Fed. 951. The remaining propositions were argued at the June term. Since the argument the circuit court of appeals for this circuit has rendered a decision which disposes of all the questions involved in favor of the plaintiff, with possibly one exception. Whitman v. Bank, 83 Fed. 288. It is argued that as the Kansas Mortgage Company is in the hands of a receiver, he is the only party who
can maintain this suit for the benefit of all the creditors. Although this precise point is not involved in the Whitman Case it is covered by the logic of that decision and the authorities cited in the former opinion herein. The Kansas law gives a right of action to the judg· ment creditor. This is enough. The demurrer is overruled, with costs. The defendant may answer within 20 days.
NORTHERN PAC. RY. CO.v. BALTHAZAR et aI. (CircUit Court, D. Washington, W. D. August 14, 1897.)
The Northern Pacific Railroad Company not having definitely located any line of road between Portland and Wallula, the original grant of lands to it by Act July 2, 1864 (13 Stat. 365, § 3), never took effect as to lands between those points; and those of such lands lying contiguous to the line built from Portland to Tacoma, and within the limits of the grant made by the joint resolution of May 31, 1870 (16 Stat. 378), were embraced within the latter grant, and on compliance with its conditions the title thereto vested in the company and Its grantees, and was not affected by the forfeiture act of September 29. 1890 (26 Stat. 496).
F. M. Dudley, for complainant. C. E. S. Wood, for defendants. HANFORD, District Judge. This suit was originally commenced by the receiver of the Northern Pacific Railroad Oompany, in behalf of said company, to quiet title and determine questions as to the rights of the company, under its land grant, to certain lands, aggre· gating about 200,000 acres, situated in the counties of Olark and OOWlitz, in the state of Washington, which the company claims to have earned by the construction of that part of its road extending from Portland to Tacoma. Said lands were sold in tracts by the railroad company, and a large number of its vendees were made parties defendant, for the purpose of obtaining a decree restraining them from commencing actions to recover the purchase money paid to the company. The Northern Pacific Railway Oompany has been substituted as party plaintiff, it having succeeded to all the rights of the Northern Pacific Railroad Oompany and its receiver, by having purchased the railroad, with its lands and business, at the foreclosure sale. The controversy as to the title grows out of the act of congress of September 29, 1890, forfeiting that portion of the land grant coterminous with the line of the Northern Pacific Railroad between Portland and Wallula, through the valley of the Oolumbia river, which its charter authorized the company to construct. In order to understand the questions submitted, it is necessary to consider the following acts and resolution of congress: By the act of .July 2,1864 (13 Stat. 36,5), the Northern Pacific Railroad Oompany, was created a body corporate, and said company was authorized to construct"A continuous railroad and telegraph line. with the appurtenances. beginning at ll'point on Lake Superior, in the state of :\1innesota or Wisr:on..;in; .


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So people we judge on a completely arbitrary standard and find wanting cannot join our merry band of lunatics, which means that they should find someone else.
They are permitted to submit an application, but that's as far as it gets. We have to accept them into the group, after all.
Kids should be allowed to join a sport than they like. It wouldn't be fair to make a kid do another sport even if they're good at it. If they want to do a sport that they're not good at let them, they will get better and a lot stronger.
As long as the parent has the resources to pay for the activity and to get the child back and forth to it, that child should be allowed to join whatever group or activity or sport strikes his or her fancy, even if it means changing activities once in a while, for it is good to follow one's heart.
No, kids should not be permitted to join any group they want to, because there might be reasons that a child should participate in something instead of something else. A child who shows great talent for music should focus primarily on that, and do athletics as a side hobby. Also, parents cannot always afford for their children to be in any activity.


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A new feature in Twitter, @anywhere, which will allow Twitter users to connect to their Twitter accounts using third party websites. This service allows users to easily share news while reading them online from different websites like The New York Times, eBay etc.
Twitter Launching @anywhere Service
March 16, 2010 by Avinash 2 Comments
Filed Under: Social Media
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Last reply was January 20, 2011
AruneshView March 17, 2010
Nice info 🙂
AruneshView January 20, 2011
Nice info 🙂


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Hilliard school officials say a 6.9-mill levy on Tuesday's ballot should not come as a surprise - the district promised to keep its budget in the black for two years after a 2008 levy.
Hilliard school officials say a 6.9-mill levy on Tuesday's ballot should not come as a surprise - the district promised to keep its budget in the black for two years after a 2008 levy.
"The reality is we have cut spending" in the past few years, Superintendent Dale McVey said. "The reality is we have been responsible."
An anti-tax group says the district should cut pay and benefits before asking for more money.
"The rate of spending growth in the district is too high," said Mike Harrold, chairman of the anti-tax group For Hilliard Kids. "It's unsustainable. They need to keep it at a rate that the tax base supports."
Issue 7 will decide whether homeowners pay more - $211 more a year per $100,000 of home value - or whether the district cuts an additional $3.9million before next school year.
Hilliard officials say they would eliminate middle-school sports, gifted instruction, field trips and more than 51 positions if the levy is defeated. An additional 247 classified jobs would be reduced in hours.
The levy would raise $16.7 million a year, but officials say they don't know how long it would keep the district off the ballot because of uncertainty surrounding Gov. John Kasich's state budget.
The 15,634-student district is slated to lose $5.5 million in support next school year - $2.5 million in state revenue and federal stimulus dollars and $3million from the phase-out of the tangible personal-property tax reimbursement, according to state figures.
As with all school districts, most of Hilliard's budget is devoted to salaries and benefits.
This year, all of Hilliard's employees have given up base salary raises. About 63percent of teachers and 76 percent of classified staff members also were eligible for a "step increase" based on experience or education, but they agreed to forgo any steps from last September through January.
Step increases for those eligible cost about $2.7 million. Eligible teachers would have gotten a 4.15 percent bump, and classified employees, depending on position and years of service, would have received between 1.3percent to 1.5percent. Contracts for the district's certified and classified unions expire Dec.31.
Harrold said the district should look at alternative ways of cutting costs, such as permanently eliminating steps after the 10th year or delaying steps to every other year. (Senate Bill 5, which is being challenged by labor groups, would ultimately get rid of all steps if it becomes law.) He said the district also could save $4million with a 3 percent across-the-board pay reduction.
Treasurer Brian Wilson said Harrold's proposal would not save the district enough money, and any salary change would have to be negotiated with the district's employee unions.
School officials said the district's expenses - which have grown from $94million in 1999 to $160million last year, after adjusting for inflation - are driven by growing enrollment.
From 1999 to 2010, Hilliard grew by more than 3,300 students, a 29 percent increase. During that time, the district also opened five new schools, added space to existing buildings and hired teachers and staff members to accommodate the growth.
Don Chapin has supported two levy requests since moving to Brown Township eight years ago. He points to his tax bill when he explains why he won't support the one on Tuesday.
His property taxes, including the cost of nonschool levies, have jumped from $5,000 in 2003 to more than $12,000 now. And his property value, he said, has dropped by $100,000.
"I don't mind paying taxes, but there can't be a total disregard to the private citizen's wealth," Chapin said. "You can't ask people to keep paying for more."
McVey said the district has cut $6.5million in spending growth since 2008. That includes $4.5 million after a 9.5-mill levy was rejected that year, resulting in the loss of five administrative positions and 34 teaching jobs.
After voters approved a 6.9-mill levy in November 2008, the district continued to trim anticipated expenses, he said.
"There's a lot at risk," said Bobbi Mueller, co-chairwoman of the levy campaign group, Community Partnership for Education. "I just feel the community has to make a choice on May 3."


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Outlast Review
Genre Survival Horror / Platforms Steam, PS4 (Q1 2014)
Developer Red Barrels / Publisher Red Barrels
Platform Played On PC
I will give you one tip: get your heart checked before playing this game. Seriously, go get yourself checked out, because this game has your heart racing and jumping for most of its length. Besides Amnesia: A Dark Descent, survival-horror titles of recent years haven't lived up to their potential – *cough*Dead Space 3*cough* so I was relieved to see how good Red Barrels did with this game. Also, I urge you not to compare this game to Amnesia, because both games offer completely different horror experiences.
Outlast thrusts you into the shoes of either the most bad-ass journalist, or the most ignorant one: Miles Upshur. Acting on a tip from an inside source, Miles breaks into the "abandoned" Mount Massive Asylum, in the remote mountains of…
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Posted on September 10, 2013, in Games, Technology, Uncategorized, Videos. Bookmark the permalink. Leave a comment.


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Monday, September 10th 2012, 5:30am
Monday, September 10th 2012, 5:32am
This post has been edited 2 times, last edit by "Autosynthesis" (Sep 10th 2012, 5:14pm) with the following reason: Cencored name to protect Nick's privacy.
Monday, September 10th 2012, 5:40am
Date of registration
: Mar 8th 2012
Platform: PC
Location: Philippines
Reputation modifier: 16
Monday, September 10th 2012, 5:46am
Date of registration
: Jan 7th 2012
Platform: PC
Location: 'Murrica
Reputation modifier: 19
Monday, September 10th 2012, 5:52am
Quoted from "Blue Panda"You're fedorable
Quoted from "ToTheSun!"I have the highest postcount. Nick doesn't count.
Quoted23:44 Lt_Col_Jesus: I'm -
23:44 Lt_Col_Jesus: Okay
23:44 Lt_Col_Jesus: I'm stabbing everyone
23:44 Lt_Col_Jesus: Bye guys
23:44 Nick: *flips table*
23:44 Legion: Bye, happy stabbing
23:44 *** Lt_Col_Jesus quit (Quit: off to murder the public at large).
Quoted10:41 LB: You just...reanimated Steve Jobs.
10:41 Dice: Well that would be unfortunate, I was just getting used to him being dead.
Quoted from "Pheozero"... fuck. Damn you hindsight!
Quoted23:58 Failure117: CAUSE IM FREEE
23:58 Nick: AS A BIIIIRD NOW
23:58 Failure117: FREEE OF NICK'S WORM RAPE
(the album in question)
QuotedViperFTW: HEY LOOK
ViperFTW: AN ALIEN LASER FISH THE SIZE OF THE SUN
ViperFTW: I WANT TO SWAT IT WITH MY COMICLY LARGE SWORD
ViperFTW: WITH
ViperFTW: THIS
ViperFTW: AS
ViperFTW: MY
ViperFTW: FUUUUCKING SOUNDTRACK DDD
Monday, September 10th 2012, 5:58am
I'll take pictures while he is asleep, after I fake a document saying I can play his Xbox while he is away, and I also add a clause just for that.
Pictures of Nick.
Send to some guy named Revolver_Ocelo7
Yeah, I didn't do that at all, you and I both know your laptop is shit, and it's probably battlelog being the piece of crap it is.
He said that the pictures would be taken in my sleep.
All things considered, he ended up screwing up some software on my laptop in his rampage of lawlz, but it should be fixable.
This post has been edited 1 times, last edit by "Skittles" (Sep 10th 2012, 6:10am)
Date of registration
: May 3rd 2012
Platform: PC
Location: Boston
Reputation modifier: 14
Monday, September 10th 2012, 6:20am
Monday, September 10th 2012, 6:26am
Alright, I'll track his movements best I can for 3 weeks and give you and Ocelot the compiled data through email.Wait, Nick raged over you changing his class setups? Y U DO DIS Skittles?
Anyways, pictures and jogging routes would be appreciated. Send to me and Revolver Ocelot.
This post has been edited 1 times, last edit by "Skittles" (Sep 10th 2012, 7:02am)
Date of registration
: Jan 7th 2012
Platform: PC
Location: Australia
Reputation modifier: 9
Monday, September 10th 2012, 6:34am
Date of registration
: Sep 2nd 2012
Platform: 360
Location: USA
Reputation modifier: 5
Monday, September 10th 2012, 6:39am
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