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WorldNetDaily Exclusive
Why does Fox News promote terror-tied, FBI-shunned group?
Bankrolled by same Saudi prince, CAIR now regular guest on network
CAIR's Ibrahim Hooper, right, on the Fox News "O'Reilly Factor" show with host Bill O'Reilly last week
Long a reliably patriotic media source in the war on terror, Fox News may now be among news outlets who have fallen under the spell of the Council on American-Islamic Relations' propaganda machine.
"We own the media," CAIR National Communications Director Ibrahim Hooper privately brags, according to a source currently working inside the aggressive Islamist lobby group.
Fox News host Bill O'Reilly last week invited the TV-savvy Hooper on his show to debate passenger profiling, the second guest appearance by the CAIR spokesman in a month. At the end of the segment, O'Reilly thanked Hooper and called him a "stand-up guy," sending shockwaves through the conservative blogosphere.
CAIR is no ordinary guest. The government has blacklisted it as an unindicted terrorist co-conspirator, and the group remains under criminal suspicion by the FBI, which has cut off outreach ties to it.
FBI agents arresting CAIR founding director Ghassan Elashi in 2002.
Congress and the IRS also are investigating CAIR, which has had no fewer than 15 executives and board members convicted or implicated in terror probes, including its founding chairman.
In addition, CAIR's very existence as a legitimate corporation has been challenged in a lawsuit in federal court.
Get "Muslim Mafia: Inside the Secret Underworld That's Conspiring to
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Given CAIR's proven ties to terrorism – which O'Reilly failed to mention – why would Fox offer the group's top executives a virtually uncritical forum on prime-time cable TV? Saudi Arabian money may be a factor.
It turns out that the same billionaire Saudi prince who owns a major stake in Fox's parent company also bankrolls Washington-based CAIR. And sensitive State Department records reveal Hooper – despite his repeated public denials – has personally solicited cash from the prince and other members of the ruling Saudi royal family during recent trips to the kingdom.
The common financial bond between Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal and Fox, and between bin Talal and CAIR, raises questions not only about Fox News's independence, but about the truthfulness of CAIR's top spokesman.
Hooper repeatedly has denied that CAIR receives foreign support, insisting it's a "grass-roots" nonprofit organization. In CAIR press releases, Hooper has stated unequivocally: "We do not support directly or indirectly or receive support from any overseas group or government."
However, smoking-gun video footage obtained during a recent six-month covert investigation of CAIR puts the lie to Hooper's claims.
See the video:
In a private conversation with undercover researcher Chris Gaubatz, who was posing at the time as a CAIR intern, Hooper boasted that he personally can "bring (in) a half million of overseas money" a year, adding: "If some guy's got a lot of extra money in Jeddah (Saudi Arabia), I don't mind taking it." Hooper made the remarks Aug. 30, 2008, during the Islamic Society of North America's 2008 annual convention in Columbus, Ohio.
A State Department cable citing Hooper by name, moreover, directly contradicts Hooper's denials about foreign support, according to the blockbuster book "Muslim Mafia: Inside the Secret Underworld That's Conspiring to Islamize America," which exposes the secret inner workings of CAIR, among other radical Muslim Brotherhood front groups in America. (The book is based, in part, on voluminous documentary and videotaped evidence gathered by Gaubatz during his internship.)
The sensitive but unclassified communiqué was written by U.S. Embassy staff in Saudi Arabia, who in June 2006 reported the following after meeting with a CAIR delegation: "One admitted reason for the group's current visit to the KSA (Kingdom of Saudi Arabia) was to solicit $50 million in governmental and non-governmental contributions."
"(Saudi) King Abdullah knows CAIR very well," the cable added.
Among other things, CAIR said the money would be used to "counter negative stereotypes about Muslims in the U.S." media, a phenomenon described by CAIR as "Islamophobia."
The core delegation, according to the cable, consisted of Hooper, CAIR Executive Director Nihad Awad and then-CAIR Chairman Parvez Ahmed. Besides Riyadh, the trio also visited Mecca and Jeddah.
Just three months after the trip, Hooper denied soliciting Saudi government funds.
"To my knowledge, we don't take money from the government of Saudi Arabia," he said in a September 2006 appearance on MSNBC's Tucker Carlson show.
At a meeting held that year at the Saudi headquarters of the kingdom-run World Assembly of Muslim Youth – whose U.S. branch was formerly run by Osama bin Laden's nephew – CAIR announced the launch of a massive PR campaign and warned potential donors that the U.S. was trying to curtail the political activity of Muslims.
Awad, with Hooper at his side, said CAIR needed a well-funded endowment to change American opinion. He proposed spending $10 million annually for five years on the media campaign.
"We are planning to meet Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal for his financial support to our project," Awad told the Arab press. "He has been generous in the past."
Indeed, the Saudi prince donated at least $500,000 to CAIR after 9/11. He also presented a $10 million relief check to then-New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani – or at least he tried. Giuliani rejected the gift after bin Talal blamed America's "pro-Israel" policies in the Middle East for the attacks.
Prince Bin Talal's voting stake
Bin Talal, a member of the Saudi ruling family, owns a 5.5 percent voting stake in Fox News' parent News Corp., run by media tycoon Rupert Murdoch. The prince has said he is willing to increase his share in Fox's parent to fend off hostile takeover bids by rivals. Murdoch, in turn, has invested in bin Talal's Saudi-based enterprises.
Prince al-Walid bin Talal
It is not immediately clear if bin Talal has influenced Fox's decision to book CAIR. But there is strong evidence that bin Talal has directly influenced Fox News content in the past.
As WND reported, during violent street protests involving Muslim immigrants in France in 2005, the Saudi prince persuaded Murdoch to change a screen banner that identified the unrest as "Muslim riots."
"I picked up the phone and called Murdoch (and told him) these are not Muslim riots, these are riots out of poverty," bin Talal said. "Within 30 minutes, the title was changed from 'Muslim riots' to 'civil riots.' "
Fox News has acknowledged it changed the banner after receiving complaints from unnamed Muslims abroad. It has not denied bin Talal's influence in its internal operations.
Bin Talal isn't the only member of the ruling Saudi elite bankrolling CAIR.
Bank wire records published exclusively in "Muslim Mafia" show another Saudi royal family member has pumped six-figure sums into CAIR coffers. In 2007, for example, Saudi Prince Abdullah bin Mosa'ad transferred $112,000 directly into CAIR's bank account at Citibank.
The Saudi bank transfers further undermine the official line peddled by Hooper, who has a reputation for dissembling.
Longtime CAIR critic Andrew Whitehead, for one, calls him "CAIR's liar-for-hire," and argues he cannot be trusted as a media spokesman. CAIR sued Whitehead for defamation and lost.
"The record shows CAIR habitually engages in deception," said terror expert Steven Emerson, executive director of the "Investigative Project on Terrorism" and author of "Jihad Inc."
In 2003, for example, CAIR accused WND of "demonizing Muslims" for citing a Bay Area newspaper's report that CAIR's then-chairman, Omar Ahmad, told a gathering of Muslims that Islam was in America to dominate and that the Quran would one day rule over America. In a phone interview, Hooper insisted to WND that CAIR had sought a retraction from the newspaper. But Hooper was forced to backtrack when confronted with the fact that the editors and reporter had just declared they never spoke with CAIR and, furthermore, stood by the story.
Despite CAIR's dubious reputation, Fox has recently given Hooper and other top CAIR leaders an unchallenged platform to persuade the American public to back off passenger profiling and other measures to counter an ominous upswing in terrorism.
Since the Fort Hood terrorist attack by a Muslim Army officer, CAIR's leaders have been invited on Fox at least four times, even though there are several other Muslim groups considered genuinely moderate who could speak for the Muslim community, such as the American Islamic Forum for Democracy.
"The issue," Emerson said, "is whether CAIR is an honest and reliable broker for American Muslims."
Hooper was invited on "The O'Reilly Factor" twice to shoot down profiling following the attempted airline attack by a Muslim would-be suicide bomber who concealed explosives in his underwear. In both appearances, Hooper – looking less fundamentalist without his trademark kufi skull cap – was given a full segment unopposed and unanswered by other guests.
In the wake of the Fort Hood attack, CAIR chief Awad was invited on Fox, and in an interview with Fox News anchor Martha MacCallum, Awad denied Islam had anything to do with the deadly massacre – even though it was known at the time that the shooter was Muslim and had yelled "Allahu Akbar!" before opening fire. Awad also got a full segment unopposed.
Free spin on Fox
Most recently, CAIR's chief lobbyist Corey Saylor appeared on Fox New during an interview with anchor Bill Hemmer. Fox did not balance Saylor with an opposing guest to challenge the CAIR spokesman during his full segment, in which he contended young Muslim men are no more "security threats" than 85-year-old grandmothers.
CAIR's Corey Saylor on the Fox News show "America's Newsroom" with co-anchor Bill Hemmer
Washington recently added Saudi Arabia – CAIR's patron – to a list of 14 mostly Muslim nations whose travelers will undergo extra airport security screening. Saylor slammed the new Obama administration policy as "across-the-board profiling" and complained "Muslims will pay the price for this one."
At no time during any of the four appearances by CAIR leaders did Fox bring up the fact that the FBI has cut off ties to CAIR or that the Justice Department has blacklisted the group as an unindicted terrorist co-conspirator – information critical to the public's understanding of CAIR's possible bias in delinking terrorism from Islam and arguing against Islamic terrorist profiling.
Curiously, even O'Reilly of "no-spin zone" fame failed to so much as hint at the many controversies surrounding CAIR in his introduction of Hooper.
O'Reilly also let Hooper get away with a glaring falsehood during his most recent appearance.
Hooper maintained CAIR does not share al-Qaida's "talking point" that America and the West are "at war with Islam." Yet after the Iraq war, CAIR's chairman declared: "The United States is at war with Islam itself."
Detractors say the misleading statement is yet another example of CAIR's deceptive tactics, which should give the media pause before booking CAIR representatives as the official voice of Muslim Americans.
Investigative journalist Paul Sperry, co-author of "Muslim Mafia," says giving CAIR's leaders a media platform is "like giving Hamas and the terrorist enemy a platform."
He notes that while CAIR may bill itself as a "civil-rights advocacy group," the FBI says that far from being a benign nonprofit, it's an American front group for Hamas terrorists and the radical Muslim Brotherhood – the parent of both Hamas and al-Qaida. The bureau last year cut off formal ties to CAIR's national office in Washington and all 30 of its branch offices across the country.
CAIR at the time blamed its ban on the "right-wing" Bush administration and confidently predicted that a Democrat administration would restore relations. Yet fully a year into the Obama administration, CAIR remains frozen out of any formal outreach with the FBI.
"Even the Muslim-friendly Obama has not helped CAIR," Sperry pointed out.
At the same time, the Justice Department has blacklisted CAIR as an unindicted terrorist co-conspirator in the largest terror finance case in U.S. history, against the Texas-based Holy Land Foundation. The trial ended in convictions on all 108 counts.
Prosecutors have also connected CAIR directly to the Muslim Brotherhood, a worldwide jihadist movement that seeks to institutionalize Saudi-style Shariah law in America and the West through immigration, coercion and political infiltration.
"From its founding by Muslim Brotherhood leaders, CAIR conspired with other affiliates of the Muslim Brotherhood to support terrorists," assistant U.S. Attorney Gordon Kromberg stated in a court filing.
Sperry says "that makes CAIR mouthpiece Hooper an advocate for the Muslim Brotherhood and terrorists, and a fiercely effective one at that."
He adds that the Saudis and CAIR's other Arab patrons pay him well for it – more than $95,000 a year in total compensation, IRS records show.
Who is 'Dougie' Hooper?
He also commands a six-figure annual budget for conducting opposition research against CAIR's enemies – which internal documents revealed in "Muslim Mafia" include, ironically, Fox's O'Reilly and other "right-wing" media personalities.
Ibrahim Hooper
A Canadian immigrant, the 53-year-old Hooper was known as "Dougie" before he converted to Islam. His birth name is Cary Douglas Hooper, according to government records.
He became a member of the Cairo Foreign Press Association while working for periodicals in the Egyptian capital, the global headquarters of the radical Muslim Brotherhood. Hooper also worked for local TV stations in Minnesota, where he once let it slip out that he favored Islamic rule in America.
"I wouldn't want to create the impression that I wouldn't like the government of the United States to be Islamic sometime in the future," Hooper said in a 1993 interview with the Minneapolis Star Tribune. "But I'm not going to do anything violent to promote that. I'm going to do it through education."
"This is Hooper's real agenda," Sperry said, "make no mistake."
In an October interview with CNN, Hooper denied charges of Middle Eastern influence-peddling: "We have no ties of any kind to any foreign group in any form."
However, CAIR is on record promising to do the bidding of its Arab backers.
In 2006, shortly after a company owned by the United Arab Emirates lost a controversial bid to take over control of several major U.S. ports, Awad, Hooper and other CAIR officials traveled to the UAE to meet with its rulers.
It was agreed that the UAE would set up an endowment in the U.S. run by CAIR to fund an "education" program to change negative perceptions about Islam that the UAE believes contributed to the public outcry that derailed its multibillion-dollar ports deal.
The endowment caught the attention of the U.S. government, which issued another sensitive State Department cable regarding the unusual deal.
It noted UAE Minister of Finance Sheik Hamdan bin Rashid Al-Maktoum endorsed a proposal to build a $24 million property in the U.S. to serve as an endowment for CAIR to launch its $50 million image-building campaign through 2011.
"The endowment will serve as a source of income," Awad told the Arab press at the time, "and will further allow us to reinvigorate our media campaign projecting Islam and its principles of tolerance."
CAIR is working out details of its endowment with the Dubai-based Al-Maktoum Foundation, founded and controlled by Sheikh Mohammed Bin Rashid Al-Maktoum, the ruler of Dubai. The anti-Israeli charity has held telethons to support families of Palestinian suicide bombers and other so-called "martyrs." Not surprisingly, the Arab press reported CAIR "values highly the stances of Al-Maktoum Charity Foundation."
After 9/11, the Al-Maktoum Foundation took a nearly $1 million stake in CAIR's headquarters property, just three blocks from the U.S. Capitol, as first reported by Sperry in his 2005 book, "Infiltration: How Muslim Spies and Subversives Have Penetrated Washington."
'Selling its services'
The United Arab Emirates fears if its image is not repaired, its business interests will continue on a downward slide in America. CAIR's leaders, who promised to act as a bulwark against any further backlash, described the planned $50 million endowment as more of a business contract than charity.
"Do not think about your contributions (to CAIR) as donations. Think about it from the perspective of rate of return," former CAIR chairman Ahmed told finance ministers in Dubai, according to the Arab press.
"The investment of $50 million will give you billions of dollars in return for 50 years" if a sufficiently Arab-friendly environment can be created in America to allow sheiks to buy up key U.S. assets, he said.
CAIR critic Daniel Pipes, president of the Middle East Forum, says the group is "selling its services to the Saudi and UAE governments by doing their ideological and financial bidding."
Yet CAIR is not registered as a foreign agent, as required by the Justice Department. And it has never disclosed its foreign funding or relationships with countries tied to 9/11 and potentially still hostile to U.S. interests.
According to the U.S. Embassy cable, CAIR has other wealthy Emirate benefactors as well, including: the Bin Hamoodah Group, a $500 million-a-year trading company; and wealthy stock trader Talal Khoori, a UAE national of Iranian origin who is said to have donated $1 million to CAIR.
It's plain that, notwithstanding Hooper's denials, CAIR's major funding comes from foreign sources largely in the Persian Gulf, including Saudi Arabia and the UAE – two nations that formally recognized and supported the Taliban rule in Afghanistan – and not from grass-roots domestic supporters as Hooper and CAIR publicly claim.
In fact, membership dues now account for a tiny 1 percent of CAIR's total revenue, according to IRS records cited in "Muslim Mafia."
As CAIR's domestic grass-roots support has dried up, it has stepped up its overseas fundraising efforts. Tax records show its travel budget for fundraising purposes has doubled since 2004.
Awad makes frequent pilgrimages to the Gulf to personally solicit funds. And he's often joined by Hooper, who over the years has obtained several passports and is described by government officials as a "heavy traveler," according to "Muslim Mafia."
CAIR's board recently proposed hiring an "international events manager" to help coordinate all the fundraising and other foreign activities. It has even created a special committee on "international affairs" headed by Awad to help tailor its pro-Arab message to American policymakers.
The amount of the UAE's pledge toward the $50 million CAIR endowment is undisclosed. But it's hardly the only Arab government funding it.
According to CAIR board meeting notes, revealed in "Muslim Mafia," a Washington PR firm used by the Emirates – Hill and Knowlton – has put together a "business plan" to help CAIR raise money from other Gulf states.
"The UAE ambassador is willing to gather all ambassadors of the Gulf Cooperating Council to listen to a presentation," Awad reported to the board. "In return, hopefully they will write to their respective people to ask for support."
The six-member Gulf Cooperating Council was set up by the Saudis as a regional common market that includes Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar and the UAE.
Investing in CAIR means having a reliable lobby for Arab interests in Washington, critics say.
"CAIR's leaders have clearly stated their intention to use Arab funds to promote Arab interests in America, even though CAIR is not a registered foreign agent or even lobbyist," Sperry said, adding that the interests of Saudi Arabia and the UAE – two nations tied to 9/11 – are more often than not at odds with those of America.
"Is O'Reilly aware of this?" Sperry asks, "And if he is, why does he withhold this critical information from his viewers when he books CAIR spinmeisters on his show?"
After the FBI in 2008 severed ties to CAIR, citing court evidence that its leaders were participating in an "ongoing" conspiracy to support terrorists, Democrat Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York requested that the FBI's anti-CAIR ban be made "government-wide policy."
"I would second that, and add an anti-CAIR ban in the media," Sperry said. "Of all people, Fox should know better than to give the enemy voice. There are other legitimately moderate Muslim voices out there who can better speak for the broader Muslim community, and they aren't hard to find. Why Fox keeps going back to CAIR really makes one wonder about the influence Saudi money is having at Fox."
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I will be picking this set up. Simply because I have always wanted a Sarlac, and the sceen would be really easy to recreate with the figures there and the few others that I have sitting in a box. Now the question is, do I need a $125 Falcon more than this set? I can only display one due to size. Which one is more important to me.
I say Sarlaac but i am not a vehicle guy.
That's actually two confirmed stores within 5 miles of each other that are pricing this at $70. Ridiculous.
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Phantom Hourglass wraps the standard Zelda formula in an innovative and fun control scheme that gives new life to several of the series' age-old concepts. The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker closed with Link and Tetra setting sail for waters unknown...but their story was just beginning, and it continues on the Nintendo DS. When a mysterious fog waylays their band of pirates and leaves Link alone on a strange island, an all-new adventure begins!
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Children between ages 10 and 14 are invited to participate in the Knights of Columbus Free Throw Championship at 2 p.m. Jan. 20 at the Marion Middle School gym. Registration is between 1:30 and 2 p.m.
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Pac-Man Championship Edition DX
Creator: Namco Bandai
Platforms: PlayStation 3, Xbox 360
Played on: PlayStation 3
Price: $9.99
Even with games like Super Mario Galaxy, Portal, and Bioshock populating the same 12-month stretch, there's an argument to be made that the original Pac-Man Championship Edition was the best game to come out in 2007. Reimagining the dot-gobbling reflex challenge as a five-minute, widescreen high-score rush was unexpectedly successful, and the game's blend of slick, simple neon graphics with thumping electronic music made the game immortal. Pac-man Championship Edition DX bests the original in every way. The revision packs in the original game with eight other maze modes, which are unlocked by playing through a well-organized set of challenges, including time- and score-attack modes. The centerpiece maze is Championship II, which evolves the ghost-eating chains of the original to its logical conclusion. Where Championship I populated the maze with the familiar four primary-colored ghosts, II is littered with ghosts. Most of these sleeping ghosts who are awakened when Pac-Man passes by. As they chase the hero, they form into one long, ghoulish string. When Pac-Man hits a power pellet and turns the tables, that chain transforms into tens of thousands of satisfying points. There are also a wealth of presentation options that cover the gamut of Pac-man's 30-year history, including even the weird rendered version of the little dude from 1996's curio, Pac-Man Arrangement… A
Aurora Chapter 1
Creator: Pastel Games
Platform: Browser
Price: Free
That Adobe Flash reopened the point-and-click-adventure floodgates over the past decade is wonderful and everything, but there's no getting away from the fact that most Flash adventures are ugly as sin. Polish adventure-game consortium Pastel Games make worlds that are downright gorgeous, bringing a painterly eye to a genre more commonly associated with wide-eyed Disneyisms or dour, Myst-style surrealism. Their latest episodic tale, the weird Western Aurora, definitely has more style than substance, but the former is strong enough to recommend the game. A cowboy wandering on the range in 1874 is whisked off by a tornado to a ghost town whose scant denizens are prisoners of Aurora. You don't meet your captor in this first chapter; you merely find a way out of town. The item-finding is the simplest sort of fair, never really taxing players with deep logic challenges—you just click whatever you see. The atmosphere and art are captivating, though, making it easy to forget that you aren't doing very much… B-
(Casual Gameplay Design Competition 9 entry)
Creator: StefanT
Platform: Browser
Price: Free
The theme of Casual Gameplay Design Competition 9? Friends. The name of StefanT's entry? Fiends. It's a cheeky move, but Fiends is a cheeky game, full of goofy, meta riffs by its cast of archetypes about how they can make it to the end of the 'game' and why they've failed so many times in the past. Even if the humor isn't your bag, Fiends is a winning puzzler that requires coordination of the skill sets of characters like Gummy, who can shield other members of the cast but is otherwise helpless, and Bonnet, whose droning stories are capable of leaving enemies in a hypnagogic state. The simplistic visuals don't detract much from the experience, and Fiends plays almost like a top-down version of that other team-based, comedy-infused puzzle game: The Lost Vikings… B+
But That Was [Yesterday]
(CGDC 9 entry)
Creator: Michael Molinari
Platform: Browser
Price: Free
Michael Molinari's [Together] won the CGSC 8 with its simple but arty execution, polished soundtrack, and nerve-jangling 8-bit smoke monster. Molinari's winning entry for CGDC 9 is But That Was [Yesterday], which keeps the catchy brackets but forgoes the streamlining, opting instead for a three-act story. Your own memories are the villain, a burbling black wall that bars progress until your latest friend and mentor imparts some necessary skills. The presentation is as lovely as ever, and [Yesterday]'s wordless cut-scenes are surprisingly moving, but the game's pace can become practically meditative, with lengthy tutorials required for tasks that take seconds to master. Maybe not everyone will find it worth their time to unlock those multiple endings, but Molinari's latest creation is absolutely worth playing through once… B+
Rage: Mutant Bash TV/Rage HD
Creator: id Software
Platforms: iPhone/iPad (Universal Binary)
Reviewed on: iPhone
Price: Rage—$0.99; Rage HD—$1.99
This simplified spinoff of id Software's as-yet-unreleased Rage series is a preview of what's to come in 2011 and also a spiritual sequel to Smash TV. You parade from rust-colored room to rust-colored room in three five-minute levels, firing off headshots and collecting cash prizes. Gorgeous graphics aside, one of the more interesting revelations is that Rage does away with the lame onscreen thumbstick. The game instead automatically moves you from room to room, allowing you to focus solely on aiming and shooting, either by touching or tilting the screen. You remain stationary until you've cleared the current room, and while you need to stay on your toes to look around for guys crawling out from the ceiling or behind barriers, one of your biggest foes is the stupidly placed pause button, right in the middle of the screen near where your thumb would rest. In some respects, Mutant Bash TV is a tech demo, showing that the iPhone can pull off impressive visuals, but it also manages to squeeze in enjoyable, although somewhat fleeting, running and gunning… B
Escape From The Underworld
Creator: Banov
Platform: PC
Price: Free
The lack of choice in videogames has proven effective fodder for titles big and small, but Escape From The Underworld's tutorial takes that lack of choice to a bizarre and awesome extreme. You play an angel, and you learn the controls by slaughtering a town full of innocents. Your heavenly superiors do not look kindly upon this, so they strip you of your powers and send you to the underworld, from which you have to escape by collecting items and power-ups, Super Metroid-style. The game was made in a hurry for a contest, hence the clunky graphics and wild swings in difficulty. However, the music and a well-executed concept are enough to balance out the rough edges… B+
Dismantlement Series
Creator: Gam.eBB
Platform: Browser
Price: Free
"Please dismantling burger. You have only screwdriver. The tool you can use is the screwdriver." It's a simple, if bizarre, premise. But as with all of the "dismantlement" games, taking apart a hamburger with a screwdriver is more difficult than it sounds (though just as weird). The screwdriver conceit provides the framework for a series of mouse-driven logic puzzles that you solve by poring over the object you're trying to dismantle and interpreting the cryptic clues hidden throughout. There are eight games in the series so far, and while they vary in difficulty—the hamburger is relatively easy, but the hard drive is insane—most of the little puzzles hit a sweet spot of obscurity: They seem impossible at first glance and laughably obvious when the solution hits you. (One critical hint: Sometimes you have to click outside the edges of an object to get a different view of it.) Don't worry about the Japanese text on the Gam.eBB homepage; these games speak a universal language of subterfuge… B+
Brother Nephi's Ultra-Funtastic Point-And-Click Adventure Chapter 2: Quest For The Plates
Creator: Book Of Mormon Toons
Platform: Browser
Price: Free
Given the frequency with which Mormonism is satirized—Trey Parker and Matt Stone have pulled down many a paycheck by swinging at the massive easy target that is the Church Of Jesus Christ Of Latter Day Saints—you'd be forgiven for not being able to tell just what the hell Brother Nephi's Ultra-Funtastic Point-And-Click Adventure is getting at. Is the game making fun of the Book of Mormon's wacky founding myth about a family of Israelites bringing their giant metal bible to the United States? Or is it just trying to make it relatable to them youths on the Facebooks? In the 20 minutes it takes to play through this simple game, you likely won't have found an answer. The game juxtaposes a grotesque, God-ordered beheading with love poems about camels. The "find-item, give-item" puzzle solving is downright strange. Also, what's with the hobo jokes? And the animal smuggling? The developers are apparently former Mormon missionaries themselves, but it's hard to tell if this chuckle-eliciting mediocre adventure is winking at the player or not… C+
Creator: Zillix
Platform: Browser
Price: Free
As roughly seven pixels of hero, your task in Endeavor is to obtain a treasure that rightly belongs in your dwarfish family. The path to said treasure cuts through a sprawling Metroidvania world, complete with some I Can Hold My Breath Forever-style aquatics, volcanoes, jungle mazes, and even a disembodied voice whose suggestions just might be on the self-serving side, à la Depict1. Most of the game's charms rest in its jumping and "endurance" mechanics rather than in its cosmetic appeal, but for a game built in a month for the Ludum Dare October Challenge, Endeavor delivers the platformer goods, and with multiple endings to boot… B+
Paper Venture
Creator: Arcade Armory
Platform: Browser
Price: Free
Paper Venture will expose just how terrible your mouse set-up is. The unfrill-y puzzle game demands the kind of mouse dexterity that hours of web-surfing and self-Googling simply don't require. Backed by a poor man's Moby soundtrack, a robot blindly walks forward, strolling off platforms and into whirring buzzsaws if given the chance. You control a block with your mouse, which can fill in gaps, lift the robot off the ground, or act as a wall for him to walk into (which makes him change direction). The game hinges on your ability to maneuver that block, thus early levels are a cinch if you can maintain the requisite discipline to put the robot on top and slowly move the mouse across to the exit. Later levels, though, can be failed with only the slightest wobble of the wrist—which will happen. The reliance on the mouse oversimplifies Paper Venture at times, but the game still sets itself apart with pleasant hand-drawn graphics… B+
One Eye Open
(2010 Interactive Fiction Competition entry)
Creators: Colin Sandel and Carolyn VanEseltine
Platforms: Browser, Linux, Mac, PC (Glulx interpreter required)
Price: Free
A technical note on the Interactive Fiction Competition entries reviewed here: Most of the games can be played in a web browser—the competition organizers have provided a list of links—but some games run slowly when played online. Yes, they're just text, but for whatever reason, this is a problem. So the more reliable option is to use a dedicated application that can interpret the handful of languages used to program interactive fiction. These applications are lightweight, available for a wide variety of platforms, and usually free.
One challenge for authors writing in the second-person perspective is deciding how much to tell the players what they're supposed to be feeling. In the hands of a clumsier scribe, the gory, thrilling "interactive nightmare" One Eye Open could have been bogged down by text-adventure clichés like "You are disgusted" or "You are horrified by what you see." Instead, this game is confident that players will react to its intense depiction of a hospital overtaken by a massive genetic abomination. While One Eye Open doesn't break much new ground in the "biological experiment gone wrong" trope, it's a striking example of the style. The story fleshes out a large cast of characters despite the fact that you are essentially alone in the hospital—you experience the others through psychic flashbacks and scraps of writing. Taking third place in this year's Interactive Fiction Competition, this memorable game probably fell short of first only because of some text-parser glitches and its extraordinary length. Competition judges must evaluate a game after two hours of play, but fully exploring Mt. Airy Hospital can take more than twice as long… A-
(IFComp 2010 entry)
Creator: Matt Wigdahl
Platforms: Browser, Linux, Mac, PC (Glulx interpreter required)
Price: Free
The first-place finisher of this year's IF Competition is also one of the most accessible. You play as a 12-year-old headed to a summer of volunteer work in New Zealand, except this is an alternate reality where that country's surviving dinosaur population allowed the native Maori to resist colonization. The game has a pretty straightforward "Billy And The Cloneasaurus" feel, with simple puzzles and a simpler plucky-kid-vs.-poachers conflict. If Aotearoa isn't exactly bursting with surprises, it is at least executed with craft, and a motif of native mythology—based in actual Maori myth—adds an appealing mystical flavor… B+
The Blind House
(IFComp 2010 entry)
Creator: Amanda Allen (writing as Maude Overton)
Platform: Linux, Mac, PC (GLULX interpreter required)
Price: Free
Weirdly mesmerizing, The Blind House is like a combination of Roman Polanski's Repulsion and Ingmar Bergman's Persona, crossed with something like Single White Female. Allen's prose can be a little overwrought, but she's very good at poking holes in the usual "you're wandering around someone's house, looking into things you shouldn't be" gameplay by suggesting the player character is hiding something very, very disturbing. Allen freely says in her introduction that the game is meant to be less about puzzle solving and more about telling a story that's open to all manner of interpretations, and that's probably true. There are few, if any, traditional puzzles, and while trying to trigger new events may drive some players nuts (particularly since the hints are so vague), it's just fun to wander around the house of the title, trying to figure out the secret of just what it was main character Helena did to seemingly drive her out of her head and why she's so obsessed with house owner Marissa. The ending will frustrate some, with its lack of easy answers, but Allen's descriptions nicely layer on the foreboding, creating a wonderful atmosphere, and there's a surprising amount to do in the small house… A-
Death Off The Cuff
(IFComp 2010 entry)
Creator: Simon Christiansen
Platforms: Browser, Linux, Mac, PC (Z-Code interpreter required)
Price: Free
Impatient mystery readers skip to the last chapter for the big reveal; Death Off The Cuff is the text-adventure equivalent. It opens in the lounge of a swanky hotel, where the suspects of an upper-crust murder case have been gathered by you, famed French detective Anthony Saint Germain. This is the climactic moment when Germain is to accuse the culprit, except that he has no idea who did it. In fact, he doesn't seem to have done any investigating at all, simply coasting on his reputation as the Continent's greatest sleuth. Thus your dramatic moment becomes one huge bluff. The object of the game is to stall for time in the hopes that something in your blind prattling will prompt the culprit to slip up and reveal his or her guilt. It's a clever satire, both of murder mysteries and of interactive fiction itself. After all, what IF player hasn't experienced the struggle to come up with words that will make the game spit out something—anything—of substance? Death Off The Cuff takes that perennial frustration and builds an amusing half-hour out of it… B
Rogue Of The Multiverse
(IFComp 2010 entry)
Creator: C.E.J. Pacian
Platform: Linux, Mac, PC (TADS 3 interpreter required)
Price: Free
C.E.J. Pacian has become somewhat famous within the IF community for his fast-paced, often hilarious games based in weird universes, featuring strong writing and even the occasional action sequence. Rogue Of The Multiverse is no exception, boasting a strong non-player character in the hilariously amoral Dr. Sliss, a reptilian scientist just trying to figure out why the chimp before her (the player) doesn't respond as fervently to promises of bananas as she thinks it should. The central device of the game—going on missions on various planets to "tag" objects of interest—is perhaps less exciting than it could be, though it's still engaging, and there's a surprising amount of stuff to do in such a short game, along with a legitimately thrilling jet-bike chase, done entirely in text. Also, like all Pacian games, it's very funny. Slight, but well worth a look… B+
Flight Of The Hummingbird
Creator: Michael Martin
Platform: Browser, Linux, Mac, PC (Z-Code interpreter required)
Price: Free
It would never occur to you just how measured a superhero's actions need to be until you play Michael Martin's The Flight Of The Hummingbird. Dr. Sinister has kicked into motion a nefarious, though curiously undefined, plot to take over the world on New Year's Eve in 2014. The Concordance Of Powered Response has sent you, The Hummingbird, to Sinister's island fortress to put a kibosh on his evil plot. The Hummingbird's special power is the basis for Martin's twist on text adventuring. You can fly by drinking the Hummingbird Energy Drink, but only temporarily. One sip gives you five inputs of sustained flight, so many puzzles revolve around manipulation of altitude and refueling. It gets tricky fast, as you need to be at least 50 feet in the air to take another drink. The writing is good if unspectacular, peppered with some funny dialogue—"Ha HA! Take that, hidebound traditional villains!"—but language is the game's downfall. Like many IF games, your progress depends not on cleverness and linear thought but whether you use the right words. You'll waste minutes trying to turn on a computer terminal only to consult the hints and find you were supposed to say "MASTER POWER TERMINAL" instead of "MAIN POWER TERMINAL"… B-
(IFComp 2010 entry)
Creator: Sara Dee
Platform: Browser, Linux, Mac, PC (Z-Code interpreter required)
Price: Free
A fairy tale primarily aimed at children, Mite may be too simple for even the least experienced of young text adventurers. Players take on the part of a tiny being who ventures out into the wider garden to return a magical gem to the fairy prince, encountering hobgoblins, fair maidens, and an armored chipmunk along the way. Even by the shorter standards of the IF Competition, Mite is incredibly brief, and the parser has a bad habit of being finicky about language choices. The game's also far too easy, though the writing is charming, and the plot is cute for this sort of thing… C+
The People's Glorious Revolutionary Text Adventure Game
(IFComp 2010 entry)
Creator: Taylor Vaughan
Platforms: Browser, Linux, Mac, PC (Z-Code interpreter required)
Price: Free
The revolution in this game is a bloodless one, achieved with zany hijinks rather than riots and gunfire. You play a bitter communist determined to purge the capitalist scourge from your local suburb, helped by a few "comrades" who boast varying levels of competence. Partly because of the form's inherent lack of a fourth wall, humor in interactive comedy tends toward the off-kilter variety, and TPGRTAG fits that trend. The logic doesn't hold together too well, and the jokes are hit or miss. (Communist Ventriloquator: hit. "Wodka": miss.) But the game remains appealing by virtue of the fact that it's working in the nerdiest form of comedy. B-


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Hostess gift ideas for under $30
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If you're a social butterfly, your holidays are filled with back to back parties.
And you know it's rude to show up empty handed.
Here are 5 gift ideas for under $30 that you can give to any hostess this holiday season.
1- Stemmarkers by Modern-Twist, $16 for a set of 6.
Help your hostess keep track of what their guests are drinking with these food-safe stemmarkers. Use a ballpoint pen to scribble your name, initials or the type of wine you're drinking. These can also be used as napkin rings.
Also available in retro and solid.
2- Normann Copenhagen Rocking Glasses, $25 for a set of 4.
The Rocking Glass features a curved bottom that allows it to rock without spilling over. Perfect for serving drinks and/or desserts. They also make really cool votive holders.
3- Normann Copenhagen True Feelings Tea Light Candle Holder, $26 for set of 2.
Give this gift as a decorative accent and let the cozy atmosphere radiate.
4- FUZ Wine Pocket, $25.
You can't go wrong with the gift of wine. But you can certainly take it up a notch by presenting your bottle in this wine pocket.
5- Tina Frey Designs Hans Desk/Vanity Tray, $26.
Handmade by artist Tina Frey, these decorative trays are perfect for desks, vanities and bookcases.
* Holiday tip: It's good to stock up on a few of these items so that you're prepared for those last minute invites!


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© 2012 The Joy of Cooking Trust and the MRB Revocable Trust
The Great Depression tightened its grip on a shaken nation in 1931, but not on the resolve of one strong-willed St. Louis woman confronting another sort of wound. Desolated by her husband's suicide in 1930, she forged her own new purpose in life. She spent more than a year assembling a collection of favorite recipes and sent it forth into the world, at her own expense, with a title that defied grief: The Joy of Cooking.
When Irma von Starkloff Rombauer (1877-1962) began her late-life career with the encouragement of her son, Edgar Jr., and her daughter, Marion, the major American cookbooks were mostly the work of what H. L. Mencken called "cooking-school marms" or "a vast and cocksure rabble of dietitians." Irma, the daughter of a cultured and politically active immigrant German family, was something else entirely. A complete amateur with no official credentials, she nonetheless knew that neophyte cooks somehow learn faster in the company of a friend. This small, chic, witty, and immensely forceful woman appointed herself that friend.
For several years she sold copies of her book out of her apartment, while rethinking the whole business of recipe writing. Eventually she hit on a novel format with the ingredients lists worked into the directions, now known as the action method. With the help of her husband's former secretary, Mary Whyte (later Mary Whyte Hartrich), she recast all her recipes in the new style and prepared an expanded edition published in 1936 by the Bobbs-Merrill Company of Indianapolis. It was a modest success.
These first JOY editions take us back to an America where chicken was expensive and veal cheap, most kitchen knives had to be scoured clean with lemon juice to keep from staining, "frosted" (frozen) vegetables were making a very slow entry into kitchens, home refrigerators didn't outnumber literal "iceboxes" cooled by blocks of ice, and milk was not homogenized. Electric mixers were a novelty; most people beat egg whites or whipped cream with a rotary eggbeater or wire whisk. Pureeing was done without blenders or food processors, by forcing the ingredients through a sieve with a wooden pusher or spoon. Many people had never encountered zucchini, broccoli, acorn squash, soy sauce, or fresh ginger. Goat cheese, fennel, fettuccine, bagels, yogurt, macadamia nuts, mangoes, hoisin sauce, extra-virgin olive oil, and cilantro were esoteric items known only to a few. Cherry tomatoes, Cornish hens, and butter wrapped in quarter-pound sticks lay some distance in the future, as did aluminum foil, household plastic bags, paper towels, and plastic wrap.
The only ethnic cuisines that most Americans had any exposure to were German, Italian, Chinese, and, in some states, Mexican. The favorite ways of serving vegetables (aside from simply boiled and buttered) were creamed or made into timbales or soufflés. For a backyard cookout—few people said "barbecue"—you needed to build a brick or stone fireplace. Mainstream cooks and hostesses might have had a qualm or two about putting garlic in the salad, but not about serving steak, cream sauces, variety meats like sweetbreads and tongue, butter-and-lard piecrusts, cheese omelets, gelatin salads, or condensed soups. Irma Rombauer's cooking wholeheartedly embraced all the important features of this landscape as well as her own family's traditional St. Louis German cooking.
Then as now, American food resisted easy generalizations, but in 1936, accommodating many diverse gastronomic preferences in a single cookbook was less of a stretch than it is today. And it was no stretch at all for Irma. She equally enjoyed old-fashioned dishes cooked from scratch and up-to-the-minute shortcuts using processed ingredients—like canned soups and evaporated or condensed milk—that some cooks thought were modern miracles while others looked down on them as inferior substitutes for homemade or fresh originals. The human bond represented by cooking meant more to her than fixed yardsticks of elegance or authenticity, and from the beginning, users of JOY felt that they were being addressed as friends, not pupils. They sensed the presence of a real person who could always take time to inject something extracurricular into the proceedings, whether it was a mention of her favorite comic-strip characters or literary quotations like Mark Twain's "Too much of anything is bad, but too much of good whiskey is barely enough."
The next JOY incarnation arrived in 1943, during the great national crisis of World War II. Irma wove together much of the 1936 edition with Streamlined Cooking, a short book of timesaving recipes that she had published in 1939, to produce an expanded edition that appealed to thebroadest audience yet. This revision paid attention to developments like pressure cookers and a growing herbs-and-seasonings vogue, introduced more culinary reference material and nutritional information, included a section of recipes that used unrationed substitutes for ingredients subject to wartime rationing (hence the first soybean recipes in JOY), and offered newly fashionable dishes like beef Stroganoff, vichyssoise, and guacamole. Just as important, Irma gave her own lively personality even freer rein, strengthening the sense of a friend speaking to friends as she patriotically held "our mighty weapon, the cooking spoon." Her efforts made JOY into a nationwide bestseller—indeed, as letters of thanks reached her from servicemen in the Pacific theater and harassed cooks on the home front.
In 1946, that edition was reissued with slight rearrangements to delete the war-rationing recipes, and in the same year Irma published a work for children, A Cookbook for Girls and Boys. She was already thinking ahead toward a more thorough updating of JOY for which she would call upon the talents of her daughter, Marion Rombauer Becker (1903-1976).
Marion had contributed artwork, recipe testing, and moral support to the first privately printed JOY. When Irma asked her to participate in the revision, she was living in Cincinnati with her husband, John William Becker, and their two young sons, Mark and Ethan. Like Irma, she was proud to call herself an amateur cook. But her skills and interests were a complement to her mother's, not a carbon copy. She held staunch beliefs about a range of issues extending far beyond the kitchen, from the nutritional importance of whole grains to the virtues of organic gardening and ecological awareness. Her years as the first professional director of the Cincinnati Modern Art Society honed her feeling for visual presentation as an aid to learning and steered her to the young artist Ginnie Hofmann, who was hired to supply a large number of unusually apt and informative line drawings for the new edition.
Irma, meanwhile, had made helpful contacts in the New York food world—especially her friend Cecily Brownstone of the Associated Press—that enabled her to keep abreast of new culinary fashions and kitchen resources. Mother and daughter together reshaped the book to embrace important postwar developments like the growing role of home freezers and other specialized appliances. New signs-of-the-times recipes included chicken cacciatore, bacon-wrapped prunes, plain brown rice, herring in sour cream sauce, homemade yogurt, and pizza (called Vegetable Shortcake). This JOY also provided bits of "desert island" information—e.g., how to pasteurize milk at home—that would prove a blessing to people in strange or isolated situations anywhere from city to wilderness.
Irma's part in the work was cut short by a series of strokes beginning in 1955. Along with the demands of her mother's illness, Marion was left to undertake the next revision with the aid of John, who contributed much editorial polish, wit, and culinary judgment. They produced not just a cookbook but an encyclopedic, though personable and entertaining, resource with strengthened desert-island elements and a new emphasis on background information. In this edition, Marion, who loved the sense of sharing pleasures with reader-friends as much as Irma, pointed to her family's special favorites with the designation "Cockaigne"—the name of the Beckers' beloved Cincinnati home, where she had created an eight-acre "wild garden" and model of ecological restoration.
This JOY would stand as one of the signal documents of the 1950s-1960s gourmet revolution, along with The James Beard Cookbook, Mastering the Art of French Cooking, The New York Times Cookbook, and Michael Field's Cooking School. It would, however, have a broader influence than any of these. It was the book that amateurs and professionals alike turned to when they needed to grind their own peanut butter, tackle chitterlings or a whole octopus, set up a campfire for cooking, deal with a then-exotic fruit like cherimoya, purify drinking water, or substitute honey for sugar without ruining a recipe. And it rightly judged that American cooks were ready to embark on dishes like fish quenelles, cassoulet, stuffed grape leaves, bolognese sauce, baked kasha, and French-style pâtés.
Because of serious author-publisher disagreements, though, the new edition was not published in a form acceptable to Marion until 1963 (a garbled version had appeared in 1962, the year of Irma's death). The next dozen years—a time of great fulfillment for Marion and John—saw JOY confirmed as the nation's reigning kitchen bible, perhaps the most remarkable American cookbook of the twentieth century.
The next revision was prepared in the shadow of advancing illness. From 1972 on, Marion underwent debilitating treatments for incurablecancer, and in 1974 she lost John to a brain tumor. With the support of loyal helpers, including Ethan and his wife, Joan, as well as illustrator Ikki Matsumoto, she soldiered on through all obstacles. In 1975, she saw to completion an edition that embodied many of her own concerns (for instance, about the often troubling course of modern agribusiness) and convictions while providing an even greater range of recipes and reference material. This edition also saw such new entries as granola, hoppin' or hopping John, bagna cauda, bulgur pilaf, pita-type flatbreads, and Chinese firepot. And it was the first to introduce kiwis and jicama, give practical directions for making tofu, discuss the uses of phyllo, and define kosher meat.
Intensely committed to continuity with JOY's past as a family legacy and document, Marion took pains to leave in place much that had been in the book since 1931, from tomato pudding, potatoes O'Brien, onion soufflé, and cinnamon star cookies to choice Irmaisms like, "A bit of tomato skin was once as out of place at a dinner table as a bowie knife." Her swan song struck an immediate chord with a huge audience ranging from suburban housewives to hippies on communes to the nation's most admired food writers, and it would prove the most durable of all JOY editions to date.
Marion died at the end of 1976, leaving JOY in the hands of Ethan and Mark. After some years of joint revision efforts, Ethan took over sole responsibility. The next decades saw large publishing-industry shifts—including the demise of Bobbs-Merrill—that impeded further progress for a long while, until at last JOY came under the Scribner imprint of Simon & Schuster. In 1997, Scribner published an edition that, unlike earlier ones, included commissioned recipes and other material from dozens of professional food writers. The new edition also broke with the past in deemphasizing the first-person comments and whimsical asides that had been crucial to Irma and Marion's approach. Yet they would have been the first to hail the valuable services that it performed: correcting past errors of fact in the light of more recent research; acknowledging the importance of appliances like food processors, microwave ovens (which Marion had had reservations about), and bread machines in contemporary American cooking; and—the most important change of all—taking account of exciting foods from other cultures, Cuban and Thai, Indian and Japanese. At the same time, the new version paid necessary attention to now indispensable ingredients or preparations (balsamic vinegar, Asian noodles, many chile pepper varieties, basmati rice, garam masala) and brought into the JOY fold such welcome recipe additions as grilled vegetables, gravlax, Mexican salsas, and Vietnamese phó.
In 1997, the year of that edition, Ethan married writer and artist Susan Cope. In the family tradition of looking toward future JOYs as soon as an updated version was completed, Ethan and Susan at once began working on a new revision for 2006.It would not have escaped Irma Rombauer and Marion Rombauer Becker's notice that, like some past JOYs, the seventy-fifth-anniversary edition finds the United States confronting "times that try men's souls." They would have been proud to send forth another version of their enduring work to all people of good will, with a title that still defies grief.
Anne Mendelson, author,
Stand Facing the Stove: The Story of the Women Who Gave America The Joy of Cooking


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"It's a real hot potato for sure politically for a lot of people," said Rep. John Zerwas, a Simonton Republican who oversees health and human services on the House Appropriations Committee.
The federal health care law would provide billions of dollars to the state to expand Medicaid to adults who don't qualify for the traditional program – more than 1 million people in Texas.
Republicans including Gov. Rick Perry oppose expanding Medicaid. But some Republicans have been trying to find an alternative way to get the billions of federal dollars available and provide health care.
Medicaid expansion would mean an estimated $100 billion more in federal money for Texas over 10 years. The state would pay $15.6 billion over that time
Zerwas' House Bill 3791, as approved by the Appropriations Committee, would seek authority to use federal health-care law money to buy private insurance for people who otherwise would be eligible for expanded Medicaid. It had been the subject of continuing negotiations.
Backers insist it's not a Medicaid expansion but an alternative to provide coverage. Perry had given a cold shoulder to the idea.
The bill hasn't been scheduled for House consideration by the Calendars Committee. Thursday is the deadline for the House to debate House bills, and there's not a Senate companion to the measure.
Zerwas said he respects the process but is disappointed that "what I think a lot of us agree is one of the premier issues of the session is not going be addressed through a debate on the floor of the House nor on the floor of the Senate. It's only going to continue to be characterized out of the governor's office.
"I don't think that's what we were sent here to do," Zerwas said. "I think we were sent here to take on these hard issues and have a very robust debate about it."
There is still the potential for the state budget to include a health-care provision.
The Senate version of the budget included a provision to ensure legislative leaders have a say in any state effort to change Medicaid eligibility even if the Legislature has adjourned by the time negotiations occur. It also would set parameters for changes.
The House had added a similar measure to its version of the budget, then removed it.
The budget proposals are the subject of negotiations in a conference committee.


text:
Bruce Wexler, MD
Professor Emeritus of and Senior Research Scientist in Psychiatry
Departments & Organizations
Psychiatry: Connecticut Mental Health Center | Neuroscience Research Training Program (NRTP) | Yale Global Mental Health Program
Office of Cooperative Research
NIH Director's Award for high impact, high innovation, paradigm changing medical research, 2012-2016
Founder and President "A Different Future", an NGO to reclaim the public idea space from extremists regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict
Facilitator for the Council of Religious Institutions of the Holy Land, designed and managing U.S. State Department funded study of how "the other" is portrayed in Israeli and Palestinian school books
Founder and Chief Scientist, C8 Sciences, created C8 Kids, a brain-based content-independent pedagogy to directly improve thinking abilities in 5-9 year old children. Combines computer presented brain exercises and physical exercises.
Education & Training
|Albert Einstein College (1973)
Honors & Recognition
Transformative Research AwardNational Institutes of Health (2011)
Second Track Peace Diplomacy West Jerusalem, Israel (2002)
1. Co-facilitator, Council of Religious Institutions of the Holy Land
2. Director, Research study of portrayal of the "other" in Israeli and Palestinian school books.


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- Introduction
- The evaluation of reasoning
- Fallacies
- Applications of logic
Applied logic
Applied logic, the study of the practical art of right reasoning. This study takes different forms depending on the type of reasoning involved and on what the criteria of right reasoning are taken to be. The reasoning in question may turn on the principles of logic alone, or it may also involve nonlogical concepts. The study of the applications of logic thus has two parts—dealing on the one hand with general questions regarding the evaluation of reasoning and on the other hand with different particular applications and the problems that arise in them. Among the nonlogical concepts involved in reasoning are epistemic notions such as "knows that …," "believes that …," and "remembers that …" and normative (deontic) notions such as "it is obligatory that …," "it is permitted that …," and "it is prohibited that …." Their logical behaviour is therefore a part of the subject matter of applied logic. Furthermore, right reasoning itself may be understood in a broad sense to comprehend not only deductive reasoning but also inductive reasoning and interrogative reasoning (the reasoning involved in seeking knowledge through questioning).
The evaluation of reasoning
Reasoning can be evaluated with respect to either correctness or efficiency. Rules governing correctness are called definitory rules, while those governing efficiency are sometimes called strategic rules. Violations of either kind of rule result in what are called fallacies.
Logical rules of inference are usually understood as definitory rules. Rules of inference do not state what inferences reasoners should draw in a given situation; they are instead permissive, in the sense that they show what inferences a reasoner can draw without committing a fallacy. Hence, following such rules guarantees only the correctness of a chain of reasoning, not its efficiency. In order to study good reasoning from the perspective of efficiency or success, strategic rules of reasoning must be considered. Strategies in general are studied systematically in the mathematical theory of games, which is therefore a useful tool in the evaluation of reasoning. Unlike typical definitory rules, which deal with individual steps one by one, the strategic evaluation of reasoning deals with sequences of steps and ultimately with entire chains of reasoning.
Strategic rules should not be confused with heuristic rules. Although rules of both kinds deal with principles of good reasoning, heuristic rules tend to be merely suggestive rather than precise. In contrast, strategic rules can be as exact as definitory rules.
The formal study of fallacies was established by Aristotle and is one of the oldest branches of logic. Many of the fallacies that Aristotle identified are still recognized in introductory textbooks on logic and reasoning.
Formal fallacies
Deductive logic is the study of the structure of deductively valid arguments—i.e., those whose structure is such that the truth of the premises guarantees the truth of the conclusion. Because the rules of inference of deductive logic are definitory, there cannot exist a theory of deductive fallacies that is independent of the study of these rules. A theory of deductive fallacies, therefore, is limited to examining common violations of inference rules and the sources of their superficial plausibility.
Fallacies that exemplify invalid inference patterns are traditionally called formal fallacies. Among the best known are denying the antecedent ("If A, then B; not-A; therefore, not-B") and affirming the consequent ("If A, then B; B; therefore, A"). The invalid nature of these fallacies is illustrated in the following examples:
If Othello is a bachelor, then he is male; Othello is not a bachelor; therefore, Othello is not male.
If Moby Dick is a fish, then he is an animal; Moby Dick is an animal; therefore, Moby Dick is a fish.
Verbal fallacies
One main source of temptations to commit a fallacy is a misleading or misunderstood linguistic form of a purported inference; mistakes due to this kind of temptation are known as verbal fallacies. Aristotle recognized six verbal fallacies: those due to equivocation, amphiboly, combination or division of words, accent, and form of expression. Whereas equivocation involves the ambiguity of a single word, amphiboly consists of the ambiguity of a complex expression (e.g., "I shot an elephant in my pyjamas"). A typical fallacy due to the combination or division of words is an ambiguity of scope. Thus, "He can walk even when he is sitting" can mean either "He can walk while he is sitting" or "While he is sitting, he has (retains) the capacity to walk." Another manifestation of the same mistake is a confusion between the distributive and the collective senses of an expression, as for example in "Jack and Jim can lift the table."
Fallacies of accent, according to Aristotle, occur when the accent makes a difference in the force of a word. By a fallacy due to the form of an expression (or the "figure of speech"), Aristotle apparently meant mistakes concerning a linguistic form. An example might be to take "inflammable" to mean "not flammable," in analogy with "insecure" or "infrequent."
The most common characteristic of verbal fallacies is a discrepancy between the syntactic and the semantic form of a sentence, or between its structure and its meaning. A general theory of linguistic fallacies must therefore address the question of whether all semantic distinctions can be recognized on the basis of the syntactic form of linguistic expressions.
Nonverbal fallacies
Among Aristotle's nonverbal fallacies, what is known as the fallacy of accident, in the simplest cases, amounts to at least a confusion between different senses of verbs for being. Because Aristotle's handling of these verbs differs from contemporary treatments, his discussion of this fallacy has no direct counterpart in modern logic. One of his examples is the fallacious inference from (1) "Coriscus is different from Socrates" (i.e., Coriscus is not Socrates) and (2) "Socrates is a man" to (3) "Coriscus is different from a man" (i.e., Coriscus is not a man). The modern understanding of this fallacy is that the sense of "is" in 1 is different from the sense of "is" in 2: in 1 it is an "is" of identity, whereas in 2 it is an "is" of predication. Aristotle's explanation is that the same things cannot always be said of both a predicate and the thing of which it is predicated—in other words, predication is not transitive.
What is known as the fallacy of secundum quid is a confusion between unqualified and qualified forms of a sentence. The fallacy with the quaint title "ignorance of refutation" is best understood from a modern point of view as a mistake concerning precisely what is to be proved or disproved in an argument.
Nonfallacial mistakes in reasoning and related errors
Some of the most common mistakes in reasoning are not usually discussed under the heading of fallacies. Some of them depend upon a confusion about the respective scope of different terms, which often amounts to a confusion about their logical priority. The phrase "farm machine or vehicle," for example, can mean either "farm (machine or vehicle)" or "(farm machine) or vehicle." In natural language, scope mistakes sometimes take the form of a confusion regarding what is the head, or antecedent, of an anaphoric pronoun. For example, the statement "The winner of the Oscar for best performance by an actress was Katherine Hepburn, but I thought that she was Ingrid Bergman" can mean either "The winner of the Oscar for best performance by an actress was Katherine Hepburn, but I thought that the winner of the Oscar for best performance by an actress was Ingrid Bergman" or "The winner of the Oscar for best performance by an actress was Katherine Hepburn, but I thought that Katherine Hepburn was Ingrid Bergman."
A philosophically important scope distinction, known as the distinction between statements de dicto (Latin: "from saying") and statements de re ("from the thing"), is illustrated in the following example. The sentence "The president of the United States is a powerful person" can mean either "Whoever is the president of the United States is a powerful person" or "The person who in fact is the president of the United States is a powerful person." In general, a referring expression ("the president of the United States") in its de dicto reading picks out whoever or whatever may satisfy a certain condition, while in its de re reading it picks out the person or thing that in fact satisfies that condition. Thus, there can be mistakes in reasoning based on a confusion between a de dicto reading and a de re reading. A related mistake is to assume that the two readings correspond to two irreducible meanings of the expression in question, rather than to the form of the sentence in which the expression is contained.
Several of the traditional fallacies are not mistakes in logical reasoning but rather mistakes in the process of knowledge seeking through questioning (i.e., in an interrogative game). For example, the fallacy of many questions—illustrated by questions such as "have you stopped beating your wife?"—consists of asking a question whose presupposition has not been established. It can be considered a violation of the definitory rules of an interrogative game. The fallacy known as begging the question—in Latin petitio principii—originally meant answering the "big" or principal question that an entire inquiry is supposed to answer by means of answers to several "small" questions. It can be considered a violation of the strategic rules of an interrogative game. Later, however, begging the question came to mean circular reasoning, or circulus in probando.
Some of the modes of reasoning traditionally listed in inventories of fallacies are not necessarily mistaken, though they can easily lead to misuses. For example, ad hominem reasoning literally means reasoning by reference to a person rather than by reference to the argument itself. It has been variously characterized as using certain admissions of, or facts about, a person against him in an argument. Ad hominem arguments based on admissions are routinely and legitimately used in adversarial systems of law in the examination and cross-examination of witnesses. (In the United States, persons who are arrested are typically informed that "anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law.") In a different walk of life, Socrates engaged in a kind of philosophical conversation in which he put questions to others and then used their answers to refute opinions they had earlier expressed. Ad hominem arguments based on facts about a person can be acceptable in a courtroom setting, as when a cross-examining attorney uses facts about a witness's eyesight or veracity to discredit his testimony. This kind of ad hominem criticism becomes fallacious, however, when it is strictly irrelevant to the conclusion the arguer wishes to establish or refute.
Some so-called fallacies are not mistakes in reasoning but rather illicit rhetorical ploys, such as appeals to pity (traditionally called the fallacy of ad misericordiam), to authority (ad verecundiam), or to popular opinion (ad populum).
Modes of human reasoning that are (or seem) fallacious have been studied in cognitive psychology. Especially interesting work in this area was done by two Israeli-born psychologists, Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, who developed a theory according to which human reasoners are inherently prone to making certain kinds of cognitive mistakes. These mistakes include the conjunctive fallacy, in which added information increases the perceived reliability of a statement, though the laws of probability dictate that the addition of information reduces the likelihood that the statement is true. In another alleged fallacy, sometimes called the "juror's fallacy," the reasoner fails to take into account what are known as base-rate probabilities. For example, assume that an eyewitness to a hit-and-run accident is 80 percent sure that the taxicab involved was green. Should a jury simply assume that the probability that the taxicab was green is 80 percent, or should it also take into account the fact that only 15 percent of all taxicabs in the city are green? Despite great interest in such alleged cognitive fallacies, it is still controversial whether they really are mistakes.
Strategies of deductive reasoning
As compared with definitory rules, strategic rules of reasoning have received relatively scant attention from logicians and philosophers. Indeed, most of the detailed work on strategies of logical reasoning has taken place in the field of computer science. From a logical vantage point, an instructive observation was offered by the Dutch logician-philosopher Evert W. Beth in 1955 and independently (in a slightly different form) by the Finnish philosopher Jaakko Hintikka. Both pointed out that certain proof methods, which Beth called tableau methods, can be interpreted as frustrated attempts to prove the negation of the intended conclusion. For example, in order to show that a certain formula F logically implies another formula G, one tries to construct in step-by-step fashion a model of the logical system (i.e., an assignment of values to its names and predicates) in which F is true but G is false. If this procedure is frustrated in all possible directions, one can conclude that G is a logical consequence of F.
The number of steps required to show that the countermodel is frustrated in all directions depends on the formula to be proved. Because this number cannot be predicted mechanically (i.e., by means of a recursive function) on the basis of the structures of F and G, the logician must otherwise anticipate and direct the course of the construction process (see decision problem). In other words, he must somehow envisage what the state of the attempted countermodel will be after future construction steps.
Such a construction process involves two kinds of steps pertaining to the objects in the model. New objects are introduced by a rule known as existential instantiation. If the model to be constructed must satisfy, or render true, an existential statement (e.g., "there is at least one mammal"), one may introduce a new object to instantiate it ("a is a mammal"). Such a step of reasoning is analogous to what a judge does when he says, "We know that someone committed this crime. Let us call the perpetrator John Doe." In another kind of step, known as universal instantiation, a universal statement to be satisfied by the model (e.g., "everything is a mammal") is applied to objects already introduced ("Moby Dick is a mammal").
There are difficulties in anticipating the results of steps of either kind. If the number of existential instantiations required in the proof is known, the question of whether G follows from F can be decided in a finite number of steps. In some proofs, however, universal instantiations are required in such large numbers as the proof proceeds that even the most powerful computers cannot produce them fast enough. Thus, efficient deductive strategies must specify which objects to introduce by existential instantiation and must also limit the class of universal instantiations that need to be carried out.
Constructions of countermodels also involve the application of rules that apply to the propositional connectives ~, &, ∨, and ⊃ ("not," "and," "or," and "if…then," respectively). Such rules have the effect of splitting the attempted construction into several alternative constructions. Thus, the strategic question as to which universal instantiations are needed can often be answered more easily after the construction has proceeded beyond the point at which splitting occurs. Methods of automated theorem-proving that allow such delayed instantiation have been developed. This delay involves temporarily replacing bound variables (variables within the scope of an existential or universal quantifying expression, as in "some x is ..." and "any x is ...") by uninterpreted "dummy" symbols. The problem of finding the right instantiations then becomes a problem of solving sets of functional equations with dummies as unknowns. Such problems are known as unification problems, and algorithms for solving them have been developed by computer scientists.
The typical example of the use of such methods is the introduction of a formula such as A ∨ ~A; such a rule may be called tautology introduction. In it, A may be any formula whatever. Although the rule is trivial (because the formula A ∨ ~A is true in every model), it can be used to shorten a proof considerably, for, if A is chosen appropriately, the presence of either A or ~A may enable the reasoner to introduce suitable new individuals more rapidly than without them. For example, if A is "everybody has a father," the presence of A enables the reasoner to introduce a new individual for each existing one—viz., his father. The negation of A, ~A, is "it is not the case that everybody has a father," which is equivalent to "someone does not have a father"; this enables one to introduce such an individual by existential instantiation. The use of the tautology introduction rule or one of the essentially equivalent rules is the main vehicle of shortening proofs.
Strategies of ampliative reasoning
Reasoning outside deductive logic is not necessarily truth-preserving even when it is formally correct. Such reasoning can add to the information that a reasoner has at his disposal and is therefore called ampliative. Ampliative reasoning can be studied by modeling knowledge-seeking as a process involving a sequence of questions and answers, interspersed by logical inference steps. In this kind of process, the notions of question and answer are understood broadly. Thus, the source of an "answer" can be the memory of a human being or a database stored on a computer, and a "question" can be an experiment or observation in natural science. One rule of such a process is that a question may be asked only if its presupposition has been established.
Interrogative reasoning can be compared to the reasoning used in a jury trial. An important difference, however, is that in a jury trial the tasks of the reasoner have been divided between several parties. The counsels, for example, ask questions but do not draw inferences. Answers are provided by witnesses and by physical evidence. It is the task of the jury to draw inferences, though the opposing counsels in their closing arguments may urge the jury to follow one certain line of reasoning rather than another. The rules of evidence regulate the questions that may be asked. The role of the judge is to enforce these rules.
It turns out that, assuming the inquirer can trust the answers he receives, optimal interrogative strategies are closely similar to optimal strategies of logical inference, in the sense that the best choice of the presupposition of the next question is the same as the best choice of the premise of the next logical inference. This relationship enables one to extend some of the principles of deductive strategy to ampliative reasoning.
In general, a reasoner will have to be prepared to disregard (at least provisionally) some of the answers he receives. One of the crucial strategic questions then becomes which answers to "bracket," or provisionally reject, and when to do so. Typically, bracketing decisions concerning a given answer become easier to make after the consequences of the answer have been examined further. Bracketing decisions often also depend on one's knowledge of the answerer. Good strategies of interrogative reasoning may therefore involve asking questions about the answerer, even when the answers thereby provided do not directly advance the questioner's knowledge-seeking goals.
Any process of reasoning can be evaluated with respect to two different goals. On the one hand, a reasoner usually wants to obtain new information—the more, the better. On the other hand, he also wants the information he obtains to be correct or reliable—the more reliable, the better. Normally, the same inquiry must serve both purposes. Insofar as the two quests can be separated, one can speak of the "context of discovery" and the "context of justification." Until roughly the mid-20th century, philosophers generally thought that precise logical rules could be given only for contexts of justification. It is in fact hard to formulate any step-by-step rules for the acquisition of new information. However, when reasoning is studied strategically, there is no obstacle in principle to evaluating inferences rationally by reference to the strategies they instantiate.
Since the same reasoning process usually serves both discovery and justification and since any thorough evaluation of reasoning must take into account the strategies that govern the entire process, ultimately the context of discovery and the context of justification cannot be studied independently of each other. The conception of the goal of scientific inference as new information, rather than justification, was emphasized by the Austrian-born philosopher Sir Karl Popper.
Nonmonotonic reasoning
It is possible to treat ampliative reasoning as a process of deductive inference rather than as a process of question and answer. However, such deductive approaches must differ from ordinary deductive reasoning in one important respect. Ordinary deductive reasoning is "monotonic" in the sense that, if a proposition P can be inferred from a set of premises B, and if B is a subset of A, then P can be inferred from A. In other words, in monotonic reasoning, an inference never has to be canceled in light of further inferences. However, because the information provided by ampliative inferences is new, some of it may need to be rejected as incorrect on the basis of later inferences. The nonmonoticity of ampliative reasoning thus derives from the fact that it incorporates self-correcting principles.
Probabilistic reasoning is also nonmonotonic, since any inference of probability less than 1 can fail. Other frequently occurring types of nonmonotonic reasoning can be thought of as based partly on tacit assumptions that may be difficult or even impossible to spell out. (The traditional term for an inference that relies on partially suppressed premises is enthymeme.) One example is what the American computer scientist John McCarthy called reasoning by circumscription. The unspoken assumption in this case is that the premises contain all the relevant information; exceptional circumstances, in which the premises may be true in an unexpected way that allows the conclusion to be false, are ruled out. The same idea can also be expressed by saying that the intended models of the premises—the scenarios in which the premises are all true—are the "minimal" or "simplest" ones. Many rules of inference by circumscription have been formulated.
Reasoning by circumscription thus turns on giving minimal models a preferential status. This idea has been generalized by considering arbitrary preference relations between models of sets of premises. A model M is said to preferentially satisfy a set of premises A if and only if M is the minimal model (according to the given preference relation) that satisfies A in the usual sense. A set of premises preferentially entails A if and only if A is true in all the models that preferentially satisfy the premises.
Another variant of nonmonotonic reasoning is known as default reasoning. A default inference rule authorizes an inference to a conclusion that is compatible with all the premises, even when one of the premises may have exceptions. For example, in the argument "Tweety is a bird; birds fly; therefore, Tweety flies," the second premise has exceptions, since not all birds fly. Although the premises in such arguments do not guarantee the truth of the conclusion, rules can nevertheless be given for default inferences, and a semantics can be developed for them. As such a semantics, one can use a form of preferential-model semantics.
Default logics must be distinguished from what are called "defeasible" logics, even though the two are closely related. In default reasoning, the rule yields a unique output (the conclusion) that might be defeated by further reasoning. In defeasible reasoning, the inferences themselves can be blocked or defeated. In this case, according to the American logician Donald Nute,
there are in principle propositions which, if the person who makes a defeasible inference were to come to believe them, would or should lead her to reject the inference and no longer consider the beliefs on which the inference was based as adequate reasons for making the conclusion.
Nonmonotonic logics are sometimes conceived of as alternatives to traditional or classical logic. Such claims, however, may be premature. Many varieties of nonmonotonic logic can be construed as extensions, rather than rivals, of the traditional logic. However, nonmonotonic logics may prove useful not only in applications but in logical theory itself. Even when nonmonotonic reasoning merely represents reasoning from partly tacit assumptions, the crucial assumptions may be difficult or impossible to formulate by means of received logical concepts. Furthermore, in logics that are not axiomatizable, it may be necessary to introduce new axioms and rules of inference experimentally, in such a way that they can nevertheless be defeated by their consequences or by model-theoretic considerations. Such a procedure would presumably fall within the scope of nonmonotonic reasoning.


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Nationals take out Dodgers
Los Angeles, CA – Ryan Zimmerman drove in three runs and Jordan Zimmermann was good enough to win his fourth straight decision in Washington's 6-2 victory over the Dodgers in the opener of a three-game set.
Adam LaRoche knocked in a pair to help the Nats snap a two-game skid and kick off a 10-game road trip on the right foot.
Zimmermann (7-1) gave up nine hits but allowed just two runs over 7 2/3 frames. The righty has surrendered just three runs over his last 31 2/3 innings pitched.
Bryce Harper had a hit, walked twice and scored two runs before leaving the contest in the fifth inning after colliding face first with the right field scoreboard. After the game, the team announced he did not sustain a concussion, but did require 11 stitches to repair a throat laceration.
"He's going to be alright. His knee was bruised and he had the cut on his neck, but he had no concussion. He should be alright," Nationals manager Davey Johnson said.
The Dodgers, back to their losing ways after a brief two-game win streak, got only three innings of work out of Josh Beckett (0-5), who remains winless in eight starts. He was tagged for four runs -- two earned -- on three hits.
"He's had some little things going on. We just need to make sure that he is alright. We'll find out over night and find out over night what's going on with him," Dodgers manager Don Mattingly said of Beckett's health.
Matt Kemp and Skip Schumaker each drove in a run for LA, which has dropped nine of its last 11 games.
The Nationals struck in the first when Span led off with a single and Harper pushed him to third with a base hit. Zimmerman then put the Nats ahead 1-0 on his ground ball to second.
Washington put three more runs on the board in the third after loading the bases. Zimmerman's double off the wall in right plated a pair and a groundout from LaRoche pushed another run home, giving the Nationals a 4-0 edge.
The Nationals took a six-run lead before leaving the bases loaded in the fifth. A throwing error by reliever Jay Guerra allowed Steve Lombardozzi to score from second and LaRoche grounded a ball through the right side to bring home Washington's sixth run.
It wasn't all positive for the Nationals, however, as Harper went crashing into the wall head first in the bottom half of the frame on A.J. Ellis' shot into right.
Harper collided with the scoreboard and laid motionless on the warning track as Ellis' hit went for a triple. Trainers immediately went to his aid and after several moments, Harper got up and left the field under his own power.
When play resumed, Schumaker sent a ground ball to second to plate the Dodgers' first run and they scored one more in the eighth on Kemp's two-out RBI single, which chased Zimmermann from the contest.
Los Angles went just 1-for-11 with runners in scoring position and were forced to use four relievers after Beckett was only able to go three innings.
Game Notes
Los Angeles' Adrian Gonzalez returned to the lineup after missing Sunday's contest with a neck issue. He went 2-for-4 ... The Nationals went 3-for-13 with RISP and left 11 men on base.


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I just upgraded my machine. From a Brother Project Runway CE5000PWR to the Singer Quantum Stylist 9960. Clearly this is a plastic starter machine to a metal mid range machine. I was worried about upgrading to such an expensive machine - but when it went on sale last week at Amazon for $250.00 I had to get it. I have been looking at it for over a month and was planning on maybe getting it in June for my birthday.
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Does anyone else use a machine without the foot pedal? What do you thing about it? And do you have an auto thread cutter? If you do - do you think you could ever go back? I don't think I could!!!
I am in LOVE!!!!


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RTC Conference Primers: #15 – Southern ConferencePosted by rtmsf on October 21st, 2011
Will Rothschild is the RTC correspondent for the Southern and the Atlantic Sun conferences. He can be found on twitter @warothschild.
Reader's Take I
Top Storylines
- The Arrival of Adjehi Baru. The highest-rated prospect ever to choose the College of Charleston, Baru is a 6'9″ native of the Ivory Coast who picked the Cougars from a final group that included North Carolina, Maryland and Virginia Tech. Bobby Cremins has always been known as a great recruiter – if not exactly John Wooden on the bench – but this was clearly his biggest coup since he beat out North Carolina, Georgetown, St. John's and Syracuse for Kenny Anderson back in 1988. Though Baru has only been playing basketball a short time and his offensive game is a major work in progress, he quickly established himself as a game-changer on the AAU circuit and shot up the recruiting rankings, eventually settling in as a consensus top-five center prospect. He will be an absolute load to deal with in the SoCon. After his eligibility was initially held up the NCAA Clearinghouse, he was cleared to play this season in early October.
- The Big Dogs Are Back: Will it be Davidson or Chattanooga? The two most tradition-rich programs in the Southern Conference are back on top this season and appear head and shoulders above what otherwise looks to be a very balanced league. Each team returns four starters, top-notch point guards, and a nice blend of versatile wings and size in the post. They also have coaches – Bob McKillop at Davidson and John Shulman at Chattanooga – who know how to get a team through the SoCon tournament and into the Dance. Davidson will be looking for its 6th NCAA trip under McKillop and its 11th overall, but its first since the team that was a rimmed-out Jason Richards jumpshot from making it to the Final Four in 2008. Chattanooga is also after its 11th NCAA trip, its third in eight seasons under Shulman, and its first since 2009.
- How Far Will Wofford Fall? After two straight Southern Conference championships and NCAA Tournament bids (in which they lost first-round games to Wisconsin and BYU by a combined 12 points), the consensus is Wofford won't be much of a threat in 2011-12. Coach Mike Young, who has turned down a couple of overtures from other schools the past two springs, watched five of the most celebrated players in program history graduate in May. But even with POY Noah Dahlman, the two title teams were more a testament to Young and his staff's ability to bring the right kind of players to Wofford, one of the most challenging liberal arts colleges in the South. Indeed, those teams always had a sum-is-better-then-their-parts ethos about them. Meanwhile, Young and his staff are excited about their past two recruiting classes, including a freshman group seven strong. Expecting the Terriers to win 20 games for the third straight season isn't realistic, but in his 10th season Young has this program rolling and stocked with young talent that will keep the Terriers from slipping very far down the standings.
- Will Appalachian State be better WITHOUT Donald Sims? While the 6'1″ Sims was a dominant scorer (21 PPG in 2010-11) he also dominated the basketball, and his teammates deferred too much at times to his one-on-one offensive ability. With the graduation of the school's all-time leading scorer and 2010 SoCon POY, the sense around Boone is that Jason Capel's second team will be much more balanced and difficult to defend. Omar Carter, a 6'5″ forward, is back after averaging 16.3 points and nearly 6 rebounds, and 6'10" center Isaac Butts returns after missing all of last season with an injury. As a junior in 2009-10, Butts averaged 8.5 points and 8.1 rebounds, and he makes Appalachian one of the few teams in the league with someone to physically match up with Baru. Capel also welcome a pair JUCO transfers – Rodney Milum, a 6'0″ guard from Houston, and Jamaal Trice, a 6'6″ forward from L.A. – who are expected to step in and contribute immediately.
Predicted Order of Finish


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When there is drinking in the family, everyone is affected. It's very difficult when one (or both) of your parents has a drinking problem. It affects how you are treated and it shapes your world. Alateen meetings are where you can find support and understanding from people your own age who are going through similar difficulties. If there's no Alateen meeting in your community, you're always welcome to attend an Al-Anon meeting. If you need help talking to your parents about your desire to try Alateen, here is a link to a YouTube video called A n New Denim Approach Shorts a leisure a Boutique xTnapqWDress Gerard winter Boutique Darel Casual IHZ5xa.
What is Alateen?
Alateen is part of Al‑Anon Family Groups. Alateen is a fellowship of young Al-Anon members, usually teenagers, whose lives have been affected by someone else's drinking. Alateen groups are sponsored by Al-Anon members who help the group to stay on track. Alateens come together to:
- share experiences, strength, and hope with each other
- discuss difficulties
- learn effective ways to cope with problems
- encourage one another
- help each other understand the principles of the Al-Anon program
- learn how to use the Twelve Steps and Alateen's Twelve Tradions
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What happens in an Alateen Meeting?
In Alateen meetings, young people share their own experiences—everyone in the meeting has been affected by someone else's drinking. Some currently live with a problem drinker, others do not. Alateens share their feelings, encourage each other, and share how the Alateen program has helped them. The adults in the meetings are the Alateen Group Sponsors, who help the teens to stay focused on the Alateen program.
Alateens share that they have come to understand that alcoholism is a disease and that:
- They are not the cause of anyone else's drinking or behavior.
- They cannot change or control anyone but themselves.
- They can detach themselves emotionally from the drinker's problems while continuing to love the person.
- They can build satisfying and rewarding life experiences for themselves, whether the alcoholic still drinks or not.