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Mid afternoon Friday round-up and Open Thread
The lovely thing about summer is that I get to sleep in a little. I like that.
The less than lovely thing about summer is that I am never alone. More than that, if my family is near me, they want me. Sometimes they want me for irritating reasons, such as asking me to do things they're perfectly capable of doing themselves (e.g., making themselves lunch); sometimes they want me for necessary things that only I can do (e.g., filling out the parent permission form for an activity or dealing with contractors); and sometimes they want me for flattering reasons ("I just want you to sit with me, Mommy."). No matter the reason, I can't write when they want me.
Other times, as is the case now, I have little bits and pieces of time within which to write. I'm therefore going to slam stuff out and you'll just have to excuse the inevitable typos. If I proceed methodically here, I won't be able to publish this until Monday.
** 1 **
Mitchell Langbert wrote an open letter to his state Senator asking that New York take away tax breaks and financial subsidies for colleges and universities that support the Boycott, Divest, Sanction movement:
I urge New York State to eliminate tax breaks and financial subsidies for colleges and universities that support involvement with the Boycott, Divestiture, and Sanctions movement. Such support is already illegal under Section 501(c)(3) of the federal tax code, which prohibits the use of tax-exempt money for political and ideological purposes.
If Langbert is correct in the way he interprets the law, all of us should make a very big deal out of this one, not just in New York, but across America. (Hat tip: JKB.)
** 2 **
So far, Israel is doing very well. Ironically, one can say that she's doing well because Obama hates her. With past administrations, when the president asked Israel to stop fighting Hamas, even when she was winning, Israel agreed to the request. She did so because all past administrations tacitly or explicitly promised that, if things get really bad, America will have Israel's back.
Barack Obama, of course, doesn't have Israel's back. He's mostly in Israel's face, with a shiv aimed at her jugular. The fact that he manifestly dislikes Israel explains why Israel now refuses to listen to his pleas for her to back down. He's got no carrot to entice her into listening to him, so Israel sneers at John Kerry when he, a Lurch without charm, insists Israel lay down her guns.
Israel is also doing well because Hamas is doing badly. The IDF put out a poster explaining just how badly Hamas is doing:
That poster doesn't even acknowledge the 150 Hamas fighters who surrendered yesterday.
For more on just how well Israel is doing, you can read an American Thinker article that purports to report a conversation with a very highly placed Israeli specialist and Bibi advisor, or read Tom Rogan's analysis about Israel's success is splitting Hamas and Fatah.
** 3 **
That same Israeli specialist and advisor has no doubt about the basis for Obama's hostility to Israel:
As for what is behind Obama's embrace of the Muslim Brotherhood, he attributes it to the fact that Obama is a Muslim and a member of the Muslim Brotherhood. Perhaps Obama also sees himself as the Caliph of any future Caliphate.
The other thing the post about the specialist mentions is Qatar's involvement in funding radical Islam. Qatar also funds lots of soccer. My son loves soccer, and he can't understand why I won't let him buy gear from Qatar-funded teams.
** 4 **
Contrary to what the Left says or implies, the war between Israel and Hamas is not a case of powerful white people attacking helpless brown people. In fact, Israel is a multicultural, multiracial, multi-religious society — and all people of good will within that society, regardless of race, ethnicity, or religion, support stamping out the terrorism emanating from Gaza.
** 5 **
CNN's Erin Burnett isn't just another pretty face. She's a really stupid pretty face, something that comes through loud and clear when Ron Dermer, the Israeli ambassador U.S., takes her to task for her inanely stupid "but what about the children" plea when it comes to the Gazan children that Hamas deliberate dots around weapons' sites in Gaza.
Regarding Hamas's tactics, I'm sure its supporters have made the point that the nature of Gaza (a small, urban area) means that Hamas can't have nice military bases or remote areas where they can stockpile weapons. That's true.
What's also true, though, is that there are choices other than schools and hospitals for storing arms and mounting attacks. Moreover, when your enemy goes out of the way to give you advance warning that it plans to demolish the schools and hospitals in which they've determined you keep your weapons and fighters, there are choices other than ordering women and children and sick people to stay in those buildings.
There are always choices — and Hamas, when it chooses, always makes the least moral choice.
** 6 **
Meanwhile, as the world's Muslims and Leftists castigate Israel for daring to defend herself in a more humane way than any other nation in history, most of the world is turning away from Muslim atrocities in Iraq and Syria. There, Muslims slaughter each other and Christians with fury and brutality, and in great numbers. Looking at this inconsistent behavior, one has to ask, If it's not the oldest hatred that drives the obsessive focus on Israel, what is driving it?
** 7 **
Sultan Knish explains that terrorism is a tactic like any other. Traditional militaries think in terms of conquering land or towns. Terrorists think in terms of conquering minds through abject fear:
This emotional calculus is misleading because it is an immediate response to a set of deaths. However terrorists are not trading an end to violence for a village or a town. They are calculating how many deaths it will take to force Israel to abandon that village or town. And once they have it, they will use it to inflict more terror on another town or village, this time using rockets.
Israelis were convinced that a price in lives had been put on Gaza and that if they withdrew, the killing would end. But Gaza was just the beginning. Not the end. There is never an end.
The goal of a terrorist movement is to change the relative perceptions of strength and the freedom of movement of both sides. Terror tactics create the perception that the winning side is losing. This perception can be so compelling that both sides come to accept it as reality. Terrorists manufacture victories by trapping their enemies in no-win scenarios that wear down their morale.
Described that way, it's hard to imagine how to defeat this profoundly cruel psychological warfare. Fortunately, though, Sultan Knish says it can be done but it will take political courage. Unfortunately, how often does one find courage in politics?
** 8 **
My back garden is dotted with solar lights. They're cheap to buy and don't require any electrical boxes, outlets, or cords in the garden. Buy enough of them, and they'll illuminate deck stairs just enough so that no one falls or will keep people from wandering off a paved pathway into the dirt. It would take a whole let of them, though, plus a full moon, to allow you to read a book by their light. Solar energy just doesn't deliver that much power, and that's the problem with trying to turn it into a viable fossil fuel alternative.
** 9 **
You've heard it everywhere else, so you may as well hear it from me too: Jonathan Gruber, an important Obama-care architect, has castigated the Halbig decision for daring to read Obamacare's language literally and, on that basis, deciding that subsidies only support state-run exchanges. Of course the government meant to include federal exchanges when it talked about subsidies, says Gruber.
A few years ago, though, Gruber was singing a different tune, when he gloated about tying subsidies to state exchanges. His theory then was that it would incentivize states to set up their own exchanges. In a sane world, Gruber would lay to rest the DemProg's discontent with the Halbig decision, but I don't see that happening any time soon.
** 10 **
Kimberly Strassel says that the Halbig case proves that the IRS, which has become an arm of the Democrat party, cannot be entrusted with Obamacare. It will do anything, including disobeying the law as written, to support the Democrat agenda. With that in mind, I wouldn't just remove Obamacare from the IRS's purview. I would argue for eliminating it entirely, and starting anew. (Like that's going to happen.)
** 11 **
I don't think Noemi Emery really explains the roots of Hillary's sense of political and monetary entitlement, but in trying to explain it, she sure paints a picture of a women who believes that the White House and millions of dollars should be hers for the asking.
My take is that Hillary didn't get to this point because of her Arkansas exile or victimized-wife roles. I believe she's just your ordinary sociopath, who managed to lever herself into a power path, and now wants more just because she's the sociopath she is. In other words, her history didn't make her a sociopath; the fact that she is a sociopath shaped her history.
** 12 **
Charles Krauthammer has offered a very interesting theory about Obama's bizarre passivity as the world burns around him: he believes that the arc of history will go his way so that he can just sit back and watch it happen.
If that idea — that bad guys will wither away in any event — sounds familiar, it's because you heard it from Jimmy Carter about our own American Revolution:
[I]n some ways the Revolutionary War could have been avoided. It was an unnecessary war.
Had the British Parliament been a little more sensitive to the colonial's really legitimate complaints and requests the war could have been avoided completely, and of course now we would have been a free country now as is Canada and India and Australia, having gotten our independence in a nonviolent way.
I think in many ways the British were very misled in going to war against America and in trying to enforce their will on people who were quite different from them at the time.
See, if you're just a little nicer to people on the other side of a quarrel, they'll fall in line with you. It's that easy. So if Obama just doesn't throw America's weight around, everyone will make nice in the end. Obama is helped in this theory by the fact that he seems happy to have that arc of history bend to Islam, not the western, Judeo-Christian tradition.
** 13 **
In the 1930s, many decent-ish people in Europe and England supported Hitler's rise. That's because initially they saw his fascism as the European antidote to Communism. It somehow never seemed to occur to Europeans, accustomed as they were to autocratic government, that the choice wasn't binary, between a tyrannical government that destroyed the rich and a tyrannical government that co-opted them. Individual freedom never occurred to them. That was stupidity, or at least limited thinking, on their part.
These same Europeans stopped being decent-ish but stupid, and became evil, though, when they still supported the Nazis despite the latter's increasingly insane antisemitism. That's another legacy of the European past — it wasn't just autocratic; it was also antisemitic. European's embrace of antisemitism into addition to totalitarianism is less forgivable than accepting totalitarianism alone, while the latter is a structural ideology, the former is pure evil.
Fascism and communism may be gone from Europe, and socialism may be dying on the vine there, but the antisemitism lingers on. That oldest hatred seems to be bred into the European DNA. Nor can one just blame the huge Muslim populations in Europe for antisemitism's resurgence. Just as the Ukrainians and Poles and French, while resenting Nazi invasions, supported Nazi ethnic cleansing, too many of today's Europeans, while frightened of the Muslims, cheerfully (and almost reflexively) chime in when the cry to "Kill the Jews" rings out.
** 14 **
Mr. Bookworm is convinced that I abandoned him politically when I moved from Democrat to conservative. I keep explaining to him that he abandoned me too, because he's been moving steadily to the Left. He denies that, since he still rejoices under the name "Democrat." Hard data, though, seems to support my perception.
** 15 **
A palette-cleanser:
** 16 **
This clever twist on a London Underground map makes a powerful point about Hamas's tunneling under Israel's borders and into her towns. If Hamas, instead of being impatient and firing rockets, had waited quietly, it's possible it could have carried out a terrorist attack in Israel that would easily have rivaled 9/11. Thank goodness, I guess, for impatient terrorists.


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Ghostwriters in Disguise ~ by Merry Farmer
There's been a lot of stress and confusion in Pioneer Hearts world lately over the concept of ghostwriters, what they are, and what exactly they do. I figured it was about time we had a quick tutorial on the subject to prevent any misconceptions and avert any stigma.
What is a Ghostwriter?
I'll confess, the first time the concept ever dawned on me was years ago when Hillary Clinton published her book It Takes A Village. All politics aside, I blinked and did a double-take when someone explained to me that she hired a ghostwriter to pen it. "Wait," I thought. "You can hire someone else to write a book and then put your name on it?" Yep! The concept blew my mind.
Since then, I've learned that a LOT of books out there in the world are ghostwritten. Do you know Sara Shepard, author of the Pretty Little Liars books that were made into the TV show? Well, last year she spoke at the Philadelphia Writer's Conference, and among other things, she talked about how she got her start ghostwriting for a popular YA series. Lots of those great James Patterson novels? Ghostwritten. A bunch of Tom Clancy? Ghostwritten. Many of those Robert Ludlum Bourne Identity series books? Ghostwritten. A super large chunk of the Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys books? Ghostwritten. There are a lot of books out there that are not written by the people whose names are in big print on the covers. (Although many authors these days will include their ghostwriter on the cover as a co-writer…in smaller print)
Okay, so why would someone have a ghostwriter write a book for them, and why would a writer want to be a ghostwriter?
Tons of reasons! James Patterson, for example, has confided that he's much better at coming up with the story idea than he is at writing it down in all its nitty-gritty glory. Other writers reach the point where they would rather do everything else that comes along with writing books—like traveling to signings and appearances, and marketing—than lock themselves away to write. Still others reach a point where they are incapable of continuing to write (that point sometimes being death, like in the case of V.C. Andrews). Publishers want the name to live on, whether the author does or not. And some popular series were always penned by a number of authors under one name so that they could be churned out fast and in large numbers.
As for why people become ghostwriters, according to Sara Shepard, it was a good way for her to get into the business. She was able to learn her craft in a much more risk-free environment. The series she ghostwrote for had specific guidelines about plots and characters, so she learned about structure without having to write twenty books that ended up on the slush-pile. Other people do it because it's a steadier source of income than trusting to fate when a book is sent out there in the world. Or—as rumors in my Philadelphia writers' circles purport—because if you're ghostwriting for a gigantic name like Tom Clancy, you can be paid about a million dollars per manuscript!
Most of the time, when a ghostwriter enters into an agreement with a professional publishing company or goes to work with a big name author, there will be an extensive contract. These contracts spell out exactly what the expectations between the author and the ghostwriter are. Oftentimes, the author will write a treatment or an outline, specifying exactly what the ghostwriter should write—like James Patterson does. Sometimes they will be given more leeway. These contracts will either specify how much credit the ghostwriter will get. They may contain a confidentiality agreement, which means the ghostwriter may be forbidden from disclosing that they have ghostwritten for a specific author.
Of course, all of this is the way things work in the traditional publishing world with old-school rules. But we now live in the age of digital publishing and indie authors. Just as those of us who self-publish can upload our manuscripts directly to vendors like Amazon and iBooks without having to go through a traditional publisher, so intrepid business people out there can seek out unknown writers, purchase stories from them, and publish them under a single pen name.
In these indie ghostwriting arrangements, the agreements can run the entire gambit from iron clad and professional to haphazard and crazy. I was reading just recently, in response to the scandal at Amazon over scammers who put together box sets with links that enable them to cheat the Kindle Unlimited system in order to log millions of page reads, that they often buy ghostwritten stories off of message boards to create their content. The scammers don't care about quality, only page reads. Fortunately, Amazon has been cracking down on that!
The same message boards and forums where scammers go to play can also be fertile ground for more legitimate authors and publishers to connect. Lucrative and satisfying partnerships can be formed between those who have the creativity and talent and those who have the business savvy. In the best of cases, these indie publishers treat their arrangements with all the professionalism of the traditional publishing world, putting together contracts that spell out precise expectations and compensation. The author can focus on writing without ever having to worry about more technical or business aspects of publishing. And both parties live up to their obligations and responsibilities toward each other.
But as is the case in all aspects of the new world of indie publishing, there are also publishers who are unprofessional and can become predatory. Because there is no regulating body for indie publishing or ghostwriting, it is possible for these publishers to maneuver authors into a position where they are held hostage, not given fair compensation, and where the publisher engages in abusive retaliation when an author decides to sever ties and set out on their own. What seems like a satisfactory relationship in early days can quickly degenerate into a nightmare behind the scenes – nightmares that the readers will never know about, except to be suddenly confused when a beloved author suddenly has a drastically different writing style or public persona.
Fortunately, when all is said and done, the talent is in the hands of the author, and as long as the terms of a given contract are fulfilled and respected, they can walk away from a bad situation and set out on their own, or enter into a new ghostwriting arrangement as they see fit. And the publisher is free to find other ghostwriters to continue any given name, if they so wish.
There's nothing wrong with ghostwriting or hiring a ghostwriter, as long as all parties involved are on the same page and treated fairly. For some writers, it's the ideal way to work. For others, it would never work. (I'm one of those kind, by the way. Too stubborn to write for anyone but myself!) But in case you are now starting to blink and get a headache and wonder if the authors and books you love are really who and what they seem to be, let me assure you that a very small percentage of authors are actually someone else or a bunch of someone else's. Writing is a heck of a lot of work, and unless someone out there is willing to offer you a brilliant contract with a lot of zeroes—and especially if you're an indie author—it's much more satisfying to write for yourself than to be a ghostwriter. So no need to panic! Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, we are exactly who we say we are.
Although some of us are a little spooky…

subset: commoncrawl


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Living with diabetes and squeamish about needles? You'll love this new invention from a doctor in South Korea.
Currently, many diabetics face the ordeal of multiple daily finger pricks in order to test blood-sugar levels and administer insulin as needed. To try and eliminate this painful hassle, Professor Kim Dae-hyeong of Seoul National University has developed a wearable, see-through patch that can detect sugar levels and deliver medication, as needed, to the wearer.
Here's how it works: sensors in the patch collect information on temperature, pH and blood sugar levels, relaying that information to an app. The app then makes calculations and, if the patients needs it, sends a message to the patch to deliver medication through the use of its painless microneedles.If all this sounds too good to be true, that's because it is: Kim expects his patch won't be available to the public for another five years. Still, it's always exciting to see new developments in the field of diabetic health management—especially ones that could get rid of those nasty needles!


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Kurnianto, Edy (2000) The Inheritance Growth And Jumping In Subspecific Crossing Of Mice. PhD thesis, United Graduate School of Agricultural Sciences, Kagoshima, Japan.
The small size of Yonakuni wid mice (Y. Mus Musculus molossinus yonakuni, about 14 g) and the large size of laboratory mouse CF#1 (C. Mus musculus domesticus, about 40 g) werw used in a series of experiments of subspecific crossing to study the inheritance of growth and jumping. The other teo laboratory mice designated C3H/HeNCrj (H) and C57BL/6NCrj (B) werw andded as materials in the 4x4 diallel cross study for body weight. Inheritance of the traits werw also examined in two-and three-way rotational crossing. Gompertz, Logistic and the other five growth curve functions werw compared to five growth curve functions werw compared to fit growth data. The Koops's triphasic function was the best fit according to the highest of adjusted coefficient of determination (AdjR 2) of 0.999. Reciprocal crossing between C and Y was conducted to evaluate the genetic effects on body weight. Litters were standardized to six mice at birth, three males and three fermales, and the first liteter used only. Average direct genetic effects werw larger than average maternal genetic effects in contributing effects accounted for 61 to 96 % and 35 to 92 % of total variance for 1 to 7% for males and 3 to 23% for males. This means thar prenatal maternal effects had a greater influence than postnatal maternal effects in contributing to variation of body weight. From 4x4 diallel cross experiment, C male x C female (CXC) ranked the highest in body weight at all ages studied (Wk1, Wk3, Wk6 and Wk10) followed byHxH, BxB and YxY. Heterosis effects were 6.5%, 10.22%, 8.70% and 5.89% for the respective ages. Degree of general combining ability (GCA) and maternal genetic effects (MGE) can be ranked as C>H>b>Y. Crossing between C and had a greater specific combining ability (SCA) than other combinations, whwrwas BxY had the smallest. Linebred had the highest effects on body weight, followed by GCA hetetitance, MGE and SCA. Inhetitance of jumping, as a measure of vigor, due to DC-electricshocking was analyzed in reciprocal crossing between C and Y. The ratio between jumping and non jumping mice (J:NJ) for C was 0%:100% whereas Y was 68% : 32%. The F1 and F2 from Y male H C femate showed 65%:35% and 51% "49% repectively; while reciprocal F1 and F2 from C male Y female demonstrated 100%")%, repectively. No differences were found in average heigh of the fist three jumping of Y, the first and second generations, ranged from 16.8 to 20.1 cm. The distribution of jumping height showed a tendency to be a normal distribution. The jumping activity and jumping height may be affected by some major genes and polygenes, respectively. Three-way totational crossing tended to maintain higher heterosis effects of body weight, but resulted in lower heterosis effects of jumping height, in whichthese results in contrast to two-way rotational crossing.
|Item Type:
|Thesis (PhD)
|S Agriculture > SF Animal culture
|Faculty of Animal and Agricultural Sciences > Department of Animal Agriculture
|ID Code:
|Deposited By:
|Mr. Sugeng Priyanto
|Deposited On:
|02 Sep 2009 05:28
|Last Modified:
|03 Sep 2009 11:24
Repository Staff Only: item control page


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Luke 13:31-35
Some Pharisees came and said to Jesus, "Get away from here, for Herod wants to kill you." He said to them, "Go and tell that fox for me, 'Listen, I am casting out demons and performing cures today and tomorrow, and on the third day I finish my work. Yet today, tomorrow, and the next day I must be on my way, because it is impossible for a prophet to be killed outside of Jerusalem.' Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing! See, your house is left to you. And I tell you, you will not see me until the time comes when you say, 'Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord.'"
The Pharisees say to Jesus, "Herod wants to kill you." No mincing of words here. They have a clear message, you are going to die.
Jesus calls Herod, the political leader, a Fox. He is a name caller. He is specific, concrete, never abstract. Herod is sly, cruel and preys on the weak. He does not say Herod is a bad guy. He calls him a name, a fox.
Jesus heals people and gives exorcisms. That is his job, his work, his vocation. He doesn't say, "I'm working."
Greg the the mathematician stares off into space for an hour. His wife yells at him, "What are you doing?" Greg says, 'I'm working." His wife may have been more satisfied if he had said, "I am working on a spatial math problems in my head."
Jesus doesn't say, "I'll leave soon." He says, "I'm out of here in three days." Not one, not two, but three days.
A man says to his lover, "I just need some space." Here we have vague, non-specific communication. He really means he is angry with his lover, or he is feeling guilty about something. He is thinking of leaving. By being vague and non-specific, he avoids the truth. We allow people to be vague. We need to be able to ask for specific information. We can be honest enough to be plain spoken and clear.
Politicians- "We are fighting terrorism. " That is vague, unclear and open to restrictions of our human rights. President Obama does not use War on Terrorism. He is fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan. I still don't like it but he is clear and specific.
Bad attitude- Vague, non-specific. I had a parish administrator who had a bad attitude. When he was harassed he would ask hurriedly. "What now?" So I made it a mantra and would repeat "What now?" Whenever I heard him do that, I'd repeat it "What now?"
"You make me happy" sounds very nice when someone says it to us. But that is so vague. What are the specifics of what makes you happy? You make me happy when you bring me flowers. You make me happy when you kiss me. You make me happy when you make an apple pie for us. The concrete specific items are really what make you happy.
Jesus predicts that he is going to die in Jerusalem. Jesus expresses his yearning and sadness. He gives a beautiful, concrete specific image to Jerusalem, He says, "How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing!" This is his picture of what God wants us to be, a family, gathered together under God's loving protection. This is an image of the peaceable kingdom. The peace that passes all understanding.
So when we are dismissed with the cry, "Go in peace to love and serve the Lord." We hear an abstraction. Our question must always be HOW?
Immigration, medical care for all, poor people, hungry in the alleys around the church. Serving the lord means specifically serving those people and our beloved families, friends and neighbors. Do something concrete and specific today to love and serve the Lord.


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Deaf blind individuals present a combination of vision loss and lack of hearing. That would generally answer the question what is deaf blindness? However, the causes vary greatly from one case to the next. People could end up deaf and blind as a consequence of aging, as was the case of Spanish painter Francisco Goya. Conversely, other patients may actually be born deaf blind. Regardless of the causes deaf blindness, the fact remains that deaf and blind individuals require a special deaf blind education in order to be able to communicate with others. The approach though differs depending on the particular characteristics. For instance, a person who experiences blindness after deafness will probably use sign language, while a tactile mode of spoken and written language is usual if blindness occurs before deafness.
A deaf blind school was not always easy to come by, as experienced by Helen Keller, who is probably the most well known deaf and blind person in history. Keller had to separately attend the Perkins Institute for the Blind, and the Wright-Humason School for the Deaf in New York, and The Horace Mann School for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing in Massachusetts. However, deaf blind schools did exist as far back as 1885, when the Florida School for the Deaf and Blind, a boarding school supported by the state, was established.
Most individuals are not completely devoid of either sense, retaining a degree of hearing and/or visual capacity, and this has a bearing on the type of deaf blind education used. Deaf students who have residual vision can take advantage of interpreters and large print texts. Teachers should ensure that the there is enough lighting in the classroom, and no glare. Some students also require extra time allotted to do written exams or assignments, since limited vision means they cannot read at the same pace as their peers.
On the other hand, blind students with leftover hearing can benefit from microphones and listening devices that allows the teacher's voice to be enhanced, volunteer readers to aid them in learning the data in their textbooks, and volunteer note takers that can type up notes in Braille during or after class for the student to use later on. Teachers of blind students with residual hearing should speak clearly, face the class while doing so, and refrain from moving around the classroom too much. Students without either residual sight or hearing will need more support, since they may have troubles learning the basics on the same achedule as their peers. It is important to keep on mind at all times that these students learn from what they do and not from what they hear or see, obviously. To learn more about deaf blind education, feel free to browse through deafblindinfo.org.


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Thursday, March 03, 2016
The Problems of Boomer Foreign Policy
Last Sunday and Monday, the New York Times printed an enormous two-part article on the role of the US government in general and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in particular in Libya. It was a terrific and terrifying piece of journalism, one which, in a rational world, might have some important influence on the election campaign. If I had to guess, I would speculate that perhaps 10,000 of my fellow Americans will do what I did and read it from start to finish. Essentially, the article tells how Hillary Clinton, goaded by aides and friends with one eye on the 2016 election, took the lead in pushing for military action to insure the fall of Muammar Qadaffi. She took credit for a brilliantly successful operation, and then sat back while Libya descended into political chaos and now, civil war, with disastrous consequences all over the Mediterranean region, including in Europe. The article is a not reassuring regarding the kind of President Hillary Clinton would be, and I hope any Democrats still on the fence will give it some thought. But my task here, as usual, is to put these events within a broader context, and in this case the appropriate context is very clear. The Libyan disaster is the latest of a series of initiatives undertaken by Mrs. Clinton's (and my) Boom generation, beginning with her husband's decision to go to war against Yugoslavia in 1999, exploding into a regional crusade under George W Bush, and proceeding, with only slight interruptions, through the Obama Presidency. The premise of those policies is that the United States has the right and the duty to make its values prevail anywhere in the world, that it need not take any account of local political realities, and that it can do all this at a very low cost. Many have tended to associate this policy with neoconservatives (whose leaders now are Boomers), and my friend Andrew Bacevich simply sees them as the logical outgrowth of US policy since 1947. I however am afraid that my own generation really needs to take the blame. The reason these policies have continued through three administrations is that our foreign policy establishment has literally no coherent alternatives to offer.
The best way to begin this discussion is to go back to the last Administration in which Boomers did not run foreign policy, that of George H. W. Bush, and look at its major foreign policy initiatives. Confronted with the collapse of the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union, Bush and his Secretary of State James Baker--from the GI and Silent generations, respectively--did not take these huge events as a signal to push US influence as far as it would go. They promised Mikhail Gorbachev not to extend NATO into Eastern Europe, and they even indicated that they would prefer to see the USSR survive. In El Salvador, they actually settled a war against Marxist revolutionaries through compromise, the only time the US has ended a major counterinsurgency effort, I believe, in that way. Most of all, when Iraq invaded Kuwait, they did not go to war until they had secured the support of the whole UN Security Council through very careful negotiations, and they limited their goals to expelling Saddam Hussein from Kuwait. In June of 2001 [sic], at the commencement of the Naval War College, I heard former President Bush explain--at least as well as I or any of my colleagues could have--why going to Baghdad would have been a dreadful mistake in a commencement address. It turned out to be a eulogy for the era of sanity in US foreign policy.
Bill Clinton, the first Boomer President, moved only slowly to introduce Boomer foreign policy, but he made at least two key steps. First of all, he enlarged NATO. Secondly, in 1999, after reaching a peace accord in Bosnia, he went to war with Yugoslavia to prevent the ethnic cleansing of Kosovo--even though Russia and its new leader, Vladimir Putin, totally opposed this step. That was the end of the new world order that his predecessor had hoped to bring about. And in a signal of things to come, even though the war eventually detached Kosovo from Serbia and completed the destruction of Yugoslavia, the result of the conflict was that the Serbs, rather than the Kosovars, were largely driven out of the territory that they had shared. Meanwhile, Clinton, going with the conservative flow as he so often did, put his signature to a "law" committing the US to the goal of overthrowing Saddam Hussein.
The Bush Administration, we now know, came into office determined to achieve that goal, and 9/11 became the excuse to do so. There is no need to rehash the details of that decision or to remind anyone of the chaos that it unleashed across the Middle East. Barack Obama became President in large part because Hillary Clinton had voted for that war, but when confronted with the Arab spring in 2011, he also regarded it as an opportunity to dethrone tyrants and spread democracy. In the same year, that led to the decision to support European military intervention against Qadaffi, ostensibly for humanitarian reasons, but then to bring down his regime as well. The Times article shows that Clinton and her team decided that overthrowing Qaddafi would be one of her signature achievements.
Rather than recapitulate the article, which I recommend in the strongest terms, I want to fill in one of its gaps. The parallels between both Clinton's words and US deeds in Libya on the one hand, and similar statements by her predecessor (and fellow Boomer) Condoleezza Rice on her watch and the mistakes of the Bush Administration on the other, are simply astonishing. In neither Iraq nor Libya did the US administration have any idea what would happen after the dictator had fallen and relied upon mindless optimism. In both cases, they relied on would-be local "leaders" whose main qualification was speaking English, making their ideas accessible to US policy makers--and in both cases, such leaders, most of whom returned from exile, turned out to have no local support worth mentioning. In both cases elections were designed to establish democracy but instead triggered the fragmentation of the country (as I noticed here when the first elections in Iraq were held.) And in both cases, Rice and Clinton insisted on willfully denying evidence that their policies had been disastrous. In 2006, in the midst of a war between Israel and Lebanon, she insisted on describing the conflict as part of "the birth pangs of a new Middle East," and renounced any attempt to maintain the status quo ante. Donald Rumsfeld had similarly dismissed the chaos in Baghdad that followed the US invasion as a "messy" consequence of a new freedom. Two years ago, Clinton tried to deflect questions about the impact of Qaddafi's fall by complaining about "American impatience," saying that transition to mature democracy "doesn't happen overnight." In one of his periodic laments about the failure of Iraq to make greater progress, President George W. Bush complained that the US could not find the Iraqi Nelson Mandela, the miracle man who would bring democracy and order, because Saddam Hussein had "killed all the Mandelas." The Times reports that State searched futilely for a Libyan Mandela as well.
Clinton, the story shows, lost interest in Libya in her last year as Secretary of State, in large part because she wanted to repeat the experiment yet again in Syria, where Boomers of both parties have criticized President Obama--not a Boomer, and proud of it--for not moving more aggressively against Hafez Assad and not once again putting the prestige of the US and the fate of a nation in the hands of mythical "good guy" rebels. President Obama, the Times story shows, has some good instincts about intervention, but as he showed in Afghanistan as well, he has an unfortunate tendency to compromise with more aggressive, older subordinates, leaving him, often, with the worst of both worlds. Since leaving office, Clinton has explicitly repudiated Obama's maxim, "don't do stupid stuff," as a guide to the foreign policy of a great power, which, she argues, needs a better "organizing principle." At the same time, she has blamed the President for the decision on Libya. Like George W. Bush, she is utterly incapable of ever admitting a mistake.
Not only is Libya now a haven for ISIS, but in another parallel to Iraq, the many, many weapons that Qaddafi cached around the country are falling into dangerous hands all over the region. Extremists in Libya threaten both Mali and Egypt. And supposed US allies, the UAE and Qatar, are funding extreme Islamist militias. Worst of all, Libya's collapse has contributed mightily to the European refugee crisis. But Clinton still argues that Assad, in Syria must also go.
John Kerry, born on the cusp between the Silent and Boom generations--and the son of a GI diplomat--has moved the United States in a different foreign policy direction. Clinton's statements on Iran suggest that we would never have reached the nuclear agreement with that country had she remained Secretary of State.Bernie Sanders, another Silent, has explicitly criticized her preference for regime change. But remarkably, the Boom generation, whose views were initially shaped by the Vietnam War, has not produced a single major political figure or high foreign policy official who has consistently opposed military intervention to transform foreign nations. Boomers in academia, finance, and foreign policy, have all generally pushed for one particular set of new departures in their fields, and the results are around us for all to see.
Several of my most devoted readers--people of considerable accomplishment themselves--have periodically suggested that I drop generational theory from these posts. I must admit that this leads me to imagine Galileo hearing from friends that he really ought to give up the idea of a heliocentric solar system, or Einstein being told that he could be a great physicist if he would simply give up this relativity nonsense. (Before you accuse me of grandiosity, let me point out that I did not discover the generational cycle in American life--Bill Strauss and Neil Howe did. I will claim credit for one thing: I am never jealous when smart people come up with something that I know I could not have done--I am simply grateful.) Boomers have done more than any generation to create the polarized climate of opinion in which we live, and they can't stand the idea that they might have anything in common with people on the other side of the political fence. Yet younger generations have no trouble figuring this out. It is because of generational theory that I have been able to contribute something original here, and I know it is no accident that it has struck such a chord among Americans of many ages, all of whom discovered it more or less by accident.
4 comments:
- Bozon said...
Great wide ranging essay.
One of the problems I have, in trying to comment, is that there is so much here to comment on.
There is so much with which I disagree in American foreign policy, and its whole modus operandi, since long before 1947.(Since the founding really.)
Part of that which you take up, with much of it, I agree. I go farther back than Boomers, and it seems to me unhelpful not to go back a couple of hundred years, in talking about some of these issues, in the Balkans, the Middle East, Russian and Austrian designs on Istanbul, German aspirations, British fears re India, etc.
I have seen that you don't want to get into civilizational discussions, for reasons I can well imagine, but that is where it has to go, like it or not, eventually, in my judgment, Western liberalism or not.
I think that trying to stop Saddam, especially merely on moral grounds, was an enormous blunder, and had cascading consequences later, and on that issue I trust we agree to disagree.
Had we reasoned that it was necessary to take over that area for oil resource reasons, I could have much better rationalized the decision; but no, that was not the reason at all! It was on moral grounds!
We agree that toppling Qaddafi was an enormous Hillary blunder....
American military involvement in the Muslim world is itself normally a civilizational blunder for the West. I sense that you agree with this, but cannot put it this way, really...
all the best
- sglover said...
I have seen that you don't want to get into civilizational discussions, for reasons I can well imagine, but that is where it has to go, like it or not, eventually, in my judgment, Western liberalism or not.
That broader perspective is necessary if only because it's the best way to deflate the delusional bubbles of people like Clinton, Wolfowitz, et al. Iraq, Libya, Syria -- these societies didn't just pop into existence when they started showing up on CNN. They're the product of millennia of history, and that history is set in perhaps the most dynamic region in human experience, the crossroads of Europe, Asia and Africa. Against that, our Beltway Caesars are going to set up suburbia with a few well-aimed bombing missions and a "moderate" "government" constructed from a gang of hotel exiles?!?!
I really wish that Sanders would bring up Clinton's horrible foreign policy record and ideas more often and more emphatically. At a minimum it'd be a good tactical move. And it's not too difficult to establish a connection between extravagant foreign adventures, and increasingly shabby public goods and services back home.
On another note, I'm tempted to read Strauss & Howe, but mostly because I enjoy Dr. Kaiser's writing. On it's face, though, I have to say that it sounds like an exercise in fitting facts to match a preconceived conclusion. We all do that -- looking for patterns is what brains do -- but of course it's easy to fall into self-deception that way. Also, if I understand it correctly, Strauss & Howe claim to have a theory specific to American history. I'm very sceptical that it even makes sense to talk about such a thing; the perspective seems too narrow. I mean, I can imagine theorizing about how, say, geography and demographics might yield a certain social structure, or how one social structure might transform into another. Broad strokes on big canvases. It's hard to believe claims that a theory can make successful predictions for a particular society, with all its quirks and accidents, on a time scale of decades.
I doubt that this is the first time anybody's mentioned these qualms. Anyway, I'll move S & H further up the reading queue. But while we're on the subject, I wonder if you're aware of Peter Turchin and his "Cliodynamics" work? In particular, the Seshat project looks like a very interesting and promising approach to history.
- Gloucon X said...
"Boomers have done more than any generation to create the polarized climate of opinion in which we live, and they can't stand the idea that they might have anything in common with people on the other side of the political fence. Yet younger generations have no trouble figuring this out."
If by this you think that those born after 1964 are going to be a generation of raging political moderates, I think you're going to be gravely disappointed. The first returns on this idea are already coming in and they don't look promising, nor are hopes for a younger generation of politicians who prefer a less aggressive foreign policy. Ted Cruz's(b1970) language consists of phrases like 'carpet bombing' and "I will rip to shreds this catastrophic Iranian nuclear deal." Marco Rubio(1971) vows to take a hard line against 'Russian aggression' and to give 'lethal military assistance' to the country of Ukraine if he is elected president. He also wants even more Nato expansion, including being open to entry by Ukraine. According to you, this cannot be happening since only Boomers are advocates of aggressive foreign policy. What gives?
- Wes Volkenant said...
Here's a link to an interesting piece at VOX, on the rise of Authoritarianism in America. I believe you've addressed this previously Dr. Kaiser, using some of the thoughts from John Dean about these conservative authoritarians....


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text: BUSINESS Earned pair of Oscar noms for his production designs 4:00 AM PST 3/7/2007 by Carolyn Giardina , AP FACEBOOK TWITTER EMAIL ME Also storyboarded major movies Harold Michelson, a veteran motion picture production designer and two-time Academy Award nominee, has died after a long illness. He was 87.Michelson, who died March 2, received Oscar nominations for "Terms of Endearment" and "Star Trek: The Motion Picture." In 1999, he received the Art Directors Guild's lifetime achievement award.His credits as an art director and/or production designer include "Dick Tracy," "Spaceballs," "Planes, Trains and Automobiles," "Mommie Dearest," "Catch-22," "History of the World, Part I," "Johnny Got His Gun," "The Outside Man," "Hair," "Mame," "Pretty Poison," "Can't Stop the Music," "The Thousand Plane Raid" and "Two People." Michelson also illustrated storyboards for such films as "The Ten Commandments," "Cleopatra," "Ben-Hur," "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" "The Graduate," "Irma La Douce," "West Side Story," "Fiddler on the Roof," "A Star Is Born," "From Here to Eternity," "Ship of Fools" and "The Turning Point."Michelson's first studio job was as an apprentice illustrator at Columbia Pictures, which segued to his being traded to Paramount Pictures to do illustrations and storyboards for "Ten Commandments." He moved up the ranks at Paramount to senior illustrator. He then moved on to MGM to work on "Ben-Hur" and then to Universal to illustrate for "Spartacus."Michelson's career in art direction began with NBC's "Matinee Theater" and went on to include CBS' "The Gomer Pyle Show" and "The Andy Griffith Show." FACEBOOK TWITTER EMAIL ME Carolyn Giardina email@example.com CGinLA AP firstname.lastname@example.com @thr


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They knew it was Batman Week
BleedingCool.com reports that "4 pages of 1939 production proofs from Detective Comics #27 [the first appearance of Batman] just surfaced, having been in the possession of a man living in an apartment building were Bob Kane once lived, who rescued it from the curbside trash some 45 years ago."
There's some great pics. Check it out.
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[…] by Kevin Mattison on February 4, 2011 · Leave a Comment Batman first appeared in Detective Comics #27 in 1939. Since then he has been called The Bat-Man, the Caped Crusader, the World's Greatest Detective […]


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I need to generate a DC control voltage from this board. All of the analog outputs are AC coupled through a 10uF cap. Can I jumper-out those caps to get the DC I need? The DC will feed an op-amp circuit, so it will be lightly loaded.
Hello Brain,
Yes you can but it is not referenced to 0V. If you look you will see that the op-amps are referenced to the common mode voltage of the codec. The DAC outputs do not sit at ground and go positive and negative, instead, they sit at a common mode voltage that is ~50% of the AVDD voltage and this it goes positive and negative from there. So you will have to compensate for this. This can be done with the DSP going from a negative number and up from there. It is all 2's compliment.
Dave T
Got it, Dave. Thanks for the pointers.


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In FP2 you will be asked to solve inequalities. Contrary to solving an equation by getting a single value, the solution to an inequality is usually a range of values instead.
You will be given two expressions, one greater than the other, and you will need to find the range of values for which it is true. By this point in your A-level maths studies you will no doubt be familiar with the inequality symbols $\gt$, $\ge$, $\lt$, $\le$.
You can solve inequalities analytically using simple algebraic manipulation. Get all the $x$ terms on one side and solve for $x$. But you will also be asked to solve them graphically. This is actually somewhat more descriptive of what an inequality is geometrically, i.e. finding the set of points for which one expression is bigger than the other.
There are also some things you can't do with inequalities that you can when solving an equation. If you multiply or divide both sides by a negative number, you must reverse the inequality. This is logical - you are flipping the signs of both sides.
Also, raising the expressions to a power is problematic. The square of a number $|x| \lt 1$ is always less than the original number, e.g. $0.5^{2}=0.25\lt 0.5$. But the square of a number $|x| \gt 1$ is always greater than the original number, e.g. $10^{2} = 100 \gt 10$. The same problem exists for nth roots.
Q) Solve $x-2 \gt 3-2x$ graphically.
A) First we need to see if the lines represented by $x-2$ and $3-2x$ meet.
$$ \begin{align} x-2 &= 3-2x \\ 2x + x &= 3 + 2 \\ 3x &= 5 \\ \therefore x &= \frac{5}{3} \end{align} $$
So the two lines meet at $x = \frac{5}{3}$. Then draw the graph of the two lines. $x-2$ meets the $y$-axis at $y=-2$ and the $x$-axis at $x=2$. $3-2x$ meets the $y$-axis at $y=3$ and the $x$-axis when $3-2x=0 \Rightarrow x = \frac{3}{2}$.
And you can see from the graph that $x-2$ is bigger than $3-2x$ for $x \gt \frac{5}{3}$. So we've solved the inequality.
Q) Solve the above example again analytically.
A) Simply move the $x$ terms to one side and solve
$$ \begin{align} x-2 & \gt 3-2x \\ 3x & \gt 5 \\ x & \gt \frac{5}{3} \end{align} $$
And that's the same answer we came to before. The analytical way is sometimes much faster but the graphical method can be more descriptive and explanatory.
Q) Solve $x+2\ge \frac{3}{x}$ graphically.
A) Let's start by drawing the lines represented by $x+2$ and $\frac{3}{x}$.
You can see that the $x+2$ line is bigger than the $\frac{3}{x}$ over two segments of $x$. The first segment is between the point where the lines first meet and the $y$-axis, and the second segment is from the second point where they meet again on to infinity.
So let's find the intersection points of $x+2$ and $\frac{3}{x}$.
$$ \begin{align} x+2 &= \frac{3}{x} \\ x^{2}+2x &= 3 \\ x^{2}+2x-3 &= 0 \\ \left(x+3\right)\left(x-1\right) &= 0 \end{align} $$
Solving this yields $x=-3, 1$. So $x+2\ge \frac{3}{x}$ when $-3 \le x \lt 0$ and $x \ge 1$.
Q) Solve the above example again analytically.
A) Move everything to one side so we get a quadratic expression. Unlike the previous graphical example where we used an equality to check where the two lines met, we don't simply multiply both sides by $x$, because there are $x \lt 0$.
$$ \begin{align} x+2 & \ge \frac{3}{x} \\ x+2 - \frac{3}{x} & \ge 0 \\ \frac{x\left(x+2\right)-3}{x} & \ge 0 \\ \frac{x^{2}+2x-3}{x} & \ge 0 \\ \frac{\left(x+3\right)\left(x-1\right)}{x} & \ge 0 \end{align} $$
So we need to find values of $x$ such that $\frac{\left(x+3\right)\left(x-1\right)}{x} \ge 0$. We see that the critical values of the left hand expression are $x=-3$, $x=0$, and $x=1$. We will test certain values of $x$ in the expression $\frac{\left(x+3\right)\left(x-1\right)}{x}$ and see if it results in a positive or negative value.
Right off the bat, we can immediately see that the values $x=-3, 1$ satisfy the 'equals' part of the $\ge$ inequality. But we'll try values that are just above/below the three critical values.
$$ \frac{\left(-\right)\left(-\right)}{\left(-\right)} \lt 0 $$
$$ \frac{\left(+\right)\left(-\right)}{\left(-\right)} \gt 0 $$
$$ \frac{\left(+\right)\left(-\right)}{\left(-\right)} \gt 0 $$
$$ \frac{\left(+\right)\left(-\right)}{\left(+\right)} \lt 0 $$
$$ \frac{\left(+\right)\left(-\right)}{\left(+\right)} \lt 0 $$
$$ \frac{\left(+\right)\left(+\right)}{\left(+\right)} \gt 0 $$
So from that we can see that $x+2\ge \frac{3}{x}$ for $-3 \le x \lt 0$ and $x \ge 1$.
In FP2 you also need to solve inequalities where either or both of the expressions contain a modulus sign. You must then consider the cases when the terms inside the modulus signs are positive and negative.
Recall that when drawing a graph with modulus signs, the graph of $|f\left(x\right)|$ is the graph of $f\left(x\right)$ with the negative values of $f\left(x\right)$ reflected across the $x$-axis, and that the graph of $f\left(|x|\right)$ is the graph of $f\left(x\right)$ with all values of $f\left(x\right)$ for $x \gt 0$ reflected across the $y$-axis, i.e. $f\left(-x\right)=f\left(x\right)$. Also recall that if $k$ is a constant, $k|x|=|kx|$.
Q) Solve $\frac{3}{|x|} \gt -2 - x$ graphically.
A) Firstly draw the graphs of $\frac{3}{|x|}$ and $-2 - x$. Note that $\frac{3}{|x|} = \left|\frac{3}{x}\right|$.
Clearly $\frac{3}{|x|}$ is bigger than $-2 - x$ to the right of the point where the two lines meet, somewhere in the negative $x$-axis.
So let's find where they meet. First take the case where $x \gt 0$.
$$ \begin{align} \frac{3}{x} &= -2-x \\ 3 &= -2x -x^{2} \\ x^{2} + 2x + 3 &= 0 \end{align} $$
This won't help us since the quadratic has no real roots. This makes sense since the graph shows that the lines only meet where $x\lt 0$. So then take the case where $x \lt 0$.
$$ \begin{align} \frac{3}{-x} &= -2-x \\ 3 &= 2x +x^{2} \\ x^{2} + 2x - 3 &= 0 \\ \left(x+3\right)\left(x-1\right) &= 0 \end{align} $$
So we have $x=-3$ and $x=1$ which is absurd since we took $x \lt 0$. The place where the two lines meet is therefore at $x=-3$. Therefore $\frac{3}{|x|} \gt -2 - x$ for $x \gt -3$.


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This is a cable kit for the RevoltOSD flight controller and the MillivoltOSD V2. The MillivoltOSD V2 has a 4 pin connector for the camera and matches the RevoltOSD cable.
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This post is likely a lot more than you want to know but read on if you are an animal lover.
Towards the end of January, a small cat, as it turned out a kitten got stuck in the barn wall and somehow survived for over two weeks without food. I finally caught the cat and put her back in the barn thinking she would start eating and run with the other barn cat, but I was wrong. She could hardly move was nothing but skin and bones. That night late, the cat somehow crawled down to the house and was crying on the porch. It looked like she wouldn't make it through the night. By morning she was taken to the vet who said she was unlikely to make it but gave her an IV and some fluids and some this and some that. PS three days later and a king's ransom and Gerlinda Grey was in recovery.
She is now a house cat and while she only got dry food before her emprisonment she has now taken to the below and is clearly becoming a picky eater. The food is GMO, MSG and Carrageenan free. I had to look up the latter, Carregeenan is a food ingredient that has a whole host of uses; it can be used as a vegan alternative to gelatin in setting desserts, it retains moisture in various kinds of cooked meats, and it suspends the chocolate in chocolate milk preventing it from separating. It even helps foods stay delicious and desirable for longer, reducing food wastage.
But yes there are those who say in spite of the FDA that it is poisonous, dangerous and should be avoided like the plague.
So Gerlinda eats Weruva Truluxe, and we have found it a wonderful spread for guests on thin wafer crackers. Here is the recipe for just one of their fine canned cat foods.
On The Cat Wok – With Chicken & Beef in Pumpkin Soup
Available in 3.0oz and 6.0oz
Your cat will be struttin its full belly after dining on this feast of boneless, skinless, white breast meat chicken that is mixed with grass fed, shredded Australian beef. Made with class and sass, our chicken is cage free and free of added antibiotics and hormones. There's also some veggies in a delectable pumpkin soup. This is one meal your cat won't be too sexy for :-).
So the last question is whether Gerlinda will be put back in the barn when the weather improves. She has not been fixed, I guess spayed is a better word, so there is the obvious danger of her getting in a family way the first night she is out there. Stay tuned, no decisions have been made.
Here she is the Great Gerlinda Grey:


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Once again autumn has arrived, meaning that many people up and down the United Kingdom will be reaching to turn their heating on.
However, thousands are likely to carry the burden of increased heating usage and rising energy costs this winter.
Some though could be eligible for the Warm Home Discount Scheme. A scheme aimed at helping those most vulnerable groups in the UK cope with their electricity bills, it is funded by energy suppliers participating in it.
Although many people are aware of this scheme, they don't know what they need to do in order to get the £130 discount.
In most circumstances the government will send all those potentially eligible for the scheme a letter informing them so. This letter may also inform them that they need to call the Warm Home Discount helpline - in order to confirm whether they are entitled to it or not. Those that are eligible and don't make a call before March 13 (2013) won't receive the discount.
Latest gas and electricity news brought to you by UK Power - the energy price comparison site.
Click here to run an energy price comparison, and see if you could be paying less for your gas and electricity.


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Rayman (Windows Mobile)
Published by
Developed by
Also For
DescriptionWhen a villain known only as Mr. Dark appears, trouble brews in Rayman's world. Mr. Dark captures the Toons - source of light and Rayman's friends. With no more light, evil creatures begin to roam, making the world unsafe for everyone. Its up to you, as Rayman, to free your friends and put an end to Mr. Dark's dastardly schemes!
Rayman is side-scrolling platformer starring the titular Rayman, a big-nosed chap with no arms or legs. Rayman can jump and use his hair to hover for a short period of time. He can also attack by throwing his fists, or winding up his fists for a more powerful punch. He can occasionally find special power ups that grant him unlimited flying power, giving him the ability to navigate through tricky mazes.
The Game Boy Color version of Rayman remains true to the spirit of the original game, but makes some notable changes, particularly when compared to the original's bright, vibrant graphics. Some levels have also been modified or simplified from the original release.
There are no Windows Mobile user screenshots for this game.
There are 35 other screenshots from other versions of this game or official promotional screenshots.
Promo Images
Alternate Titles
- "レイマン ミスター・ダークの罠" -- Japanese Game Boy Color spelling
- "Rayman: Mister Dark no Wana" -- Japanese Game Boy Color title
Part of the Following Groups
User Reviews
There are no reviews for this game.
Critic Reviews
There are no critic reviews for this game.
There are currently no topics for this game.
There is no trivia on file for this game.
Kabushi (243826) added Rayman (Windows Mobile) on Feb 22, 2014
Other platforms contributed by CrankyStorming (3005), Kabushi (243826) and Macintrash (2643)
There are no game credits on file for this release of the game. Everything in MobyGames is contributable by users.


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"A home made affair! This is a collection of footage from old cine film of both our families. See if you can spot us as little kids!!" - Paper Aeroplanes
Video edited by Richard Llewellyn.
Paper Aeroplanes are currently on their headline UK your, head to PaperAeroplanesMusic.com/live-dates/ to see when the're coming to your city.


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Guy R. Colson is a Member of the firm and chair of the firm's Litigation, Insurance and Education Law Groups, with a focus on insurance defense, insurance coverage, professional liability, personal injury, civil litigation and education law.
Mr. Colson represents his clients with a depth of legal knowledge honed over 40 years of experience handling challenging litigation and business matters in state and federal courts. He is a seasoned litigator with a notable record of successful trials before the state and federal courts as well as the substantial appellate experience before the Kentucky and United States Supreme Courts.
In addition to his litigation practice, Mr. Colson has substantial experience representing School Boards across the Commonwealth in matters involving students, teachers, and school system issues.


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Odds: Thursday – The first gay superhero? And Dogme on Broadway.
Posted by Alison Willmore on
At Movie City News, Larry Gross posits:
l. V is about the gayest superhero of all time.
I mean he makes Batman look like Tarzan by comparison. An outcast who cannot be himself in the ultimate ways, he is at the same time a dedicated gourmand, lover of 40's torch songs, a great dancer, an unrepentant high culture aesthete, an exceptional interior decorator and an enthusiast of 1930s black and white period costume tear-jerking swash bucklers – and maybe he's just tomorrow's with-it metro sexual – but given his lack of nostalgia for nuclear family or lost love, and given that he can only warm up physically to Natalie when she's bald, it would seem to me that, well … you get where this is going.
At the Reverse Blog, clarencecarter wonders if, for all it's sledgehammer-subtlety and silliness, "V For Vendetta" is more revolutionary than this year's crop of Issue Films.
I'll go out on a limb: packaging this kind of rhetoric in with a rip-roaring (or close to it) actioner is a more important and valuable gesture than the sum of Brokeback Mountain and Good Night and Good Luck. Are those films better? We can leave that up to personal preference (for my part: yes to Brokeback, possibly to GN&GL). But I think that the dissemination of the ideals that these films share may stand a better chance at long term success in the places where they really need to be heard when not worn so openly on the sleeve.
Tom O'Neil at the LA Times' Envelope reports that the hugely expensive "Lord of the Rings" musical opens onstage in Toronto today, while Joe Dziemianowicz at the New York Daily News makes us wonder what's stranger: that anyone saw "The Celebration" and thought, "Now there's something that deserves the Broadway treatment!" (not a musical, sadly), or that it stars Ali MacGraw.
And Roger Ebert revisits "Cat People":
Do the movies still work today, or are they too quiet? Depends on your tastes. Paul Schrader made a much more specific version of "Cat People" in 1982, which I admired for its own qualities, including the use of atmospheric New Orleans locations. But the 1942 movie gets under your skin. There is something subtly alarming about the oddly mannered good-girl behavior of Simone Simon, and the unearthly detachment of Kent Smith as her husband, and the rooms and streets that look not like places but like ideas of places. And something touching about Irena, who has never had a friend, and fears she will kill the only person she loves, and is told she is insane. At the end, Oliver pays her a simple tribute: "She never lied to us."
+ Is V for Vendetta A Drag? (Movie City News)
+ Where You Least Expect It (Reverse Blog)
+ Can 'Lord of the Rings' rule the Tonys someday? (LA Times)
+ B'way gains unlikely Ali (NY Daily News)
+ Cat People (1942) (RogerEbert.com)


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A blueprint for high-volume, high-quality lung cancer screening that is detecting cancer earlier—and helping to save lives
As Highmark greatly expands its patient-centered medical home, the Pittsburgh-area insurer does so with the idea that the PCMH will lay the foundation of even more encompassing systems: accountable care organizations.
Highmark's PCMH relies on primary care physicians, as do all PCMHs, and that's where health care reform starts but not necessarily where it ends, says Paul Kaplan, MD, senior vice president for provider strategy and integration.
"We acknowledge that this is a journey, and accountable care organizations cannot be successful unless you have the right infrastructure," says Kaplan. "You need to give the doctors time to get organized, to experiment until they find what works. But we do intend to move into the ACO world and we're having discussions with health system entities."
"The goal is to ensure that the practice of medicine is fun for doctors," says Paul Kaplan, MD, Highmark's senior vice president for provider strategy and integration. The team model fostered by the PCMH allows physicians to focus on the things that they do best.
Michael Fiaschetti, Highmark's president for health markets, says, "The medical home is the foundation of the broader accountable care organization. When you think of the large systems that own hospitals and groups, you start with the primary care doctors and all the members who those doctors serve."
Energized by the results of a PCMH pilot program, Highmark, a Blue Cross & Blue Shield affiliate, is expanding the initiative this year to include nearly 1,050 primary care physicians in more than 100 practices. They serve about 170,000 patients. The pilot, begun in 2011, included 160 PCPs in 12 practices that cover about 45,000 members.
In the pilot:
The basis of the pilot and what now drives the expansion is that physicians are paid more for delivering better care. "We're not going to compromise quality for cost," says Fiaschetti. "This isn't the old days; that may have happened 20 years ago at some of the old HMOs. There will be huge returns because we'll eliminate many emergency visits, unnecessary admissions, and unnecessary readmissions."
Kaplan says that specialists will probably play an outsider role in how the PCMH functions. "Our view is that we start by reorganizing and re-empowering primary care doctors. Just as when you build a home it needs a strong foundation, we see PCMH as one brick in the foundation of the house.
"Specialists will be involved as we need to create the infrastructure for the primary care physicians and the specialists to improve communications with each other. Eventually the PCMH really is a collaboration between the primary care physician and the specialist based on real-time useful information exchange and real-time ability to communicate."
All doctors are not equal when it comes to who's ready to become part of a PCMH or can use "real-time data" effectively and efficiently. "We're already having discussions with the more mature doctors in the system about accountable care and how to make it work," says Kaplan. "The less mature doctors — we need to help them get to the point where they have the capability, because our goal is that 75 percent of all our primary care doctors will be part of a PCMH and will be working very effectively and efficiently with their specialist physicians."
Meanwhile, the PCMH encourages innovation. For instance, the members of one practice huddled over the appointment book at the end of the shift to see which patients were scheduled for the next day.
"One doctor would say, Mrs. Smith is coming in tomorrow," says Kaplan. "But I also look after Mrs. Smith's four kids. Let's pull the charts of the children and see if they're up to date on their immunizations."
Two of the children in this particular instance were not. "So the doctor said to the team, Give Mrs. Smith a ride and have her children come with her. Ask Mrs. Smith if she's willing to let the two not-up-to-date children get up to date while they're here. That saves her from having to come in a second time with her kids."
In this way, PCMHs encourage effective visits, says Kaplan. "People are busy. They don't want to have to go back to the doctor frequently when a lot of things could be addressed at once."
He also tells the story of a practice that wanted to reduce ER admissions. "They got together with some patients and the hospital staff and they realized they could do one very simple thing: Leave Monday mornings completely open with no appointments and guarantee patients who called that they would be seen on Monday. Their ER utilization dropped. People who were sick over the weekend, but not bad enough that it was life-threatening, waited to see the doctor because they were guaranteed that they could get in."
"Physicians can earn more for better care," says Highmark's Michael Fiaschetti, president for health markets, about the PCMH model. "There will be huge returns because we'll eliminate many emergency visits" for one thing.
As Fiaschetti puts it: "Lower costs for the patient, lower costs for the system. It is going to take a different approach, a much tighter alignment between Highmark and physicians than we've had in the past."
The insurer will be sharing much more information. "Data about services that have been provided to these members, data about clinical information about these members," says Fiaschetti. "For example, the actual sugar levels of the diabetic patient and what can be better done to control those levels so that those patients have a better quality of life, stay out of the emergency room and, God forbid, stay away from being admitted to the hospital."
Kaplan adds, "The goal is to ensure that the practice of medicine is fun for doctors. Doctors are working harder and harder and aren't always convinced they're catching the patient at the best time. By creating a team environment in which the doctor can hand patients off to other members of the team, the doctor focuses on the things he does best.
"They are all practicing at the top of their license. The goal is to create a different infrastructure in which the doctor can more effectively know the patient he's touching and when he should be touching him. That useful information passes to the physician in real time or as close to real time as we can make it."
Practices will be encouraged to take the team approach, says Fiaschetti. "In their offices they would have a care coordinator [often a nurse provided by Highmark] who could spend time with the chronically ill patients and get them the right level of care and the right education and coordinate their care more intensely. In exchange we will provide higher incentives to the physicians for better managing those patients based on certain quality parameters and based on certain cost parameters."
One thing that should work better is disease management, says Kaplan. "Doctors weren't able to do disease management, so the insurers took on this task. But if a physician tells a patient, I'll have a staff member call you tomorrow evening to remind you to take your medications so that this becomes a habit for you, then "The patient is more likely to pick up the phone. He's less likely to do it if the insurance company is making a cold call. This takes time, and we need to better reward the physicians for his time. But we also need to have the infrastructure so the doctor can have a team that knows what the doctor wants for each patient. We know that we will have happier patients and we will actually have happier doctors."
A blueprint for high-volume, high-quality lung cancer screening that is detecting cancer earlier—and helping to save lives
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