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I took the eastern route from Idaho, on a day of freezing rain, over the Strawberry Mountains, into the broad John Day River Basin, in Oregon. I was used to empty places. Most of my childhood was spent in this region of eastern Oregon, in remote areas of the sagebrush desert or in the volcanic mountains with their jagged peaks and old-growth forests. My family moved away just before I entered high school, and I never returned; I've felt in romantic exile ever since. This part of America that had once belonged to my childhood became the spotlight of national news in the winter of 2016, when the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge — an old childhood haunt — became the scene of a cowboy takeover. The takeover began as a protest in the town of Burns after two ranchers were sentenced to prison for arsons on federal land. The ranchers, Dwight and Steven Hammond, caught the attention of the Nevada rancher Ammon Bundy, who thought the punishment unfair. Bundy and a crowd of nearly 300 marchers paraded through Burns, and a splinter group eventually took over the Malheur headquarters. For 41 days, they refused to leave, protesting federal ownership of public lands, which they considered unlawful and abusive. I didn't understand what had happened since I left, why so many people seemed so disillusioned and angry.
The ground was snow-covered when I visited John Day last winter and the temperature below freezing. I was there to attend a meeting organized by Jeanette Finicum, the widow of LaVoy Finicum, an Arizona rancher who was shot and killed by government agents a year earlier. LaVoy was a leader of the Malheur occupation. He left the refuge for a speaking engagement in John Day with plans to return, but he was shot three times at an F.B.I. roadblock. For that reason, his widow was calling this event "The Meeting That NEVER Happened."
The town of John Day isn't much more than a two-lane road through end-of-frontier brick buildings and is barely two square miles in size. A "closed" sign hung from the Ranch and Rodeo Museum, and the only vacancy was at a motel called Dreamers Lodge. Just west of town, off the Journey Through Time Scenic Byway, were the John Day fossil beds, where the remains of saber-toothed tigers and small horses were dug up from 30-million-year-old volcanic ash. To the east, replicas of covered wagons stood on the side of the road.
I pulled up next to a minivan in the parking lot of Americas Best Value Inn. Three women stepped out. The driver wore American flag earrings and a Christmas sweater, her hair piled on her head. She was a candy-company representative in Boise and had driven to John Day with a trunk full of Mentos. "What's going on with the media is absolute crap," the driver said. We walked down the street, to the Outpost restaurant, and over lunch, she described what was happening in eastern Oregon as a "truth insurrection." One of her companions, a delicate, elderly lady with long white hair, told me that she attended protests during the federal siege at Ruby Ridge, followed the killings at Waco and took an interest in the Bundys during the occupation. All three believed the government could come to their homes anytime and shoot them. "Someone please needs to get this story right," the elderly lady said. When I showed her my tape recorder, she gave me a high five. She figured I couldn't twist her words now. "Sometimes it happens," she said. "The truth will end up in The New York Times. But your editors will probably mess it up." I asked what truth she had in mind. "Well, for one thing," she said, "LaVoy was not 'killed'; he was 'murdered.' "
The meeting was up the road at the Grant County Fairgrounds, in a building called the Trowbridge Pavilion, where every summer local residents gathered to show prizewinning livestock. The parking lot was crowded with pickup trucks mounted with Don't Tread on Me flags and decorated in stickers that read, "LaVoy" or "Not Guilty." The crowd was all white, a mix of ranchers, farmers, loggers, miners, firefighters and hard-right Mormons from Idaho, Utah and Arizona. There were as many women as men, lots of families and children. People wore T-shirts that read #libertyrevolution. A few dozen self-proclaimed militia members, mostly representatives from the Oath Keepers and the Oregon Three Percenters, were there, as well as members of the Finicum family and the Bundy family. I recognized occupiers from their mug shots. A few people carried guns to show their support of the Second Amendment. Many had traveled from out of state, and some had driven through the night, on bad roads and through dangerous weather, and spent money on hotels and food they could not really afford, they said. Why? They told me their livelihood was at stake.
A long line formed to get in the door, and I started a conversation with Robin Olson and her 18-year-old daughter, Emily. Robin had long hair and bangs that brushed against the frame of her glasses. The Olsons lived in Powell Butte, a town of less than 2,000 people in central Oregon, not far from where I grew up. "This is the West," she told me. "This is the real West. If only everyone could see it."
"Why are you here?" I asked.
"To support the ranchers and farmers who feel like the people they are feeding are trying to destroy them. The people in the cities and suburbs just don't get it."
Emily was a member of the Central Oregon Patriots (COP), a conservative grass-roots organization that rose out of the Tea Party. Its members intended to push back against environmental regulations that they believed hindered economic growth. They wanted the local community to make the decisions, not the federal government. "We are not a militia," Emily said, "but everyone calls us a militia. I'm probably the only person under 60 in the group, and I've been called a terrorist. Can you believe it?"
The building was about the size of a gymnasium, and inside an American flag that looked big enough to be a parachute hung behind a small stage equipped with a podium and a projector screen. In exhibit booths, people bought copies of books on patriot ideology, including an end-times novel by LaVoy Finicum and a biography of the rancher Cliven Bundy, Ammon's father, by Shawna Cox, another Malheur occupier. "The rural people don't have power to stand up against this mighty army that's coming up against them," Cox told me.
The Finicum family sat on one side of the stage and the Bundys on the other. Three members of the Bundy family — Cliven, Ammon and his brother Ryan — were at the Nevada Southern Detention Facility in Pahrump. After the Malheur occupation, 26 of the occupiers were charged with federal conspiracy. The Bundy brothers and five others were acquitted in October 2016, but the Bundys and their father were in detention for their role in a 2014 standoff with the Bureau of Land Management at the Bundy ranch. Each faced more than a dozen charges for stopping a federally mandated impoundment of Cliven's cattle as payment for fines and fees, including conspiracy, assaulting and threatening federal officers and obstruction of justice. Ammon's mother, Carol, was in attendance at the meeting, as was his wife, Lisa, who had told me she didn't know that Ammon intended to occupy the refuge until she saw a livestream on YouTube. In the video, her husband stood on the back of a truck bed and told a crowd about his plans. Lisa got Ammon on the phone. "He was like, 'Just trust me, honey, I wouldn't have done anything that God didn't tell me to do.' "
About 650 people showed up at the meeting that afternoon, and tens of thousands of viewers watched on Facebook Live. The building was dimly lit, and cold air blew through door. The evening's M.C. was Trent Loos, a sixth-generation farmer from central Nebraska, best known among patriots for hosting "Loos Tales Podcasts" and "Rural Route Radio," shows about rural America. Loos wore a red neckerchief and a leather vest over a button-down shirt tucked into jeans that fit snugly over riding boots. He spoke in the quick, clipped manner of an auctioneer.
These patriots were right-wing populists who felt they were losing power. Many in the crowd expressed excitement about President Donald Trump and advocated for the transfer of federal lands to local control. They blamed environmentalists for the decline of rural culture and talked about the Endangered Species Act as a government conspiracy meant to drive ranchers off the land.
LaVoy's widow, Jeanette Finicum, had thick white hair with a fringe of bangs. Her loose black T-shirt read, "It matters how you stand," a quote from LaVoy. A pin near her breast read, "I am the virus," referencing a quote from Oregon's longtime Democratic senator Ron Wyden, who described the ideology of the occupiers as a virus after they were arrested. She was a soft-spoken mother of 12, and at one point, she stepped onstage to share a video montage that included images of armed federal agents and burning cars, followed by "peaceful" images of cowboys, including LaVoy and Ryan Bundy. "I ask: Who are the real terrorists?" she said to the crowd.
KrisAnne Hall, a 48-year-old lawyer and former prosecutor, was the evening's keynote speaker. Hall averages 260 speaking engagements a year; the Southern Poverty Law Center once included her on its list of 998 anti-government groups and figures in the United States. She teaches that almost every federal agency, other than the military, is unconstitutional. "Do you think the federal government is out of control?" she asked. "We need to wake up. Nothing needs to happen except America needs to have a revolution of the mind."
Kate Dalley of a Utah affiliate of Fox News Radio wore heels and a red trench. "I want to talk about truth in media," she told the crowd. "I know you laugh when I say that, because it's kind of an oxymoron." The media, she told us, was controlled and infiltrated, and the scripts were already written by the powers that be. She talked about the history of journalists working for the C.I.A. "They included journalists from The New York Times, Time magazine, which was already bought and sold by the elite anyway, The Washington Post, TV networks like CBS." Robin Olson leaned forward and gave me a pat on the arm. "It will be O.K.," she said. "We still like you."
In a 1992 photograph of America taken from space at night, the land in the Eastern half of the United States resembles a smear of the Milky Way, while the Western half resembles bright star clusters in empty space. A visitor to eastern Oregon would find country covered in sagebrush and juniper, hills painted with belts of ocher, orange, brick-red sand, Mars-like pillars formed by waterfalls and volcanic sludge, glacial lakes, volcanic uplifts, ancient seabeds and between all this, small human settlements: wheat fields, alfalfa farms and cattle ranches. The geographer Paul Starrs writes about the photograph in his essay "An Inescapable Range, or the Ranch as Everywhere." "The dark space is ranching," he says. "Ranching's realm is really, then, definable as being where most people are absent."
I thought about this photograph when I first returned and began speaking with the people. After only a few generations living here, what made them feel the land so completely belonged to them?
Robin Olson told me that a lot of the region's thinking about politics in the West originated from a publication called Range magazine. "What you will find," she told me, "is that it was never about the sage grouse, never about the spotted owl and never about the wolf. It was about getting people off the land." I asked Robin about the sage grouse, whose population had plummeted from 16 million to a few hundred thousand, and she told me, "I don't think they are really endangered." The sage grouse "just happened to live in almost every Western state" and that's why "the government chose it."
Range could be found in almost every grocery and tack store in rural Oregon. The glossy quarterly claims a readership of around 170,000, half of them ranchers and farmers in the rural West. Range, its website says, is "devoted to the issues that threaten the West, its people, lands and wildlife," and it intends to "halt the depletion of a natural resource, the American cowboy." In an article from 2012, the Endangered Species Act and the spotted owl are described as tools "used by radical environmentalists and government agents to destroy the timber industry in the 1990s." The publication calls Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring" a work of liberal propaganda. It is critical of the concept of global warming and suggests the real concern is global cooling. The magazine published features on the Malheur occupation and articles supporting the Bundys' fight against the federal control of Western land.
In many ways, it seemed, the people were constructing their ideas of the land upon a fantasy of the past. In the 2003 book "Where Land and Water Meet: A Western Landscape Transformed," Nancy Langston, an environmental historian, writes about how each wave of white settlers to the Malheur ignored the history preceding their own. When Peter French first arrived in 1872, Langston writes, "the place had seemed nearly empty to him, and indeed it was this apparent emptiness that made the watershed such a fine place to establish an empire." Of course, the land was not empty at all, but belonged to the Paiute Indian tribe, which had been living in the region for at least 13,000 years. In the decades after the land was designated a wildlife refuge in 1908, under the orders of President Theodore Roosevelt, conservationists built dikes, storage dams, canals, ditches and channels, and sprayed rotenone, an aquatic poison, to kill invasive carp. All these manipulations were done to make the Malheur seem wild again, the way it was before white settlers arrived.
In the 1970s, the Federal Land Policy and Management Act shifted the focus of the Bureau of Land Management from resource extraction to conservation. The policy marked the beginning of the Sagebrush Rebellion, a grass-roots revolt among ranchers, loggers and miners against environmental laws, like the 1964 Wilderness Act and the 1973 Endangered Species Act. Rural communities believed these new restrictions and regulations undermined their prosperity and shifted the fate of small-town economies into the hands of the federal government. If an endangered species lived on the range, for example, the bureau could decide to cut cattle numbers. Such protections fueled theories that the government was trying to eliminate ranchers to control the land.
The history of Oregon is filled with stories of violent and racist groups. Communes, cults, alternative religious communities, militias: The state has been home to nearly 300 of them since 1856, including the Christian Identity movement, Posse Comitatus, Aryan Nations and the Roy Masters' Foundation of Human Understanding. African-Americans were legally barred from residence in Oregon until 1926; the state, according to some historians, was essentially founded as a kind of white utopia. No one in my family, three generations of Oregonians, had ever heard about that.
When my mother revised her understanding of the past, her romance with the West came to an end. A few years ago, she decided to start using the word "genocide" to describe the fate of the American Indians at the hands of white settlers. My grandparents had been involved in cults and fringe religious groups, and my mother and father attended past-life readings. One day she handed me a stack of these readings. On these pages was a story scribbled in the curvy cursive loops of the religious leader who told my mother that she had once been a brave pioneer on the edge of the Western frontier defending hard-won land from the onslaught of Indians.
For many years, my family made it a habit to drive out to places like the Malheur and other remote areas. We carried rock picks. We found artifacts and fossils in the cracked mud of dry lake beds. We searched behind the high school baseball diamond in Fossil for the imprints of ancient ferns and crawled through buildings abandoned by the cult of the Rajneeshee. We saw arrowheads scattered on land where scientists uncovered the bones of ice-age sloths. We dug up an agatized root and dragged it home. We slept under the stars or in a trailer my father sometimes hitched to the truck. My mother filled my backpack with survival gear, and my father always carried a loaded gun. We cut down trees where we saw one; built a fire where we wanted one; slept on the ground in the valleys, among the sagebrush, near Indian burial sites. The eastern Oregon desert felt like a world that belonged to me. I felt antipathy toward visitors; even a lone hiker on the trail felt like a disturbance. In these moments, I figured that I, too, had arrived to an empty place. The rest of the world, the rest of America, were distant news.
If you drive two hours south of John Day on Route 395, you'll pass 1.7 million acres of Malheur National Forest, and end up in Burns, a town of a few thousand people. Outside Burns, on an old ice-age lake bed, is the ranch of Joe Cronin. In the spring, Cronin's ranch fills with birds from the neighboring Malheur National Wildlife Refuge: great egrets, trumpeter swans, black crowned night herons.
At 7 a.m. one day last January, there were more tractors on the road than cars. Cattle huddled in the snow-covered fields. I drove beneath a wood ranch gate, fitted with steer horns, and Cronin stepped out of his house to greet me in the driveway. He was a blue-eyed, 68-year-old, with a white goatee, wearing a plaid Elmer Fudd hat, baggy bluejeans and a mossy-oak camo coat with matching gaiters. His wife, Gay, made coffee in the kitchen, and their son Dirk loaded frozen hay bales onto a tractor bed. This was Cronin's "home ranch," where he housed his cattle in the winter and provided shelter for their newborns. In the spring, he gathered the cattle in trailers the size of semis and hauled them north, into the Malheur National Forest, where he owned 320 acres of land. He also had a permit that allowed him to graze his cattle for five and a half months of the year, usually June to October, on lands in the Malheur managed by the U.S. Forest Service. Every year he and Gay attended a required meeting to discuss the terms of their permit. Usually, the Forest Service decided how many cattle he could let out on the range and for how long. If an endangered species lived on the federal land, the terms of the permit were subject to change.
Cronin told me that he wasn't at the Meeting That NEVER Happened because he was advised by his lawyer not to attend. He called the Bundy takeover of the refuge a protest and didn't see anything wrong with that. He was quiet for a minute. "Well, they probably shouldn't have taken over that refuge, but what I liked about it was that it got this conversation going about government overreach. People wouldn't believe it otherwise." He remembered the day the F.B.I. came to Burns and barricades went up at the courthouse. The school turned into a staging ground. He said the town looked like "something out of that 'Red Dawn' movie, for Christ sakes" and that "it was World War III in Harney County."
Joe and Gay didn't travel much because the cattle always needed to be looked after. In Burns, they didn't have a local radio station, and they got their news when they could from television. Cronin didn't attend college, and the farthest east he had traveled was Boise, Idaho. "I've worked out here all my life," he said. "That's my degree." Joe had the sleep cycle of a lumberjack, waking up at 3 or 4 in the morning and going to bed around 7 in the evening. It was what his family had always done. In 1955, Joe's dad took a job at the Edward Hines sawmill, which purchased a 67,400-acre tract of timber in the Malheur National Forest. Burns was a vibrant timber town until around 1973 when the mill started laying off workers, and the unemployment rate in Harney County reached 30 percent. The mill closed after the Forest Service restricted the cutting of old-growth forest in the mid-1990s. For-sale signs went up and people moved away. Cronin graduated from high school in 1968 with about 120 people in his class, and his grandson's class will graduate with about half that many. The biggest employers in the region are now the Forest Service, the Bureau of Land Management and other government agencies. Cronin was in the logging business for years, but it was hard to make ends meet. He bought a small ranch in 1994. He started with four cows, and after 10 years those four cows turned into a 600-head operation. He didn't use antibiotics or hormones, and his cattle were grass-fed, no fertilizers in the field. Each calf was born into his open arms.
After he fed the cows, he took me for a drive on some icy back roads. Near Rattlesnake Creek, we stopped to gaze at a herd of half-starved mule deer. "Our main problem," he said, "is with the Fish and Wildlife Service." A few years ago the agency found the bull trout was vulnerable, including on the river that runs through Cronin's land and determined grazing cattle endangered the fish's spawning grounds.
"They say the cows are killing the fish," Cronin said. "I think it's a vehicle to remove cattle off national forest. I can't see anything wrong with that river. I think the government science is slanted." Cronin asked a riparian ecologist who had been at the University of Montana to run an independent analysis of Little Crane Creek, where his livestock grazed. "He said that it was one of the healthiest riparian areas he's ever studied," Cronin said. "Excellent shape." The ecologist sent a copy to Cronin and another to the Forest Service office in John Day. "Never heard anything about it," Cronin said. "But if I'm hurting that stream, I want to know about it. I just don't understand it. They are saying the numbers are down. I think there ought to be an independent study. We just get the feeling that the science is out of touch all together."
Cronin's friend David Torrence came up the road in a pickup. People called him "Big Hat." He wore a gray hoodie and a pretty big hat. There were two Chihuahuas in the passenger seat. He and Cronin caught up on the weather and chatted about the bald eagles in the canyon. "The Forest Service didn't let us haul logs in the canyon," Cronin told me, "because of those birds. They said the trucks were waking up the birds. Look at all of them."
Big Hat asked about me. Cronin looked my way. "Should I say it?" he said. He meant my New York Times affiliation. Big Hat got out of his truck, stuck his sun-wrinkled face in the open window and folded his arms over the door. He asked about the meeting I attended in John Day. "Was there any violence or anything?" he said.
"There was no violence," I said.
"You know, Trump," Big Hat said, "he has been having all this with the media, you know? How they twist [expletive] up and everything? I was watching the news, and it showed a local reporter who was at the meeting. She told Jeanette [Finicum] she was expecting violence and demonstrations, you know? Jeanette was all teary-eyed, and she said: 'Hey, we are not outlaws. We are not criminals. We are full-blooded American ranchers. We don't want no violence.' " He pointed at me. "You people are talking about violence and the meeting hasn't even started? We just think that the government got too much control." He opened his mouth and shook his head. "We just want to live our lives."
"I told her my story," Cronin said. "I get up at 3 a.m. and start watching Fox News. I'm so pissed off by 5 o'clock, it's time to go to work."
"Hey, hey," Big Hat said. "Fox News is a good channel." Big Hat said he voted as a Democrat until Donald Trump's election. "Trump has been the best guy we've dealt with in 30 years," Big Hat said. "I voted for Trump. But all my sisters and stuff are all pissed off at me because I'd been a Democrat."
Cronin switched parties because of gun control in the '80s. "I went right up to the courthouse and changed to a Republican." He tapped the gun on the dashboard: a .22 Magnum he'd packed for 30 years. "I don't have a permit to carry concealed," he said. "I'm one of those guys who wants you to see my goddamn gun. See where it's at. Almost put it away for you but thought, No, she just needs to see me the way I am. It's part of our lifestyle."
Cronin brushed some hay from his shoulder. "Now," he said, "I know The New York Times, they don't like anything Trump does. When he was elected though, oh, my God, maybe something will start happening to help us out here. I'm just looking at natural-resource uses. Out here, no one has ever done anything for us. We are saying what's happening and nobody is listening and nobody cares. Nobody back East loses one second of sleep over two ranchers. They said we're bad guys."
Later that day, Cronin and his wife took me to see the spot where LaVoy Finicum was shot. There were elk tracks in the thickets and ice on the roads. He pointed out the dying trees with bare branches and yellow needles. "The forest doesn't look like this on our property," he said. "The government's side of the fence looks like [expletive]."
Cronin stopped the truck. He pointed to a smear of red spray paint in the snow.
"That's probably where he died right there."
My childhood home of Tumalo lies at the meeting point between the foothills of the Cascade Range and the high desert. When I was a kid, the town had less than 500 people, a post office, a hamburger joint and a gas station. Tumalo was like a border town between one kind of Oregon and another, between the foothills of the central Cascades and the rural high desert of the east.
My parents ended up here only because they were hippies who wanted to live off the land. My induction to the land began with my parents, but my introduction to the culture began at Tumalo Elementary School. The kids were sons of farmers and ranchers, and they wore work boots to school and talked about their heads of cattle, their prize livestock for breeding, their acres of wheat. I wanted nothing more than to become like them. After school, I attended 4-H meetings, learned to shoot a rifle and traveled door to door with my Christian friend to warn neighbors that if they didn't believe in Jesus they might burn in hell. Despite my efforts, I never felt fully part of the culture. I tried to hide my liberal parents, who refused to buy me livestock, any livestock, for 4-H competitions. I was stuck showing guinea pigs. Every week I visited the guinea-pig lady's house to learn how to brush and clean prizewinning rodents. At the fair, my guinea pig won nothing. In fifth grade, I wanted to try rodeo. All the kids started with mutton busting, which meant sitting on a sheep while it ran. I tried riding a sheep that my friend found in a field, but I got bucked from it and broke my wrist. After that, the kids praised me. I associate those years most fondly with thrill and violence: that wrist bone I cracked beneath the weight of a sheep, the electric horse fence I gripped in the rain, the day I put my hand inside a pregnant, laboring sheep and pulled out a living creature.
After a three-hour drive west on Highway 20, I was back in Tumalo. It was still a quaint town, dotted with juniper trees, centered on the general store, but it had been overtaken by a fancy coffee house and a yoga studio. I wanted to cry. I visited my elementary school and took a few pictures of the playground, but a man chased me off. I felt a kind of native antipathy toward Bend, which had more than doubled in population since I was a kid and spurred the growth of nearby towns.
That week, Robin Olson, from the meeting in John Day, had invited me to a high-school wrestling match in Redmond, not far from Tumalo. It was Crook County versus Redmond, longtime rivals. The gymnasium of Redmond High School was dark. The bleachers were crowded with ranchers, miners and loggers. A single lamp hung over a vinyl wrestling mat. Some of these kids get up at 4 a.m. to work the ranch, go to school and then wrestle at night. I'd been to this gymnasium before to watch family and friends wrestle on the mat.
Robin's nephew was going to wrestle that night. She told me that they had been on their way to a wrestling tournament at Burns during the occupation at the wildlife refuge the night her son, Daniel, decided he wanted to meet Ammon Bundy. They drove to Malheur, and Daniel asked Bundy to autograph a pocket constitution. At the gym, about halfway through the night, her nephew stepped onto the mat. The Crook County boys pointed their arms at the mat to send energy into the fight. "It's not so much wrestling," Olson explained, "as it is a religious experience." The boys grabbed at each other, wiggled in and out of headlocks. Their skin was luminous with sweat. In the end, her nephew walked off defeated.
"We are just out here trying to survive," Olson told me. "We have been preserving the land for the last 100 years, but now you are telling us we won't preserve it? How do we get along with the people who are trying to take away everything precious to us?"
Robin's daughter Emily had been an active member of 4-H. She once competed in the Crook County Fair. In 2014, she went to New York City for a choir trip, and she thought it was "all right." Most Thursday nights, Emily attended a Central Oregon Patriots meeting at the Calvary Baptist Church off Main Street in Prineville. On Feb. 2, I joined Emily there, along with her mother and her grandparents. It was snowing and 15 below zero. The wind burned your skin. The adult Bible-study room where we gathered was warm and brightly lit. The walls were covered in Jesus posters.
A couple of dozen members sat around foldout tables set with vinyl tablecloths. They recited the Pledge of Allegiance and said a prayer thanking God for this day and for the snow. The group had been meeting for six years and every year held a raffle. They raffled a gun once in a while and a freezer full of meat at Christmas. On the Fourth of July they handed out pocket constitutions. Tom Case, the chairman of the group, crossed his arms. "You might have heard we are a militia," he said to me. He pointed to Darlene, a woman in her 70s with short gray hair and large prescription glasses. "She's a dangerous lady," he said. "You should see her with a broom in her hands." Everybody in the room laughed.
"Another thing you might hear," Darlene said, "is that we are trying to take land away from the federal government, and we are not. We just want to work with them. See, if you're a patriot, you're automatically evil. You've seen that. Look around the table. A lot of us know how to shoot a gun, but that's about it."
"Oregon Wild would say we are a shadow government," Case said. Oregon Wild, a conservation group, had lobbied to expand wilderness and recreation areas in the 845,000-acre Ochoco National Forest near Prineville. The potential of that forest as an engine of economic growth gnawed at the members. To fight federal regulations in the Ochoco forest, the patriots helped form a political-action committee that drafted a proposal called the Crook County Natural Resources Plan, which argued for "coordination," a process that would allow state, county and other lower-level governments to give input to federal agencies' land-use plans. The 59-page resource plan favored extractive use of public lands, called for no reduction in cattle numbers, asked that forests be logged following a wildfire and requested that lands previously open to mining remain open.
"We have to do everything we can to preserve our culture and community," another said, "so that we all don't fade away to Portland for a job."
A woman named Kristin Thomas told us she was new to the patriots. She was a vegetarian with long blond hair who read Shakespeare and had attended Juilliard for stage acting.
Thomas shared a story about her father's life as a commercial fisherman on the Indian River in Florida. She told us that his business collapsed after the "ban the nets" movement that eliminated the use of gill nets in the 1990s. "The media twisted everything," she said, "saying that my father caught dolphins and sea turtles in his nets. We took care of our river, and we didn't overfish, but we were always the bad guys. The day after 'ban the nets,' my dad's best friend died of a heart attack, one of my friends hung himself, another shot himself." The room was quiet. Darlene jumped in with her own story. The Forest Service was going to shut down a ranger station that she had visited every year since she was a child. She lifted her glasses and wiped her eyes.
After the meeting ended, the patriots drove to McDonald's, as they did every Thursday night, because it was the only restaurant open past 9 p.m. They pushed tables together and ate soft-serve ice cream. Everyone ordered vanilla.
Robin and Emily were headed home to Powell Butte and suggested that I follow them on the Ochoco Highway until it intersected with Highway 20. Emily rode with me in my passenger seat. When we reached the intersection, Olson called Emily and said she was going to lead me through the snowstorm, to Burns. I tried to stop her. "It's too late," Emily said. "She's going all the way."
We drove for hours through the dark. I could see nothing ahead but the churning snow and the distant glow of brake lights. The road was straight and flat and populated by rabbits. We heard a thump. "I killed something," I said. Emily smiled. "Don't worry about the bunny," she said.
Nearly half the state of Oregon appeared to be on fire when I returned in August. Megafires were burning nearly 300,000 acres of forest, and the skies turned a sickly yellow hue in the evening.
The Forest Service offices for the Malheur National Forest are on the outskirts of John Day in a building decorated with big topographical maps, Smokey Bear posters and replicas of old skulls in glass viewing cases. The office worked with 60 ranchers, including Joe Cronin. When I sat down with Steve Beverlin, the forest supervisor for the Malheur National Forest, I asked about the ranchers who didn't trust the government. Beverlin looked surprised. "None of our permittees attended the Finicum event in John Day," he said. "Our employees all have a good relationship with all the permittees. They don't talk like that. They recognize the laws of the United States."
I told Beverlin that I'd spent time with one of his permittees, and he did talk like that. Beverlin asked who it was, and I told him it was Joe Cronin. He shrugged. It was the first he'd heard of it. I asked about Cronin's riparian report. He said they probably had it somewhere. "The split caused by the Bundys in Burns will take generations to heal," he told me.
That week, Cronin was out at his summer range, deep in the Malheur National Forest with his cows, sleeping in an old homesteader's cabin. Blue and violet-colored sagebrush spread east, north, south and west. The nights were cold. There was no internet, no cellphone service, no potable water. The bathroom was an outhouse. It was about as desolate a spot as you could find.
I met Cronin and Gay in the town of Seneca, population 197, and followed them down an old logging road for two hours into the woods. Along the way, Cronin stopped his truck, got out and pointed at a sign. "Now," he said, "I want you to pay attention to this." The sign reminded fishermen to release bull trout, which have been listed as "threatened," or they would be fined. That was all. Cronin climbed back into his truck.
The landscape shifted from dark forests to sunlit meadows. About every half-hour we came across a gathering of cows. There was one spot on a hill where cellphones picked up service. Cronin ran to it in his spurs and cowboy hat, stood on the highest point and caught up on some business. Gay sat in my rental car and led me the rest of the way, over washboard roads that turned into something like a dry riverbed, clotted with boulders and jagged rock. We barely made it.
Cronin called the settlement Cow Camp. It was a mix of trailers, trucks, old farm equipment and homesteader shacks. He and Gay slept in the original homestead, a one-room cabin. The wood was gray and cracked. Sparrows built nests in the awnings and small animals burrowed beneath a sagging fence. Inside, bright, buttery pine boards covered the walls. There was a queen bed with a quilt and two gun racks.
Cronin searched for his glasses and smoothed a topographical map of the Malheur National Forest over the top of the dining table. On the map, his private property, 320 acres, was marked in blue. It was a small island in a sea of green, which was the public land where he had a grazing permit. Cronin's allotment of grazing land was divided into eight pastures, and the North Fork of the Malheur River ran through one pasture called Mountain Unit.
The Forest Service had just started limiting use on one of Cronin's pastures to protect bull-trout habitat. The agency wanted Cronin to keep his cattle out of the creek, which is an important spawning grounds for the fish. Cronin tried, but he couldn't keep the cows out unless he fenced off the whole pasture. He needed that pasture if the calves were going to gain enough weight. Cronin asked the agency if he could fence off the creek instead, and they agreed. But then he would have to find another water source. There were springs running beneath the ground that would be easy enough to dig up. But he needed permission and the process would take months.
"If they are going to take away my permit," he said. "I'll tell them I disagree with that, without just compensation. O.K., are you going to compensate me for it? Do you want to buy from us so we are never on there again?"
Cronin sat down and pulled off his boots. The hardships of ranching showed in his body. Cronin had cracked his neck when a horse bucked him, and two months later he was hit by a tree branch and suffered a concussion.
"I just don't believe the science," he said.
He turned to his wife. "What do you think, Gay? Do you think the bull trout is endangered?"
"If they were endangered," she said, "they wouldn't be able to go out and count them."
Joe Cronin said he contacted Trent Loos, the radio host and M.C. of the meeting in John Day, to talk about regulations on federal land. "I hear that Loos has Trump's ear," Cronin told me, "so Trump will know some of the issues out here we're dealing with."
For dinner, Cronin cooked a beef brisket the size of a football on an outdoor grill and talked about global warming. In elementary school, the teachers told him that the earth might plunge into another ice age, and the news had scared him, but then the ice age never happened. He thought it would be the same with global warming: It would never happen. He mentioned the petrified oak trees dug up nearby, and he said that oak trees only grow in warm climates. "The point is," he said, "a million years ago it was a hell of a lot warmer climate then than now."
Cronin poured meat juice on his dogs' food. "You got to get that Range magazine," he said. "This article on why global warming was a farce had graphs and everything." In the article, the author accused scientists of installing temperature-monitoring devices near asphalt to record higher temperatures. "I assume it's all fact-checked," Cronin said.
The day before, white supremacists gathered in Charlottesville, Va., to protest the removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee. A man named James Fields drove into a crowd of counterprotesters and killed a 32-year-old woman. I said that the white supremacists had seemed to channel Trump's vision of America. Had it shifted Cronin's thinking at all?
He and Gay had been out on the range and hadn't heard about the event.
That night I slept in a R.V. trailer next to the cabin. Inside was a cowboy hat, a handgun and some soiled clothes. Cronin told me the wolves in the area didn't always kill to eat but left whole carcasses behind. I didn't sleep well. During the night, a fog rolled over Cow Camp, and in the morning before the sun rose, I could barely see. I heard Cronin in the corral, getting the horses ready to ride. They were running in circles. When the sun came out, the fog brightened and it looked heavy like smoke. Cronin was inside it, waving at me. It looked like a dream, like we were all burning alive.
The writer William Kittredge was raised on a cattle ranch in southeastern Oregon and later spent 30 years as a professor of English and creative writing at the University of Montana in Missoula. He writes about being born into the ranching culture, loving that culture but also making the decision to leave it. He had many misgivings about "ruining" the Warner Valley, where his ranch was located. People in his hometown considered him a traitor for what he wrote. In his 1996 book, "Who Owns the West," Kittredge calls for a change in mentality: "We have taken the West for about all it has to give. We have lived like children, taking and taking for generations, and now the childhood is over."
In October, the Interior secretary, Ryan Zinke, and his team announced their intent to amend 98 science-based sage-grouse management plans in 10 states, a plan that favored resource extraction over conservation. Trent Loos was selected as a member of Trump's agricultural-advisory team, a committee of rural representatives that intends to mobilize support in communities and reduce environmental regulations. In December, Trump announced the largest federal land reduction in United States history, including almost half of Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in southern Utah. Escalante's once-seamless expanse of protected land was divided into three separate monuments.
Kristen Thomas, the member of the Central Oregon Patriots from Florida, had written a letter to Ammon Bundy in prison, and he'd written back. She had chatted to Ryan Bundy over a livestream while he sat in prison. She loved listening to the Bundy boys talk, she told me when we spoke on the phone this summer. "We've grown a lot deeper," she said. "The movement is solidifying." Thomas had been learning about F.B.I.-informant behavior, training, tactics and goals — how to go in and implode a movement, how to create chaos, how to divide a people — because she believed the patriot movement had been infiltrated. "We are not raping the environment," she said. "We are not doing the things you are accusing us of doing."
On Jan. 8, almost a year after the rally in John Day, the Bundys walked free. They had been on trial in Las Vegas for 11 months, before Judge Gloria M. Navarro dismissed the case, citing the federal prosecution's and the F.B.I.'s "flagrant misconduct" and "deliberate attempts to mislead and distort the truth." The prosecution withheld more than 1,000 pages from the defense, which included reports that federal snipers surrounded the Bundy family as Bureau of Land Management agents prepared to impound their cattle and that F.B.I. surveillance cameras recorded the Bundy home. Thomas felt vindicated. "I think the Bundys have woken up a lot of people experiencing different versions of federal oppression," she told me. "If we pull back and make a smaller federal government, we won't have as many problems. When the feds have all the power, look at what they do."
In August, I met Emily and Robin Olson for dinner at Tastee Treet, a vintage hamburger joint in Prineville. We sat in a red vinyl booth, and Robin ordered a bacon cheeseburger and a root-beer float, which Emily described as her mother's "last meal," meaning the meal Robin would choose if she knew it would be her final one. While Robin ate, she reflected on the landscape she witnessed on a road trip in July. They drove 5,600 miles through 10 Western states in two weeks. They tried to hit every Western state but missed California and Utah. They never passed a town of more than 20,000 until they reached Fort Collins, in Colorado. "The rural United States, it's like eastern Oregon," she said, "and that's like the entire world."
They visited Yellowstone National Park and saw, they said, two million acres of natural resources gone to waste. "At least one day a year," Robin said, "we ought to be able to go in and take advantage."
Emily thought the trees were too close together. "Didn't look healthy," she said, "because they don't log."
"And look at all those buffalo," Robin said. "Can't some of them be used for meat?"
"You wanted to eat them?" I said.
"I was looking at the buffalo and just seeing a steak," she said.
Robin was disappointed in Yellowstone, but she remained hopeful about Trump. "A lot of conservatives were concerned that he wouldn't be conservative enough." At home Robin saved a copy of The Bulletin, a local paper in the liberal-leaning town of Bend, with the headline "Trump Victory" because it gave her "energy" to look at it. "Sometimes I look at that headline and think, Right, yes, I feel good."
Two ranchers, a young husband and wife, walked into Tastee Treet and sat down behind us. They were friends of Robin. "Hey, do you guys like The New York Times?" Robin asked.
The husband told me that his son came home from school one day and informed him that cow flatulence was contributing to global warming. "No, it's just the climate cycle," he told his son. Emily had had the same teacher. "When I learned her teacher was doing stuff on global warming," Robin said, "that fired me up." Robin asked for five minutes of class time to give a counterargument.
"I think if people are honest," Robin said, "they look at all this and think black helicopters and tinfoil hats, but if you really go deeper, you'll ask: 'What are they doing to take away the forestry, logging and timber industry? What are they doing to take away farming?' "
"Too much to be a coincidence," Emily said. "The spotted owls, the wolves, the sage grouse, the cougar, the frogs."
I tried to suggest a lack of understanding between rural and urban people, but Robin stopped me. "No," she said. "We just want different things." The statement was cold and clear. It suggested the end of reconciliation. "We don't want you breathing down our back," she said. "Bottom line is we don't trust you. We don't trust you to look out for our best interests. And in truth we don't even know that you know how to. A lot of people were saying this was about saving the bunnies and butterflies, but that's not what this is about."
Robin sat over her empty plate. "It's about getting people off the land," she said. "It's dark."


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After my first course I underwent a very special experience , since my realtionship with my parents started getting better. I used to argue and confront with them most of the times. I couldn't be in good terms with anyone within my family. Now I feel more bonded with my family and it gives me a lot of inner satisfaction and calmness, a feeling of joy emerges out of me having my family with me. Sudarshan Kriya helped me broaden up my views and helped me analyse and understand things in a broader perspective leading to an effective communication and clarity of mind and actions . It has turned me into a lovable and caring person. I really thank Guruji for introducing this blissful technique into our lives.
Sudarshan Kriya is a powerful breathing technique cognized by spiritual leader Sri Sri Ravi Shankar. The technique, taught in the Art of Living Happiness program, has benefited millions of people across all walks of life – youth, corporate executives, trauma affected, underprivileged, children and homemakers.

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Alive at New Life offers opportunities to be involved for all age groups. It is our intention, that in these groups, you will find not only a sense of family and friendship, but also a place that reflects our purpose. We feel called as a church, as believers to reach out to our community, our city, and the needs around the world. We want to reach out to others to show them that lives can be changed. Hope can be restored. Faith can be trusted! A new life can be found in Jesus Christ!


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Public Comment
The Dementia of Petroleum Addiction?
Petroleum executives assure us that their giant tankers and offshore oil rigs pose no danger to the environment; coal company CEOs insist that their mines are safe and that blasting away mountaintops is ecologically benign; natural gas companies insist that "fracking" deep underground geological formations will not contaminate fresh water aquifers; and nuclear power promoters tell us not to worry about core meltdowns or the disposal of millions of tons of highly radioactive waste.
Do we have S-T-U-P-I-D written on our foreheads? Or do we just choose to swallow these lies because, like addicts everywhere, we need these pushers to provide us with our daily energy fix?
These energy "suppliers" have a sordid history of crimes against nature and humanity and their assurances of safety have proven tragically wrong time after time. Clearly their drive for profit knows no ethical or legal boundaries. So why do we continue buy their lies, and reward them with lavish subsidies and tax breaks, instead of kicking our habit and sending these petroleum pushers to prison?
Just last year BP—who now tells us BP stands for "Beyond Petroleum," not British Petroleum—told the government that an oil spill like the one wreaking havoc in the Gulf was highly unlikely so they didn't need to install the remote controlled valves that could prevent an uncontrolled blowout. Beyond Petroleum?…more like Beyond Belief.
According to the watchdog group, Public Citizen, BP has the worst criminal rap sheet of any oil company—and that's no mean feat. In the last few years, BP has paid $485 million in fines and settlements to the US government for environmental crimes, willful neglect of worker safety, and penalties for manipulating energy markets. As BP's massive oil slick smothers the Gulf's fragile wetland ecosystems and lays waste to the fishing and tourist industries, assurances of safety are no more credible than the sworn testimony of a career criminal.
The same goes for the Massey Coal Company—the biggest coal mining business in central Appalachia. Massey insisted its Montcoal operation was safe right up to the day when their mine--that was repeatedly cited for improperly venting methane gas--exploded killing 29 people in the country's deadliest underground disaster in a quarter-century.
Last year, the number of citations issued against the mine more than doubled and the penalties proposed against the mine more than tripled. Massey was fined $897,325 over the last year, more than $382,000 for repeated serious violations involving its ventilation system. Andrew Tyler, a conveyer belt electrician, told the New York Times that live wires were often left exposed and that coal dust and methane accumulation were routinely ignored. Yet, after the explosion, Massey CEO Don Blankenship told Metronews radio that, despite the company's many violations, the Mine Safety and Health Administration would never have allowed the mine to operate if it had been unsafe.
It's time to clear our heads of gasoline fumes and our economic arteries of high-octane euphoria. Energy addiction is distorting our judgment and allowing these energy pushers to get away with murder and ecocide. Unless we come to our senses soon, we will have sacrificed the planet to feed our addiction.
Craig Collins, Ph.D., of California State University East Bay, is the author of the newly released book, TOXIC LOOPHOLES: Failures and Future prospects of Environmental Law (Cambridge University Press)


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text: 30 ottobre (Reuters) - 10:30 30OCT19 EUROPEAN CENTRAL BANK, FRANKFURT a.M. GE66608 ECB26 Longer Term Refinancing Op.-Allotment Intended Volume: Reference Number: 20190111 Min Allotment: Transaction Type: Reverse Transactions Fixed Rate: 0.00 % Operation Type: Liquidity Providing Max Bid Limit: Procedure: Standard Tender Max Bids per Cpty: 1 Tender Date: 30/10/2019 11:30 Marg. Rate: Start Date: 31/10/2019 % of All. at Fixed Rate: 100 Maturity Date: 30/01/2020 Tot Amount Allotted: 592 mn Duration (days): 91 Weight. Avg. Allot. Rate: Tot Bid Amount: 592 mn Auction Type: Fixed Rate Tender Tot Number of Bidders: 9 Allotment Method: Min Rate (bids): Max Rate (bids): ////// This page is updated by Thomson Reuters based on data disseminated by the ECB. For more information refer to here


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2002 Ford F-100 Supernationals, Tennessee - Forever Ford
What A Difference A Year Makes! What do you need to know about the 2002 edition of the F-100 Supernationals in Tennessee? That it was a huge show with 915 registrations? That Mother Nature dumped everything she had on the show from torrential rains early in the week to almost freezing temperatures on Saturday? That I had just as excellent a time as I usually do?
I've been going to the show for about ten years now. Every year I think I may justskip it, but I'm always drawn to seeing old friends, enjoying great trucks, and making new memories. This year was a new experience for me as I didn't go with friends, but took along my wife, Sonya, and my kids, Rebecca, Ryan, and Kevin. It was a different type of holiday, a little more casual and in some ways more stressful, but still just as much fun. We decided to make it more of a vacation instead of the hustle down, overdose of looking at trucks, and the bomb-home trip I usually do. I'm glad we did. I actually had some good, solid sleep-more than I'm used to, as I usually stay up late typing to meet deadlines, just like tonight!
Usually we arrive sometime Thursday; this year we were there Wednesday and you wouldn't have known the difference. There were as many trucks as we usually see Thursday. I took in as much as I could of the trucks between unpacking and greeting old friends. Once we got settled we made some plans for sightseeing. We decided to show the kids the splendor of the Smokies by travelling the road to Gatlinburg through town and into the heart of the mountains. Going up the majestic mountains gave me a better feel for why so many people come here: I thought it was just for the trucks up until now! I would encourage anyone who hasn't done so to get up in the mountains and enjoy their beauty!
Once I got into actually perusing the trucks, it was surprising to see the changes in attendance. For pure numbers, there was the still-growing population of the '61-66 class, but the number of '61-63 Unibodies actually shrunk to only four! I guess that means the standard cab trucks are really growing in popularity. The '67-72 class had a lot higher numbers, perhaps due to gained acceptability and accessibility of parts. The number of pre-'48 trucks was up too, and there were some high-quality rides in that class with an awesome orange '40 Panel picking up the Truckers' Choice Award. I don't think that has ever happened with a pre-'48 truck. I was disappointed that there were only two Mercury trucks in the entire show, but I think folks will be blown away next year when the Mercurys invade "The Forge" on our "SuperCruise to the Supernats" (www.socp.net).
Speaking of choice, there were some choice rides there too! An awesome plum slant cab from Arizona had just the right color, stance, and mods to grab my attention. The white interior really set it off too. Funny how sometimes it's hard to say what makes it right, just that it looks right. Another favorite was the two-tone '61 Unibody from Non-Profit Truckers club that again won the '61-66 Truck of the Year Award. Phil's machine has that same "right" look and stance. The extended cabs continue to awe me-they look so good. I heard a couple of people "out of the loop" say they came that way. Little did they know!
For new products, I was able to find some cool new pieces. Being at a show like the Supernationals always gives you first crack at these products, often at a lower introductory price or at "Show Special" pricing:
Fatman Fabrications (704-545-0369) now offers 2-inch dropped spindles for the Volar front suspension. For getting the height down or ride quality back into your frontend, this is an item that F-100 owners have needed for a long time.
No Limit Engineering (909-386-RODS) is also offering dropped lower control arms for the Volar which can return ride quality to your ride. They also have some other new suspension pieces and will have a brand-new high-tech aluminum dash insert by the time you read this. Call them or see them on on the Web at www.nolimit.net.
Rod Doors (530-896-1513) is now offering their interior pieces for the years '57-60, '61-66, and '67-72. That now gives them coverage for pretty well every classic Ford truck ever made, and you can get anything from just a headliner or door pads to complete interiors with kick panels and a tank cover. If you've never seen their pieces, you must check them out on the Web at www.roddoors.com to see one of the easier ways to build an interior!
Carolina Classics (1-800-598-4211) is now offering more products for the later-model guys with 10-piece body molding sets for '65-66 F-100s, and 16-gauge steel floorpans for '61-64 trucks. They are also carrying bolt-in power-window kits for '48-79 trucks.
Mid 50s F-100s (800-252-1956) is now offering some new truck covers, interior pieces, dash extensions, repro door latches, and many small hard-to-find pieces. They are also close to having repro original gauges for '53-56 trucks. Be sure to call Sy for whatever you need as she may now have it or may make it if demand is high enough.
The Anniversary Giveaway '53 F-100 for the 2003 Supernationals was there and drew a crowd all weekend with its awesome chassis and chromed and polished Ford powerplant. Builder extraordinaire, Eddie Smith, "Fast Eddie" as I now call him, gave the crowds the scoop on the awesome truck he is putting together for someone to win at next year's show. Major contributions from sponsors and the talents of Eddie and his hot rod shop are combining to produce what will be a dream come true for one lucky trucker. The truck is now a "cab on chassis" and progressing as planned according to Eddie and show producer Pat Ford. Pat also put to bed many rumors and questions regarding the winning of the truck. To clarify, the truck will be given away at the awards ceremony on Saturday night to a registered trucker who must be at the ceremony to win. No exceptions!
I doubt many will miss next year's Supernationals, as it'll be a "must do" event to start the summer and celebrate the 100th anniversary of Ford, the 50th anniversary of the F-100, and the 25th anniversary of the show! I'm glad I was there and able to show my family what makes the Ford family a special one. See y'all there next year!
Until next month, keep it... Forever Ford
Gary Pratt 8196 Old Scugog Road Enniskillen, Ontario Canada L0B 1J0 E-mail: email@example.com


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The Home of Representatives consists of 120 members who serve a term of two years. Sneaking right into a house that is nonetheless beneath building in the course of the night sounds better. If you would like to receive updated schedule changes and notices please sign-up on our Home TELEVISION Subscription Discover page. In the run as much as the referendum, the then Chancellor, George Osborne, suggested voters that a Depart end result would put a critical dent in UK house costs. Our realtor didn't show our house in a yr till it was time to renew and all of the sudden we've someone taking a look at our home, now you already know it is simply one other realtor. Hello MsDora, It's simple to imagine living in the home significantly when surrounded by the artifacts of that time. You'll, nonetheless, have to follow the accredited plans and particulars without making changes.
Her daughters Ada, Laura, Constance and Leila purchased some land and the house and contined to spent most of their adult lives at Como. Hello as you seem like a fantastic apreciator of deep home, i would have to ask you for the name of a music, I can't discover it anyplace however I heard it in a deep house bar. Cedar, pine advert redwood are cheaper and simpler to find than mahogany, and these are additionally good decisions for constructing a butterfly home.
It turns out that an clever arrangement of fruit additionally offers you lots of bang in your buck, when it comes to oohs and ahs and… properly… some Instagram likes This style of tart, with contemporary fruit atop a cheese or custard filling can be highly adaptable to season; top the goat cheese inside with no matter fruit you may have available, and time of the year, and it ought to serve you properly.
The temperature inside the home would not should be as cozy because it may be while you're dwelling. I even had one istance where I bought a Property myself, as a result of the Agent couldn't finalise (close) the Sale. I liked visiting this web page and all the nice directions on constructing a butterfly home and all the other wonderful information and footage.
House Television airs protection of the Michigan Home of Representatives Session in addition to choose committee conferences to the general public on the World Huge Web. Nonetheless you would possibly want to take into account the outdated saying 'higher the most cost effective house in the most effective highway, than the best home within the most cost-effective road'. This has happened twice and now, each home in my worth range is being bought identical day of listing and is pending in less than 24 hours. I am just saying, there are some belongings you simply shouldn't do in the event you visit a haunted home. Go to your boyfriend or girlfriend's (if they're a Game Middle/Facebook buddy) home near LAX or Calabasas and say hello to them. I now stay in Peel, on the west coast of the Isle of Man about 3 mins walk from the beach in an outdated four bedroom Victorian house that we purchased for £one hundred eighty,000 about eight years in the past and I really feel so fortunate.


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First, I have to say thank you for all the wonderful comments on yesterday's post. It's interesting; on Tuesday night I attended my first Idea Potluck and was blown away and inspired by everyone who spoke. It was just what I needed to remind myself that sometimes you just need to put yourself out there and ask and you will be happily surprised at what the universe gives you in return. So, thank you, everyone, for reminding me that being who I am is perfectly fine.
Vest – Old Navy from Jen (similar) | Shirt – Le Tote (same) | Jeans – Old Navy (same) | Boots – Sam Edelman c/o Shopbop (same) | Necklace – c/o T&J Designs (similar)
Even if who I am is a gal trying to take pictures outside her parents' house, which happens to be situated in the windiest part of all of Central Illinois.
Anyway, today is apparently St. Patrick's Day although Chicago celebrated last weekend. I avoided the crowds downtown and still got to see the green river on my walk to work on Monday morning. I also figured that since you're supposed to wear green on St. Patrick's Day I'd share this outfit with a greenish vest. It's close enough, right?
I mean, even though my name is Erin (which basically means Ireland), the closest I've ever come to Ireland is an Irish pub. Even if my dad tells me it's as authentic as you're going to get in the States. I also plan to drink a Guinness (Nitro IPA) tonight. So, you know, close.


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Took my daughter to see Dr. Sark for her follow-up appointment on her ear infection today. Before he came in I was seated on the examination table, and he surprised me by crossing immediately to me and putting his arms around me. I didn't realize what he was doing getting so close to me and I rather stupidly blurted out, "What's this?" He replied, "This … is a hug." "Okay … so we're on a hugging basis now …" I said, trailing off. It kind of took me by surprise.
Far be it from me to complain though. A hug from a hot doctor is a hug from a hot doctor, right?
I asked Dr. Sark about travel during pregnancy, explaining that my sister is engaged and angling for a wedding date in November of next year. He replied that he wouldn't want me traveling after four months.
"Four months!" I said in disbelief. He said something about being old-fashioned and not wanting pregnant women jetting around everywhere.
I'm sorry, but no. Even if I didn't have the wedding, I have academic conferences to attend in the summer that are important to me. I only need a doctor's permission to fly with certain airlines during the final month of pregnancy, and quite a few of them have no requirements for a doctor's permission at any point of the pregnancy.
So, I guess I shouldn't count on getting permission from him if I need to do any traveling during my final month of pregnancy. Which is fine. I'll just have to stick to the airlines that don't require it.
In other news, I asked him at an appointment several months ago if I could have a doula at my delivery if he were my doctor, and he said he'd get back to me on that. Today he finally got back to me, and he said a doula would be fine. So yay for that.


text: The manual says that the rear shock comes pre-set in the #4 position. I am approximately 235 lbs. I frequently ride with my wife as a passenger as well. Lets say that adds another 120 lbs for a total of 355 lbs. We ride mostly on the highway that are for the most parts smooth, with the exception of some that are a bit rougher due to patching and poor crack tarring. I think I could get a bit better ride than I am now with some minor adjustments to the pre-load on the rear shock. What position would everyone recommend adjusting it to?


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Kenwood Interdisciplinary Research Complex Starts to Rise
Construction continues on the $80 million Kenwood Interdisciplinary Research Complex.
Construction workers from CG Schmidt have been busily building the first phase of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee's $80 million Kenwood Interdisciplinary Research Complex since October 2012. Located at the northwest corner of Maryland Avenue and Kenwood Boulevard on UWM's campus the facility will become the new home for the UWM Department of Physics. The building will also contain labs for the Zilber School of Public Health. The first phase, at a cost of $45 million, should be substantially completely by November 2014.
Photo Gallery


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New Road Hotel Opens 16 April 2018
Congratulations to New Road Hotel which opened its doors on Monday 16 April 2018. The very first guests were welcomed with a bottle of Champagne and a key to the hotel, as there will always be a room available to them.
New Road is a stylish 80 bedroom boutique hotel in East London. It's set to be the No.1 place for sleeping, eating, drinking and meeting. Housed in a former textile factory in Whitechapel, this unique hotel has been inspired by the New York metropolis.
All the bedrooms have original brickwork and large windows to allow natural daylight to flood in – a rarity sometimes in London. The Loft Rooms on the top floor of the hotel offer some fantastic views of the city's skyline from their own terraces. For something extra special, the Loft+Jacuzzi has an in-room Jacuzzi. In addition the Loft+Hot Tub enables guests to enjoy their own private outdoor hot tub on the terrace, soak away under the stars and the city's twinkling lights.
There are event meeting spaces, a fitness studio and several social zones where guests enjoy live music, play pool in the games zone or relax in the library.
The hotels signature restaurant is the first ever Chophouse, by acclaimed chef Marco Pierre White, in London. Mr White's English Chophouse gives a nod to tradition and centres on everything that chophouses are famed for: meat and hearty portions. The Chophouse menu cleverly combines English classics whilst also introducing a little French flair that epitomizes Marco's cooking style. The menu centres around steaks, grills and chops. There is also a full Halal Menu.
For further information or to arrange a personal tour contact Karen McFall email@example.com


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Embracing Artificial Intelligence and Deep Learning for Cyber Defense
At Enlighten, we focus on delivering capabilities to facilitate all aspects of the system development lifecycle in order to support many of our nation's leading defense initiatives. Software, infrastructure, and systems engineering teams focus on architecture, design, development, implementation, and support for front-end visualizations, service tier implementations, and back-end data management infrastructures (SQL and NOSQL) to enable our big data systems and analytics to support various mission requirements.
To learn more click here.


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Oh too fun!! Do the Brad Wing Do the Les Clap Geaux Tigers
Friday, December 16, 2011
Do the Brad Wing and Les Clap - LSU Championship Game Video
Posted by James H at 12/16/2011 09:37:00 AM
Labels: alabama, LSU, LSU Football, SEC
1 comment:
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It is the little changes which will make the largest changes.
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- May 20, 2013 at 5:39 AM
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Thankfully, we are living in the modern world, and in this miraculous utopia of electric toothbrushes and Google Translate and Elon Musk, it's perfectly possible to hold your entire love life in the palm of your hand.
Whether you're a nurse yourself and are looking for a way to streamline your love life, or you're looking to date a nurse, EliteSingles represents the perfect solution; a premium dating website and dating app combination created entirely for discerning professionals looking for love. If you're a nurse searching for 'the one', beginning your journey to a serious relationship never been easier.
Online dating: the perfect choice for single nurses
Taking the leap online makes dating a nurse easier than ever before. Ponder a while on that fact – down eons of human history, there has never been a more surefire way to meet someone wonderful. Nurses in Ancient Greece would have had to simply attend their lectures and hope that Plato might bring an attractive, single plus one to the next team feast (and perhaps a more practical uniform!).
Today's singles have the chance to use a platform that not only provides access to thousands of like-minded singles, but also actively finds singles that match their own personality.
When looking for that next romance, leaving things to chance is a surefire way to spend endless months of your precious time languishing in the monochrome waiting room of love. 'The one' may well be somewhere out there right this second, and every day that passes as you sit in the window and sigh is a day you could have spent frolicking in the sun in matching outfits. So then, what's a single professional to do? Join EliteSingles, of course, and take charge of your love life!


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Invest in Hillel
Information for donors
Thank you for considering a tax-deductible gift to support Oregon Hillel!
Hillel works tirelessly to infuse campus living with rich and meaningful opportunities for Jewish life. We strive to provide students with experiences that complement the University's offerings and afford students space and freedom to explore and investigate their Jewish identities. We rely on the generosity of our alumni, parents, & community to enable our work. We appreciate your willingness to support our endeavors to provide students with gateways to Jewish life that are relevant and exciting. For more information or assistance contact Andy Gitelson at (541) 343-8920 ext. 101, or at firstname.lastname@example.com.
Leaving a Legacy:
Oregon Hillel Endowment Fund
It is said that a society becomes great when individuals plant trees whose shade they know they shall never enjoy. Oregon Hillel strives to secure the funding of our programs, services, and to empower our future students to develop the next great idea for building Jewish community and for engaging their peers. In order to achieve that goal, we have established the Oregon Hillel Endowment Fund. An investment in our endowment fund will be permanent and will generate an annual interest payment of 4% to Oregon Hillel that will ensure that our programs are funded in perpetuity. I hope you will take this opportunity to plant a seed for future Jewish students at the University of Oregon. Thank you for your consideration, and for more information or questions regarding the Oregon Hillel Endowment, please contact Andy Gitelson.


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The sound of a thought sparking flatly on a fire starter, catching itself on nothing at all and disappearing into wild air.
Brick walls extending upwards into heavens and heavens offering them no windows.
Cathedrals daunting upwards, discovered by natives instead of discovering them, left as only shattered stained glass crafted into jewelry.
Empty boxes falling against each other in a rusted moving van, paint chips littering the lids.
Carelessly used needles rattling blankly onto the ground of a gravel lot by a school yard.
Echoes of words we've heard before and before and before and never afterwards.


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British utility companies are all terrible
I find the way utility companies treat their customers is absolutely terrible. I'm in a mood to write a letter to someone anyone about the way they do their billing. We moved into our new house and settled down and waited for the bills to come, but nothing. Then sure enough we receive in the span of week:
- United Utilities have sent us a bill for all the water and waste water for the house. For one year in advance. Kindly they have broken it down into 6 monthly payments, so payable immediately 250 please.
- British Gas have sent us a bill for electricity. Payable immediately for 75.
- British Gas have sent us a bill for gas. Payable immediately for 150.
The total of these bills (plus the council tax) is now somewhere in the order of 4x the cost of the same bills in Canada. But the thing I find obscene is that they are payable immediately, no arguing right now. I've never seen any other business operate in such a manner. You can't bill a client and expect immediate payment, never mind immediate payment for a years work in advance.
Time to complain to someone and try and get Britains utility rules improved... throw the letters to the bottom of pile and sort out my bank account on my own time.
No wonder


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We offer a plethora of best quality diagnostic services under one roof with latest, state of the art equipment and a team of professional, well qualified, & experienced staff. Please go through our detailed services catalog provided below.
Ultrasound and Color Doppler
We provide state of the art, professional and versatile ultrasound scanning services with real time and complete diagnostic information.
We are among the select few diagnostic centers in India using the latest Voluson E8 Expert from GE Healthcare. We are proud to have been the first installation in North Delhi.
It is one of the most advanced "Live" 3D/4D whole body ultrasound scanner cum color doppler with Echocardiography facility.
It features multiple multi-frequency broadband probes for all diagnostic applications.
Digital OPG
We provide advanced digital OPG (Orthopantomography) and dental X-Ray imaging services with the all new CS 8100, the sophisticated compact panoramic imaging system, developed by Carestream Dental, USA.
It uses Carestream's most advanced imaging technology to deliver high quality digital images instantly, helping us provide the best possible patient care.
It has won several prestigious awards including the Reddot Design Award for 2013.
Available at only a select few diagnostic centres in India, ours being the FIRST installation in North Delhi.
Dexa Scan
We provide whole body DEXA scan imaging and Bone Mineral Densitometry services using the latest DEXA machine from GE Healthcare.
Digital X-Ray
We use the latest AGFA CR 35-X digitizer and the AGFA Drystar AXYS imager, one of the best available computed radiography systems from Agfa Healthcare.
The CR 35-X is a highly versatile digitizing system which supports a broad range of applications and gives an excellent image quality.
The DRYSTAR AXYS is the only tabletop imager on the market able to print mammography images, it meets demanding image quality requirements, such as mammography and rheumatology, with ease. The imager incorporates Agfa HealthCare's Direct Digital Imaging (DDI) technology, which provides virtually flawless and consistently sharper image quality.
DRYSTAR AXYS offers a new "axis" for digital radiography workflows, including support for mammography imaging among a wide range of applications.
Enjoy the benefits of our increased productivity thanks to the ultra-short access time and the efficient throughput; the first prints are now available in an instant.
Digital Mammography
We use the GE SENOGRAPHE 600T SENIX H, which is a top of the line mammography machine from GE Medical, USA.
It provides excellent high resolution digital mammography images.
We have a fully equipped state of the art pathology lab having latest equipment from leading global manufacturers. We use the following :
- METROLAB 2300 PLUS - Random Access Clinical Autoanalyzer
- ARK - Fully automatic Biochemistry Autoanalyzer
- RADIANCE TOSOH (Japan) - CLIA (Chemiluminescence immunoassay) Hormone Analyser
- EASYLYTE - Fully automatic Electrolyte Analyzer.
- MINDRAY - Fully Automatic 5 parts 25 parameters Hematology Analyser
- MICROLAB 2000 MERCK (Germany) - Computerized Biochemistry Autoanalyzer
- HUMA CLOT (Human) (Germany) - Coagulometer
- VES-MASTIC EASY from Transasia (Japan) - Automated ESR analyser
- MISPA - I2 from AGAPPE (Switzerland) - Nephelometery & Photometry Specific Protein Analyser
- B.D. Sure Path DTS system - For PAP smear by LBC (Liquid based cytology)
We do most clinical pathology, histopathology, FNAC, biochemistry, microbiology and haematology tests including hormones and Elisa tests.
ECG and TMT
We provide expert echocardiography and TMT facilities using the following machines:
– Latest BTL08-MD ECG AND TMT MACHINE- Computerised with Instant Reports
– Computerized ECG machine from Schiller (Switzerland) with Instant Report
We use the state-of-the-art microprocessor based ORTHOPANTOMOGRAPHY X-RAY SYSTEM featuring a CEPHALOGRAPHY attachment to provide quality OPG scanning facility.
It has a 0.5 mm Fine Focus, world class, dedicated OPG X-Ray tube which guarantees high quality OPG and CEPH. X-Rays.
Foot- switch operated motorized column carriage alonge with triple light beam and mirror for precise, effortless patient positioning.


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The owner of Cake Concoctions, the downtown Bangor bakery and custom cake making business located at 6 Water Street, announced this week that after some question as to whether or not she would reopen his business, she has officially decided to close. Basant Paradis said on Friday morning that her downtown storefront would remain permanently closed after its then temporary closure on Oct. 2, and that she would be getting out of the baking business entirely.
"Bangor can't handle the prices that I need to be charging for my products," said Paradis. "A lot of people want custom cakes, but they just don't want to pay for the labor."
Paradis said baking her made-from-scratch cakes and the elaborate, hand-sketched drawings she can apply them can take four to five hours to create, upping the price to the $400 range, which is out of the reach of some consumer's budgets.
"Some people won't bat an eye at paying $150 for a specialty cake… others want some beautiful hand-sketched cake, but are not willing to pay for the labor associated with it," she said.


text: Professional/Self Development Five Teaching Anchors by John Izzo | Date Released : 06 Feb 2009 0 comments Print Close Being a successful fitness professional is not always measured in sessions sold or income generated. Some personal trainers enjoy the interaction and challenge of helping individuals change or improve their lives. Success, in this case, is measured by the number of clients you are able to help achieve their goals. Success can be easily achieved by everyone, especially if you have a firm understanding of the way the industry works. Over the years, I have learned a few things that have helped me as a fitness professional reach new heights of success. I have dubbed them "teaching anchors," and I share them with all of my staff trainers to help them meet and exceed the unique demands placed upon them in the personal training profession. Teaching Anchor #1: "The people you share your company with become an extension of you." Clients become your representatives, not because they will make sales for you but because they represent everything you know. Your service to them helps accomplish a goal. That goal is facilitated through your knowledge, expertise and planning. If your client has attained a goal (i.e., fat loss, marathon completion, increased strength, etc), then he has accomplished it partially by what you taught him. He accomplished this because at each session, during every set and every repetition, you were there encouraging and motivating him because you understand that the road to achieving a goal begins with "connecting" with your client. Connecting with your client is what separates trainers from other professions because we see how hard work contributes to behavior modification, and we see the profound effect we have once a client has achieved his goal. That profound effect stays with your clients and becomes your billboard to success and confidence. Teaching Anchor #2: "You have to be in a position where you 'service others.'" Gas attendants pump your gas, waiters take your food order and police protect you. How do you service others in personal training? You have to understand and accept the position of helping others for the betterment of others... and not for self serving pleasure. As a fitness professional, you want to help someone achieve his goal because it is what he has struggled to do for years alone. And now, with your help, he can and will accomplish this goal. Don't view your clients' successes as notches under your belt. Rather, view them as experiences with the diversity of the human spirit. The human spirit can be strong, weak, sturdy, fragile, complicated, simple, driven or misguided. You "give" yourself to others to improve your own spirit. This process is usually seen in fitness professionals and enthusiasts who have been exercising for decades. They tend to have increased self efficacy and self esteem and speak with more conviction. Teaching Anchor #3: "You have to have interaction to be an effective communicator." In order for your clients to perform the exercises you prescribe properly, you need to give them the instructions effectively. The difference between you and the newest issue of a muscle magazine is you can provide verbal and kinesthetic cues to your client. A page in a magazine cannot. Remember, communicating effectively involves interaction between the personal trainer and client. Reciprocal conversation allows the client to feel more comfortable and open to you. As a personal trainer, this is helpful because it allows your clients to avoid any apprehension or doubt they may have towards exercise. It helps make your client become "coach-able." Communicating with a client effectively promotes proper instruction and relationship building, which will also assist in achieving the previous two anchors. Teaching Anchor #4:"Instruct…Inspire…Integrate." Longevity in any industry enables you to look back and learn from mistakes and emphasize on positives. This is how I came up with the three "I"s. Instruct - Instructing means teaching the skills you have acquired through education, experience or certification courses. These are the skills from which your exercise programming originates. However, it is important to note that education alone does not make you an effective fitness professional. Most successful fitness professionals also have the ability to engage their clients through vocal conviction (speaking clearly, concisely and with confidence) and potent motivational techniques that enable them to capture their clients' attention. Inspire - Inspiring is the subconscious technique of putting into action the first three teaching anchors: realizing that clients are representative of you (extensions), understading you need to service others and becoming an effective communicator. Integrate - Integrating yourself into your client's life doesn't have to be an ethics issue or a question of professionalism. Get to know your clients and the things that matter to them. Make achieving your clients' goals your goal to achieve. Teaching Anchor #5: "The client is your boss." Yes, it's true. Good trainers realize this. You work for every client. They don't work for you. Just as you assume you can "fire" your clients, they can also fire you. And if they fire you, it doesn't make you look good, and you run the risk of being bad mouthed, losing referrals and losing potential income. If you understand and apply the first four teaching anchors, then this last one should not be a problem. If you accept that every client is your responsibility and that you have goals (deadlines), and if you are insubordinate (tardy, habitual calling out, lying, etc), you can be let go! It's the trainers who don't believe this (or don't want to) that don't last more than six months in the business. Remember, personal training is a career. Treat it as a business. Show your clients you are a responsible professional from day one. Show them you are respected among your peers and fellow staff. Be ready to showcase your accomplishments and experience to earn their trust and business. Doing these things will give you that crucial advantage you'll need to succeed where others have failed. Back to top About the author: John Izzo John Izzo holds a Bachelor's degree in Public Health Promotion specializing in Community Nutrition. He holds certifications from NASM, ACE, NESTA, AFPA and APEX Training Systems. John has been involved in the fitness industry since 1992, and he has enjoyed a successful career as a personal trainer since 1998. He has helped transform the lives (and bodies) of hundreds of fitness enthusiasts and athletes in facilities located in Connecticut such as World Gym, Gold's Gym and Healthtrax, Inc. John has been featured in various publications including Fitness Management Publication, ESPN Local News Break and the Hartford Courant (CT). Full Author Details Related content Content from John Izzo Predicting Your Future Performance by James Caan | Videos Becoming a Successful Health Club Trainer Pete McCall | Articles Nine Lessons for Business Success Phil Kaplan | Articles Success Series - Part 1 Paul Chek | Articles Five Teaching Anchors John Izzo | Articles Five Ways to Retain Clients John Izzo | Articles Foot/Ankle Joint and the Vertical Jump John Izzo | Articles Please login to leave a comment Comments (0) Back to top