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Buying a dental practice? Here’s what you need to know about getting your financing in place:
If there’s a fire, the banks want to be covered for the amount of the loan. For this reason, you will have to obtain fire insurance and assign it to the bank. The amount of fire insurance depends on the value of the contents.
If you die / become disabled, the banks want to be covered for the amount of the loan (or more in order to cover additional expenses). They’ll ask you to assign the life insurance policy to them (although you’ll still be required to pay the monthly premiums). So if you do have to do this, make sure you get EXTRA insurance to cover your loved ones (in the event of your death)!
You will need to provide the bank with proof of malpractice insurance. Since all dentists in Ontario are automatically insured through the Royal College of Dental Surgeons of Ontario (the “RCDSO“), this only requires you to write to the RCDSO and ask for a letter confirming that you have malpractice insurance in the amount of $2,000,000.
Another form of insurance required by the bank is general liability insurance. This is because the bank wants to know that, in the event of a lawsuit against the company, the insurance will be able to cover the costs of the law suit so that you may continue to pay back your obligations towards the bank.
Where the practice premises is leased, the bank will want to be provided with a copy of the signed lease assignment, coupled with the landlord’s consent. Where the practice premises is being purchased, the bank will want to see the purchase documents.
The bank will normally ask to see at least 10 years left on the lease. This can be an issue, for example, if you’re purchasing a practice where the lease only has 5 years left. What this means is that your lawyer will have to work extra hard to get you that 10 year term. But in the event that the landlord is not willing to give you the 10 years you seek, then a shorter term (i.e. 8 years) could work, but the terms of your bank loan, such as the amortization period of the loan, will have to change.
Another tricky situation when it comes to leases is that the bank will not tolerate a demolition clause in the lease which can be exercised during the 10 year term. The reason for this is because a demolition clause, properly exercised, could cause the dentist to be out on their rear without a location from which to practice well in advance of the lease term being up. Such a disturbance to the practice may result in loss of revenue and therefore a default on the loan.
For more information on demolition clauses you can read this blog.
If you are borrowing funds in the name of a dentistry professional corporation then, in order to ensure that you do not “hide behind the corporation”, the bank will usually ask that you, the dentist, sign a guarantee stating that you will be personally responsible for any default of the corporation.
8. General Security Agreement
Another way the bank will seek to protect its interest is by asking you to sign a General Security Agreement (the “GSA“). The GSA gives the bank interest in and recourse to all of the equipment, inventory, instruments, books & records, tangibles/intangibles, etc. at your office in the event that you and/or your corporation defaults on the loan. The bank calls these items “collateral”.
Once you agree to the bank’s terms, then the banks lawyer or your lawyer will register the GSA in the Personal Property Security Act (the “PPSA“) register. The PPSA register is a place where creditors can register their interest against a person or company. This registration will normally stay in place until it is renewed or until such time as you pay off your debt and the registration is “discharged”.
In some situations (depending on the bank, the amount of the loan, etc.) the bank will ask your lawyer to provide the with a letter of opinion. This states that the lawyer has examined certain documents and has done the necessary searches in order to guarantee to the bank that the borrower is a valid corporation which has the capacity to borrow funds, that there are no other PPSA registrations against the borrower, etc. Not all banks and not all loans require a lawyer’s letter of opinion, but in our experience, this is a more and more common occurrence and you should be aware of it.
Where your corporation is borrowing the funds for the purchase, the bank will want to see a directors’ resolution authorizing the corporation to sign the loan documents. A Certificate of Status of the corporation will also be required. This is a document from Service Ontario stating that the dentistry professional corporation is a valid corporation that is still in existence.
For further guidance and information on practice financing, you can contact me (Ljubica Durlovska), David Mayzel or Michael Carabash. We are your legal dental team.
Please note that the information provided herein is not legal advice and is provided for informational and educational purposes only.
David Mayzel is your legal risk manager. He is a trained courtroom lawyer and has spent many years resolving disputes both in and out of court. He knows how to prepare documents and execute transactions in a way that avoids or mitigates legal risks. He can be reached at 416.528.5280. or firstname.lastname@example.org.
Michael Carabash is your business law adviser. He is an entrepreneur at heart who helps you see the big legal picture. He drafts clear and effective agreements that protect your rights while promoting your interests. He can be reached at 647.680.9530. or email@example.com.
Ljubica Durlovska is your transition lawyer. She helps you with staff and associates, maintaining your corporation, and other business matters. She can be reached at 416.443.9280, extension 206 or firstname.lastname@example.org.
Jonathan Borrelli is your employment lawyer. He helps you with staff and associates matters, including hirings, terminations, switching staff to written contracts and resolving disputes. He can be reached at 416.443.9280, extension 204 or email@example.com.
Benjamin Kong is an experienced business law clerk. He assists David and Michael with corporate matters and purchase / sale transactions. He can be reached at 416.443.9280, extension 207 or firstname.lastname@example.org.
Julie Whitehouse is an experienced business law clerk. She assists David and Michael with corporate matters and purchase / sale transactions. She can be reached at 416.443.9280, extension 203 or email@example.com.
David, Michael, Ljubica, Jonathan, Ben and Julie are a truly dynamic team. Their diverse knowledge, skills, and experiences will help you get the best deal possible while promoting your interests and protecting your rights. You can read dentist testimonials here.

domain: law


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The fight against the Wu Dou Jiu Dao has resulted in new threats emerging for the Baguadaoshi and their pupils. Chaoyun has spent a long time furiously training and tempering his body for such an occasion, and in the release of Jiangshi X Chapter 28, we’ll see it in action.
Jiangshi X Chapter 28 Release Date, Time, and Countdown
Jiangshi X will release Chapter 28 on Monday, November 20, 2023, at midnight JST. It will be available in the West and for most readers worldwide on November 19, 2023, at 7 AM PT / 10 AM ET on the VIZ Media Jiangshi X portal and Manga Plus!
Release Date Countdown | AOTF
If you’re wanting to catch this chapter as soon as it drops, consult our Jiangshi X release time zone guide for Chapter 28 below!
|Time Zone||Release Time|
|Pacific Time (Los Angeles, Vancouver)||7:00 AM PST|
|Mountain Time (Calgary, Denver)||8:00 AM MST|
|Central Time (Chicago, Regina)||9:00 AM CST|
|Eastern Time (New York, Toronto)||10:00 AM EST|
|Atlantic Time (Halifax, Fredericton)||11:00 AM AST|
|Brazil (Brasília Time)||12:00 PM BST|
|UK and Ireland||3:00 PM GMT|
|Europe||4:00 PM CEST|
|Moscow||6:00 PM MSK|
|India||8:30 PM IST|
|Vietnam and Thailand||10:00 PM ICT|
|Philippines||11:00 PM PHT|
In Chapter 27, Chaoyun watches his mentor fight while being mindful of another extremist nearby.
Jiangshi X Chapter 28 Recap and Spoilers
While we’ve seen plenty of Xiaohu in the latest chapters of Jiangshi X, it’s Chaoyun’s time to shine. While his shifu Li is locked in combat, Chaoyun is attacked by an extremely agile close-quarters fighter. The assailant points out that the Baguadaoshi have grown soft after a thousand years of peace, but Chaoyun awakens the immense power he’s been training the past few years. Check Jiangshi X Chapter 28 to find out how the fight goes from here!
- This article was updated on November 14th, 2023

domain: literature


text:
March 23 2009 01:59PM
The Oilers skated this morning except for Souray, Roloson, Reddox and Nilsson. Nilsson just walked by me during practice and I jokingly asked him if he will be in the doghouse for missing the skate. He laughed and said he got the green light not to skate today. He bruised his knee on the road trip, so they gave him the day off today, but said he will play tomorrow.
March 19 2009 04:20PM
Lucky number 26? If 13 is widely considered unlucky by many, I wonder if double the amount is twice as bad or if there’s no significance what so ever.
Either way, Dwayne Roloson will start his 26th straight game tonight against the Avs. An Oiler win tonight should get JDD his first start since November 30, tomorrow in Chicago.
March 17 2009 03:11PM
While many of you are already at Ceili’s, O’Brynes or some other Irish pub pounding meal-in-a-glass Guinness and celebrating like you actually have some Irish blood in you, the Oilers are looking to avoid a 4th straight overtime loss. And if you’re an historian or a believer in fate, destiny or voodoo it doesn’t look good for the Edmonton Oilers tonight. Saint Patrick, prior to the 20th century was always depicted in blue rather than green, so with the Blues in town tonight they could have some historic luck on their side.
March 14 2009 03:25PM
Do you remember your English 10 teacher? Mine was Mrs. Stroud and I couldn’t stand her obvious bias.
March 12 2009 12:26PM
The Oilers looked like a team a few days before the start of the season, with 24 players, five coaches and third goalie Floyd Whitney on the ice for the morning skate today.

domain: sports


text:
The Art Teacher's Book of Lists, Grades K-12, by Hume, Helen D.
- ISBN: 9780470482087 | 0470482087
- Cover: Paperback
- Copyright: 11/30/2010
A revised and updated edition of the best-selling resource for art teachers
This time-tested book is written for teachers who need accurate and updated information about the world of art, artists, and art movements, including the arts of Africa, Asia, Native America and other diverse cultures. The book is filled with tools, resources, and ideas for creating art in multiple media. Written by an experienced artist and art instructor, the book is filled with vital facts, data, readings, and other references,
-Each of the book's lists has been updated and the includes some 100 new lists
-Contains new information on contemporary artists, artwork, art movements, museum holdings, art websites, and more
-Offers ideas for dynamic art projects and lessons
Diverse in its content, the book covers topics such as architecture, drawing, painting, graphic arts, photography, digital arts, and much more.
This thoroughly revised and updated edition of the acclaimed The Art Teacher's Book of Lists offers a practical yet comprehensive guide to everything arts educators need to know—from art history basics to a wealth of project ideas that will transform art learners into art lovers.
This dynamic resource includes more than 125 projects that art teachers, from novice to veteran, can use as everyday lessons. To enhance students' experience and fit with existing lesson plans, many projects combine art with science, math, language arts, and social studies. In each chapter, veteran art instructor Helen Hume describes the historical, cultural, and educational aspects of teaching art and offers tips on everything from photographing art to creating books.
Designed for busy educators, each of the book's lessons offers a description of the necessary preparation, explores interdisciplinary connections, gives clear instructions, and lists alternative projects. There are also tips on adapting projects for children with special needs and students at different grade levels.
The Art Teacher's Book of Lists, Second Edition helps art teachers encourage creativity in their students and integrate winning ideas into their lessons while aligning them with National Standards.
Praise for The Art Teacher's Book of Lists, Second Edition
"This book should top your list of 'must have' art education references. Whether I'm in need of a lesson idea or facts about an artist or art style, I'm continually amazed at the amount of information packed into this book. I always keep it within easy reach."-Rick Peterson, art educator, Nixa Schools, Nixa, MO
"Hume packs decades of experience into her lists so that teachers old and new have a solid resource for creating lesson plans, bulletin boards, timelines, activities, and much more! It's like sitting down with a mentor who shares information that really works. You wouldn't believe what these lists can answer for you!"-Christie Berrier, art specialist, Atlantis Elementary School, Cocoa, FL
-100+ NEW lists
-350+ art project ideas
-Art history timelines

domain: hobby


MTV Video Music Awards
Celebrate National Puppy Day With These Slayer & Pup Pics
Forget the midweek blues -- today (March 23) is National Puppy Day. Sure, it's another one of those Twitter-friendly holidays you didn't realize existed until just now, but there's nothing wrong with this one for two reasons: 1) It's never a bad time to look at photos of sweet pups, and 2) Any holiday that spurs donations to dogs in need justifies its existence.
So why not do both today? And for a start, here's recent photos of thrash metal pioneers Slayer posing with dogs from the incredibly named Motley Zoo Animal Rescue, an organization operating out of Redmond, Washington. At the same March 19 photo shoot (h/t MetalInjection), fellow metal outfits Testament, Carcass and Soundgarden's Kim Thayil also stopped by.
Photography by Niffer Calderwood Photography. Courtesy of Motley Zoo Animal Rescue


text:
This is a House of Commons Committee report, with recommendations to government. The Government has two months to respond.
Date Published: 1 February 2024
Local authorities in England deliver key services paid by local taxpayers and which are critical to their everyday lives. However, local authorities are now issuing section 114 notices at an alarming rate which puts them and local taxpayers at risk. In the last six years, eight local authorities have issued a section 114 notice, which notifies of severe financial distress — while none had done so in the preceding eighteen years. Moreover, local authorities are increasingly reporting concerns about their financial positions and their ability to maintain delivery of their services. The Government must act now if local authorities are to survive the severe crisis and financial distress that they face.
It is no surprise that the financial crisis that local authorities are encountering comes after significant reductions in local authorities’ spending power which has itself coincided with increasing demand for their services and inflationary pressures driving up costs. Ultimately, the levels of funding available to local authorities, through council tax, retained business rates, and government grants have not kept pace with these pressures, leading to a funding gap which is already estimated at £4 billion over the next two years.
This has meant that local authorities are increasingly reliant on income from council tax to fund service delivery. However, council tax is regressive, long overdue for reform, and is contributing to a disproportionately negative impact on funding levels of local authorities in the most deprived areas of the country. Furthermore, the business rates retention scheme is increasingly misaligned with local authorities’ current spending needs and the government has not delivered on its earlier commitments to review and reform the scheme. The Government must urgently reform these core funding mechanisms to ensure that the levels of demand and cost pressures faced by local authorities are adequately considered in determining their funding levels.
Children’s and adults’ social care are frequently cited as key pressures on local authorities’ finances. For children’s social care, rising demand for residential care placements, combined with a poorly functioning market for provision of those placements, has driven significant cost increases. For adults’ social care, demand has been driven by a changing population with increasingly complex needs — alongside long-term workforce shortages and inflationary pressures — which has contributed to unmanageable bills for some local authorities. While we welcome the Government’s commitment to implementing fundamental reforms of the systems for delivering social care, a consistent and sustainable increase in funding is required in the long term. In the short term the Government must ensure that local authorities receive sufficient financial support to enable them to continue delivering the services that people need.
Local authorities are also facing significant financial pressures relating to delivery of services for children and young people with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND), including provision of home-to-school transport. The Government’s introduction of Education, Health and Care (EHC) plans in 2014 has contributed to increased demand for specialist services, often requiring delivery through placements in special schools located outside of families’ local areas. The level of funding available to local authorities has not kept pace with demand, and the Government is using temporary measures to enable local authorities to maintain service delivery while building up significant budget deficits. The Government must commit to a full review of the EHC plan system and consider reforms to make SEND provision financially sustainable. The Government must also provide clarity to local authorities on its treatment of budget deficits relating to SEND, and ensure that funding is sufficient to meet demand.
It is also clear that the increasing levels of homelessness have required local authorities to spend more in fulfilling their responsibilities to those requiring support. While ultimately the Government needs to deliver more affordable housing to provide a sustainable alternative to local authorities’ increasing need to use temporary accommodation, a key driver of increased homelessness in the short term has been the Government’s decision to freeze local housing allowance (LHA) rates at April 2020 levels. As the cost of renting in the private sector rental market has increased, the effect of the freeze has been to constrain the available supply of housing by making increasing numbers of properties unaffordable to those receiving benefits. We welcome the Government’s recent announcement that it will increase LHA rates from April 2024, although we urge the Government not to subsequently re-freeze LHA rates and instead to maintain them at least at the 30th percentile of local market rents each year.
The Government elected after the next UK General Election, regardless of their political persuasion, must embark on a fundamental review of the systems of local authority funding, local taxation, and delivery of social care services. In doing so, it must be clear about what local authorities are for and how they can best co-ordinate with delivery of the Government’s wider objectives. The next Government will need to design and implement fundamental reforms to bring the local authority funding system into the 21st Century and should consider options such as land value taxes and wider fiscal devolution in doing so. It must also explore all options for reforming funding and delivery of social care services to address the underlying causes of the acute funding and delivery pressures currently faced by local authorities.

domain: economics


text:
› Forums › Trading Post › For Sale Aquarium Items – Local › What are you bringing to sell at the Aquatic Swap Meet? › Reply To: What are you bringing to sell at the Aquatic Swap Meet?
I should be able to bring a couple starter cultures of the following. $5 per culture
please don’t ask the difference. They are all small worms suitable for feeding fry. I use them to feed killie fry and have used in the past to feed apisto fry the first few days of them being free swimming and I have fed them to Viet Mountain Minnow fry.

domain: pet


Governance structures for transboundary water management in the Jordan Basin
This policy brief draws upon a full report that was commissioned from the Stockholm International Water Institute (SIWI) by EcoPeace Middle East for the benefit of a wide range of stakeholders concerned with designing and establishing a future basin governance structure for the Lower Jordan River.
The work should be considered complementary to the Regional Non-Governmental Organisation (NGO) Master Plan for Sustainable Development in the Jordan Valley released in 2015 by EcoPeace Middle East and its partners SIWI and Global Nature Fund (GNF) with the support of the European Union’s Sustainable Water Integrated Management (SWIM) programme.
While recent trends towards increasing transboundary water cooperation are demonstrated by a growing number of River Basin Organisations (RBOs) globally, experts point to the variant effectiveness of these organisations to leverage the benefits of multi-lateral cooperation. Some form of regional governance is considered essential to achieve the goal of a rehabilitated Lower Jordan River, fair share of the basin water among the riparian’s and leverage the economic and geo-political benefits of cooperation for Palestinian, Jordanian and Israeli communities along its banks. This report seeks to inform thinking as a potential starting point to formalize a basin governance structure.
SIWI has been contracted by EcoPeace Middle East to prepare a report presenting the options available for the development of a basin governance structure for the Lower Jordan River.


GTM Holdings Corp. engages in the real estate, investment and electronic business. The company provides corporate governance and decision management services to assist its subsidiaries. Its business operation includes textile, electronics, and real estate. The company's products include spinning, weaving, dyeing, finishing, garment making, semiconductor assembly and testing, and renting and development of properties. GTM Holdings was founded in 1951 and is headquartered in Taipei, Taiwan.


text:
Оmar Hayam Mini-Hotel
Оmar Hayam Mini-Hotel is placed in a lively area of Moscow in the vicinity of Yeliseyevsky Shop, Bolshoi Theatre and Red Square .
Оmar Hayam Mini-Hotel is 20 minutes' walk from the center of Moscow. A museum and a theater lie a short distance away.
Оmar Hayam Mini-Hotel is a historical hotel offering soundproof rooms including Private Double Room and Economy Double Room. There are private bathrooms with a bathtub, a hairdryer and towels along with kitchenware, a washing machine and a fridge for self-catering.
Cafe Pushkin treats guests with russian and italian meals and lies within 250 meters from the property.
Chekhovskaya underground station is about 5 minutes' walk of the hotel. Due to its location 30 km from Sheremetyevo airport, it will take about 30 minutes' drive to get there.
Guests at Оmar Hayam Mini-Hotel are offered to use a baggage storage and a safe deposit box as well as airport transfer, 24-hour reception and ironing service.

domain: travel


text:
https://www.google.com/maps/place/Dr.+Enrico+Mango+-+Long+Island+Orthopedic+Surgeonemail@example.com,-77.0691319,8z/data=!4m8!1m2!2m1!1sDr+Mango!3m4!1s0x89e839f4aa9747d3:0x60e2d4df9133f912!8m2!3d40.8483549!4d-73.2505021?hl=enRotator cuffs would be the groups of muscles and tendons attaching the humerus bone on the shoulder blade. The rotator cuffs allow for folks to raise and rotate their arms. People who often execute overhead motions -- As an illustration, tennis players, carpenters, and painters -- are more likely to injure a rotator cuff.
This service is gratis and is for US phone calls or text messages only. Standard carrier prices are used In line with end users' wireless program.
An orthopedic surgeon can assist with arthroscopic knee and shoulder operation and can also assist with intradiscal electrothermal therapy (IDET). When an orthopedic surgeon does carry out surgical methods, these doctors also use nonsurgical interventions when probable to take care of patients.
Reserving an appointment that has a Long Island orthopedic surgeon with your insurance policies network is easy and free of charge with ZocDoc. And if your surgeon lets you know to determine an eye fixed medical doctor, we can help you there, far too.
Dr. Jeffrey Dermksian, MD Orthopedic Surgeon "Dr. Dermksian examined my sore knee, and discovered unique ways to easing the discomfort. Two types of injections were being talked about - 1 usually presenting instant aid and the other giving a longer-term Resolution with the knee's troubles.
Tutorial credentials, working experience and availability in an emergency should top the list of cardiologist qualifications, heart people should also take into consideration benefit.
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*On line appointments for this medical doctor are managed by HealthPost, a 3rd party. By clicking on go on, you may be taken to your monitor managed by HealthPost. HealthPost is entirely accountable for this provider.
on Superpages. The more info you present about your organization, the a lot easier it will be for purchasers to discover you online.
Dr. William Briner, a primary care athletics medication doctor specializing from the nonsurgical therapy of orthopedic injuries, joined the Business before this year.
Dr. Briner, who lives in Long Beach front, has the outstanding credentials clinic directors search for in new doctors who occur on board.
Orthopedic surgeons have to complete a minimum of a Bachelor Degree, followed by 4 yrs of healthcare college and 5 several years of orthopedic residency. A further 12 months of instruction is necessary for specialties throughout the industry. The orthopedic surgeon needs to go licensing requirements with the point out wherein moved here he / she will exercise medication.
This assistance is totally free and is particularly for US calls or textual content messages only. Regular provider rates are utilized Based on people' wi-fi program.
After you have located your state, locate the town that you're going to need an Orthopedic Surgeon in. Choose the state and town and you may see a listing of Orthopedic Surgeons as part of your metropolis and state.
In the course of a consultation or initially appointment by having an orthopedic surgeon, the practitioner will request the patient a variety of inquiries to know the specific situation. The surgeon may talk to in regards to the affected individual's discomfort stages, professional medical history, and any prior accidents.
You recognize the old expressing, ‘Break a leg?’ Yeah, don’t essentially do this when people let you know to — it’s simply a figure of speech. But when you need to do occur to break your leg or another bone, Be sure my sources to reach an orthopedist’s office stat.

domain: health


Anna's movement, Anna's team has had all of India speak out with one, effective voice. The latent energy of the people's anger has erupted never to be bottled again. What are the lessons to take away from this most inspiring of movements?
We need to, however embarrassed it makes us, accept that we haven't taken a stand before. And it isn't too difficult to see why. So many people have given their lives for speaking out. The latest victim - hopefully the last to give up her life in so blatant, unafraid and open a murder, was Shehla Masood. Has the guilty party been punished?
Indians know, with the system as it is, they never will.
What's more, Indians have always known this to be the consequence of speaking out. It's made us afraid for our lives and the lives of our loved ones. We've learnt to be cowed, to give up and give in with a sense of hopelessness and frustration.
I hope India never feels afraid to speak out again. If there's unity and a well thought out action plan there is no need to be afraid. Today ordinary Indians are pitted against a powerful foe - corruption in politics. India Against Corruption has clearly spelt out what politicians have been getting away with and why. It has made ordinary Indians angry. IAC has made them understand that democracy won't work unless they take an active role in questioning each and every move made by these politicians. That means giving up a bit of that most precious of resources - time.
And IAC are under no illusions that people who've benefitted from the system will give in meekly. These people are bound to resist any moves to change the status quo. IAC has said only one thing will ensure their accountability. UNITED ACTION. Otherwise they will carry on doing what they've done before.
- create a parellel economy through bleeding Indians and India dry
- through demanding bribes and
- through scams to siphon off for themselves, what the tax payer gives them for India.
- not allow access to even the basics - good pucca roads that last and footpaths made to walk on, clean air to breathe, electricity, water, a basic education and an equal chance for everyone to be able to hope for a better future - benefits that every Indian should rightfully be able to expect. But most dastardly of all,
The lessons for us:
Being scared is a vicious cycle. It keeps corruption alive.
Yet, being afraid is prudent unless we are united, have a well thought out action plan and the lines of communication are always open, not only between us but between the media and the movement leaders as well.
In a democracy, ordinary people have to participate to make politicians accountable.
I am a proud member of "India Against Corruption" (IAC)
Activity: IAC is the movement spearheaded by Anna Hazare and Arvind Kejriwal against the cancer of corruption that is eating away at India. Our current aim is to get a strong anti-corruption bill (The Jan Lokpal bill) passed by the parliament in the monsoon session.
Details: We have a few PPT\'s, FAQ\'s and pamphlets which can help the bloggers get a bit more clear idea about the movement and the bill. Moreover the 2.2 version of the bill is also available on the website for those who are interested in the legal aspects. We also plan to start hour long webcasts about the bill every weekend very soon. Interested people can join us there too. Contact us for more details. (Ankit Lal is also a blogger and is responsible for online activities of IAC. His blog links are: ankitlal.blogspot.com, naivereader.blogspot,com)
Note: There is a lot of misconception in the public about Anna\'s movement, Janlokpal and the aftereffects it would have. Our aim is to clear the air and make the public aware about JLP.
This post is a part of BlogAdda's Bloggers Social Responsibility (BSR) initiative. Visit http://www.blogadda.com/bsr/ and support an NGO of your choice by writing about its work.


Norma TAC-22 Ammunition 22 Long Rifle 40 Grain Lead Round Nose
Norma TAC 22 ammunition in stock is precisely manufactured to deliver outstanding performance time and time again. The 40 Grain round nose is perfect for target shooting at the range or for use on small varmints.
This ammunition is new production and non-corrosive.
NORMA TAC-22 is a reasonably priced, high quality ammunition mainly for practice and plinking. You’ll be sure to shoot unmatched accuracy on and off the range when you need to practice on competition level.
Norma Tac 22 for Sale
The NORMA TAC-22 has been used by competition shooters for many years and has won national matches in steel challenge with its unmatched consistency and accuracy.
The projectile is a 40 grain lead soft nose with a target velocity of 1083 FPS. It shoots consistent tight groupings and offers reliable fast firing regardless how quick you pull the trigger. NORMA TAC-22 is utilized in all segments of rimfire, to include benchrest practice.
- Unmatched accuracy
- Easy feeding
- Consistent speed and grouping
- Reliable training ammunition for competitive match shooting
- Caliber: .22 LR
- Bullet Type: LRN
- Weight: 40 grain
- Muzzle velocity: 1,083 fps
- Muzzle energy: 105 ft. lbs.


ITC FINDS IMPACT OF ATPA IMPORTS NEGLIGIBLE DESPITE ENHANCEMENTS
The overall effect of imports under the Andean Trade Preference Act (ATPA) on the U.S. economy and consumers continued to be negligible in 2003, reports the U.S. International Trade Commission in its publication Andean Trade Preference Act: Impact on U.S. Industries and Consumers and on Drug Crop Eradication and Crop Substitution, Tenth Report, 2003.
The ITC, an independent, nonpartisan, factfinding federal agency, recently issued the tenth report in a series monitoring imports under ATPA. The ATPA program affords preferential tariff treatment to most products of Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru. The ATPA's goal is to promote the development of sustainable economic alternatives to drug crop production by offering alternative, legal Andean products broader access to the U.S. market. The four Andean countries are the source of the coca plants from which most of the world's cocaine is produced or are major transit areas for cocaine.
The ATPA was renewed and amended on August 6, 2002, under the Andean Trade Promotion and Drug Eradication Act (ATPDEA), which broadened the scope of products eligible for tariff preferences. The year 2003 marked the first full year that the ATPDEA was in effect. Following are highlights of the report.
Andean Trade Preference Act: Impact on U.S. Industries and Consumers and on Drug Crop Eradication and Crop Substitution, Tenth Report, 2003 (Inv. No. 332-352, USITC Publication No. 3725, September 2004) will be available on the ITC's Internet site at www.usitc.gov. The publication will also be available at federal depository libraries in the United States. A CD-ROM or printed copy of the report may be requested by calling 202-205-1809 or by writing to the Office of the Secretary, U.S. International Trade Commission, 500 E Street, SW, Washington, DC 20436. Requests may also be faxed to 202-205-2104.
ITC general factfinding investigations, such as this one, cover matters related to tariffs or trade and are generally conducted at the request of the U.S. Trade Representative, the Senate Committee on Finance, or the House Committee on Ways and Means. The resulting reports convey the Commissions' objective findings and independent analyses on the subject investigated. The Commission makes no recommendations on policy or other matters in its general factfinding reports. Upon completion of each investigation, the ITC submits its finding and analyses to the requestor. General factfinding investigations reports are subsequently released to the public unless they are classified by the requestor for national security reasons.


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Название: IPv6 Core Protocols Implementation
Авторы: Li Q., Jinmei T., Shima K.
This book is the first and the only one of its kind, which reveals all of the details of the KAME IPv6 protocol stack, explaining exactly what every line of code does and why it was designed that way. Through the dissection of both the code and its design, the authors illustrate how IPv6 and its related protocols have been interpreted and implemented from the specifications. This reference will demystify those ambiguous areas in the standards, which are open to interpretation and problematic in deployment, and presents solutions offered by KAME in dealing with these implementation challenges.


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"A Merry Life" Sheet Music by Luigi Denza
This is a Neapolitan song known in Italy as "Funiculi-Funicula," so called because it was written to celebrate the opening of the funicular railroad (cars drawn by cable), up Mt. Vesuvius. It became a popular street-song in Naples and has spread to all parts of the world. It portrays the care-free life of the Italian idler.

domain: library


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Ryo Ishikawa of Japan tees off on the first hole during the first round of the Masters golf tournament Thursday, April 7, 2011, in Augusta, Ga. (AP Photo/Charlie Riedel)
©2015 KMOV, (A Meredith Corporation Station). All Rights Reserved.
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Gladys L. Carico, Appellant, v. John W. Gardner, Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare, Appellee, 377 F.2d 259 (4th Cir. 1967)Annotate this Case
Decided April 17, 1967
Carl E. McAfee, Norton, Va. (Hugh P. Cline and Cline & McAfee, Norton, Va., on brief), for appellant.
William C. Breckinridge, Asst. U. S. Atty., for appellee.
Before SOBELOFF and CRAVEN, Circuit Judges, and SIMONS, District Judge.
CRAVEN, Circuit Judge:
We think the facts found by the Hearing Examiner, and adopted by the Appeals Council, do not support the decision that claimant Gladys L. Carico is not entitled to disability insurance benefits or to a period of disability under Sections 216(i) and 223(a) of the Social Security Act, as amended.1 The judgment of the district court upholding the administrative decision is reversed.
Mrs. Carico is a short, fat, semiliterate housewife. Her ideal weight is 120 pounds, and she has at various times weighed as much as 200 pounds. She is now fifty-seven years old and completed the fifth grade in school. Dr. U. S. Gonzalez and Dr. E. J. Banks summarized her physical and mental condition as follows: (1) umbilical hernia; (2) chronic posterior urethritis; (3) chronic uterine cervicitis; (4) probable rheumatoid arthritis, quiescent stage; (5) osteoarthritis, minimal (synovitis, left knee); (6) varicose veins, bilaterally; (7) exogenous obesity; and (8) psychoneurosis. Mrs. Carico has also complained of stomach adhesions, appendicitis, and a tumor on her kidney for which she has had many tests and returns every two months for dilation of her bladder. As stated by Dr. Gonzalez, she complains "of a multitude of trouble which in short involves from the top of her head down to her feet."
Mrs. Carico has held only one job: from 1944 to 1958 she worked as a checker in a dry cleaning plant in Coeburn, Virginia. Her duties required her to stand on her feet all of the time. In order to have an operation for varicose veins on her legs, she quit her job, was replaced by someone else, drew unemployment compensation for sixteen weeks, and thereafter attempted unsuccessfully to get employment at various stores and places in Coeburn, Virginia.
Claimant has an I.Q. of 74 and is in the mild mental defective range of intelligence. Dr. Pierce D. Nelson summarized her mental and nervous condition as follows:
"I think the patient's diagnosis is best described as a longstanding psychoneurotic disorder of a mixed type with somatic conversion symptoms, depression and hysterical symptoms. The problem of her emotional illness probably started many years ago and her home adjustment was made considerably worse with the onset of her first marriage and difficult adjustment there.2 I think that continuing difficulty occurred as she adjusted to her work problems and the onset of female trouble, thrombosis of both legs, problems of hernia, etc., all added to her problems of adjustment. I think the patient has functioned in a rather low level of intellectual function most of her life and I think this has also contributed to her problems of adjustment at the present time and her inability to carry on in a reasonable manner.
"I think the patient is functioning in the moderate range of psychiatric disability. I think that any one of a number of factors could be stressful enough to increase her disability in a substantial manner. I think that medical and psychiatric treatment would make her feel more comfortable at home and I doubt that either treatment or rehabilitation would improve her overall level of function from its present level. I think she is probably at the optimum level of function at the present time and would expect very little change in her in the next several months and years to come although she probably will go down hill in this period of time.
"I think the patient should be considered competent to manage any financial assistance that might be offered to her as a result of this examination."
Although the Hearing Examiner noted the testimony of Dr. Nelson, he concluded that with "proper motivation and a desire to do remunerative work, [the claimant] would still be able to work as a checker in a laundry and could do many other types of light, sedentary work such as would be involved in the manufacture of plastic products or in the light metal industry without aggravating any conditions." We think the Hearing Examiner failed to appreciate the true significance of claimant's lack of motivation.
Insufficient or improper motivation may be symptomatic of illness, or it may, perhaps, indicate lack of character. The Hearing Examiner apparently assumed the latter in complete disregard of the psychiatrist's report. He made the implicit assumption, for which there is no support, that Mrs. Carico could be properly motivated if she only wished to be. We do not think questions of motivation can be so simply regarded. In assuming that she had a bad attitude, the Hearing Examiner utterly disregarded her testimony that she has tried to find a job she could do (other than one requiring her to stand on her feet all day).
We think the medical evidence clearly shows, considering the record as a whole, that claimant is physically unable to do manual labor or labor requiring her to stand on her feet,3 and that due to her mental inability and lack of education and lack of training she is unemployable within the Appalachian area where she resides.
Since she could not continue to perform in her previous occupation, the burden shifted to the Social Security Administration to show that there are other kinds of work actually available for which a fifty-seven-year old woman with claimant's impairments may be considered reasonably suited. Boyd v. Gardner, 377 F.2d 718 (4th Cir. 1967). Nothing in the record indicates that the Secretary seriously attempted to sustain this burden. Certainly it is not sufficient that a Hearing Examiner suggest that theoretically she "could do many other types of light, sedentary work" such as would be involved in the plastic products or light metal industry. Hayes v. Gardner, 376 F.2d 517 (4th Cir. 1967).
The Hearing Examiner also suggested that claimant might be able to get employment in motels or hotels in keeping the rooms cleaned and supplying towels and bed linens. But this sort of manual labor would require not only standing up all day but more physical effort than her prior employment. Compared to checker in a dry cleaning plant, the suggested "light" work would be harder rather than easier.
On the record as a whole, we think the district court was clearly in error in holding that there was substantial evidence to sustain the decision of the Secretary. The case will be remanded to the district court for entry of judgment for claimant.
Reversed and remanded.


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Bobcats beat Magic to end 5-game losing streakPosted by Inside Hoops
A little rest turned out to be the perfect slump-buster for the Charlotte Bobcats.
A jolt from their speedy backcourt didn’t hurt, either.
Three days after getting flicked aside in a 27-point loss against Indiana, the Bobcats got 25 points from Kemba Walker and Gerald Henderson added 17 as they broke out of a five-game losing streak with a 106-100 win over the Orlando Magic on Friday night.
”It was very important to us,” Henderson said. ”A lot of games recently we put ourselves in the hole to start the game and kind of have to climb uphill to try to get a win. It’s a tough thing.” …
Charlotte started fast and shot the ball well throughout, with its field goal percentage hovering above 50 percent for most of the night. The Bobcats also shot 17 more free throws than Orlando, including some crucial ones in the final minute to secure the victory.
Their guard play off the bench was also big, with Ramon Sessions leading all reserves with 15 points and seven assists. The Bobcats also finished with just 11 turnovers…
Arron Afflalo led Orlando with 23 points, followed by Jameer Nelson with 22…
Charlotte earned its first road win since Jan. 6, improving to 5-14 on the season. … Vucevic finished with 11 points and nine rebounds, ending his string of eight straight double-doubles.
– Reported by Kyle Hightower of the Associated Press

domain: news


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Hostage: A Locked-Room Thriller
“Fast moving, loaded with suspense, edge-of-your-seat reading.”
Mina joins a Boeing 777 crew on a celebrated 20-hour nonstop flight from London to Sydney. Not included on the original crew roster, she maneuvered a spot by trading with another crew member. She needs a time out from her disintegrating marriage to Adam, and her difficult daughter, six-year-old Sophia.
Though Mina and Adam dearly love Sophia, coping with her challenging behavior is taking a toll. She's an unnerving handful taken to exhibiting unpredictable behavior and exaggerated reactions to various stimuli. Sophia has been diagnosed with hyperlexia.
On the other hand, she's somewhat of a savant, able to recognize and name the specifics of every plane her mother flies in—make and model, interior design, seating capacity, layout—all of it for every plane.
". . . Adam and I had recently discovered that Sophia had not, as we'd imagined, been reciting the words of her favorite picture books from memory, but was instead reading. She was three years old."
Mina's relationship with Adam has deteriorated into unfounded accusations and brief, mostly necessary conversations about money, travel, and child care. So it's with a worried and distracted mindset that she boards the plane. She snaps at passengers and fellow crew members, neglects necessary tasks and duties leaving them to others, and spends a lot of time either crying or on the verge of tears.
It's a highly anticipated and publicized flight:
"Journalists, a smattering off celebs and 'influencers' who will spend sixteen hours of the flight Instagramming and the other four drinking."
Shortly after takeoff, Mina is confronted by hijackers with a handwritten note:
"The following instructions will save your daughter's life. An hour from now, you will ask one of the pilots to leave the flight deck. You may use whatever reason you wish, but you will not raise the alarm in any way. . . ."
More instructions follow, then: “If you do it, your daughter will live. Don't, and she will die."
Mina is not only a flight crew member, she is also a pilot, but makes an emotional decision to comply with the hijacker's demands.
Author Mackintosh presents several points of view in this intriguing narrative. Readers are privy to the thoughts of numerous passengers on the plane.
Identified by seat number, some of the 350 passengers reveal learn their innermost thoughts and fears, as well as their hopes and dreams for their future. There's a computer game professional in seat 7G. A gifted but tired-of-it-all student sits in 40C, a runaway wife in seat 5J. Which one is the hijacker? All of them? None of them? Readers will enjoy the challenge of trying to figure it out.
But the hijackers are not foreign terrorists. Rather they are domestic environmental activists trying to shut down the airline industry in an effort to reduce air pollution (apparently without giving a thought to what would happen to the world economy without air transportation). The dialogue takes a turn toward preachiness and scolding, tempting some readers to skim over those scattered passages.
Still, it's a compelling read. The author doesn't let up, proffering page after page of unrelenting suspense. This is truly a book that is hard to put down as readers are willingly lured on by one plot twist after another.
Even though the characters are for the most part fully developed, some of them are unlikeable enough to jolt readers out of the story now and then by their questionable decisions and reactions, and it's not only the bad guys. The flight crew squabbles and a snipes at each other and makes snarky comments about passengers. An air of discontent hovers over passengers and crew even before the hijackers make themselves known.
The subplot with Adam ends with a splat. Simple explanations early on would have alleviated the false accusations and emotional distress of the rocky marriage. The epilogue is confusing, perhaps intentionally so, and seems to be only peripherally related to the primary story thread.
But none of that ruins the overall reading pleasure of Hostage. The author is a gifted writer with a captivating voice and an outstanding ability to put together a story that fully engages the reader. Fast moving, loaded with suspense, edge-of-your-seat reading.


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A democratic civilization will save itself only if it makes the language of the image into a stimulus for critical reflection, not an invitation to hypnosis.
5th Annual Summer Institute in Digital Literacy
Registration for the 2017 Summer Institute in Digital Literacy is closed. If you would like to be added to the waitlist, please contact Carolyn Fortuna firstname.lastname@example.org
KINGSTON, R.I., July 10, 2017—More than 150 teachers, college professors and librarians will gather at the University of Rhode Island’s Providence campus to hone their digital literacy skills at the fifth annual Summer Institute in Digital Literacy.
In addition to workshops, the program from July 23 through 28 at the Alan Shawn Feinstein College of Education and Professional Studies, 80 Washington St., Providence, will feature a keynote address by leading news literacy expert and journalist Dan Gillmor.
Gillmor’s address will explore strategies for teaching and learning about so-called “fake news,” as well as other forms of propaganda and media manipulation. “There’s never been a more important time for educators and librarians to learn how to improve people’s digital and media literacy skills,” he said.
The Institute supports the lifelong learning needs of educators through a 42-hour intensive learning and professional development experience. The program was recognized in the 2017 National Education Technology Plan, published by the U.S. Department of Education Office of Educational Technology.
“In this program, educators and librarians work collaboratively to engage in project-based inquiry and curriculum design to integrate digital literacy into existing academic programs,” said Julie Coiro, associate professor of education and co-director of the Graduate Certificate in Digital Literacy, a 12-credit program that includes both in-person and online courses.
During the week, participants explore a variety of digital media tools for learning, including web, video, social media and multimedia production. In the program, participants choose from among more than 40 workshops to learn free or low-cost digital tools including Storify, FlipGrid, Padlet, WordPress, Evernote and more.
“By applying knowledge and skills in using digital texts, tools and technologies, participants advance their digital literacy through practical hands-on creative activity,” said Renee Hobbs, professor of communication studies at the Harrington School of Communication and Media and co-director of the literacy program.
Participants also discuss and reflect on broader issues, including how literacy is changing as a result of media and technology and how media manipulation may affect the democratic process. Registration is available at https://mediaeducationlab.com/2017-summer-institute-digital-literacy.
Participating faculty include Troy Hicks of Central Michigan University; Jill Castek of Portland State University; Kara Clayton of Lee M. Thurston High School in Redford Charter Township in Michigan; Jill Castek of the University of Arizona; Charlie Coiro of the Coast Guard Leadership Academy; William Yang of Edgewood School, Scarsdale, N.Y.; Rhys Daunic of The Media Spot in New York City; Yonty Friesem of Central Connecticut State University; Kristin Hokanson of Inquiry Schools in Pennsylvania; Emily Bailin Wells of Teachers College, Columbia University; Amanda Murphy of Westerly High School; Stephanie Branson of the University of South Florida; and Maria Ranieri of the University of Florence, Italy.


Blockchain.com has become the latest cryptocurrency exchange to receive regulatory approval from the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS), according to a Reuters report.
The announcement came only a day after its rival Coinbase revealed its new Singapore in-principal license. With the MAS approval, the crypto exchanges can legally offer crypto products in the city-state.
Singapore is a major financial center in the Asia Pacific region. In addition, it became a favorite base for crypto companies for its proximity to several major regional markets in Southeast Asia.
However, the MAS became one of the stringent regulators for crypto startups with strict regulatory requirements. The latest approval of Blockchain.com only took the number of MAS-approved crypto companies to 18, while the Singapore regulator has received around 180 applications for crypto payments licenses since 2020.
Other companies to obtain the crypto license in the Southeast Asian city-state are Crypto.com and DBS Vickers, among others.
A Major Crypto Platform
Blockchain.com, which is valued at $14 billion, is one of the prominent crypto exchanges in the market. It was founded in 2011 as a crypto wallet and later expanded its services to other areas of the industry.
The platform processed over $1 trillion in cryptocurrency transactions and has 84 million wallet holders from 200 countries. Interestingly, half of its business now comes from institutions.
Additionally, the company is bullish on the future prospect of its Singapore presence as the new license will help to grow its institutional customers and team.
Last month, Blockchain.com received a provisional license from the crypto regulator of Dubai. This shows the focus of the company on expanding its footprint in several Asian markets. Meanwhile, several other crypto platforms, including Binance and Crypto.com, also received approval from Dubai’s VARA to set up regulated businesses in the Middle East.


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Less than a century after the Black Death descended into Europe and killed 75 million people—as much as 60 percent of the population (90% in some places) dead in the five years after 1347—an anonymous Alsatian engraver with the fantastic appellation of “Master of the Playing Cards” saw fit to depict St. Sebastian: the patron saint of plague victims. Making his name, literally, from the series of playing cards he produced at the moment when the pastime first became popular in Germany, the engraver decorated his suits with bears and wolves, lions and birds, flowers and woodwoses. The Master of Playing Cards’s largest engraving, however, was the aforementioned depiction of the unfortunate third-century martyr who suffered by order of the Emperor Diocletian. A violent image, but even several generations after the worst of the Black Death, and Sebastian still resonated with the populace, who remembered that “To many Europeans, the pestilence seemed to be the punishment of a wrathful Creator,” as John Kelly notes in The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death, the Most Devastating Plague of all Time.
The cult of Sebastian had grown in the years between the Black Death and the engraving, and during that interim the ancient martyr had become associated with plague victims. His suffering reminded people of their own lot—the sense that more hardship was inevitable, that the appearance of purpled buboes looked like arrows pulled from Sebastian’s eviscerated flesh after his attempted execution, and most of all the indiscrimination of which portion of bruised skin would be arrow-pierced seeming as random as who should die from plague. Produced roughly around 1440, when any direct memory of the greatest bubonic plague had long-since passed (even while smaller reoccurrences occurred for centuries), the Master of the Playing Cards presents a serene Sebastian, tied to a short tree while four archers pummel him with said arrows. Unlike more popular depictions of the saint, such as Andrea Mantegna’s painting made only four decades later, or El Greco and Peter Paul Reubens’s explicitly lithe and beautiful Sebastians made in respectively the 16th and 17th centuries, the engraver gives us a calm, almost bemused, martyr. He has an accepting smile on his face. Two arrows protrude from his puckered flesh. More are clearly coming. Sebastian didn’t just become associated with the plague as a means of saintly intercession, but also because in his narrative there was the possibility of metaphor to make sense of the senseless. Medical historian Roy Porter writes in Flesh in the Age of Reason: The Modern Foundations of Body and Soul that the “Black Death of the mid-fourteenth century and subsequent outbreaks…had, of course, cast a long, dark shadow, and their aftermath was the culture of the Dance of Death, the worm-corrupted cadaver, the skull and crossbones and the charnel house.” All of said accoutrement, which endures even today from the cackling skulls of Halloween to the pirates’ flag, serve to if not make pandemic comprehensible, then to at least tame it a bit. Faced with calamity, this is what the stories told and the images made were intended to do. Religion supplied the largest storehouse of ready-made narrative with which to tell stories, even while the death toll increasingly made traditional belief untenable. John Hatcher writes in The Black Death: A Personal History that many lost “faith in their religion and…[abandoned] themselves to fate,” where fatality is as unpredictable as where an arrow will land.
A different narrative, though not unrelated, was depicted 40 years later. Made by the Swedish painter Albertus Pictor, and applied to the white walls of the rustic Täby Church north of Stockholm, the mural presents what appears to be a wealthy merchant playing a (losing) game of chess against Death. Skeletal and grinning, Death appears with the same boney twisted smile that is underneath the mask of every human face, the embodiment and reminder of everyone’s ultimate destination. Famously the inspiration for director Ingmar Bergman’s 1957 film The Seventh Seal, Pictor’s picture is a haunting memento mori, a very human evocation of the desperate flailing against the inevitable. Both pictures tell stories about the plague, about the lengths we’ll go to survive. They convey how in pandemic predictability disappears; they are narratives about the failure of narratives themselves. What both of them court are Brother Fate and his twin Sister Despair. The wages of fortune are the subject of which cards you’re dealt and the tension of strategy and luck when you avoid having your bishop or rook taken. Life may be a game, but none of us are master players and sometimes we’re dealt a very bad hand.
There has always been literature of pandemic because there have always been pandemics. What marks the literature of plague, pestilence, and pandemic is a commitment to try and forge if not some sense of explanation, than at least a sense of meaning out of the raw experience of panic, horror, and despair. Narrative is an attempt to stave off meaninglessness, and in the void of the pandemic, literature serves the purpose of trying, however desperately, to stop the bleeding. It makes sense that the most famous literary work to come out of the plague is Giovani Boccaccio’s 1353 The Decameron, with its frame conceit of 100 bawdy, hilarious, and erotic stories told by seven women and three men over 10 days while they’re quarantined in a Tuscan villa outside Florence. As pandemic rages through northern Italy, Boccaccio’s characters distract themselves with funny, dirty stories, but the anxious intent from those young women and men self-exiled within cloistered walls is that “Every person born into this world has a natural right to sustain, preserve and defend” their own life, so that storytelling becomes its own palliative to drown out the howling of those dying on the other side of the ivy-covered stone walls.
Pandemic literature exists not just to analyze the reasons for the pestilence—that may not even be its primary purpose. Rather the telling of stories is a reminder that sense still exists somewhere, that if there is not meaning outside of the quarantine zone there’s at least meaning within our invented stories. Literature is a reclamation against that which illness represents—that the world is not our own. As the narrator of Albert Camus’s The Plague says as disease ravages the town of Oran in French Algeria, there is an “element of abstraction and unreality in misfortune. But when an abstraction starts to kill you, you have to get to work on it.” When confronted with the erraticism of etiology, the arbitrariness of infection, the randomness of illness, we must contend with the reality that we are not masters of this world. We have seemingly become such lords of nature that we’ve altered the very climate and geologists have named our epoch after humanity itself, and yet a cold virus can have more power than an army. Disease is not metaphor, symbol, or allegory, it is simply something that kills you without consideration. Story is a way of trying to impart a bit of that consideration that nature ignores.
The necessity of literature in the aftermath of pandemic is movingly illustrated in Emily St. John Mandel’s novel Station Eleven. Mostly taking place several years after the “Georgian Flu” has killed the vast majority of humans on the planet and civilization has collapsed, Mandel’s novel follows a troupe of Shakespearean actors as they travel by caravan across a scarred Great Lakes region on either side of the U.S.-Canadian border. “We bemoaned the impersonality of the modern world,” Mandel writes, “but that was a lie.” Station Eleven is, in some sense, a love letter to a lost world, which is to say the world (currently) of the reader. Our existence “had never been impersonal at all,” she writes, and the novel gives moving litanies of all that was lost in the narrative’s apocalypse, from chlorinated swimming pools to the mindlessness of the Internet. There is a tender love of every aspect of our stupid world, so that how the crisis happened can only be explained because of the fact that we were so interconnected: “There had always been a massive delicate infrastructure of people, all of them working unnoticed around us, and when people stop going to work, the entire operation grinds to a halt.” As survivors struggle to rebuild, it’s the job of narrative to supply meaning to that which disease has taken away, or as the motto painted on the wagon of the traveling caravan has it: “Survival is insufficient.” The need to tell stories, to use narrative to prove some continuity with a past obliterated by pandemic, is the motivating impulse of English professor James Smith, the main character in Jack London’s largely forgotten 1912 post-apocalyptic novel, The Scarlet Plague. With shades of Edgar Allan Poe, London imagines a 2013 outbreak of hemorrhagic fever called the “Red Death.” Infectious, fast-moving, and fatal, the plague wipes out the vast majority of the world’s population, so that some six decades after the pestilence first appears, Smith can scarcely believe that his memories of a once sophisticated civilization aren’t illusions. Still, the former teacher is compelled to tell his grandchildren about the world before the Red Death, even if he sometimes imagines that they are lies. “The fleeting systems lapse like foam,” writes London, “That’s it—foam, and fleeting. All man’s toil upon the planet was just so much foam.”
The Scarlet Plague ends in a distant 2073, the same year that Mary Shelley’s 1826 forerunner of the pandemic novel The Last Man was set. Far less famous than Shelley’s Frankenstein, her largely forgotten novel is arguably just as groundbreaking. As with Station Eleven, narrative and textuality are the central concerns of the novel; when the last man himself notes that “I have selected a few books; the principal are Homer and Shakespeare—But the libraries of the world are thrown open to me,” there is the sense that even in the finality of his position there is a way in which words can still define our reality, anemic though it may now be. Displaying the trademark uneasiness about the idea of fictionality that often marked 19th-century novels, Shelley’s conceit is that what you’re reading are transcriptions of parchment containing ancient oracular predictions that the author herself discovered while exploring caves outside of Naples that had once housed the temple of the Cumae Sibylline.
Her main character is a masculinized roman a clef for Shelley herself, an aristocrat named Lionel Verney who lives through the emergence of global pandemic in 2073 up through the beginning of the 22nd century when he earns the titular status of The Last Man. All of Shelley’s characters are stand-ins for her friends, the luminaries of the rapidly waning Romantic age, from Lord Byron who is transformed into Lord Randolph, a passionate if incompetent leader of England who bungles that nation’s response to the pandemic, to her own husband, Percy, who becomes Adrian, the son of the previous king who has chosen rather to embrace republicanism. By the time Verney begins his solitary pilgrimage across a desolated world, with only the ghosts of Homer and Shakespeare, and an Alpine sheepdog whom he adopts, he still speaks in a first person addressed to an audience of nobody. “Thus around the shores of deserted earth, while the sun is high, and the moon waxes or wanes, angels, the spirts of the dead, and the ever-open eye of the Supreme, will behold…the LAST MAN.” Thus, in a world devoid of people, Verney becomes the book and the inert world becomes the reader.
The Last Man’s first-person narration, ostensibly directed to a world absent of people who could actually read it, belies a deeper reason for the existence of language than mere communication—to construct a world upon the ruins, to bear a type of witness, even if it’s solitary. Language need not be for others; that it’s for ourselves is often good enough. Literature thus becomes affirmation; more than that it becomes rebellion, a means of saying within pandemic that we once existed, and that microbe and spirochete can’t abolish our voices, even if bodies should wither. That’s one of the most important formulations of Tony Kushner’s magisterial play Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes. Arguably the most canonical text to emerge from the horror of the AIDS crisis, Kushner’s three-hour play appears in two parts, “Millennium Approaches” and “Perestroika,” and it weaves two narrative threads, the story of wealthy WASP scion Prior Walter’s HIV diagnosis and his subsequent abandonment by his scared lover, Louis Ironson, and the arrival to New York City of the closeted Mormon Republican Joe Pitt, who works as a law clerk and kindles an affair with Louis.
Angels in America combines subjects as varied as Jewish immigration in the early 20th century, Kabbalistic and Mormon cosmology (along with a baroque system of invented angels), the reprehensible record of the closeted red-baiting attorney and Joseph McCarthy-acolyte Roy Cohn, and the endurance of the gay community struggling against the AIDS epidemic and their activism opposing the quasi-genocidal non-policy of conservative politicians like Ronald Reagan. If all that sounds heady, Kushner’s play came from the estimably pragmatic issue of how a community survives a plague. Born from the pathbreaking work of activist groups like ACT UP, Angels in America has, because of its mythological concerns, an understanding that pandemics and politics are inextricably connected. In answering who deserves treatment and how such treatment will be allocated we’ve already departed from the realm of disinterested nature. “There are no gods here, no ghosts and spirits in America, no spiritual past,” says Louis, “there’s only the political, and the decoys and the ploys to maneuver around the inescapable battle of politics.” Throughout Angels in America there is an expression of the human tragedy of pandemic, the way that beautiful young people in the prime of life can be murdered by their own bodies. Even Cohn, that despicable quasi-fascist, who evidences so little of the human himself, is entitled to some tenderness when upon his death kaddish is recited for him—by the spirit of Ethel Rosenberg, the supposed Soviet spy whom the lawyer was instrumental in the execution of.At the end of the play, Prior stands at Bethesda Fountain in Central Park, with all the attendant religious implications of that place’s name, and intones that “This disease will be the end of many of us, but not nearly all, and the dead will be commemorated and will struggle on with the living, and we are not going away. We won’t die secret deaths anymore… We will be citizens. The time has come.” In telling stories, there is not just a means of constructing meaning, or even endurance, but indeed of survival. Fiction is not the only means of expressing this, of course, or even necessarily the most appropriate. Journalist Randy Shilts accomplished something similar to Kushner in his classic account And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic, which soberly, clinically, and objectively chronicled the initial outbreaks of the disease among the San Francisco gay community.In a manner not dissimilar to Daniel Defoe in his classic A Journal of the Plague Year (even while that book is fictionalized), Shilts gives an epidemiological account of the numbers, letting the horror speak through science more effectively than had it been rendered in poetry. Such staidness is its own requirement and can speak powerfully to the reality of the event, whereby “the unalterable tragedy at the heart of the AIDS epidemic…[was that] By the time America paid attention to the disease, it was too late to do anything about it,” the shame of a nation whereby Reagan’s press secretary Larry Speakes would actually publicly laugh at the idea of a “gay plague.” Shilts waited until he finished And the Band Played On to be tested for HIV himself, worried that a positive diagnosis would alter his journalistic objectivity. He would die of AIDS related complications in 1994, having borne witness to the initial years of the epidemic, abjuring the cruel inaction of government policy with the disinfectant of pure facts.
Most people who read about pandemics, however, turn to pulpier books: paperback airport novels like Michael Crichton’s clinical fictionalized report about an interstellar virus The Andromeda Strain, Robin Cook’s nightmare fuel about a California Ebola pandemic in Outbreak, and Stephen King’s magisterial post-apocalyptic epic The Stand, which I read in the summer of 1994 and remains the longest sustained narrative I think that I’ve ever engaged with. Because these books are printed on cheap paper and have the sorts of garish covers intended more for mass consumption than prestige, they’re dismissed as prurient or exploitative. Ever the boring distinctions between genre and literary fiction, for though the pace of suspense may distinguish entertainment as integral as aesthetics, they too have just as much to say about the fear and experience of illness as do any number of explicitly more “serious” works.
The Stand is an exemplary example of just what genre fiction is capable of, especially when it comes to elemental fears surrounding plague that seem to have been somehow encoded within our cultural DNA for more than seven centuries. Written as an American corollary to J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, The Stand depicts a United States completely unraveled one summer after the containment loss of a government “Super-Flu” bioweapon nicknamed “Captain Trips.” In that aftermath, King presents a genuinely apocalyptic struggle between good and evil that’s worthy of Revelation, but intrinsic to this tale of pestilence is the initial worry that accompanies a scratchy throat, watery eyes, a sniffling nose, and a cough that seemingly won’t go away. If anything, King’s vision is resolutely in keeping with the medieval tradition of fortuna so expertly represented by the Master of the Playing Cards or Pictor, a wisdom that when it comes to disease “Life was such a wheel that no man could stand upon it for long. And it always, at the end, came round to the same place again,” as King writes.
Far from being exploitative, of only offering readers the exquisite pleasure of vicariously imagining all of society going to complete shit, there is a radical empathy at the core of much genre fiction. Readers of Robert Kirkman and Tony Moore’s graphic novels The Walking Dead (or the attendant television series) or viewers of George Romero’s brilliant zombie classics may assume that they’ll always be the ones to survive Armageddon, but those works can force us into a consideration of the profound contingency of our own lives. Cynics might say that the enjoyment derived from zombie narratives is that they provide a means of imagining that most potent of American fantasies—the ability to shoot your neighbor with no repercussions. More than that, however, and I think that they state a bit of the feebleness of our civilization.
This is what critic Susan Sontag notes in Illness as Metaphor about how pandemic supplies “evidence of a world in which nothing important is regional, local, limited; in which everything that can circulate does, and every problem is, or is destined to become, worldwide,” so that products and viruses alike can freely move in a globalized world. The latter can then disrupt the former, where plague proves the precariousness of the supply lines that keep food on grocery store shelves and electricity in the socket, the shockingly narrow band separating hot breakfast and cold beer from the nastiness, brutishness, and shortness of life anarchic. Such is the grim knowledge of Max Brook’s World War Z where “They teach you how to resist the enemy, how to protect your mind and spirit. They don’t teach you how to resist your own people.” If medieval art and literature embraced the idea of fate, whereby it’s impossible to know who shall be first and who shall be last once the plague rats have entered port, than contemporary genre fiction has a similar democratic vision, a knowledge that wealth, power, and prestige can mean little after you’ve been coughed on. When the Black Death came to Europe, no class was spared; it took the sculptor Andrea Pisano and the banker Giovanni Villani, the painter Ambrogio Lorenzetti and the poet Jeauan Gethin, the mystic Richard Rolle and the philosopher William of Ockham, and the father, mother, and friends of Boccaccio. Plague upended society more than any revolution could, and there was a strange egalitarianism to the paupers’ body-pit covered in lye. Sontag, again, writes that “Illness is the night-side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use only the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place.” Such equality motivated the greatest of medieval artistic themes to emerge from the Black Death, that of the Danse Macabre or “Dance of Death.” In such imagery, painters and engravers would depict paupers and princes, popes and peasants, all linking hands with grinning brown skeletons with hair clinging to mottled pates and cadaverous flesh hanging from bones, dancing in a circle across a bucolic countryside. In the anonymous Totentanz of 1460, the narrator writes “Emperor, your sword won’t help you out/Scepter and crown are worthless here/I’ve taken you by the hand/For you must come to my dance.” During the Black Death, the fearful and the deniers alike explained the disease as due to a confluence of astrological phenomenon or noxious miasma; they claimed it was punishment for sin or they blamed religious and ethnic minorities within their midst. To some, the plague was better understood as “hoax” than reality. The smiling skulls of the Danse Macabre laugh at that sort of cowardly narcissism, for they know that pestilence is a feature of our reality and reality has a way of collecting its debts.
Illness sees no social stratification—it comes for bishop and authoritarian theocrat, king and germaphobic president alike. The final theme of the literature of pandemic, born from the awareness that this world is not ours alone, is that we can’t avert our eyes from the truth, no matter how cankered and ugly it may be in the interim. Something can be both true and senseless. The presence of disease is evidence of that. When I was little, my grandma told me stories about when she was a girl during the 1918 Spanish Influenza epidemic that took 75 million people. She described how, in front of the courthouse of her small Pennsylvania town, wagons arrived carting coffins for those who perished. Such memories are recounted to create meaning, to bear witness, to make sense, to warn, to exclaim that we were here, that we’re still here. Narrative can preserve and remake the world as it falls apart. Such is the point of telling any story. Illness reminds us that the world isn’t ours; literature let’s us know that it is—sometimes. Now—take stock. Be safe. Most of all, take care of each other. And wash your hands.
Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons.

domain: artistic


Q-OneTM is a state-of-the-art tool for deterministic single ion implantation with nanoscale precision. A completely new design, this powerful FIB enables positioning of single ions with incredible accuracy and unprecedented speed. Featuring a host of powerful features, the Q-OneTM is the most advanced system for fabrication of quantum devices and advanced materials engineering.
- Deterministic single ion implantation
- 25 kV liquid metal ion source
- 20 nm ion column
- Implant a wide range of elements
- Nanometre-precision stage
- High-resolution electron column
- 6-inch wafer handling with load-lock


There’s nothing cookie-cutter about West Asheville, an eclectic, progressive, and thriving community just minutes to downtown Asheville, NC. So we knew there could be nothing cookie-cutter about Craggy Park.
From the outset, our mission has been to meet the growing demand for quality homes in the urban village of West Asheville. But only in a way that harmonized with the existing community – environmentally, aesthetically, culturally, and economically.
This vision drove every decision we made.
It meant finding an in-fill location to reduce sprawl, optimize existing infrastructure, and celebrate West Asheville’s walkable, urban environment. It meant developing a master plan that maximized green space and preserved trees and nearby habitats. It meant designing and building green. And It meant creating beautiful, sustainable, modern homes that complemented the arts and crafts bungalows of the surrounding neighborhood.
The result is Craggy Park, a community of forty-five green-certified homes in the heart of West Asheville. Just a short walk from the independent businesses of Haywood Road and the River Arts District, Craggy Park marries sustainable design and low-impact development with local living. We’d love to show you how.


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In the heart of the action. A golf court on one side, The Formula One Grand Prix on the other side and the Ferrari in the middle.
Leave your car with the complimentary valet and enter the vibrant Lobby at Crowne Plaza Abu Dhabi Yas Island, with its deep blue, turquoise and gold design. Relax in the lavish spherical booths hanging from the high ceiling. A vista of verdant mangroves stretches out from the 24-hour Lobby lounge, or you can head to your room or Suite for a soothing rest in the luxury bedding.
Crowne Plaza Abu Dhabi Yas Island is next to Yas Links golf course and minutes' walk to both Yas Marina Circuit, home of the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix, and Ferrari World. As for the Abu Dhabi airport it's a 10 minutes drive. I've been there before the Grand Prix of 2011 for a Motorcycle training course with the California super bike school organized by ANB Motorcycles lebanon. After a very long day of driving around the YAS circuit, the Crowne Plaza was the perfect place to relax and prepare for the next day.
My three nights stay at the Crowne Plaza were memorable. The room was spacious with a window connecting the bathroom to the room. All Rooms are equipped with large bathtubs. What I remember the most was the breakfast; a wide choice of eggs, fruits, cheese, viennoiserie, croissants and cooked dishes. The breakfast area is wide and relaxing, starting your day joyfully. Enjoying a swim, a SPA treatment or any fun activity, the Crowne Plaza is a place I will visit back again.

domain: geography


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I am overwhelmed by loans and I can't tell which one is the best for me! #college #loans...
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domain: finance


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SAN ANTONIO (AP) - A police officer for a university in San Antonio has shot and killed a student during a struggle following a traffic stop near campus. Alamo Heights police say a University of the Incarnate Word officer early today fatally shot 23-year-old student Robert Cameron Redus. The officer's name wasn't immediately released pending a review of the incident.
AUSTIN, Texas (AP) - A Texas grand jury has indicted a former executive of the state's $3 billion cancer-fighting agency with fraud for his involvement in improperly awarding an $11 million taxpayer-funded grant. Travis County District Attorney Rosemary Lehmberg says today that Jerald Cobbs has been charged with securing execution of a document by deception. It's the first criminal charge following a yearlong criminal investigation into the Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas.
OKLAHOMA CITY (AP) - Oil producers say the planned opening next month of the southern leg of the Keystone XL pipeline will remove a glut of crude oil at a storage hub in Cushing, Oklahoma. The 485-mile pipeline will carry up to 700,000 barrels per day from Cushing to Houston area refineries after its expected opening on January 3rd.
HOUSTON (AP) - The Houston Texans have fired coach Gary Kubiak. The team announced the decision on Friday, one day after the Texans lost their 11th straight game, 27-20 at Jacksonville. The 2-11 Texans played miserably and were flagged 14 times for a franchise-record 177 yards.
Copyright 2013 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.


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Ice is still not fully out. This loon was fishing right at the edge of the. And there was a river otter sitting on the ice nearby munching on a sunfish!
Latitude: 43.6 Longitude: -71.6
Observed by: Scott
The observer's e-mail address will not be disclosed.
Contact will be made through a web-based form.

domain: biology


Fence Post Hole Reamer 12 inch
The Post Hole Reamer enlarges 6-inch diameter holes to 12-inches. Other diameters are available – 10 inch, and 8 inch. In addition, the all steel reamer has a movable cutting blade. As a result, in the up position, the 6-inch pilot tube is exposed for starting holes. Consequently the reamer stays perfectly aligned. After starting a hole, it’s easy to move the blade to the down position. As a result, In the down position, the blade will cut a square bottom in the hole.
This reamer works with the same Shop Vacuum as the Holey Moley Diggers. The vacuum removes cuttings from the bottom of the hole while reaming. This significantly reduces the time on cleaning up holes. In addition, the clean holes with uniform sides reduce the amount of dirt removal required for each job.
Fence Post Hole Reamer 12 inch Assembly
The Post Hole Reamer Assembly 12 inch includes the digger head, lower vacuum tube, the standard upper vacuum tube and the handle assembly.
Fence Post Hole Reamer 12 inch (Quick Change Head)
The 12 inch Diameter Post Hole Reamer Quick Change Head includes the digger head and lower vacuum tube. As result of engineering design, the Quick Change Head works with the 6-inch Post Hole Digger. Consequently, there is no need to buy the reamer with a handle and upper vacuum tube if you own or are purchasing a 6″ post hole digger. Hence, Quick change heads same you money that you can put into the diversity of digger heads available. We offer a number of Post Hole Digger Quick Change Heads.
Fence Post Hole Reamer 12 inch Uses
There are many uses for this reamer. The holes are suitable for large gate posts such as 4×6 posts, steel pipe posts, telephone poles, and concrete tubes. In addition, if you are putting in a pole barn, this is the perfect tool. As a result, this reamer works side-by-side with the 6-inch Holey Moley Post Hole Digger to enlarge deep holes for tall poles.
Easy digger head change out
The Quick Change Digger Heads are easily changed out with other digger heads with only two bolts.
The diameters of these unique post hole reamers are 1/4″ larger than the nominal diameter. As a result, the holes ideal for concrete form tubes. As a result, concrete form tubes have many uses including:
- Deck supports
- Fence posts
- Mailbox posts/bases
Further information on Concrete Form Tubes can be found below:
- Quickrete Quick-tube Building Forms available in 8″, 10″ and 12″ sizes
- Sonotube Concrete Forms available in 8″, 10″ and 12″sizes
- Sakrete Form Tubes also available in 8″, 10″ and 12″ sizes
Need a smaller diameter?
Other links you may enjoy:
70 years of Manufacturing Experience
Keene Engineering of Chatsworth, California manufacturers the Holey Moley DIggers and Reamers. Keene Engineering in business now for over 70 years makes quality dredging and mining equipment. All parts are backed by a 30 day replacement and 1 years manufacturing parts defect warranty.
Made in the USA
Cat 6 Tools is proud to manufacture most if its products in the USA.


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Mayor Bill de Blasio said the city will not allow scooter sharing company Revel to reopen its New York City operations unless they are convinced it can be done safely. Revel shut down its fleet of electric mopeds in the city on July 28 after the second death of a rider in just two weeks.
“Our people have been talking to Revel, and they’ve been making changes, but not enough changes, is the bottom line,” the mayor said according to the New York Times. “This has just gotten to be too much. It just doesn’t work the way it’s structured.”
Fair enough. But, if safe streets are still front and center of the Vision Zero mayor’s mind, why not forward stricter policy and regulatory measures that makes similar demands of automobiles and their manufacturers?
This past June as the city began to slowly awaken from months of COVID-19 trauma and quarantine, nine pedestrians were killed by automobiles on city streets. Not only that, four cyclists, five passengers and 11 other motorists were also killed in motor-vehicle collisions according to NYPD. Nearly 3,500 were injured—many seriously— in motor vehicle collisions across the city.
Despite the jarring automobile carnage, the mayor has yet to introduce solid policy proposals that prioritize safer streets such as bike, alternative transportation and public transit infrastructure.
All that’s not to say that Revel and their scooters don’t have serious safety issues. Besides the two people who were killed, it’s not clear how many other people have been injured by a Revel moped crash since the company began expanding its footprint in the boroughs beyond Brooklyn last year. Although the company requires little training for its riders, the scooters can easily accelerate to speeds over the city’s 25 mph speed limit on local streets and for many riders, it may be the first time on a moped. Further, it’s common to see Revel riders barreling down bike paths which is not acceptable.
Reportedly, the company’s rider accountability and safety measures are lackluster at best. Revel has also been named in at least a dozen lawsuits because of faulty brakes and balding tires. Nonetheless, it would be a real shame to see the company and its fleet of convenient clean energy scooters simply disappear.
Revel said in a June 28 statement announcing the closure that the company was “reviewing and strengthening our rider accountability and safety measures and communicating with city officials, and we look forward to serving you again in the near future.”
Here in Brooklyn, the blue Revel scooters have become a common site and their popularity has clearly exploded because of the COVID-19 pandemic. The Vespa-like mopeds add a little funky European flavor to the herds of SUV’s, trucks and cars crawling down crowded avenues. But like any mode of transportation in New York City, there’s an element of risk involved.
It’s probably because we’re raised to believe streets and roads—our largest swath of public space— were created solely for the automobile, that we’ve essentially normalized automobile violence on the city’s roadways. The hundreds of deadly or body maiming city car crashes that happen each year in New York City hardly ever show up in headlines like the two tragic Revel deaths and thus, they mostly get a pass in the arena of public outcry.
While the mayor is correct to call out Revel for its sketchy rider training and other seemingly lax oversight, all the sanctimonious hand wringing over the scooter company’s safety record, comes off as just a tad bit hypocritical considering the dearth of vision and solid policy he’s articulated for city streets—just as we face what some are calling the upcoming automobile congestion crisis or carmageddon.
As the city continues to reopen and scores of New Yorkers return to work, those who might be reluctant to get on the subway or a bus will likely rely on a car to get from point A to B. Anyone, like myself, who rides a bike through the streets of Manhattan or Brooklyn on a daily basis, has already witnessed an already stifling level of automobile traffic. Not only that, frustrated automobile drivers are clearly getting aggressive and driving faster where they can.
In a July 1 statement after June’s automobile crash carnage, the organization Transportation Alternatives wrote that de Blasio’s indifference to the return of traffic has Been disastrous for street safety.” They called on the mayor to prioritize the safety of those using our streets, to invest in bike and public transit infrastructure to support our city’s recovery, and to stave off a massive influx of cars.
Although Revel’s electric scooters are certainly not bicycles, they are also not fast-moving carbon belching moving machines made of thousands of pounds of steel that are capable of crushing the bones of pedestrians and cyclists in a matter of seconds. Perhaps the city could develop a quasi-private-public partnership with Revel—or a company like it—and exert greater oversight of the company’s safety protocols and the screening of its riders. Now is the optimal time for the city and mayor to be thinking outside the box and seeking out ways of providing alternative modes of transportation to New Yorkers.
Cody Lyon is a New York City-based journalist.