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They Have the Numbers; We, The Heights
On The Best of the Best American Poetry, 1988-1997.
Harold Bloom
My title is from Thucydides and is spoken by the Spartan commander at Thermopylae. Culturally, we are at Thermopylae: the multiculturalists, the hordes of camp- followers afflicted by the French diseases, the mock-feminists, the commissars, the gender-and-power freaks, the hosts of new historicists and old materialists—all stand below us. They will surge up and we may be overcome; our universities are already travesties, and our journalists parody our professors of "cultural studies." For just a little while longer, we hold the heights, the realm of the aesthetic. There are still authentic poems being written in the United States. Elizabeth Bishop, May Swenson, and James Merrill are gone, but two great poets remain in John Ashbery and A. R. Ammons, and there are a score of contemporaries almost of their eminence. This anthology cannot assert that it contains all of the best poets and poems of the last decade. My charge was to select seventy-five poems out of seven hundred and fifty, and not to look outside of the volumes of this series. There is thus nothing here by Edgar Bowers in an older generation or by Henri Cole in the middle one, to mention just two poets whom I greatly admire. Nor would I suggest that all seventy-five poems I have chosen are going to be permanent achievements; I have made a heap of all the best I could find, where I was instructed to search. Nevertheless, there are poems here that should be perpetuated for future generations. These pass my personal test for the canonical: I have reread them with pleasure and with profit.
One of the ten volumes is not represented at all; I failed to discover more than an authentic poem or two in it. The series editor, David Lehman, kindly suggested some possibilities, but the poets involved had done better work elsewhere in these volumes. That 1996 anthology is one of the provocations for this essay, since it seems to me a monumental representation of the enemies of the aesthetic who are in the act of overwhelming us. It is of a badness not to be believed, because it follows the criteria now operative: what matters most are the race, gender, sexual orientation, ethnic origin, and political purpose of the would-be poet. I ardently wish I were being hyperbolical, but in fact I am exercising restraint, very difficult for a lifelong aesthete at the age of sixty-seven. One cannot expect every attempt at poetry to rival Chaucer and Shakespeare, Milton and Wordsworth, Whitman and Dickinson, Wallace Stevens and Hart Crane. But those poets, and their peers, set the measure: any who aspire to poetry must keep such exemplars always in mind. Sincerity, as the divine Oscar Wilde assured us, is not nearly enough to generate a poem. Bursting with sincerity, the 1996 volume is a Stuffed Owl of bad verse, and of much badness that is neither verse nor prose.
How could this have happened? The last thirty years of intellectual decline provide the answer: cultural guilt. Enthusiastic young men and women (and some of their middle-aged gurus) rushed forth in a Great Awakening of Rock Religion in the closing years of the 1960s. Their immediate provocation was the obscene American slaughter of the Vietnamese, but the Saturnalia that reigned for a few years, from Tokyo to Paris, quickly transcended the occasion. The epiphenomenon of the Revival went by soon enough, but it was clear to discerning spirits in 1968-70 that the consequences, though minimal for our capitalist society's ruling powers, would be endless for any cognitive and aesthetic activities throughout the Western world. Robber barons, in all countries, were immune from the contamination of the New Enthusiasm. Nothing has changed, except perhaps for the worse, in our political and economic life. The true legatees of the mock-Revolution were Ronald Reagan and now his parody, Bill Clinton. The change, all but catastrophic, instead afflicted our intellectual, cultural, educational, and aesthetic spheres, in a kind of Creation-Fall. Robert Hughes has termed what was born "the Culture of Complaint," whose hucksters—academic, journalistic, pseudo-artistic—I've named "the School of Resentment," a rabblement of lemmings leaping off the cliffs into the waters of oblivion.
Perhaps none of this matters, since good poems continue to be written, printed, and sometimes even read (whether well or not, few seem to care). Yet it will matter to some young people, as once it did, when we went to the poets to make our souls, as Yeats said. My mind was formed by Blake and Hart Crane, and then by Wallace Stevens and Shelley. The uses of great poetry are manifold, provided that an educated readership survives. Criticism, both academic and journalistic (a distinction that now scarcely exists), is dying, mostly because the universities have replaced literary criticism by "cultural criticism," a would-be social science. To survive, criticism would have to move outside the academy, but it certainly can find no home in the media. If what Walter Pater called "Aesthetic criticism" dies, then what he termed "Aesthetic poetry" must in time die also, since we will cease to know good from bad poetry. By "Aesthetic" in regard both to poetry and to criticism, Pater simply meant "authentic" or "good", since he kept in mind always the Greek meaning of aesthesis: "perceptiveness." If we lose all sense of the aesthetic, then we scarcely will see the difference between Emily Dickinson and Ella Wheeler Wilcox, or between John Ashbery and his weaker imitators.
Scolding the universities, or the media, is useless: enormous social pressures—that do not affect the people in general, or the Republican Congress and not very Democratic president the people elected—have been loosed upon institutions hopelessly vulnerable to cultural guilt. Every variety of "studies" at last will be housed: if sexual orientation is to be placed with race, ethnic group, and gender as sources of aesthetic and cognitive values, then why should we not have "Sado-Masochistic Studies," in particular honor of the god of resentment, the late Michel Foucault? If there is a Homosexual Poetic, then why not a Poetics of Pain? If representation-by-category is to be the law of the universities, and of all those they influence, what "minority" is to be excluded? Shakespeare and Dante were European males; is that worth remarking? William Wordsworth invented modern poetry. I do not know whether the more than fifty poets I anthologize all have read Wordsworth, but if they haven't, they have anyway, since all but a few write Wordsworthian poetry, in the broad sense. Even where they have ostensible subjects, almost all of the poems in this volume manifest Hazlitt's characterization of Wordsworth's work:
He takes a subject or a story merely as pegs or loops to hang thought and feeling on; the incidents are trifling, in proportion to his contempt for imposing appearances; the reflections are profound, according to the gravity and aspiring pretensions of the mind.
Hazlitt's personal ambivalence toward Wordsworth is palpable, but so is the critic's realization that Wordsworth reinvented poetry. Yet nearly all current published criticism of Wordsworth and almost any class taught on him at our universities and colleges now actively condemn this greatest of all modern poets on political grounds, because he "betrayed" his early allegiance to the French Revolution! By our means test, Wordsworth cannot pass. So absurd have the professors become that I can see no way to salvage literary study except to abolish tenure. Tenure is an archaic survival anyway, but it becomes pernicious when faculties are crowded by thousands of ideologues, who resent Wordsworth even as they resent Shakespeare. When I was a young teacher of poetry at Yale, the English Romantic poets were Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, and Keats, as well as Blake and Shelley, whose place in the canon I helped restore. On hundreds of campuses now, these poets have to share attention with the "women Romantic poets": Felicia Hemans, Laetitia Landon, Charlotte Smith, and Mary Tighe, among some others. These were, to understate, justly neglected verse writers, though superior to many in The Best American Poetry 1996. Anthologies of seventeenth-century English literature now give us, side by side with Donne, Ben Johnson, and Milton, a group including the Duchess of Newcastle, Lady Mary Chudleigh, Anne Killigrew, and the venerated Aphra Behn. I have seen my profession dying for over a quarter century now, and in another decade it may be dead. If its function is to appreciate and teach Laetitia Landon and Lady Mary Chudleigh, then the demise cannot come too soon.
More than ever before, American poetry needs aesthetic and cognitive difficulty.
One asks again: How could this have happened, and not just in the universities but in the publishing world and in the media? The New York Times essentially is now a countercultural newspaper. When Maya Angelou read a poem for Clinton's first inauguration, the Times printed the text, a monument of sincerity, and in an editorial praised this effusion for its "Whitmanian amplitudes." Recently, one of the Times rock critics proclaimed our contemporary Mozart to be the glyph formerly known as Prince. Literary satire is impossible when the Times exceeds Nathaniel West and Terry Southern in outrageousness. If all aesthetic and cognitive standards are abandoned by professors and journalists alike, then the tradition of American poetry can survive only by a profound inward turning.
Walt Whitman was not only the strongest of our poets (together with the highly antithetical Emily Dickinson), but he is also now the most betrayed of all our poets, with so much of the ongoing ideological balderdash being preached in his name. Whitman's poetry generally does the opposite of what he proclaims its work to be: it is reclusive, evasive, hermetic, nuanced, and more onanistic even than homoerotic, which critics cannot accept, particularly these days when attempts are made to assimilate the Self-Reliant Whitman into what calls itself the Homosexual Poetic. If we are to have gay and lesbian studies, who will speak for Onan, whose bards include Whitman and the Goethe of Faust, Part Two? The most figurative of all our poets, Whitman eludes every effort to entrap him in an ideology. As elitist a democrat as his master Emerson, Whitman continues with his ideas of representation to outwit his historicizing and eroticizing critics. The crucial figure in Whitman is neither his self—Walt Whitman, one of the roughs, an American—nor his soul, but "the real me" or "me myself," a conceptual image that prophesies Wallace Stevens, T. S. Eliot, and particularly John Ashbery:
Apart from the pulling and hauling stands what I am,
Stands amused, complacent compassionating, idle, unitary,
Looks down, is erect, bends an arm on an impalpable certain rest,
Looks with its sidecurved head curious what will come next,
Both in and out of the game, and watching and wondering at it.
That Whitmanian "what I am," his "real me" or "me myself," is both an inspiration to strong American poetry after him and a reproach to the cultural and erotic dogmas now circulated in his great name. It is no accident that the best American poets who have emerged from Whitman—sometimes insisting that they owed him nothing—are formalists, major artists of verse: Stevens, Eliot, Hart Crane, and even Ashbery when at his most gravely traditional. Cast out the aesthetic, and you cast away Whitman, who was a major poet and a poor prophet, and who was, above all else, a very difficult poet, whose synecdoches do not unravel without very frequent rereadings. Authentic American poetry is necessarily difficult; it is our elitist art, though that elite has nothing to do with social class, gender, erotic preference, ethnic strain, race, or sect. "We live in the mind," Stevens said, and our poetry always is either Emersonian or anti-Emersonian, but either way is informed by Emerson's dialectics of power:
Life will be imaged, but cannot be divided nor doubled. Any invasion of its unity would be chaos. The soul is not twin-born, but the only begotten, and though revealing itself as child in time, child in appearance, is of a fatal and universal power, admitting no co-life. Every day, every act betrays the ill-concealed deity. We believe in ourselves, as we do not believe in others. We permit all things to ourselves, and that which we call sin in others, is experiment for us. It is an instance of our faith in ourselves, that men never speak of crime as lightly as they think: or, every man thinks a latitude safe for himself, which is nowise to be indulged to another. The act looks very differently on the inside, and on the outside; in its quality, and its consequences. Murder in the murderer is no such ruinous thought as poets and romancers will have it; it does not unsettle him, or fright him from his ordinary notice of trifles: it is an act quite easy to be contemplated, but in its sequel, it turns out to be a horrible jangle and confounding all relations. Especially the crimes that spring from love, seem right and fair from the actor's point of view, but, when acted, are found destructive of society. No man at last believes that he can be lost, nor that the crime in him is as black as in the felon. Because the intellect qualifies in our own case the moral judgments. For there is no crime to the intellect. That is antinomian or hypernomian, and judges law as well as fact.
That does not allow any room for the false generosity of any Affirmative Action in the judging of poetry. Printing, praising, and teaching bad poems for the sake of even the best causes is simply destructive for those causes. "We believe in ourselves, as we do not believe in others" is a truth that makes us wince, but no one ever can write a good poem without it. Tony Kushner, who could be a greater playwright but for his obsession with the ideologies of political correctness, ought to ponder Emerson's "Experience," from which I have just quoted. Every attempt to socialize writing and reading fails; poetry is a solitary art, more now than ever, and its proper audience is the deeply educated, solitary reader, or that reader's sitting within herself in a theater.
It was inevitable that the School of Resentment would do its destructive damage to the reading, staging, and interpretation of Shakespeare, whose eminence is the ultimate demonstration of the autonomy of the aesthetic. Cultural poeticians, ostensible feminists, sub-Marxists, and assorted would-be Parisians have given us French Shakespeare, who never wrote a line but instead sat in a tavern while all the "social energies" of early modern Europe pulsated into his quill and created Hamlet, Falstaff, Iago, and Cleopatra, with little aid from that mere funnel, the Man from Stratford. It has not been explained (at least to me) just why the social energies favored Shakespeare over Thomas Middleton or John Marston or George Chapman or whoever, but this remarkable notion totally dominates today's academic study of Shakespeare. First, Paris told us that language did the thinking and writing for us, but then Foucault emerged, and Shakespeare went from being language's serf to society's minion. No longer can we speak of the best writer–Auden's Top Bard–and if Shakespeare recedes, why call a volume The Best American Poetry? Certainly the 1996 volume should have been retitled The Most Socially Energetic American Poetry, and if I were not Bloom Brontosaurus, an amiable dinosaur, we could have called this book The Most Socially Energetic of the Socially Energetic. The madness that contaminates our once high culture cannot be cured unless and until we surrender our more than Kafkan sense that social guilt is not to be doubted. No thing can be more malignant than a disease of the spirit that sincerely regards itself as virtue.
Sincerity is not nearly enough to generate a poem.
Shakespeare, precisely because he is the only authentic multicultural writer, demonstrated that our modish multiculturalism is a lie, a mask for mediocrity and for the thought-control academic police, the Gestapo of our campuses. Each time I make the mistake of glancing at the Yale Weekly Bulletin, I shudder to see that the dean of Yale College has appointed yet another subdean to minister to the supposed cultural interests of another identity club: ethnic, racial, linguistic, with gender and erotic subsets. Shakespeare, performed and read in every country (with the sporadic exception of France, most xenophobic of cultures), is judged by audiences of every race and language to have put them upon the stage. Shakespeare's power has nothing to do with Eurocentrism, maleness, Christianity, or Elizabethan-Jacobean social energies. No one else so combined cognitive strength, originality, dramatic guile, and linguistic florabundance as virtually to reinvent the human, and Shakespeare is therefore the best battlefield upon which to fight the rabblement of Resenters. Our multiculturalists are reductionists; the 1996 volume actually is asserting: "Our bad poets are just as good as your bad poets." Shakespeare, pragmatically the true multiculturalist, is the least reductive of all writers; his men and women never invite us to believe that when we know the worst about them, then we know exactly who they are. Emerson, in Representative Men, caught this best:
Shakespeare is as much out of the category of eminent authors, as he is out of the crowd. He is inconceivably wise; the others, conceivably. A good reader can, in a sort, nestle into Plato's brain, and think from thence, but not into Shakespeare's. We are still out of doors. For executive faculty, for creation, Shakespeare is unique. No man can imagine it better. He was the farthest reach of subtlety compatible with an individual self,—the subtilest of authors, and only just within the possibility of authorship. With this wisdom of life, is the equal endowment of imaginative and of lyric power. He clothed the creatures of his legend with form and sentiments, as if they were people who had lived under his roof; and few real men have left such distinct characters as these fictions. And they spoke in language as sweet as it was fit. Yet his talents never seduced him into an ostentation, nor did he harp on one string. An omnipresent humanity coordinates all his faculties. Give a man of talents a story to tell, and his partiality will presently appear. He has certain observations, opinions, topics, which have some accidental prominence, and which he disposes all to exhibit. He crams this part, and starves that other part, consulting not the fitness of the thing, but his fitness and strength. But Shakespeare has no peculiarity, no importunate topic; but all is duly given; no veins, no curiosities; no cow-painter, no bird-fancier, no mannerist is he: he has no discoverable egotism: the great he tells greatly; the small, subordinately. He is wise without emphasis or assertion; he is strong, as nature is strong, who lifts the land into mountain slopes without effort, and by the same rule as she floats a bubble in the air, and likes as well to do the one as the other. This makes that equality of power in farce, tragedy, narrative, and love-songs; a merit so incessant, that each reader is incredulous of the perception of other readers.
If this be Bardolatry, then let us have more of it, for it may be the only medicine that can cure us of the French blight that afflicts our culture and our academies. It is no accident that poetry is the principal victim of the decline and fall of our literature faculties. Almost no one these days is taught how to read a poem; there are very few who know how to instruct in the difficult art of interpretation, and the going ideologies distrust poetry anyway. How do you politicize this?
All day within the dreamy house,
The doors upon their hinges creak'd;
The blue fly sung in the pane; the mouse
Behind the mouldering wainscot shriek'd,
Or from the crevice peer'd about.
Old faces glimmer'd thro' the doors,
Old footsteps trod the upper floors,
Old voices called her from without.
She only said, "My life is dreary,
He cometh not," she said;
She wept, "I am aweary, aweary,
I would that I were dead!"
The sparrow's chirrup on the roof,
The slow clock ticking, and the sound
Which to the wooing wind aloof
The poplar made, did all confound
Her sense; but most she loathed the hour
When the thick-rooted sunbeam lay
Athwart the chambers, and the day
Was sloping toward his western bower.
Then she said, "I am very dreary,
He will not come," she said;
O God, that I were dead!"
It is ironical that, in this bad time, American poetry is of a higher quality than our criticism or teaching of poetry. Four major poets who appear in this book—Elizabeth Bishop, James Merrill, Amy Clampitt, and the still undervalued May Swenson—are gone, yet there are poems here by Ashbery, Ammons, and at least a dozen others that I think will endure, if only we can maintain a continuity of aesthetic appreciation and cognitive understanding that more or less prevailed from Emerson until the later 1960s, but that survives only in isolated pockets. While it is true that several of the greatest American poets—Whitman, Dickinson, Stevens, Hart Crane—had either no or little authentic critical response during their lifetimes, they at least did not have to endure a cultural situation fundamentally hostile to aesthetic and cognitive standards of judgment. I marvel at the courage and desperate faith of our best younger poets, who have to withstand the indifference or hostility not just of society in general, but also of the supposed defenders of poetry, who now will advocate it only as an instrument of social change. If you urge political responsibilities upon a poet, then you are asking her to prefer to poetry what can destroy her poem. Emily Dickinson had the inner freedom to rethink everything for herself and so achieved a cognitive originality as absolute as William Blake's. She had economic and social advantages that Walt Whitman did not enjoy, yet like Whitman she did not have to confront ideological persuasions either irrelevant or inimical to aesthetic ambitions. Wallace Stevens could take for granted the autonomy of the aesthetic; how would Harmonium otherwise have been possible, or Hart Crane's first volume, White Buildings? I write this introduction out of the conviction that a literary critic has no political responsibilities, as a critic. My obligation is only to help (if that I can) make it possible for another Elizabeth Bishop or May Swenson or James Merrill to develop without being impeded by ideological demands. I am more than aware that the Resenters speak constantly of "the ideology of the aesthetic" and of "the Romantic ideology," but that is simply a playing with loaded dice. The only pragmatic aesthetic I know is that some poems intrinsically are better than others, while Romanticism, as I apprehend it, is a discipline in sensibility and in perception.
In his essay "Politics," Emerson provides a spark for these times:
It makes no difference how many tons weight of atmosphere presses on our heads, so long as the same pressure resists it within the lungs. Augment the mass a thousand fold; it cannot begin to crush us, as long as reaction is equal to action.
The Resenters prate of power, as they do of race and gender: these are careerist stratagems and have nothing to do with the insulted and injured, whose lives will not be improved by our reading the bad verses of those who assert that they are the oppressed. Our schools as much as our universities are given away to these absurdities; replacing Julius Caesar by The Color Purple is hardly a royal road to enlightenment. A country where television, movies, computers, and Stephen King have replaced reading is already in acute danger of cultural collapse. That danger is dreadfully augmented by our yielding education to the ideologues whose deepest resentment is of poetry itself. What John Hollander remarks of Whitman—"The poetry, like its title, looks easy and proves hard"—is true of almost all great or very good poets. But there, I hope, will be one of the crucial uses for us of the best American poems: more than ever before, our situation needs aesthetic and cognitive difficulty. The mock poetry of Resentment looks easy and proves easy; unlike Whitman, it lacks mind. When I think of the American poets of this century whom I myself love best, I begin always with Wallace Stevens and with Hart Crane. Stevens subtly gives us what be calls "the hum of thoughts evaded in the mind," and Crane urges us to the most difficult transcendence ever visualized by any American poet. Their heirs, including Elizabeth Bishop, Merrill, Ashbery, and Ammons, have carried forward this mingled legacy of thoughts available to us only in poems, and yearnings made palpable only in complex imaginings. Mastery of metaphor and power of thinking are the true merits of the best American poetry of our time. I give the last words here to the sacred Emerson, from his Whitman-inspiring essay "The Poet," where the freedom of poetry is ascribed to "tropes" and to "thought":
The poets are thus liberating gods. The ancient British bards had for the title of their order, "Those who are free throughout the World." They are free, and they make free. An imaginative book renders us much more service at first, by stimulating us through its tropes, than afterward, when we arrive at the precise sense of the author. I think nothing is of any value in books, excepting the transcendental and extraordinary. If a man is inflamed and carried away by his thought, to that degree that he forgets the authors and the public, and heeds only this one dream, which holds him like an insanity, let me read his paper, and you may have all the arguments and histories and criticism. All the value which attaches to Pythagoras, Paracelsus, Cornelius Agrippa, Cardan, Kepler, Swedenborg, Schelling, Oken, or any other who introduces questionable facts into his cosmogony, as angels, devils, magic, astrology, palmistry, mesmerism, and so on, is the certificate we have of departure from routine, and that here is a new witness. That also is the best success in conversation, the magic of liberty, which puts the world, like a ball, in our hands. How cheap even the liberty then seems; how mean to study, when an emotion communicates to the intellect the power to sap and upheave nature: how great the perspective! nations, times, systems, enter and disappear, like threads in tapestry of large figure and many colors; dream delivers us to dream, and while the drunkenness lasts, we will sell our bed, our philosophy, our religion, in our opulence.
About the Author/s
Harold Bloom is Sterling Professor of the Humanities and English at Yale University. His published works include The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages and The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry. He is Co-editor of Romantic Poetry and Prose and Victorian Poetry and Prose.
Bloom's impassioned argument goes thuddingly and misleadingly wrong.
Mark Doty
I needn't doubt the gift of hoof.
Thylias Moss
Bloom is perfectly aware of the limitations of his chosen texts.
Marjorie Perloff
View all responses
Response: Here in Hell
Response: The Extraordinary Hoof
Response: Visionary Company
Response: A Note from Caliban
Bloom's sight is not God-like.
David Mura
Response: Hungry for Spirit
Both Rich and Bloom are spirited contrarians.
J. D. McClatchy
Response: Mrs. B and Me
Bloom's argument is nothing new. It is the age-old assertion of aesthetics.
Response: Down from the Summits
Bloom's essay is a cruel misreading.
Donald Revell
Response: Criteria
Bloom rather willfully ignores Modernism.
Reginald Shepherd
Response: Fear of the New
Bloom's test for canonical poems seems disingenuous.
Suzanne Gardiner
Response: Screaming Fire
I am not writing for the approval of Harold Bloom.
Response: Slaves of Fashion
Discovery cannot be reduced to formulas, captions, or categories.
Ann Lauterbach
Response: War of the Edens
The faithful grow weary of this thundering from the pulpit.
Carol Muske-Dukes
Response: A Fever Dream
Bloom's jeremiad is an action in the theater of the mind.
Sven Birkerts


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Govt extends Asphalt Kabwe roads deadline
Kabwe residents have accused government of favouring Asphalt Roads contractor working on roads in the town by extending the contract to next year despite the company failing to finish the project on schedule.
The residents, who last year held mass protests against the shoddy works on the roads, have also complained of being subjected to lead-contaminated dust emanating from the works.
But Central Province Permanent Secretary Edwidge Mutale has appealed to the residents to cooperate with the contractor to enable them perform their duties freely and come up with good roads.
He also advised the contractor to give a definite time frame on the road stretches they were working on to win the cooperation and faith of the road users.
Mutale confirmed the extension of the deadline on the 34 kilometeres of selected urban roads in Kabwe and Kapiri Mposhi after being assured that the works will now be completed by April next year.
"It is unfortunate that Asphalt Roads has continued to get favours from the government despite doing shoddy works and subjecting us to a lot of lead-contaminated dust." The residents complained.
They said the quality of roads being constructed by Asphalt was below standard.
Mutale however urged the residents; especially the vendors to move out of the streets that are being worked on following reports that newly laid pavements were being vandalized.
"The problem is some people and especially vendors have a tendency of climbing on the freshly-erected pavements, hence the damage. I would like our people to cooperate with the contractor to enable them do a good job, but the contractor must also be communicating on how long they will work on each stretch and assure the people that they would get back when they are done," she said.
After launching the works last year, a lot of excitement filled Kabwe residents who have not had good roads for many years but the project has taken longer than scheduled, leading to mass protests by residents in May.
Asphalt Roads site engineer Jared Musonda said works were progressing well and was confident of finishing the works in good time.
Zambia mourns Mazombwe
RB's lawyers thwart charge 'ambush'

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


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Section N: Infiltrative Immunologic
Infiltrative Immunologic. In: Usatine RP, Smith MA, Mayeaux, Jr. EJ, Chumley HS. Usatine R.P., & Smith M.A., & Mayeaux, Jr. E.J., & Chumley H.S.(Eds.),Eds. Richard P. Usatine, et al.eds. The Color Atlas and Synopsis of Family Medicine, 3e. McGraw-Hill; Accessed January 18, 2021. https://dermatology.mhmedical.com/content.aspx?bookid=2547&sectionid=206776311
Infiltrative immunologic. Usatine RP, Smith MA, Mayeaux, Jr. EJ, Chumley HS. Usatine R.P., & Smith M.A., & Mayeaux, Jr. E.J., & Chumley H.S.(Eds.),Eds. Richard P. Usatine, et al. (2019). The Color Atlas and Synopsis of Family Medicine, 3e. McGraw-Hill. https://dermatology.mhmedical.com/content.aspx?bookid=2547&sectionid=206776311
"Infiltrative Immunologic." The Color Atlas and Synopsis of Family Medicine, 3e Usatine RP, Smith MA, Mayeaux, Jr. EJ, Chumley HS. Usatine R.P., & Smith M.A., & Mayeaux, Jr. E.J., & Chumley H.S.(Eds.),Eds. Richard P. Usatine, et al. McGraw-Hill, 2019, https://dermatology.mhmedical.com/content.aspx?bookid=2547&sectionid=206776311.
A 39-year-old woman presents with raised rings on her right hand. Not knowing the correct diagnosis, another physician prescribed topical steroids and antifungal medicines with no benefit. The diagnosis of granuloma annulare (GA) was made by the typical clinical appearance, and the patient was offered intralesional steroids. Triamcinolone acetonide was injected as seen in Figure 182-1A. The patient noted improvement over the subsequent weeks, but within a month new lesions began to appear on her other hand (Figure 182-1B). Additional injections were provided and 1 month later the patient had regression of the treated lesions but had new lesions on the right arm (Figure 182-2A). At the next visit, the patient had new lesions on her feet as well (Figure 182-2B). The diagnosis of disseminated GA was made and systemic treatment was started.
FIGURE 182-1
A. GA in a 42-year-old woman. Intralesional steroids were administered on the first visit with resolution of the injected lesions. B. Same patient months later with new annular lesions on the opposite hand. She requested additional injections. (Reproduced with permission from Richard P. Usatine, MD.)
A. Same patient as in Figure 182-1 1 month later with new crops of lesions on the arms and feet. She has disseminated GA. Note the area of hypopigmentation secondary to a previous steroid intralesional steroid injection. B. Disseminated GA on the foot of the same patient. The rings are flatter and many are conjoined. (Reproduced with permission from Richard P. Usatine, MD.)
GA is a common dermatologic condition that presents as small, light-red, dermal papules coalescing into annular plaques without scale. As in the above vignette, it is often mistaken for nummular eczema or tinea corporis. Distribution, pattern, and lack of scale are important diagnostic clues.
GA affects twice as many women as men.1
The four presentations of GA are localized, disseminated/generalized, perforating, and subcutaneous.
Of the four variations, the localized form is seen most often.1
Benign cutaneous, inflammatory disorder of unknown origin.1
Disease may be self-limiting, but may persist for many years.
Reported associations include diabetes mellitus, viral infections (including HIV), Borrelia and streptococcal infections, insect bites, lymphoma, tuberculosis, and trauma.2,3
One proposed mechanism for GA is a delayed-type hypersensitivity reaction as a result of T-helper–type cell (Th)-1 lymphocytic differentiation of macrophages. These macrophages become effector cells that express tumor necrosis factor (TNF)-α and matrix metalloproteinases. The activated macrophages are responsible for dermal collagen matrix degradation.4
An association between high expression of gil-1 oncogene and granulomatous lesions ...


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BC terror trial reveals gong show RCMP investigation
Sarah Berman April 24, 2015 May 24, 2015 News
BY SARAH BERMAN, VICE.COM
When the RCMP busted two people for attempting to bomb the BC legislature on Canada Day in 2013, few questioned the millions in police resources spent intercepting the alleged terrorist plot.
And when Crown prosecutors first laid out their case against John Nuttall and Amanda Korody at trial beginning February 2, 2015, the alleged Boston bombing copycats still seemed genuinely scary.
But nearly three months into the terrorism trial, about 90 hours of covert police recordings have revealed two sides of the RCMP sting. On one hand you have gotcha footage of a dude assembling what he thinks is a pressure cooker bomb with intent to die a martyr for jihad. On the other hand, the alleged two-person terrorist cell was exceedingly poor, sick, self-medicating, and irrational during their months-long interaction with law enforcement.
The 240-officer investigation contemplated whether Nuttall was "developmentally delayed" or not months before he and his common law spouse were arrested on four terrorism charges. The impoverished Surrey couple's Rambo-inspired plans varied wildly from minute to minute as police provided groceries, bus tickets, many hotel rooms, clothes, cigarettes, and eventually the inert "C-4" explosives used inside the fake bombs. Both accused were on methadone and welfare at the time.
Thanks to the addicts' wild imaginations, BC's Supreme Court has now heard enoughchemtrail conspiracies and paintball gun punchlines to sustain a feature-length stoner comedy. Nuttall thinks Michael Jackson was assassinated because he converted to Islam, for example. As defence lawyers Marilyn Sandford and Mark Jette wrapped their cross-examination of the Crown's star witness this week, the expensive sting operation looks more like a gong show than anyone could have imagined.
The accused terrorists were enjoying a police-financed weekend getaway in Kelownawhen undercover cops told Nuttall that building a pressure cooker bomb was "feasible," "exciting," and "realistic." Months into the investigation and two weeks before the mock bombing would take place, Nuttall still mused about assembling cow-manure rockets, sinking ships, and hijacking defunct VIA trains.
The RCMP corporal who posed as an Arab businessman with "mujahedeen" connections has denied he orchestrated any element of the attack. The cop, whose identity is protected by a publication ban, maintains he was merely steering the would-be bombers away from unmanageable strikes.
"'Feasible' to me is something police can control," he told the jury last week.
This week, Korody's lawyer Mark Jette focused on the couple's spiritual relationship with the RCMP. He noted that Nuttall, who converted to Islam in 2011, was seeking religious guidance from the undercover cop the day before the planned attack. (He also asked if tomorrow was, in fact, Canada Day.)
Convinced he would burn in eternal hellfire if he turned his back on jihad, Nuttall hoped the undercover RCMP corporal would set up a meeting with a "sheikh" or spiritual advisor as the clock ticked down to "D-day." The cop told Nuttall a meeting was not possible, adding he might be able to see the sheikh in a few days' time.
Jette argued the couple looked up to the undercover cop for Muslim teachings, who in turn toyed with their minds. When questioned, the RCMP corporal clarified Nuttall's request was to see a specific sheikh who would justify his violent plot. He told the jury the accused could have sought guidance from a normal British Columbian imam or sheikh at any time, but didn't.
All of this courtroom theatre comes as Tuesday's federal budget announced $293 million in new funding for cops and spies to tackle terrorism. Within the last year, the RCMP's budget redirected $22.9 million to support Integrated National Security Enforcement Teams (INSETs) in five major Canadian cities.
Metro Vancouver's "INSET" took credit for arresting Nuttall and Korody in July 2013. "These arrests are another example of the effectiveness of our Integrated National Security Enforcement Team who worked tenaciously to prevent this plan from being carried out," BC RCMP assistant commissioner James Malizia said at the time.
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Q: mysql query that has join and counts I need help getting the top 5 results and their counts from columns from two different tables in a mysql database joined together.
table1 cols
-------
id, country, timestamp

table2 cols
--------
id, table1_id, reason

The results id like to get are the top 5 countries and their number of times found between two timestamps, and the top 5 reasons and their counts for all the rows used to generate the first count. There is a one to many relationship between table1 and table2. This is stumping me and I appreciate any insight you could give me.

A: It's not entirely clear what resultset you want to return.
This may be of some help to you:
SELECT t.country
     , COUNT(DISTINCT t.id) AS count_table1_rows
     , COUNT(r.id)          AS count_table2_rows
     , COUNT(*)             AS count_total_rows
  FROM table1 t
  LEFT
  JOIN table2 r
    ON r.table1_id = t.id
 WHERE t.timestamp >= NOW() - INTERVAL 7 DAY
   AND t.timestamp  < NOW()
 GROUP BY t.country
 ORDER BY COUNT(DISTINCT t.id) DESC
 LIMIT 5

That will return a maximum of 5 rows, one row per country, with counts of rows in table1, counts of rows found in table2, and a count of the total rows returned.
The LEFT keyword specifies an "outer" join operation, such that rows from table1 are returned even if there are no matching rows found in table2.
To get the count for each "reason", associated with each country, you could do something like this:
SELECT t.country
     , COUNT(DISTINCT t.id) AS count_table1_rows
  FROM table1 t
  LEFT
  JOIN ( SELECT s.country
              , r.reason
              , COUNT(*) AS cnt_r
           FROM table1 s
           JOIN table2 r
             ON s.table1_id = t.id
          WHERE s.timestamp >= NOW() - INTERVAL 7 DAY
            AND s.timestamp  < NOW()
          GROUP
             BY s.country
              , r.reason
       ) u
    ON u.country = t.country
 WHERE t.timestamp >= NOW() - INTERVAL 7 DAY
   AND t.timestamp  < NOW()
 GROUP
    BY t.country
     , u.reason
 ORDER
    BY COUNT(DISTINCT t.id) DESC
     , t.country DESC
     , u.cnt_r DESC
     , u.reason DESC

This query doesn't "limit" the rows being returned. It would be possible to modify the query to have only a subset of the rows returned, but that can get complex. And before we muck the complexity of adding "top 5 within top 5" type limits, we want to ensure that the rows returned by a query are a superset of the rows we actually want.

A: Is this what you want?
select t2.reason, count(*)
from (select t1.country, count(*)
      from table1 t1
      where timestamp between @STARTTIME and @ENDTIME
      group by country
      order by count(*) desc
      limit 5
     ) c5 join
     table1 t1
     on c5.country = t1.country and
        t1.timestamp between @STARTTIME and @ENDTIME join
     table2 t2
     on t2.table1_id = t1.id
group by t2.reason;

The c5 subquery gets the five countries.  The other two bring back the data for the final aggregation.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


away from the prototyping stage of product development and into production. 3D printing is claiming its place as a manufacturing tool – for vacuum forming, paper pulp tooling, jigs and fixtures, and end-use parts – and that is where the industry will grow.
What we're seeing now is a demand for materials to encompass more properties in a single 3D print. We have materials that print in multiple colors, durometers, and with a certain degree of diversity, but the next opportunity for growth lies in furthering the capability for completely consolidated manufacturing.
I expect the next material development phase will be in assembled 3D prints, with both metals and plastics printed simultaneously. I see a trend expanding into assembled, functional, and involved units with multiple application uses built into a single print, this will transform production lines. Materials developed in the future will focus more on viable, long-term functions as a final product. New materials will take 3D printing further into true manufacturing.
Advances in rapid prototyping materials include improvements in tear and thermal resistance, shape memory, stiffness, and photorealistic color.
individual features on a single part.
3D Systems has also developed a wax resin hybrid casting material to be used on the ProJet 1200 micro-SLA printer. This material enables non-technical direct investment casting using the same investment materials as common lost-wax casting, for parts such as jewelry and small medical devices. Also, new materials are printing jewelry mock-ups or counter-top samples without the expense of precious metals and casting, and a new clear material ideal for samples and prototyping.
Additionally, new plastic-based powder and color binders for the ProJet 4500 and ColorJet Printers provide vivid, photorealistic color in a light-weight and durable plastic. This allows for the full color printing of parts with delicate features.
Expectations for future materials include: faster imaging materials, closing the gap between conventional injection molding processes, improved mechanical properties and surface finishes, and long term stability. Additionally, it would be great to see expanded properties to enable new applications.
This 3D printed rake was printed with ASA, an FDM material similar to ABS that is more UV resistance for use in outdoor applications. Image courtesy of Stratasys Direct Manufacturing.
SLS chrome plated parts. Image courtesy of Stratasys Direct Manufacturing.


For building a company that could be india's answer to coke and pepsi. It was chosen for being a category creator in the indian ethnic beverage segment, for its ability to ramp up distribution and for its focus on nutritive drinks with low-sugar.
Neeraj Kakkar and Neeraj Biyani founded Hector Beverages in 2010 with an energy drink brand called Tzinga. However, three years later, the duo created a new category in the beverage industry by venturing into unchartered territory of packaging authentic Indian drinks with a brand called Paper Boat, which is the first and fastest growing brand in the Indian ethnic drinks segment.
With an employee base of around 800 people now, the founders believe in being honest in all things they do and that is the key to their employees' happiness. Keeping this philosophy, they want to lead the effort of finding rare and forgotten recipes, from across the country and revive it, as a result preserve and contemporize heritage. In 2015, the company received investment to the tune of US $30 million apart from two earlier rounds of funding totaling US $11 million from leading investors such as Sequoia Capital, Hillhouse Capital, Catamaran Ventures, Sofina, Footprint Ventures.
The USP: It has a diverse and continually increasing range of products, as opposed to leading with a single, signature product. The company's recipes are constantly improved to achieve a standard of being the "reference taste" and each recipe cannot be less than a 100 years old.
Key Feature: The company makes its drinks without any preservatives, artificial colour or carbonation. Currently, there are nine variants available across India : Aamras, Jaljeera, Jamun Kala Khatta, Aam Panna, Kokum, Golgappe ka Pani, Chilled Rasam, and Iced Tea in two flavours: Ginger Lemon and Tulsi.
Impact: This is best described through an anecdote. Kokum, a Konkan coast specialty, is unknown to so many parts of the country. But recently, a doctor in Gurgaon picked up a pack of Paper Boat Kokum, loved it, and made it a regular fixture in his day. When he went to Goa, he found a profound cultural connection with locals who have grown up with Kokum – a journey that has happened entirely because of curiosity and discovery. Paper Boat wants to affect more such meaningful exchanges between people, and showcase with wonder, that we really are such a deliciously diverse country!