text:
The Night Circus, by Erin Morgenstern
No announcements precede it, no paper notices on downtown posts and billboards, no mentions or advertisements in local newspapers. It is simply there, when yesterday it was not.
The towering tents are striped in white and black, no golds and crimsons to be seen. No color at all, save for the neighboring trees and the grass of the surrounding fields. Black- and-white stripes on grey sky; countless tents of varying shapes and sizes, with an elaborate wrought-iron fence encasing them in a colorless world. Even what little ground is visible from outside is black or white, painted or powdered, or treated with some other circus trick.
The book opens thus, with the unannounced arrival of the circus. You enter the world as an astonished outsider, as part of the crowd anticipating its new role as audience, but you leave the story in quite a different way, more aware, more alive, a part of the circus: knowing that you have a role in keeping it alive.
This circus is open only at night.
ʻWhat kind of circus is only open at night?' people ask. No one has a proper answer, yet as dusk approaches there is a substantial crowd of spectators gathering outside the gates.
You are amongst them, of course. Your curiosity got the better of you, as curiosity is wont to do.
It is Le Cirque des Reves, the Dream Circus, the Circus of Dreams.
Part of the story is an argument between two men about whether magic has to come naturally to someone, or whether it is a talent that can be taught. I will say only that this argument is made in the way arguments usually are, with a careless bluntness and disregard for "collateral damage." The magic of the tale is in the fact that magic is something that can shred both sides of an argument and heal those wounded by the arguers; it is in the fact that magic is both a natural talent and something you, and I, can, through focus, learn to wield ourselves. We do it every day.
I have written often on this site about perspective, about how our beliefs shape what we see and block other things from our view. There have been mountains of experiments to explain this phenomenon that makes it impossible to rely on witness testimony, difficult to rely on our own memory, and uncertain about what we can truly claim to be reality. But what none of these experiments seem to focus on (please correct me if you know otherwise) is the best part: you don't have to live in a wretched world where the nightly news gives you heartburn and your interactions with others are tinged with distrust and fear. After all, you're actively creating that world as you go along.
Tonight, the circus could arrive. You might notice people performing who are doing something you previously thought impossible. You might make some sort of decision in your own life based on that moment of surprise. You might feel that you are entering a dream,
You might, lucidly, decide to alter your surroundings, and your relationship with them.
In a dream, the monster chases you, and you are never fast enough. You turn and scream, "why?" as he rips you to shreds, and somewhere in the middle, you wake up, sweating and exhausted, and later you return to the same dream. This repetition means something. The meaning is not: Just like when I'm awake, when I'm dreaming, things go to hell. The dream is simply a short story encapsulating your beliefs. Once you know you're dreaming, without waking up, you decide that you would prefer a different relationship with this monster, you turn around, you invite it for tea. The next morning you wake up and go about your business, and that night, the circus arrives.
The next step, the step that takes focus, is realizing that you are always dreaming. Alter your surroundings slightly and change your relationship with them. The whole world will change accordingly. There are many world beliefs based on this. At the top of the blog, we have the famous quote from Remedios Varo about the placement of a pot of green paint and a pattern for making vests. There is Feng Shui, the art of arranging the items in your house in order to invite certain energies in. We have the placement of candles and images of saints, paired with patterns of word and rhythm, to request the intercession of particular powers in our affairs. We have habit.
Habit grinds certain neuro-chemical pathways into the folds of your brain; it creates patterns. Those patterns inhabit your motions; they inhabit your emotions; they control not just how you interpret what you see, but what you see. Ritual is an attempt at reversal of a particular harmful pattern. Ritual is a magical influence on the world around you. It has tangible effects.
ʻCelia,'" he says without looking up at her, ʻwhy do we wind our watch?'
ʻBecause everything requires energy,' she recites obediently, eyes still focused on her hand. ʻWe must put effort and energy into anything we wish to change.'
I would posit that the seeming lack of magic in the world is simply a matter of laziness.
An unwillingness to focus, to put that effort and energy into what we wish to change. Not necessarily a particularly negative form of laziness; often it's only a lack of clear desires and goals. In many of the scientific experiments designed to test for the existence of ESP, the person tested looks at playing card after playing card, trying to guess the next one. Scientists have noted that performance decreases over time. There is a theory being posited, which makes sense to me, that these clean lab-tests, while the only method acceptable for "proving" the existence of something to a doubting public, are also the worst way to test for that existence: the knowledge sought is not anything the person being tested actually cares about. Who can focus in such a situation? What's the next card? What difference does it make? Even if you're "trying," the core of your focus just can't put itself in such an unimportant place. What goes through your head as you sit through one of those tests? Probably "what's for dinner?" Borges once stated that the problem with scientific tests is that nothing in life occurs like a lab experiment; there are endless interactions in reality, all of which alter the impact of a particular (interactive) part. In this case, removing all subjective importance in the testing process also removes the impetus for focus, which removes the likelihood of any extra-sensory perception taking place. We've all heard stories of super-human strength in a person at the time of an emergency—mothers who can lift cars off of their children, that sort of thing. Lifting the car for the hell of it is another item entirely, and hugely unlikely.
As Kafka says in the quote above, "The nonexistent is that which we have not sufficiently desired."
This story, The Night Circus, is almost a how-to. It is not just full of beautiful language, intense imagery,
and a spellbinding tale. It leads you from spectator to performer; it reminds you of your own abilities.
The reader gets brief descriptions of the circus from Friedrick Thiessen, a writer that is so enthralled with the circus that his writings about it in the papers gather a following whose members come to be called "Reveurs;" dreamers. They enter the black and white circus also dressed in black and white, with one scarlet addition, so as to not presume themselves on the same level as the performers. They follow the circus; they bring it deep into their own lives, and in their day long before overnight deliveries and well, well, before the internet, they forge lasting relationships across the world.
A few chapters in, you are drawn forward, from outsider to spectator:
Beyond the ticket booth the only way forward is through a heavy striped curtain. One by one each person passes through it, vanishing from sight.When it is your turn, you pull back the fabric and step forward, only to be engulfed by darkness as the curtain closes again.
After the above quote, in which you, from the audience, enter the circus, your eyes are closed by the darkness and given time to slowly adjust to some other way of seeing (which becomes stars lining a twisted hallway, through which you feel your way until you are set back out in the light, which is now blinding in its seeming intensity...), a new chapter opens in which we meet Bailey. Bailey is a young boy who discovers the circus as we do, with its unannounced arrival in his town. He goes; he is enthralled. But during the day, his irritating older sister dares him to enter the gates during the day.
He takes the dare.
And even though it seems that nothing much happens, something is begun. He goes back to his home, back to the regular family problems and overwhelming decisions of coming into adulthood, but something has changed. He has begun a process. It takes him a while. It takes him as long as it takes us, in fact; it takes him the length of the story. I'll come back to him.
We receive our pieces of the story from three sources: we watch the magicians Celia and Marco grow
into adulthood and begin their work in the circus, their story driving the stories of everyone else in the book--the whole world, in fact. We read the descriptions of Thiessen and join his fellow Reveurs in their astonishment which draws them inside to be more than mere spectators, though not exactly performers. And we watch Bailey grow from his position outside the gates, like us, move inside the gates, and become a force from within the Circus of Dreams itself. The book is magic, its story enthralling; the book is a guide.
PART TWO: ILLUMINATION
There is so much that glows in the circus, from flames to lanterns to stars. I have
heard the expression ʻtrick of the light' applied to sights within Le Cirque des Reves so
frequently that I sometimes suspect the entirety of the circus is itself a complex illusion
of illumination. --Friedrick Thiessen, 1894
A complex illusion of illumination. Like a holograph, creating a three-dimensional world out of light and air: this is what our brain does, by the way--it formulates some visual representation of a series of informational signals, and it convinces the rest of our senses of the details of that representation. If you don't like the style of your holograph- maker, create a new model. Put the spotlight on different parts of the stage, close your
eyes and inhale the scent of something else, focus your mind until you can feel a particular material, a flower petal, the skin of another, the texture of warm beach sand. Maybe you'll open your eyes on the same office you closed your eyes in, but something will have changed. Underneath. Bailey's story is there to show us how.
On this evening, Mme. Padva wears a dress of black silk, hand embroidered with
intricate patterns of cherry blossoms, something like a kimono reincarnated as a gown.
Her silver hair is piled atop her head and held in place with a small jeweled black cage.
A choker of perfectly cut scarlet rubies circles her neck, putting forth a vague impression
of her throat having been slit. The overall effect is slightly morbid and incredibly elegant.
Mr. Ethan W. Barris is an engineer and architect of some renown, and the second of the
guests to arrive. He looks as though he has wandered into the wrong building and
would be more at home in an office or a bank with his timid manner and silver
spectacles, his hair carefully combed to disguise the fact that it is beginning to thin...
Do not think you must be born a magician, like Celia, or tutored from childhood, like Marco. Do not even think you must be a regal and aging theater personality, like Mademoiselle Padva. You, the anxious one from the back of the class, the one who wanders through life, shuffled from one position to another by "higher forces," the one who doesn't see how you can have any impact on your own existence--or at least no more than it takes to keep your head barely above water--this is the call you've been waiting for. Get up. Focus on the thing that matters, but focus on it internally. I think the confusion about magic is, we're all trying to bend the spoon in front of us. As the small, wise child in the Matrix says, there is no spoon. You choose something fantastic, something that exists only in your own head. You focus on it, you develop it--
A small example, this is difficult--
Say you want to build a clock. That is your mental project. Why a clock? Why not? It is an image, an object that resonates with you. You are drawn in by the perfection of its pieces, by its rhythm, by the regular glimmer of the swinging pendulum, by the grace of the woodwork and the futuristic (even after all this time) aspect of its works. Gears that all come together to make a small dance, perhaps even with a special show at the turning of the hour, a small door opening, someone coming out for a dance or a song. It's magical enough as it is. And it marks something so oddly unreal and yet so enormously controlling. Focus. You are creating something. Whatever you create matters. Where your focus is matters.
A man from the circus approaches Herr Thiessen the clockmaker asking him to create das Meisterwerk.
Money is no object. The only constraints are that it must be only in shades of grey from black to white, and that it must be Dreamlike. Her Thiessen, it must be emphasized, is a clock-maker. Not a magician. Not even, thus far, affiliated with a circus.
Herr Thiessen, loving details and loving challenge, puts his all into the project.
The finished clock is resplendent. At first glance it is simply a clock, a rather large black
clock with a white face and a silver pendulum. Well crafted, obviously, with intricately
carved woodwork edges and a perfectly painted face, but just a clock.
But that is before it is wound. Before it begins to tick, the pendulum swinging steadily
and evenly. Then, then it becomes something else.
The changes are slow. First, the color changes in the face, shifts from white to grey, and
then there are clouds that float across it, disappearing when they reach the opposite
side.
Meanwhile, bits of the body of the clock expand and contract, like pieces of a puzzle. As
though the clock is falling apart, slowly and gracefully.
All of this takes hours.
The face of the clock becomes a darker grey, and then black, with twinkling stars where
the numbers had been previously. The body of the clock, which has been methodically
turning itself inside out and expanding, is now entirely subtle shades of white and grey.
And it is not just pieces, it is figures and objects, perfectly carved flowers and planets
and tiny books with actual paper pages that turn. There is a silver dragon that curls
around part of the now visible clockwork, a tiny princess in a carved tower who paces in
distress, awaiting an absent prince. Teapots that pour into teacups and miniscule curls
of steam that rise from them as the seconds tick. Wrapped presents open. Small cats
chase small dogs. An entire game of chess is played.
At the center, where a cuckoo bird would live in a more traditional timepiece, is the
juggler. Dressed in harlequin style with a grey mask, he juggles shiny silver balls that
correspond to each hour. As the clock chimes, another ball joins the rest until at
midnight he juggles twelve balls in a complex pattern.
After midnight the clock begins once more to fold in upon itself. The face lightens and
the clouds return. The number of juggled balls decreases until the juggler himself
vanishes. By noon it is a clock again, and no longer a dream.
Sounds impossible? Here for your amazement is an actual clock, designed by Abū al-'Iz Ibn Ismā'īl ibn al-Razāz al-Jazarī in the 1200s:
[The intricate action is described thus on wikipedia:
"The timing mechanism is based on a water-filled bucket hidden inside the elephant. In the bucket is a deep bowl floating in the water, but with a small hole in the centre. The bowl takes half an hour to fill through this hole. In the process of sinking, the bowl pulls a string attached to a see-saw mechanism in the tower on top of the elephant. This releases a ball that drops into the mouth of a Serpent, causing the serpent to tip forward, which pulls the sunken bowl out of the water via strings. At the same time, a system of strings causes a figure in the tower to raise either the left or right hand and the mahout (elephant driver at the front) to hit a drum. This indicates a half or full hour. Next the snake tips back. The cycle then repeats, as long as balls remain in the upper reservoir to power the emptying of the bowl...Another innovative feature of the clock was how it recorded the passage of temporal hours, which meant that the rate of flow had to be changed daily to match the uneven length of days throughout the year."]
No detail is too unimportant to receive your attention. You are sitting at your desk, which is a mess—a mess of items you have to deal with, which you would like to put off. Arrange it: put something to the right which represents things you would like drawn to you. Put something to the left which represents moments in which you have felt strongest and most able. Put something in the drawer that smells good, and smell it often. Put an unfinished piece of something which matters to you there also, and during idle moments or irritating moments, let your gaze float over to it, let your mind wonder how you might work on it next.
Bailey does something like this. He works on the family farm, and it is not his dream job. He spends a lot of time in the tree he has loved climbing since he was a child, the same tree he was sitting in (though on a branch below his sister) when she dared him to enter the circus after hours, often wishing he was a princess some knight would come and spirit away, even grumbling to himself about the absolute unfairness of the fact that all fairy tales only give such an opportunity to girls.
He tells himself that it is not a bad life. That there is nothing wrong with being a farmer.
But still, the discontent remains. Even the ground beneath his feet feels unsatisfying to his boots.
So he continues to escape to his tree.
To make the tree his own, he even goes so far as to move the old wooden box in which he keeps his most valued possessions from its standard hiding spot beneath a loose floorboard under his bed to a nook in the oak tree, a substantial indentation that is not quite a hole but secure enough to serve the purpose.
The box is fairly small, with tarnished brass hinges and clasps. It is wrapped in a scrap of burlap that does a fairly good job of keeping it protected from the elements, and it sits securely enough that it has not been dislodged by even the most resourceful squirrels.
Its contents include a chipped arrowhead he found in a field when he was five. A stone with a hole straight through it that is supposedly lucky. A black feather. A shiny rock that his mother said was some sort of quartz. A coin that was his first never-spent pocket money. The brown leather collar that belonged to the family dog who died when Bailey was nine. A solitary white glove that has gone rather grey from a combination of age and being kept in a small box with rocks [note: this glove was given to him when he snuck into the circus].
And several yellowed and folded pages filled with handwritten text.
After the circus departed, he wrote down every detail he could remember about it so it would not fade in his memory. The chocolate-covered popcorn. The tent full of people on raised circular platforms, performing tricks with bright white fire. The magical, transforming clock that sat across from the ticket booth, doing so much more than simply telling the time.
While he catalogued each element of the circus in shaky handwriting, he could not manage to record his encounter with the red-haired girl. He never told anyone about her. He looked for her at the circus during his two subsequent visits during proper nighttime hours, but he had not been able to find her.
Then the circus was gone, vanished as suddenly as it had appeared, like a fleeting dream.
First of all, there is an action. He feels unsatisfied with the ground, so he climbs above it. He wants to leave the house he lives in—this is as specific as his desire gets—and so he moves his box of treasures from underneath the bed (the safe, the most inside room of the house, really), to the top of the tree, which stretches towards the sky. Up and out—that's a good start, at least. Another action is the writing he does. He records every detail. Why? So he can call it up again. He can recreate the circus in his mind; he can smell it, see it; there are visual symbols to take him back, and there is the glove—a tactile proof of some other world, some other place, some other possibility. Also, there is a secret. All magic has a secret. The secret is his meeting with the girl.
'Secrets have power,' Widget begins. 'And that power diminishes when they are shared, so they are best kept and kept well. Sharing secrets, real secrets, important ones, with even one other person, will change them. Writing them down is worse, because who can tell how many eyes might see them inscribed on paper, no matter how careful you might be with it…
This is, in part, why there is less magic in the world today. Magic is secret and secrets are magic, after all, and years upon years of teaching and sharing magic and worse. Writing it down in fancy books that get all dusty with age has lessened it, removed its power bit by bit…'
But there's another way that could go: a secret gets passed to you, and you make it your own. You learn a technique, add your secret sauce, and voila: new magic.
Clock by Eric Freitas
("Growing relentlessly in the mind of Eric Freitas lies a realm of dark mechanical curiosities and horological contradictions. In this world gears are harvested and mechanisms are alive with the organic repetitions of nature's machine. Balancing carefully between creative conception and logical execution, this world would slowly be brought to life. In 2004 Eric began to study the dying craft of clockmaking so that his ideas could be executed, and it would become apparent that even an instrument as logical and precise as a clock could be compromised by ungoverned subconscious thought."—from his website)
There is much that goes on in this novel, and I haven't even touched on the masterfully written story of a great love between two magicians, Celia and Marco. I have not described a single tent in the immense maze of mysterious circus tents, a single flavor of the amazing dinner-parties thrown by the circus proprietor. Or the way that Bailey comes in to his own. Read this book.
Note: The magnificence of clockworks extended into the creation of automata that did not "bother" with marking time. Tiny humans played chess; music boxes opened to reveal dancers inside. The wondrous possibilities of gears extended to the stage and expanded in scope via magicians. Below is one of the more famous magic pieces performed by Robert Houdin, who was a pioneer of such automata use. (The Night Circus does not go in this direction, but the story of the circus clock leads me there in my own twisted mind .) It was called "The Marvelous Orange Tree" and in the movie "The Illusionist," Edward Norton performs a variation of it. If you can get through the theatrics of the first 2 or 3 minutes, you will reach the performance of the orange tree, which is truly amazing. I don't want to know how it works… After all, does it matter? He paid attention to the details, and he created magic.
Posted by zoe at 11:27 AM
Labels: al-jazari, clocks, eric freitas, illusionist, magic, Magical Realism, magician, Night Circus, robert houdin, Time
Vesna October 26, 2011 at 1:06 PM
Beautiful post my dearest Zoe! Thank you.
I sometimes read backwards so I first watched the video, really enjoyable!
I like the idea that we're alays dreaming...it reminded me of this poem
A Dream Within a Dream, Edgar Allan Poe
Take this kiss upon the brow!
And, in parting from you now,
Thus much let me avow
You are not wrong, who deem
That my days have been a dream;
Yet if hope has flown away
In a night, or in a day,
In a vision, or in none,
Is it therefore the less gone?
I stand amid the roar
Of a surf-tormented shore,
And I hold within my hand
Grains of the golden sand
How few! yet how they creep
Through my fingers to the deep,
While I weep - while I weep!
O God! can I not grasp
Them with a tighter clasp?
O God! can I not save
One from the pitiless wave?
Is all that we see or seem
But a dream within a dream?
zoe October 26, 2011 at 1:12 PM
what a beautiful comment :)) hvala puno, vesnice...
"all that we see or seem
is but a dream within a dream"
(so i would posit yes! he can not only keep those grains, but make more! bigger ones, even :D)
yew tree nights October 26, 2011 at 1:47 PM
I was thinking, as I was reading your lovely post, about the mirror image of this. About trying to take everything the way it is and make it work for you, whether or not it seems agreeable at first. Like if you are painting on a surface that is not so nice, you can perhaps, with a bit of creativity, transform the "bad" surface into something integral and unique in the painting, something that makes the design stronger, or you could take "awful" traffic noises and transform them into a sort of song, that kind of thing.
So Poe's sand turns into a falling stream of sand and water, and then into a poem, then into a real and solid thought of sand in your two minds and mine (and into an Elysian Fields song somewhere along the line, I might add). What do you think?
I might add that do think all this transformation does maybe take a lot of energy and time though.
ahhh---back to that 'focus,' right?
yes, i think that taking a 'bad' surface and transforming it thus is really what it's about--the 'badness' of the thing is sort of the difficulty to your particular situation, right? and that makes your transformation particular, elevates it to art, to magic..?
The Manic Reader October 29, 2011 at 10:18 AM
LOVED your information. I have a fan site for the night circus and I'd like to pull your page into it, for the readers/reviewers to see this. LOVED it!!! Thank you again!!
zoe October 29, 2011 at 11:30 AM
thanks, manic :)
please feel free, that would be great!
Zara H. November 1, 2011 at 1:24 PM
What a beautiful post, dear Zoe, delightfully written! I found myself captivated from the very beginning, by the extracts from the book and your own reflections!!
Lovely video, too! Thank you!
Danmark December 28, 2011 at 6:34 PM
I love when I read a book and it stops me in my tracks.guess I'll add this one to my ever growing list of must reads. I would find the characters would jump out of the pages and speak to me like they did the first time that I read it.
zoe December 29, 2011 at 3:22 AM
danmark:
yes, it's definitely one of those books that grabs you and keeps you, and you wish you could stay with its characters!
it makes it hard to pick "the next book," because they seem so pale...
i'm so glad you enjoyed it :)
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IT Company Becomes Cloud-Ready Service Provider Thanks to Daughter's Insistence
Last Updated: Feb 10, 2017 by Paul Chaney In Startup 0
This article is sponsored by Meylah.
Sometimes, it's a good idea to take your child's advice.
That's what Stana Steen, founder and president of High Standards Technology, Inc., an information technology company based in Houston, Texas, realized when she considered making the move from providing traditional IT solutions to becoming a cloud-ready managed services provider.
"We need to get on this cloud thing," is what her daughter (who also happens to be the company's operations director) stated emphatically during a discussion of the topic.
"I had my reservations," Steen told Small Business Trends in a telephone interview. "I had seen a lot of hype about technologies that didn't come to fruition. I told my daughter to hold off and let's see what happens first. I just kept putting her off despite her insistence."
Steen said the tipping point came when clients began to approach her about the cloud.
"I began to receive push back from clients asking about the cloud, and was seeing companies such as Microsoft, Amazon and Google offering cloud-based products," she said. "I remember thinking, 'I guess there is something to this cloud thing.' At that point, we went to Microsoft, got certified and started onboarding clients. Now, every time we bring a client on to cloud platform, my daughter never fails to remind me that it was her idea!"
How High Standards Got Its Start
Steen started the company in 2002 based on a desire to provide, in her words, "honest" services.
"I wanted to start an IT company that was honest and told the truth to the client," she said. "I found that not that many IT companies in our area put the needs of clients first. We wanted to differentiate ourselves in that respect, which is largely the reason we included 'High Standards' in the company name.
Services High Standards Provides
High Standards is a Microsoft Silver midmarket cloud-ready managed services partner that serves businesses in the greater Houston area. The company also has a particular focus on providing HIPAA and PCI compliant security services.
However, to quote Steen, "We do just about anything that has to do with IT."
The company currently employs seven staff members (including Steen's insistent daughter).
Handling Client Resistance to Transition
Steen said that resistance from clients usually arises from two quarters, for two different reasons: employees who resist change to their work habits and executives concerned about costs.
"Employees fear that moving to the cloud will make their jobs harder and that they will have to new learn new ways of doing things," she said. "Our task is to educate them on the benefits of the cloud, convincing them that the transition will actually make doing their jobs easier and faster."
For company executives, it's all about the money.
"CFOs and CEOs express concerns over how moving to the cloud will affect financial data, particularly who will have access to it and be able to see it," she said.
There are also concerns over implementation costs.
"CEOs and business owners think they own the cloud-based software and have trouble realizing that's not the case," she said. "We have to explain that the fee they pay each month for managed services is better from an ROI perspective. They don't incur large expenditures from buying and maintaining a fixed server or from data migration. We try to get them to see it as an investment long-term."
Steen says she relies on education to get clients over their fear of moving to the cloud.
"We explain how the data centers operate, how redundancies and encryption protect data and cite statistics that support our case," she said. "We also enlighten clients on how moving to the cloud eliminates downtime, fosters group collaboration and provides anytime access. When business owners see how a group of employees can work on one document in the SharePoint environment, that's usually all it takes to push them over to a yes."
Steen added that because the cloud has been around for a while, people are more comfortable with the idea of moving to it.
"Convincing a client usually takes anywhere from 30 to 60 days," she said. "But depending where the client's head is at, it could be as little as two weeks."
That process is often expedited when clients experience some type of disaster, such a server crash resulting in the loss of data or even when the client realizes he can't access information when out of the office.
"We had a law firm that absolutely refused to move to the cloud," Steen said. "The company became the victim of ransomware through a phishing scheme. Files got encrypted, and the firm had to pay the ransom to retrieve them. That's when we received a call."
She was quick to point out that had the firm been a managed services client, it would "never have gotten that email in the first place."
Steen said that she often uses incentives in the form of free training to convince clients to convert.
"We provide free training through the local Microsoft retail store," she said. "It doesn't cost us anything, and we work closely with the store to provide training. I also speak there, on occasion."
Cloud Transition Timetable, Costs
Steen indicated that implementation could take as little as one to two hours per user, and that includes training. Costs average around $350 per user, which covers all aspects: Microsoft licensing for one year, data migration and training.
Midmarket companies with many employees could see expenditures rise into the five-figure range, but, according to Steen, costs for a company with 20 users, for example, could be as little as $2,000.
Where the Transition Process Starts
Typically, Steen starts by migrating email, whether that involves a POP environment or in-house Exchange server.
"The reason we start with email is that it has a low impact on the client," she said. "It includes new features the client didn't have before and does not require them to change the way they work. If the company has been using Outlook, for instance, it continues to do so. It's not an imposition on their time, which makes them think, 'This cloud thing is really easy.' That's when we take them to the next step."
Challenges Cloud-ready Managed Services Providers Face
The primary challenge when moving a client to the cloud is trying to make too many changes at one time, Steen said.
"We don't want to overwhelm the client with all this new technology," she said. "Our challenge is to move them through the process slowly, step-by-step. We get them onto email, and then progress to other products over time."
Becoming a cloud-ready managed services provider has enabled Steen to realize her vision of providing a high standard of service that places the needs of the client ahead of her own. It's something for which she is grateful, even if she has to give her daughter the credit.
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redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


In Cameron Dodds' take on the world there are two kinds of people: "losers who know they are losers, and losers who don't know they are losers." Cameron, a small-time writer, considers himself a loser who knows he is a loser. He works at a Sally Ann drug and alcohol treatment centre, where he steals the file of Darryl Green, a recent suicide case, and gets so engrossed in the file that he translates Darryl's life into fiction, going as far as befriending the deceased's sister: a Down Syndrome patient named June, who he regularly visits.
It's a book about a lot of things: the bonds and tensions unique to blood relations, a truthful and amusing exposé on the life of emerging writers, or even the ways cats have it knocked. But more than anything, it's a novel about identity, replete with well-crafted and complicated characters, i.e very human characters. Every single character is in denial about who they are, and without giving too much away about the brilliant, page-turner of an ending, Cameron quite literally gets lost looking for himself.
The novel received a critical review in The Journal on Developmental Disabilities, which took issue with Greer's portrayal of a disabled character, and also with the language about disability used throughout the novel. The reviewer found that this was a novel that got so much right, and moreover managed to cast all kinds of outsiders and misfits in a new kind of light, but casts the disabled character as simple and one-dimensional. Cameron Dodds' world is a pretty complicated place but June, as all the other reviews I've read point out, is "just June". The reviewer writes that this is "another story in which Down syndrome exists as a metaphor". And I take note of this review because I think it comes from a different and interesting perspective, is thoughtfully written, and worth keeping in mind.
Still Life With June's book trailer is here, and worth a look (though I can't get it to embed correctly). Cormorant has also posted an audio interview with Darren Greer.
I am heartened by B.'s assessment of this as not your usual book with a cynical main character, attracted to the book jacket, and excited by Chad Pelley's enthusiasm for Still Life… I am really looking forward to reading it (and hopefully it will be more successful than my last Still Life… attempt).


The Law Team of Fetterman & Associates announces the winners of its fifth annual Scholarship Project.
Entrants, required to be college-bound high school seniors, had to write an essay about their "Most Influential Teacher." Five winning students were chosen and each student received a $1,000 award, and each chosen teacher was honored with special recognition.
Michael Nunez of Inlet Grove Community High School, and Sammantha Donovan of Inlet Grove Community High School.
The winning students, teachers, principals and their families gathered to enjoy an evening of inspiration and recognition at the awards ceremony April 19 in North Palm Beach.
The Law Team of Fetterman & Associates is a personal injury law firm with over 40 years experience representing clients suffering the most serious injuries arising out of car and truck collisions and other motor vehicle accidents, as well as injuries resulting from falls on dangerous property or the use of defective products. Fetterman & Associates, headquartered in North Palm Beach, has additional offices in Port St. Lucie and a mobile office. For more information, visit www.lawteam.com or call 1-800-330-HELP.


text:
\section{Formulation of the model}
High temperature superconductivity in the lanthanum \cite{bednorz1},
yttrium \cite{wu1} and related copper-oxide compounds remains a subject
of intensive investigation and controversy. It was suggested that
electron-phonon interaction mechanism, which is very successful in
understanding of conventional (``low temperature") superconductors
within the Bardeen-Cooper-Schriffer scheme \cite{bardeen1}, may not
be adequate for high-$T_c$ cuprates, and even the conventional Fermi liquid
model of metallic state may require reconsideration. This opens an area
for investigation of mechanisms of electron-electron interaction which
can be relevant in understanding peculiarities of superconducting, as well
as normal state, properties of cuprates. Specific to all of them is
the existence of oxide orbitals. Band calculations
\cite{hybertsen1,mahan1} suggest
that hopping between the oxygen $p_x,p_y$ orbitals and between the
copper $d_{x^2-y^2}$
orbitals may be of comparable magnitude. On the experimental side,
spectroscopic studies \cite{nucker1,kuiper1} clearly show that the oxygen band
appears in the same region of oxygen concentration in which
superconductivity in
cuprates is the strongest. Therefore there exists a possibility
that specific features of oxide compounds may be related to oxygen-oxygen
hopping, or to the interaction between the copper and the rotational $p_x-p_y$
collective modes. If the oxygen hopping is significant then it
immediately follows that intrinsic oxygen carriers ($p_x,p_y$ oxygen holes)
should be different from the more familiar generic $s$-orbital derived itinerant
carriers. The difference is related to low atomic number of oxygen
such that removing or adding of one electron to atom induces a
substantial change in the Coulomb field near the remaining ion and
therefore results in the change
of the effective radius of atomic orbitals near the ion.
This will strongly influence the hopping amplitude
between  this atom and the atoms in its neighborhood. Such ``orbital
contraction'' effect  represents a source of strong interaction which
does not simply reduce to the Coulomb (or phonon) repulsion (or
attraction) between the charge carriers. It was suggested
by Hirsch and coauthors \cite{hirsch1,hirsch2,hirsch3}, and by the
present authors \cite{kulik1,kulik2,boyaci1,kulik3} that the occupation
dependent hopping can have relevance to the appearance of superconductivity
in high-temperature oxide compounds. In the present paper, we investigate
the generic occupation-dependent hopping Hamiltonians with respect
to peculiarities of the normal
state, and to the range of existence of the superconducting state.
Theoretical investigation of Cooper instability is supplemented by
numeric study of pairing and diamagnetic currents in finite atomic
clusters. We study the effect of Cooper pairing between the carriers and
show that at certain values and magnitudes
of the appropriate coupling parameters,
the system {\em is} actually superconducting. The
properties of such superconducting
state are in fact only slightly different from the properties
of conventional (low-$T_c$) superconductors.
Among those we so far can only mention
the change in the fluctuation conductivity above or near the
critical temperature $T_c$. Relaxation of the pairing parameter to equilibrium
acquires a small real part due to the asymmetry of contraction-derived
interaction between the quasi-particles above and below the Fermi energy.

Oxygen atoms in the copper-oxygen layers of the cuprates (Figure 1)
have simple
quadratic lattice. We assume that $p_z$ orbitals of oxygen ($z$ is the
direction perpendicular to the cuprate plane) are bound to the
near cuprate layers
whereas carriers at the $p_x,p_y$
orbitals may hop between the oxygen ions in the
plane.

Let $t_1$ be the hopping amplitude of $p_x \, (p_y)$ and $t_2$ the
hopping amplitude of $p_y \, (p_x)$ oxygen orbitals between the nearest
lattice sites  in the $x \, (y)$ direction in a square lattice
with a lattice parameter $a$. Then the non-interacting Hamiltonian is
\begin{equation}
H_0=-t_1 \sum_{<ij>_x} a_i^{\dagger}a_j - t_2 \sum_{<ij>_y} a_i^{\dagger}a_j
-t_1 \sum_{<ij>_y} b_i^{\dagger} b_j - t_2 \sum_{<ij>_x}b_i^{\dagger} b_j
\end{equation}
where $a_i^{\dagger} \, (a_i)$ is the creation (annihilation) operator
for $p_x$ and correspondingly $b_i^{\dagger} \, (b_i)$ for $p_y$ orbitals.
The interaction Hamiltonian includes the terms
\begin{equation}
H_1=\sum_{<ij>} a_i^{\dagger}a_j \left[ V m_i m_j + W (m_i+m_j) \right]
+ \sum_{<ij>} b_i^{\dagger}b_j \left[V n_i n_j + W (n_i +n_j) \right]
\end{equation}
where $n_i=a_i^{\dagger}a_i$, $m_i=b_i^{\dagger}b_i$. This corresponds
to the dependence of the hopping amplitude on the occupation numbers
$n_i, \, m_i$ of the form
\begin{equation}
\left( \hat{t}_{ij} \right)_{a_i \rightarrow a_j} = \tau _0 (1-m_i)(1-m_j)
+\tau _1 \left[ (1-m_i)m_j+m_i(1-m_j) \right] + \tau_2 m_i m_j
\end{equation}
and correspondingly $(\hat{t}_{ij})_{b_i \rightarrow b_j}$ of the same  form
with $m_i$ replaced with $n_i$. The amplitudes $\tau_0, \, \tau_1, \, \tau_2$
correspond to the transitions between the ionic configurations of oxygen:
\begin{eqnarray}
\tau_0: \, & O_i^-+O_j^{2-} & \rightarrow O_i^{2-}+O_j^- \nonumber\\
\tau_1: \, & O_i+O_j^{2-}   & \rightarrow O_i^{2-}+O_j \\
\tau_2: \, & O_i+O_j^-      & \rightarrow O_i^- +O_j \nonumber
\end{eqnarray}
$O$ corresponds to the neutral oxygen ion whereas $O^-$ to the single
charged and $O^{2-}$ to the double charged negative ions. Since oxygen atom has
$1s^22p^42s^2$ configuration in its ground state,
filling of the $p$ shell to the full
occupied configuration $2p^6$ is the
most favorable. Amplitudes $V$ and $W$ relate
to the parameter $\tau_0, \, \tau_1, \, \tau_2$ according to
\begin{equation}
V=\tau_0-2\tau_1+\tau_2, \:
W=\tau_1-\tau_2 \, .
\end{equation}
Assuming $t_1=t_2$ and replacing $a_i, \, b_i$ with $a_i$
with the pseudo-spin indices
$\sigma=\downarrow , \,  \uparrow$ we write the Hamiltonian Eq.(1) in the
form
\begin{equation}
H=-t\sum_{<ij> \, {\sigma}} a_{i \, \sigma}^{\dagger}a_{j \, \sigma}
+H_U+H_V+H_W
\end{equation}
where
\begin{eqnarray}
H_U &=&U \sum_i n_{i \uparrow} n_{i \downarrow}  \\
H_V &=& V \sum_{<ij> \, \sigma} a_{i \sigma}^{\dagger} a_{j \sigma} n_{i, \bar{\sigma}}
n_{j, \bar{\sigma}} \\
H_W &=& W \sum_{<ij> \, \sigma} a_{i \sigma}^{\dagger} a_{j \sigma} (n_{i, \bar{\sigma}}
+n_{j, \bar{\sigma}})
\end{eqnarray}
where we also included the in-site Coulomb interaction (U)
between the dissimilar
orbitals at the same site. $\sigma$ can also be considered as a real spin
projection of electrons at the site. In that case, the pairing will originate
between the spin-up and spin-down orbitals, rather than between $p_x$ and $p_y$
orbitals. More complex mixed spin -and orbital- pairing
configurations can also be
possible within the same idea of orbital contraction (or expansion) at
hole localization but are not considered in this paper.
The following discussion
does not distinguish between the real spin and the pseudo-spin pairing.
The Hamiltonian, Eq.(6), is a model one which can not refer to the reliable
values of the parameters appropriate to the oxide materials. The purpose of our
study is rather to investigate the properties of superconducting transition
specific to the model chosen and to find the range of the
$U, \, V, \, W$ values which may correspond to superconductivity.
This will be done along the lines of the standard BCS model \cite{abrikosov1}
in the weak coupling limit, $U, \, V, \, W \, \rightarrow \, 0$, and by an
exact diagonalization of the Hamiltonian for a finite atomic cluster at
large and intermediate coupling.

In the momentum representation, the Hamiltonian becomes
$H=H_0+H_1+H_2$ with
\begin{eqnarray}
H_0=\sum_{{\bf p} \, \sigma} \xi_{\bf p} a_{{\bf p} \sigma}^{\dagger}
a_{{\bf p} \sigma}\\
H_1=\frac{1}{4} \sum_{p_1 p_2 p_3 p_4,
\alpha
\beta \, \gamma \, \delta}
a_{{\bf p}_1 \alpha}^{\dagger} a_{{\bf p}_2 \beta}^{\dagger}
\Gamma_{\alpha \beta
\gamma \delta}^0(p_1, p_2 ,p_3 ,p_4) a_{{\bf p}_4 \delta}
a_{{\bf p}_3 \gamma}
\end{eqnarray}
where
\begin{equation}
\xi_{\bf p} = -t\sigma_{\bf p}-\mu,  \;\;\: \sigma_{\bf p}=2(\cos p_xa+
\cos  p_y a),
\end{equation}
and $\mu$ is the chemical potential. $\Gamma_{\alpha \beta \gamma \delta}^0$
is the zero order vertex part defined as
\begin{equation}
\Gamma_{\alpha \beta \gamma \delta}^0(p_1, p_2, p_3,
p_4)= \left[ U+(W+
\frac{1}{2}\nu V) (\sigma_{{\bf p}_1}
+\sigma_{{\bf p}_2}+\sigma_{{\bf p}_3}+\sigma_{{\bf p}_4}) \right]
\tau_{\alpha \beta}^x
\tau_{\gamma \delta}^x(\delta_{\alpha \gamma} \delta_{\beta \delta} -
\delta_{\alpha \delta} \delta_{\beta \gamma}) \delta_{{\bf p}_1+{\bf p}_2,
{\bf p}_3+{\bf p}_4}
\end{equation}
where $\tau_{\alpha \beta}^x$ is a Pauli matrix
\begin{eqnarray*}
\left( \begin{array}{lr}
0 & 1 \\ 1 & 0 \end{array}  \right) .
\end{eqnarray*}
For reasons which will be clear later,
we separated $H_V$  and put some part of it into
the $H_1$ term, while the remaining part is included in the
$H_2$ term, thus giving
\begin{equation}
H_2=V \sum_{<ij>\sigma} a_{i\sigma}^{\dagger} a_{j\sigma}
(a_{i\bar{\sigma}}^{\dagger}
a_{i\bar{\sigma}}-\frac{\nu}{2})(a_{j\bar{\sigma}}^{\dagger}a_{j\bar{\sigma}}
-\frac{\nu}{2})
\end{equation}
with $\nu=<n_i>$ being the average occupation of the site.

\section{The Cooper instability in the occupation-dependent
hopping Hamiltonians}
The Cooper instability realizes at certain temperature $T=T_c$ as a singularity
in a two-particle scattering amplitude at zero total momentum. Let's introduce
a function
\begin{equation}
\Gamma(p_1 p_2,\tau - \tau^{ \prime})=<T_{\tau} a_{{\bf p}_1 \uparrow}
(\tau) a_{-{\bf p}_1
\downarrow}(\tau) \bar{a}_{-{\bf p}_2 \downarrow}(\tau^{ \prime})
\bar{a}_{{\bf p}_2 \uparrow}
(\tau^{ \prime})>
\end{equation}
where $\bar{a}_{{\bf p}\alpha}(\tau) =
\exp(H\tau) a_{{\bf p} \alpha}^{\dagger} \exp(-H\tau)$, $a_{{\bf p}\alpha}
=\exp(H\tau)
a_{{\bf p}\alpha} \exp(-H\tau)$ are the imaginary time $(\tau)$ creation and
annihilation operators.
At ${\bf p}_1=-{\bf p}_2$, ${\bf p}_3=-{\bf p}_4$,
the kernel of $\Gamma_{\alpha \beta \gamma \delta}$ is
proportional to $G_{\alpha \beta}^x$ $G_{\gamma \delta}^y$ ($G$ is one-electron
Green function).
We keep notation  $\Gamma({\bf p p}^{\prime})$ for such a reduced Green function
specifying only momenta ${\bf p}={\bf p}_1=-{\bf p}_2$ and
${\bf p}^{\prime}={\bf p}_3=-{\bf p}_4$. By assuming
temporarily $V=0$, this Hamiltonian results in an equation for the Fourier
transform $\Gamma(p,p^{\prime},\Omega)$
\begin{equation}
\Gamma({\bf p},{\bf p}^{\prime}, \Omega)= \Gamma^0({\bf p},
{\bf p}^{\prime})- T \sum_{\omega} \sum_{{\bf{k}}} \Gamma^0({\bf{p}},
{\bf{k}})G_{\omega}({\bf{k}})G_{-\omega+\Omega}(-{\bf{k}})
\Gamma({\bf{k}},{\bf{p}^{\prime}},\Omega)
\end{equation}
corresponding to summation of Feynmann graphs shown in Figure 2.
In the above formulas,
$\omega=(2n+1)\pi T$ and $\Omega=2\pi m T$
($n,m$ integers) are the discrete odd and even frequencies
of the thermodynamic perturbation theory
\cite{abrikosov1}.
$G({\bf k}, \omega)$ is a one-particle Green function in a
Fourier representation
\begin{equation}
G({\bf k}, \omega)= \frac{1}{\xi_k-i\omega}.
\end{equation}
Diagrams of Figure 2 are singular since equal momenta of two parallel
running lines bring together singularities of both Green functions
$G({\bf k},\omega)$ and $G(-{\bf k}, \omega)$.

6-vertex interaction, Eq.(8), is not generally considered in the theories
of strongly-correlated fermionic systems. Such interaction also results in
singular
diagrams for ${\bf p} \rightarrow -{\bf p}$ scattering shown in
Figure 3. Since a closed loop in this figure does not carry any momentum
to the vertex, it reduces to the average value of $\bar G$ which in turn is the
average of the number operator, $<a^{\dagger} a>$.
Taking into consideration of such diagrams is equivalent to
replacing one of the $n_i$'s in Eq.(8) to its thermodynamical average
$\nu=<a_{i \sigma}^{\dagger}a_{i \sigma}>$. Then the $V$ term
can be added to the renormalized value of $W$,
\begin{eqnarray*}
W \rightarrow W+ \frac{1}{2} \nu V
\end{eqnarray*}
We will check by numeric analysis in Sec. III
to which extent such an approximation
may be justified.

Solution to Eq.(16) can be received by putting
\begin{equation}
\Gamma({\bf p},{\bf p}^{\prime}, \Omega)=A(\Omega)+B_1(\Omega)\sigma_{\bf p}
+B_2(\Omega)\sigma_{{\bf p}^{\prime}}+C(\Omega)\sigma_{\bf p}
\sigma_{{\bf p}^{\prime}}.
\end{equation}
Substituting this expression into Eq.(16) and introducing the quantities
\begin{equation}
S_n(\Omega)=T\sum_{\omega}\sum_{\bf k} \sigma_{\bf k}^{n}G_{\omega}({\bf k})
G_{-\omega+\Omega}(-{\bf k})
\end{equation}
we receive a system of coupled equations for $A,B_1,B_2,C$
\begin{eqnarray}
\left( \begin{array}{cccc}
       1+U S_0 + \tilde{W} S_1 & US_1+{\tilde W}S_2 & 0 & 0 \\
        {\tilde W}S_0            & 1+{\tilde W} S_1 & 0 & 0 \\
        0 & 0 & 1+U S_0 +{\tilde W}S_1 & U S_1+{\tilde W} S_2 \\
        0 & 0 &  {\tilde W} S_0 & 1+{\tilde W} S_1 \end{array} \right) & &
\left( \begin{array}{c}
      A \\ B_1 \\ B_2 \\ C \end{array} \right)=
\left( \begin{array}{c}
     U \\ \tilde{W} \\ \tilde{W} \\ 0 \end{array} \right)
\end{eqnarray}
where $\tilde{W}=W+\frac{1}{2} \nu V$, which are solved to give
\begin{equation}
A=\frac{U-\tilde{W}^2S_2}{D} , \;
B_1=B_2=\frac{\tilde{W}(1+\tilde{W}S_1)}{D} , \;
C=-\frac{\tilde{W}^2S_0}{D}
\end{equation}
where $D$ is a determinant
\begin{equation}
D=\left| \begin{array}{cc}
           1+US_0+\tilde{W}S_1 & US_1+\tilde{W}S_2 \\
           WS_0 & 1+WS_1 \end{array} \right| .
\end{equation}

The determinant becomes zero at some temperature which
means an instability in the two-particle scattering
amplitude ($\Gamma\rightarrow\infty$). This temperature is
the superconducting transition temperature $T_c$. At $T_c$, Eq.(16)
is singular, which means that two-particle scattering amplitude gets infinite.
Below $T_c$, the finite value of $\Gamma$ is established by including the
non-zero thermal averages (the order parameters),
$<a_{\bf p}^{\dagger} a_{-\bf p}^{\dagger}>$,
$<a_{\bf p} a_{-\bf p}>$. We first analyze the
case of non-retarded, non-contraction interaction $U$, and after that will
consider
the effect of the occupation-dependent hopping terms, $V$ and $W$.

\subsection{Direct non-retarded interaction}
Neglecting contraction parameters $V,W$, solution to Eq.(16) reduces to
\begin{equation}
-\frac{1}{U}=T\sum_{\omega}\sum_{\bf k} \frac{1}{\xi_{\bf k}^2+\omega^2}
\end{equation}
which after the summation over the discrete frequencies reduces to the
conventional
BCS equation (at negative $U$)
\begin{equation}
\frac{1}{|U|}=\sum_{\bf k} \frac{1-2n_{\bf k}}{2\xi_{\bf k}},
\end{equation}
with $n_{\bf k}=(\exp(\beta\xi_{\bf k})+1)^{-1}$.
At finite frequency $\Omega$, Eq.(23) reduces to
\begin{equation}
\ln \frac{T}{T_c}=T \sum_{\omega}\int_{-E_1}^{E_2} d\xi \frac{-i \Omega}
{(\xi^2+\omega^2)(\xi+i\omega+i\Omega)}
\end{equation}
where we replaced for simplicity an integration over the Brillouin, zone
$\int d^3k$, by the integration over the energy assuming that the density
of states near the Fermi energy $\mu$ is flat.
$-E_1$ and $E_2$ are the lower and upper limits of
integration equal to $-4 t-\mu$ and $4 t-\mu$, respectively.
Such an approximation is not very bad since most singular
contribution to integral comes from the point $\xi_p=0$
where the integrand is the largest.

Above $T_c$, Eq.(25) determines the frequency of the order
parameter relaxation
\cite{abrahams1,gorkov1,kulik4}.
There is a small change in this frequency compared to the
BCS model in which limits of the integration $(-E_1,E_2)$ are symmetric
with respect to the Fermi energy, and small in comparison to $\varepsilon_F$,
therefore we briefly discuss it now.

To receive a real-time relaxation
frequency, Eq.(25) needs to be analytically continued to a real frequency
domain from the discrete imaginary frequencies $i\omega_n=(2n+1)\pi i  T$
\cite{abrikosov1}.
Using the identity
\begin{equation}
T \sum_{\omega}\frac{1}{(\omega+i \xi_1)(\omega+i \xi_2)...(\omega+i \xi_n)}
=(-i)^n\sum_{i=1}^{n} \prod_{i\neq j} \frac{n(\xi_i)}{\xi_i-\xi_j}
\end{equation}
where $n(\xi)$ is a Fermi function $n(\xi)=(\exp(\beta \xi)+1)^{-1}$ gives
\begin{equation}
\ln \frac{T}{T_c}= \frac{i \Omega}{2} \int_{-E_1}^{E_2}
\frac{\tanh \frac{\xi}{2T}}{\xi(2\xi + i \Omega)} d\xi
\end{equation}
where
\begin{equation}
T_c=\frac{2 \gamma}{\pi} \sqrt{E_1E_2}\exp \left(- \frac{1}{N(\varepsilon_F)|U|} \right)
, \: \ln \gamma=C=0.577.
\end{equation}
$C$ is Euler constant.
Analytic continuation is now simple: we change  $\Omega$ to
$i(\omega-i \delta)$, $\delta=+0$, to receive a function which will be analytic
in the upper half plane of complex $\omega$,
$Im \omega>0$. The order parameter relaxation
equation becomes
\begin{equation}
\left( \ln \frac{T}{T_c}-\frac{\omega}{4}\int_{-E_1}^{E_2}\frac{\tanh \frac
{\xi}{2T}}{\xi(\xi-\frac{\omega}{2}+i\delta)}d\xi\right) \Delta=0.
\end{equation}
At $\omega \ll T_c$ and $T-T_c \ll T_c$, the real and imaginary parts of
Eq.(29) are easily evaluated to give
\begin{equation}
\left( T-T_c-\frac{\pi i \omega}{8 T_c}+ \omega \frac{E_1-E_2}{4E_1E_2}
\right) \Delta=0.
\end{equation}
Thus, the order parameter relaxation equation at $T > T_c$ becomes
\begin{equation}
(1+i \lambda) \frac{\partial\Delta}{\partial t} + \Gamma \Delta= 0
\end{equation}
where
\begin{equation}
\Gamma = \frac{8}{\pi}(T-T_c), \:\: \lambda=\frac{2(E_1-E_2)}{\pi E_1E_2} T_c.
\end{equation}
In comparison to the BCS theory in which $E_1=E_2=\omega_D$
($\omega_D$ is the Debye frequency) and therefore $\lambda=0$,
we receive the relaxation which has
a non-zero ``inductive'' component, $-i \lambda \Gamma$. Typically,
$E_1 \sim E_2 \sim \varepsilon_F$ and therefore
$|\lambda|$ is a small quantity. It increases however near the
low ($\nu \ll 1$) or near the maximal ($\nu \simeq 2$)
occupation where $E_1$ or $E_2$ become small. Such mode of relaxation is
specific to a non-retarded (non-phonon) interaction which is not
symmetric near $\varepsilon_F$ and spans over the
large volume of the ${\bf k}$-space
rather than is restricted to a narrow energy $\omega_D \ll \varepsilon_F$
near the Fermi energy.

\subsection{Occupation-dependent hopping instability and relaxation}
Neglecting direct interaction, we put $U=0$ in Eq.(22) and
receive
\begin{equation}
-\frac{1}{\tilde{W}}=S_1(\omega) \pm \sqrt{S_0(\omega)S_2(\omega)}
\end{equation}
where at finite frequency $\omega$
\begin{equation}
S_n(\omega)=N(\varepsilon_F)T \sum_{\omega} \int_{-E_1}^{E_2}
\left(\frac{\xi+\mu}{-t}\right)^n \frac{\tanh \frac{\xi}{2T}}{2\xi-\omega
+i \delta} d\xi .
\end{equation}
Putting $\omega=0$ we receive from Eq.(33) a transition temperature $T_c$.
The equation has a solution at $\tilde{W} < 0$, $\mu < 0$, or at
$\tilde{W}>0$, $\mu>0$ (we assume that $t>0$).
Plus or minus sign is chosen to receive the maximal value of
$T_c$ (the second solution corresponding to smaller $T$,
then, has to be disregarded since at $T<T_c$ the order parameter will be finite
and therefore Eqs.(20)-(22) do not apply). This gives an expression for
$T_c$
\begin{equation}
T_c=\frac{2\gamma}{\pi} \sqrt{E_1E_2} \exp \left[ \frac{E_1-E_2}{2|\mu|t}
(t-|\mu|)+\frac{E_2^2-E_1^2}{8\mu^2}\right]
\exp \left(-\frac{t}{2|\tilde{W}|N(\varepsilon_F)}\right)
\end{equation}
where $\mu<0$, $\tilde{W}<0$ (second exponent is dominating the first one
in the weak coupling limit $\tilde{W} \rightarrow 0$).
Real and imaginary parts of $S_n(\omega)$ are calculated at $\omega \ll T_c$
\begin{eqnarray}
ImS_n(\omega) \simeq -\frac{\pi\omega}{8T_c}\left( -\frac{\mu}{t} \right)^n
N(\varepsilon_F)\\
ReS_n(\omega)=\frac{\omega}{4}N(\varepsilon_F) \left(-\frac{\mu}{t} \right)^n \times
\left\{ \begin{array}{ll}
       \frac{E_2-E_1}{E_1E_2}, & n=0\\
       \frac{E_2-E_1}{E_1E_2}+ \frac{2}{\mu} \ln \frac{\gamma \sqrt{E_1E_2}}{T_c},
                               & n=1\\
       \frac{E_2-E_1}{E_1E_2}+\frac{E_1-E_2}{\mu^2}+
                               \frac{2}{\mu} \ln \frac{\gamma \sqrt{E_1E_2}}{T_c},
                               & n=2 \end{array} \right.
\end{eqnarray}
Equation for $\lambda$
is received with a value larger than the previous one (Eq.(32))
\begin{equation}
\lambda \simeq \frac{T_c}{\mu} \left( 3 \ln \frac{2 \gamma
\sqrt{E_1E_2}}{\pi T_c}+ \frac{2 \mu(E_2-E_1)}{E_1E_2}+\frac{E_1-E_2}{2\mu}
\right).
\end{equation}
Eigenvalue equation gives the ${\bf p}$-dependence
of the two particle correlator
$\Gamma({\bf p},{\bf p}^{\prime})= \\ <a_{{\bf p} \uparrow}^{\dagger}
a_{-{\bf p} \downarrow}^{\dagger} a_{-{\bf p}^{\prime} \downarrow}
a_{{\bf p}^{\prime} \uparrow} >$
near $T_c$
\begin{equation}
\Gamma({\bf p}, {\bf p}^{\prime})=C \left[ S_2-S_1(\sigma_{\bf p} +
\sigma_{{\bf p}^{\prime}}) + S_0 \sigma_{\bf p} \sigma_{{\bf p}^{\prime}}
\right].
\end{equation}
Since $C$ diverges at $T_c$, this determines that order parameter
becomes macroscopic at $T<T_c$. Then, the
pair creation operator, $a_{\bf p}^{\dagger} a_{-\bf p}^{\dagger}$, will
almost be a number, i.e., we may decompose Eq.(39) into a product
\begin{equation}
\Delta_{\bf p}^{\star} \Delta_{\bf p} = <a_{{\bf p} \uparrow}^{\dagger}
a_{-{\bf p} \downarrow}^{\dagger}><a_{-{\bf p}^{\prime} \downarrow}
a_{{\bf p}^{\prime} \uparrow}>
\end{equation}
and, to be consistent with the ${\bf p}$, ${\bf p}^{\prime}$ dependences,
by putting $\xi_{\bf p}=\xi_{{\bf p}^{\prime}}$ we receive
\begin{equation}
\Delta_{\bf p}=C_1 \left( \exp(i \theta/2) \sqrt{S_2(0)}+\exp(-i \theta /2)
\sqrt{S_0(0)} \right) \exp(i\varphi)
\end{equation}
where
\begin{equation}
\cos \theta= - S_1(0)/\sqrt{S_0(0)S_2(0)}
\end{equation}
and $\varphi$ is an overall phase which is irrelevant for a single
superconductor but is important for calculating currents in multiple or
weakly coupled superconductors. Therefore, system undergoes a pairing transition
at temperature found from the Eq.(35). Since the pairs are charged, the
state below $T_c$ can not be non-superconducting.

We have not calculated the Meissner response but in the following
section we present
numerical calculation of flux quantization which supports the above statement.

\section{Exact diagonalization of the occupation-dependent hopping
Hamiltonians in finite cluster}
We calculate the ground state energy of a cubic system as shown in
Figure 4. A magnetic flux $\Phi$ is produced by a solenoid passing through the
cube. Corners of the cube are the lattice sites, which can be
occupied by electrons. With the inclusion of the magnetic flux, model
Hamiltonian, Eq. 6, becomes
\begin{eqnarray}
H=-t \sum_{<ij>\sigma} a_{i \sigma}^{\dagger} a_{j \sigma} \exp(i \alpha_{ij})+h.c.
+U \sum_i n_{i \uparrow}n_{i \downarrow} + \nonumber \\
+ \sum_{<ij>\sigma}
a_{i \sigma}^{\dagger} a_{j \sigma} \left[ V n_{i \bar{\sigma}}
n_{j \bar{\sigma}} + W (n_{i \bar{\sigma}}+n_{j \bar{\sigma}}) \right]
\exp(i \alpha_{ij}) +h.c.
\end{eqnarray}
where
\begin{equation}
\alpha_{ij}=(2\pi/\Phi_0)\int_{{\bf r}_i}^{{\bf r}_j} {\bf A} \, d{\bf l}
\end{equation}
and $\Phi_0=hc/e$
is the magnetic flux quantum. Throughout the calculations we take $t=1$.

We start with constructing the model Hamiltonian. In a Hilbert
space of one electron
\begin{eqnarray}
a=\left( \begin{array}{lr}
        0 & 1 \\ 0 & 0 \end{array}  \right), \;
a^{\dagger}=\left( \begin{array}{lr}
        0 & 0 \\ 1 & 0 \end{array} \right) .
\end{eqnarray}
with a basis specified as $\psi_0=(0,1)$ for the ground state ($n=0$)
and $\psi_1=(1,0)$ for the excited state ($n=1$). In case of $N$ states
operator of annihilation $a_n$ takes the form
\begin{equation}
a_n=s^{n-1}\otimes a \otimes e^{N-n}
\end{equation}
where $e$ is the unit matrix and $s$ is unitary matrix
\begin{eqnarray}
e=\left( \begin{array}{lr}
         1 & 0 \\ 0 & 1 \end{array} \right), \;
s=\left( \begin{array}{lr}
         1 & 0 \\ 0 & -1 \end{array} \right)
\end{eqnarray}
and $\otimes$ stands for the Kronecker matrix multiplication.
Explicitly, we have
\begin{eqnarray*}
a_1&=&a \otimes e \otimes e \otimes e \ldots \otimes e \\
a_2&=&s \otimes a \otimes e \otimes e \ldots \otimes e \\
 &\ldots& \\
a_N&=&s \otimes s \otimes s \ldots \otimes s \otimes a
\end{eqnarray*}
Thus, for example, for two states
\begin{eqnarray}
a_1=\left( \begin{array}{cccc}
          0 & 1 & 0 & 0 \\ 0 & 0 & 0 & 0 \\
          0 & 0 & 0 & 1 \\ 0 & 0 & 0 & 0 \end{array} \right), \;
a_2=\left( \begin{array}{cccc}
          0 & 0 & 1 & 0 \\ 0 & 0 & 0 &-1 \\
          0 & 0 & 0 & 0 \\ 0 & 0 & 0 & 0 \end{array} \right) .
\end{eqnarray}
These matrices, which are annihilation operators, and corresponding
Hermitian conjugate matrices, which are the creation
operators, satisfy the Fermi anti-commutation relation.
These operators are sparse matrices with only $N/2$ non-zero
elements, which are equal to $\pm 1$. Next we solve the Schr\"{o}dinger
equation $H\psi=E\psi$. We implemented a novel algorithm
for solving such sparse systems, which will be described elsewhere.

The cubic cluster within the Hubbard Hamiltonian and no external flux applied
to the system was studied previously by Callaway et. al. \cite{callaway1}.
Quantum Monte Carlo methods applicable to large systems
within the Hubbard model (both attractive and repulsive), but not
the occupation-dependent hopping Hamiltonians, are reviewed in a paper of
Dagotto \cite{dagotto1}.

\subsection{The number parity effect}
Superconductivity reveals itself in the lowering of the ground state energy
as electrons get paired. Therefore the energy needs to
be minimal for even number
of electrons $n$ and will attain a larger value when $n$ is odd. We consider
a ``gap" parameter \cite{matveev1}
\begin{equation}
\Delta_l=E_{2l+1}-\frac{1}{2}\left(E_{2l}+E_{2l+2}\right)
\end{equation}
as a possible ``signature" of superconductivity
(where $E_m$ corresponds to the ground state energy for $m$ fermions). For all
interaction parameters set to zero ($U=V=W=0$),
no sign of pairing is observed. To
check our analytic results of Sec. IIb and the argument following Eq.(34),
we calculated $\Delta$ above and below the half-filling
($n=8$ in case of cubic cluster). Below the half-filling
chemical potential is negative ($\mu<0$) and
above the half-filling it is positive ($\mu>0$).
We first checked that the $W\rightarrow 0^+$,
$W\rightarrow 0^-$ and $V\rightarrow 0^+$, $V\rightarrow 0^-$ calculation
is consistent with an exact solution available for a non-interacting
system of $n$ electrons.

We then test our program for the
case of negative-$U$ Hubbard Hamiltonian ($U<0, \, V=0,\, W=0$) which is
known to be superconducting (e.g. Refs. 22,23). Positive-$U$
Hubbard model does not show any sign of superconductivity, in
disagreement with some statements in the literature \cite{pao1}. Our
calculations
can not disprove the (possible) non-pairing mechanisms of superconductivity
but these seem to be unlikely models for the problem of superconductivity
in oxides which clearly shows pairing of electrons (holes) in the
Josephson effect and in the Abrikosov vortices. The relation
$2eV=\hbar \omega$ is justified in the first case \cite{witt1} and
flux quantum of a vortex is $hc/2e$ in the second \cite{gammel1}, both
with the value of the charge equal to twice the electronic
charge, $e$.

Figure 5 shows the dependence of the ground state energy upon the
number of particles in case of negative-$U$ and positive-$U$ Hubbard models
assuming $V=0$ and $W=0$. Such dependences are typical for any value of
$|U|$. There clearly is the pairing effect when $U<0$ and there is no
sign of pairing at $U>0$.

Tests for pairing in the contraction
$V$, $W$-models ($V \neq 0, \, U=W=0$ and $W\neq 0,\,U=V=0$, respectively)
are shown in Figs. 6,7.
The results are in agreement with our perturbative calculation of Sec. II
and with its extension for the intermediate and strong coupling limits
$|V|\gtrsim t$, $|W|\gtrsim t$. Since chemical potential is negative below the
half-filling and positive above the half-filling,
there is no pairing in the former case ($\tilde{W} \rightarrow 0^+$)
and there is a sign of pairing in the latter case ($\tilde{W} > 0$),
in accord with the value of the effective coupling constant $\tilde{W} =
W+\frac{1}{2}\nu V$.
Similarly, for $\tilde{W} \rightarrow 0^-$ below the half-filling there is a
sign of pairing ($\Delta \neq 0$) while above the half-filling there
is no pairing. These results are summarized in Table 1.

For larger values of the interaction
parameters, the perturbative results do not remain
applicable anymore. Figure 8b shows the dependence of the parity gap
$\Delta$ on the strength of the interaction. From Figure 8 it is
understood that the $W$ interaction introduces a ``signature" of pairing
in a similar way as the negative-$U$ interaction does. The possibility
of the ``contraction" pairing has been investigated formerly in the papers
\cite{hirsch3,boyaci1}.

\subsection{Flux quantization}
Flux quantization is another signature of superconductivity
which is a consequence of the Meissner effect. We also tested for
the periodicity of the energy versus
flux dependence with the period $\Phi_1=hc/2e$ as compared to the period
$\Phi_0=hc/e$ in the non-interacting system \cite{kulik6,buttiker1}.
Unfortunately, the even harmonics of $\Phi_0$-periodic dependence of the
ground state energy (and related to it, the harmonics
of the persistent current $J=-\partial E/
\partial \Phi$ \cite{kulik6,buttiker1}) may simulate the
pairing in a non-superconductive system.
Small-size (mesoscopic) system can mask the superconducting
behavior \cite{dagotto1}. Flux quantization in Hubbard Hamiltonians was
studied formerly in Refs. 29-31.

We first demonstrate the behavior of
the ground state energy with respect to flux,
Figure 9.
A
characteristic feature
of mesoscopic system suggests that addition of one extra particle to the
system changes the sign of the derivative of the
ground state energy with respect to
magnetic flux at $\Phi=0$. That is, depending on the parity of the number
of particles and on the number of sites, system can change from paramagnetic
to diamagnetic state or vice versa. But this behavior is not always observed
for the cubic geometry studied.
Except the sign change from $n=2$ to $n=3$ and
from $n=7$ to $n=8$, no such behavior is seen.
As mentioned above, however, the $\Phi_1$-periodic component
of the $E(\Phi)$ dependence begins to appear at the higher value
of $n$ (Figure 9,c).
For both contraction parameters equal to zero, i.e. $W=V=0$, we observe
appearance of the $hc/2e$-periodic component for some values of $U$
(Figure 10). Even for positive (repulsive) values of $U$, it is possible to
see a local minimum appearing at $\Phi=hc/2e$ (Figure 10b). This is
in agreement with the authors' previous works \cite{boyaci1,ferretti1}. But
this minimum, which does not lead to an exact periodicity of the
ground state energy with a period
$\Phi_0/2$, should not be attributed to superconductivity, this is
rather a characteristic behavior in mesoscopic systems.

For $U<0$ (while $W=V=0$), the expected mesoscopic behavior,
that is the change of the sign of the slope of ground state energy
at $\Phi=0$, starts to demonstrate itself (Figure 11). But this
happens at sufficiently large absolute values of (negative) $U$.
For other values of $U$,  however,  there is no such change.

More pronounced
$hc/2e$-periodic components are observed
with the introduction of non-zero interaction parameters.
The role of $W$ on
the ground state energy, when both $U$ and $V$ are zero, is
shown in Figure 12. Meanwhile setting both $U$ and $W$ to zero
and observing the effect of the non-zero $V$ shows that $V$ does not
play a role as significant as the other two interaction parameters do.
There is not much difference in the
behavior of the ground state energy upon magnetic flux  between the
zero and non-zero $V$ (for example $V=-1$) cases.

\section{Conclusions}
We studied the peculiarity of electron conduction
in systems in which conduction band is derived
from the atomic shells with a small number of electrons ($N_e$) in
an atom. Such materials may include oxygen ($N_e=8$) in the oxides,
carbon ($N_e=6$) in borocarbides (e.g. $LuNi_2B_2C$), hydrogen
($N_e=1$) in some metals (e.g., $Pd-H$). Some materials of this
kind are superconductors. It was argued that the Coulomb effects
within the atoms strongly influence the inter-atom wave function
overlap between the atomic sites and therefore the electron hopping amplitude
between the sites. The phenomenology of such conduction mechanism results in a
novel, to the conventional solid state theory, Hamiltonians
called the occupation-dependent-hopping (or contraction)
Hamiltonians, specified with the two coupling parameters $V$, $W$. We then
attempted a study of superconductivity in such systems within
the BCS-type approach assuming the Cooper pairing
of electrons. The weak-coupling limit allows determination of the range
of parameters $V$, $W$ values and also of the in-site Coulomb
interaction $U$ value which show the Cooper instability.
The strong-coupling limit was addressed by  a
numeric calculation on finite clusters using
the novel algorithm (of non-Lanczos
type) for eigenvalues of large sparse matrices. One of the
results of this numeric calculation was that the positive-$U$ Hubbard model,
sometimes believed to be a candidate for high-$T_c$
superconductivity, does not comply with the goal.

This work was partially supported by the Scientific and Technical
Research Council of Turkey (T\"{U}B{\.I}TAK) through
the BDP program.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaArXiv


text:
Home » India » US seeks Kim Jong-un assets freeze
India • World
US seeks Kim Jong-un assets freeze
Written by IANS
The US has proposed a range of new UN sanctions against North Korea, including an oil ban and a freeze on the country's leader Kim Jong-un's assets.
The draft resolution circulated to the Security Council members came after North Korea's sixth nuclear test and repeated missile launches, BBC reported.
Pyongyang also claimed to have developed a hydrogen bomb and continues to threaten to strike the US. China and Russia were both expected to oppose further sanctions, the report said.
North Korea is already under highly restrictive sanctions imposed by the UN that were intended to force the leadership to curtail its weapons programmes.
In August, a new round of sanctions banned exports including coal, costing North Korea an estimated $1 billion — about a third of its entire export economy. The draft US proposal called for a total ban on supplying a range of oil products to North Korea and a ban on its textile export industry.
It also suggested freezing the assets of Kim and the North Korean government, as well as banning him and other senior officials from travelling. North Korean labourers would also be banned from working abroad.
But the US is expected to face opposition from China and Russia, which both supply oil to North Korea and wield vetoes at the Security Council. Both the countries have been pushing for an alternative solution.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has argued that the amount of oil his country exports to North Korea — some 40,000 tonnes — is negligible.
Russia and China said that the US and ally South Korea stop their military drills — which anger the North — and end the deployment of the controversial anti-missile Thaad system in South Korea, in return for Pyongyang ceasing its nuclear and missile programme.
The proposal was rejected by the US and South Korea. On Thursday, the South's military announced it had completed the deployment of Thaad, reported Yonhap news agency.
US President Donald Trump had previously warned that Washington could cut off trade with countries that do business with North Korea.
The US had indicated that if the resolution is not passed when the Security Council meets next Monday it may impose its own sanctions unilaterally.
EU urged to adopt new sanctions against N.Korea
New Google feature to help Indian SMBs manage business online
IANS, also known as Indo-Asian News Service is a private news agency. IANS covers topics related to politics, entertainment, sports, general and world news etc.


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text:
Disney Sues "Frozen Land" Film Company For Trademark Infringement
December 28, 2013 By Eric Misterovich
Disney has filed a trademark infringement lawsuit against Phase 4 Films, creator of the upcoming film "Frozen Land." Disney claims that Phase 4 Films named the film "Frozen Land" to trade off of Disney's popular film, and Oscar contender, "Frozen." Though the film was previously released under the title "The Legend of Sarlia," Disney contends that Phase 4 Films
redesigned the artwork, packaging, logo, and other promotional materials for its newly (and intentionally misleadingly) retitled film to mimic those used by [Disney] for FROZEN and related merchandise.
This case is interesting because, generally speaking, movie titles do not indicate the source of goods or services and, therefore, are generally unregisterable as trademarks. Movie merchandise, however, can serve as a basis for a trademark application. Additionally, under copyright law, copyright protection does not extend to short names and phrases. It will be interesting to see how the California federal court handles this case.
If you have been targeted by a trademark infringement lawsuit, or if a third party has infringed on your rights, contact the trademark lawyers at Revision Legal today at 855-473-8474.


text:
Russia case footnotes to be declassified, exposing FBI concerns about Steele disinformation
Declassified case notes referring to Christopher Steele deception and FBI knowledge of that deception demonstrates just how infested and invested the FBI is as a Deep State agent to take down a sitting President. NO ONE past or present in the FBI to date has been accountable! WHY THE HELL NOT?!
Previously redacted footnotes from Inspector General Michael Horowitz's report expected to raise questions about prior FBI assessment of key informant.
FBI to face new scrutiny with declassified Russia case notes.
Official FBI Photo
By John Solomon
Last Updated: April 9, 2020 – 6:33pm
U.S. intelligence has decided to declassify several redacted footnotes from a recent Justice Department report that will expose more problems with the FBI's investigation into President Trump's campaign, including that agents possessed evidence their main informant may have been the victim of Russian disinformation, Just the News has learned.
The previously redacted footnotes are likely to raise new concerns that the FBI ignored flashing red warning signals about the informant Christopher Steele and gave a false picture in briefing materials supplied to Congress.
The declassified sections from Inspector General Michael Horowitz's December review of FBI FISA abuse could be made available to key Senate and House committees as early as the end of this week, according to people familiar with the effort.
John Solomon Reports Podcast
The unredacted footnotes are expected to provide new data points in the timeline showing when the FBI learned, or should have suspected, that its key evidence suggesting Trump was colluding with Russia was erroneous and how high up those concerns were known, the sources said.
The new information "will make clear the FBI possessed information at multiple levels that undercut the evidence it was using to sustain a collusion investigation" and will be specific enough to renew a debate in Washington over "whether the FBI intentionally ignored red flags or simply was blinded by ambition from seeing them clearly," one source with direct knowledge said.
The evidence could also raise new questions about whether statements made to Congress during the Russia probe were false or misleading, and whether the intelligence community's official assessment that Vladimir Putin was solely trying to help elect Trump was contradicted by some evidence in FBI files, the sources said.
The declassification was prompted in part by a letter sent in January by Senate Finance Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, and Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee Chairman Ron Johnson, R-Wis., that requested four footnotes from the Horowitz report be declassified.
Grassley and Johnson are two strong allies of Trump who played a key role in debunking the false collusion allegations the FBI investigated. Johnson's investigators flagged the redacted passages during a review of the Horowitz report and worked with Grassley's team to escalate to Attorney General William Barr.
"We are concerned that certain sections of the public version of the report are misleading because they are contradicted by relevant and probative classified information redacted in four footnotes," Grassley and Johnson wrote Barr. "This classified information is significant not only because it contradicts key statements in a section of the report, but also because it provides insight essential for an accurate evaluation of the entire investigation."
The two followed up with a letter earlier this month to the Acting Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Ric Grenell saying the release of the classified information would provide "insight essential for an accurate evaluation of the entire investigation."
Sources said DNI and Justice Department are planning to declassify those four footnotes as well as others in the report that will provide new understanding about failures in the FBI's now-debunked Russia collusion probe.
One of the key revelations will be the unmasking of footnotes that show specific red flags raised inside the bureau's intelligence files that Christopher Steele, the former MI6 agent whose anti-Trump dossier played a key role in the collusion probe, could have been the victim of Russian disinformation through his contacts with Russian oligarchs, the sources said.
Horowitz's report in December concluded that most of the allegations Steele included in the dossier he gave the FBI were inaccurate, uncorroborated, or internet rumor and that the FBI falsely represented to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court that Steele's intelligence had been verified in securing a FISA warrant to target the Trump campaign and former adviser Carter Page in fall 2016 in an investigation code-named Crossfire Hurricane.
Horowitz's report also raised concerns the FBI failed to fully evaluate evidence in its intelligence files that suggested Russian disinformation was flowing to Steele, who was working during the 2016 campaign for the opposition research firm trying to help Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party defeat Trump.
Those concerns were echoed in the report by former FBI counterintelligence chief Bill Priestap and former Justice Department lawyer Stuart Evans.
"In view of information we found in FBI files we reviewed, and that was available to the Crossfire Hurricane team during the relevant time period, we believe that more should have been done to examine Steele's contacts with intermediaries of Russian oligarchs in order to assess those contacts as potential sources of disinformation that could have influenced Steele's reporting or, at a minimum, influenced Steele's understanding of events in Russia that furnished context for the analytical judgments he used to evaluate the reporting," Horowitz wrote at the time. "We agree with the assessment of Priestap and Evans that this issue warranted more scrutiny than it was afforded."
While Horowitz raised the issue broadly, a detailed set of footnotes laying out what actually was in the FBI files was completely redacted. That footnote is expected, along with other information, to be declassified.
Persons familiar with the effort said the new declassifications also may raise questions about representations FBI witnesses made in classified briefings and briefing documents to Congress in 2017.
Horowitz's report flagged one such possible episode, recounting a memo that the FBI provided in December 2017 to congressional leaders that claimed to have dismissed the notion that Steele was the victim of disinformation.
"According to an FBI memorandum prepared in December 2017 for a Congressional briefing, by the time the Crossfire Hurricane investigation was transferred to the Special Counsel in May 2017, the FBI did not assess it likely that the [Steele] [ election reporting] was generated in connection to a Russian disinformation campaign," Horowitz noted.
Such a claim may have dismissed or overlooked evidence sitting in the FBI's own files, the report suggested.
When pressed by the IG about the possibility that Steele had been the victim of Russian disinformation, Priestap, the former counterintelligence chief whose supervised the lead case agent Peter Strzok, offered an uncertain answer.
"I'm struggling, with, when you know the Russians, and this I know from my Intelligence Community work: they favored Trump, they're trying to denigrate Clinton, and they wanted to sow chaos. I don't know why you'd run a disinformation campaign to denigrate Trump on the side," Priestap answered.
Steele broadly defended his work in an interview with the IG. And after Horowitz's report was issued, the former British spy issued a statement through his lawyers and his company Orbis Business Intelligence disputing many of the IG's findings, including the allegation that Steele's primary sub-source had disowned or denied much of the information attributed to him in the dossier.
"Public discussions about a source are always fraught with danger for the source and the source's sub-source," the statement said. "Had Orbis been given an opportunity to respond in a private session, the statement by the primary sub-source would be put in a very different light."
Horowitz isn't the only government official to raise concerns that Steele may have been victimized by Russian disinformation. One of the Democrats' star witnesses during President Trump's impeachment investigation, government Russia expert Fiona Hill, testified about Steele that she had "misgivings and concern that he could have been played" by Russian disinformation. Hill had previously worked with Steele when he was with MI6.
"Their goal was to discredit the presidency," she testified in an October deposition. "Whoever was elected president, they wanted to weaken them. So, if Secretary Clinton had won, there would have been a cloud over her at this time if she was President Clinton. There's been a cloud over President Trump since the beginning of his presidency, and I think that's exactly what the Russians intended."
The new evidence from the declassified footnotes will give the American public a first chance to evaluate whether the FBI dropped the ball on evaluating Russian disinformation in the Steele dossier.
Whatever the final verdict, the upcoming declassifications are a pointed reminder that the public still has much to learn about what did, and did not, go right in the Russia collusion probe.
JusttheNews.com is committed to just reporting facts from journalists with a long record of public trust and excellence. In an era where opinion and supposition are too often substituted for fact and where journalists rush to get things first and hope their stories are correct, JusttheNews.com tries to stand out by returning to the bedrock promise of getting news first, but first getting it right. We try to deliver exclusive news you can trust.
JusttheNews.com is a back-to-the-future initiative where old-fashioned, honest and exclusive reporting is delivered in a neutral voice, but delivered through the modern channels of YouTube, podcasting, e-books and social media. And in a twist of old and new, JusttheNews.com journalists deliver unprecedented transparency by offering a Dig Deeper tool on their Web site that … READ THE REST
Author oneway2dayPosted on April 10, 2020 Categories Conservative, Conspiracy/Secret Society, Crime, Democrats, Elections, Espionage, Left Wing, News and politics, OrganizationsTags Christopher Steele, Declassified Case Notes, FBI Deception, FBI Deep State, FISA Abuse, John Solomon, Michael Horowitz
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text:
NEGOTIATIONS JIMMY-CLINTON-STYLE GIVE N. KOREA PRECIOUS TIME FOR BUILDUP
By WILLIAM SAFIRE
'It was kind of like a miracle," breathed Jimmy Carter, about his conversion of North Korea's dictator from lion to lamb.
No wonder Kim Il Sung denied entry to special envoys chosen by President Clinton last month. Sens. Sam Nunn and Richard Lugar would have presented a strong American position on his nuclear bomb production.
North Korea much preferred the eager courtship of Jimmy Carter, who as president wanted to remove U.S. troops from the South. Carter went not as a representative of the United States, but as one who opposed the imposition of pressure on the North that would have made it costly for Kim to break the nuclear treaty.
Amazingly, as Carter proudly brought a CNN crew into his meeting with the North Korean strongman, the world could see and hear the American blatantly misrepresent the U.S. position: Clinton would not continue to press for sanctions, Carter declared, in direct contravention of instructions.
Even more amazing was the reaction of what is laughingly called the Clinton national security team to this usurpation of presidential authority. At the urging of Vice President Gore, Clinton grasped for some reason to believe that Carter's appeasement had worked, and that North Korea was using the Carter brokerage as a face-saving device to make a concession on its plutonium production.
Enter what Kennedyites liked to call "the Trollope ploy."
In the 19th-century romantic novels of Anthony Trollope, heroines deliberately misinterpret a squeeze of the hand as a proposal of marriage.
Last week, Clinton chose to view Kim's promise of a temporary suspension of his plutonium-making - a pause required anyway to let rods cool - as the long-sought verifiable "freeze."
In response to this televised manipulation, Clinton then embraced his loose cannon as his savior. We caved in to Kim's demands to resume high-level talks that had been denied North Korea after its repeated double-crossing of negotiators. Crisis declared over.
Here, on the vital interest of the United States in stopping rogue states from becoming nuclear powers, we have an amalgam of the worst of two presidents.
Jimmy Carter, truster of Leonid Brezhnev until Afghanistan, truster and promoter of the BCCI banker until thousands of depositors were bilked of their savings, makes his pilgrimage to the last Stalinist - and again bets on the contagion of his own indisputable goodness.
Bill Clinton, passive in Bosnia, paper tiger in China, other-directed about Haiti - is again hoping for a break to distract the world's attention and to kick the can ahead for decision by his nuclear-threatened successor.
Result: the creation of President Jimmy Clinton, with the return of the malaise of leaderlessness.
Reaction of doves to this latest visit to Trollope is: What's wrong with talking? If Kim wants meetings, give him summits. Since we can't get China and Japan to help lean on him, why not test his promise to "suspend" his nuclear buildup, in return for recognition, trade and aid?
The reason for not getting suckered into another year's cat-and-mouse is the ticking of a clock. For safety's sake, we should negotiate from strength; betting on our hopes is irresponsible.
North Korea is in the business of secretly building nuclear bombs. It deceived the world by producing plutonium in the past; the CIA and the U.N. inspectors believe North Korea has at least one device ready. From Moscow we learn that the KGB was convinced of Kim's impending capability four years ago.
Remember how wrong the world nuclear police turned out to be in underestimating the advanced state of Saddam Hussein's buildup?
The odds are that the experts are just as wrong about North Korean nukes today; a closed society can keep big secrets.
By pretending to be insulted by the world's nosiness, Kim has already prevented the world from checking on his past production of plutonium. Maybe it's in untested weapons; maybe some has been sold to Iran; maybe more is being made secretly beyond Yongbyon.
We are today giving him the time to make a fresh five-bomb supply. If we do not accede to his demands this fall, Kim will add to the stockpile beyond our reach.
That's the position Jimmy Clinton has placed us in. With no basis for trust, we're trusting North Korea with precious time. It's kind of like a miracle.
Readers may write to William Safire at The New York Times, 229 W. 43rd St., New York, N.Y. 10036.


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PlayStation app to be released for iOS and Android
Sony Computer Entertainment Europe (SCEE) is planning to release an official PlayStation app for iPhones, iPod touches and Android devices.
The app will be compatible with devices with iOS4 and Android 1.6 and up.
It will allow users to check their PlayStation Network trophies and keep up to date with friends' games and statuses.
It will also let users discover new games and hardware for their PlayStation consoles.
The PlayStation app will allow users to check the European PlayStation blog and users can share favourite products and news with friends on Facebook, Twitter and email.
Version 1.0 will only be available for the UK, France, Germany, Spain, Italy and the Netherlands for Europe, but the next version will support "most SCEE countries and languages."
Interestingly, a leaked video of the rumoured PlayStation Phone caught a view of a PlayStation app on the Android device, which held a library of games.
And with SCEE saying it is planning to have "tons more features" for the app, perhaps gaming on the app will soon be possible.
A release date for the app hasn't been confirmed as of yet.
Related: iOS, Sony, PlayStation, iPhone, iPod, Android
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Check out a beautiful video of our airboat tour on the Bravo Channel, "Vanderpump Rules" season 5. The film was shot for their TV series, but it also shows what it's like to experience one of our tours on and off the boat.
We are the highest rated airboat swamp tour in the New Orleans area!
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