text:
Q: ggplot that looks like main effects plot in R, but is not I am trying to produce a chart that looks like a main effects plot, but does not come from a live analysis, just the output itself. Here is my data:
> gains.df
  var   level1   level2      gain
A  x1 12.44224 16.15509 -3.712853
B  x2 16.24322 12.35410  3.889120
C  x3 16.54085 12.05647  4.484381
D  x4 16.00008 12.59725  3.402832
E  x5 15.62463 12.97269  2.651939

The chart I am trying to produce is looking like this, with one facet per var, the two factor levels as level1 and level2 (corresponding to 1 and 2), and the line segment is created from the level1 value on the left and the level2 value on the right. Thus the final chart should have five line segments, with slopes that reflect the gains in the gain column.

I am trying this:
ggplot(gains.df, aes(level1,level2)) + geom_line() + facet_wrap(~var)

Which unfortunately produces this, and gives the odd values on the horizontal axis too.

I feel like I am missing something very straightforward and seeking some advice. Here is the data. Thank you.
gains.df <- structure(list(var = structure(1:5, .Label = c("x1", "x2", "x3",
"x4", "x5"), class = "factor"), level1 = c(12.4422350148863,
16.2432212378588, 16.5408518645381, 16.0000771728686, 15.6246308859921
), level2 = c(16.155087746947, 12.3541015239745, 12.0564708972952,
12.5972455889646, 12.9726918758412), gain = c(-3.71285273206076,
3.88911971388437, 4.48438096724297, 3.40283158390399, 2.65193901015094
)), class = "data.frame", row.names = c("A", "B", "C", "D", "E"
))

A: The first two terms of ggplot(aes() refer to the x and y values, respectively, so it helps to reshape your data into longer format before it goes into ggplot. In this case, I've shifted the column names into a new column "level" and the values that were there into a new column "value."
library(tidyverse)
gains.df %>%
  select(-gain) %>%
  pivot_longer(-var, "level", "value") %>%
  # tidyr::pivot_longer is new in v1.0.0; older versions of tidyr could use:
  # tidyr::gather(level, value, -var)
  ggplot(aes(level, value, group = var)) +
  geom_line() +
  facet_wrap(~var)


Got the Oppai mouse pads today straight from my dealer in Japan. Would love to keep one but my fiancée is not a fan of me having one ^^;;. Going to post them in the store. Who here has, likes or wants oppai mousepads?


text:
Home Governance Bihar : Exit Poll to Result day, three days that caused turbulence...
Bihar : Exit Poll to Result day, three days that caused turbulence in state bureaucracy
So one more time, Nitish Kumar becomes the CM of a coalition government in Bihar. And with JD(U) leader once again adorning the crown, the people of the Bihar have busted all theories and exit polls that had speculated a change in the guard this time. Almost all exit polls had predicted a clear majority for RJD led Mahagathbandhan.
Now the bureaucracy- the class most comfortable with the status quo in the political power, heaves a sign of relief with Nitish government once again coming to power. Earlier, with most exit polls predicting a clear majority for Mahagathbandhan and the possibility of Tejaswi Yadav becoming the CM had given jitters and sent shock waves to the power corridors in Bihar.
The final results of Bihar Assembly elections have proven all exit polls wrong. Though, RJD is the single largest party with a final seat tally of 75, it is the NDA under the leadership of Nitish Kumar who has formed the government once again in Bihar. Within the NDA alliance, the BJP in spite of winning more seats than the JD(U) is supporting Nitish Kumar as CM and saffron party has not staked the claim for CM's chair.
The political heat in the state has now subsided and so is the disquiet within the state bureaucracy receding .
But things appeared to be much different, till a few days back. The period between 6 pm of November 7 till 8 pm on November 10 was particularly turbulent for the bureaucracy and its impact was felt and being widely discussed in the power corridors of Bihar as well as in New Delhi.
Nitish Kumar has been the CM and the Power Centre of Bihar for last 15 years. It is very obvious that the state's present bureaucratic structure was of his making and placed according to his suitability. But the Exit Poll predictions in the evening of November 7, had shaken the entire state's bureaucratic structure built over the years. By 7 pm in the evening of November 7, most news channels, through their exit poll, had predicted that people of Bihar had have voted for a change in the regime.
In such a scenario, it was very obvious for the state bureaucracy to be anxious about the possible outcome. Each moment, after the Exit Polls were adding to the anxiety and suspense. The entire day the poll predictions had kept the Babus on tenterhooks- their mobile phones buzzing and ringing, with each one of them speculating and pondering over the exit poll predictions, while few in the echelon still putting up a brave front with hoping that the final result could still turn the tide in other direction.
While some were certain that there is going to be a major upheaval in an otherwise settled and comfortable state bureaucracy and cadre due to a " Regime Change" and power transfer. Bureaucrats being bureaucrats, they were trying to analyze the exit poll predictions in terms of its accuracy in percentile terms over the years. Everybody was still hoping that the exit poll results could turn out to be inaccurate and unreliable and in that even they will retain their power and position, as usual. But from inside, most of them were a shaken lot. A mere thought of RJD led Mahagathbandhan Raaj was reason enough for many of them to go packing and planning for their next career moves, preferably on Central deputation and outside Bihar. The night of November 7 was the most restless for many of them…. a night of uncertainty, speculation….a night to remember.
The unsettling and the dust storm started by Exit Polls intensified further on November 8. Bureaucracy, now started believing the predictions, since everybody else believed them. Now speculative discussions started in Bailey Road drawing rooms, i.e. who is going to be the next Chief Secretary? Who will be the new DGP? Speculations and rumors were rife. People started looking for Chief Secretary Dipak Kumar's successor. Doubts started making the rounds whether DGP S K Singhal, would be made regular. By the afternoon of November 8, people started discussing the replacements and new postings in important departments. Discussions intensified on who will be kept intact and who will be shunted out and who will be allocated which department, etc. In the power corridors of Patna, the intensified dark clouds of uncertainty forced some of the most powerful bureaucrats, considered to be closer to the power Centre, just till a few days back, to plunge into a pal of gloom. For bureaucrats, after all one has to smell the air, and plan accordingly. Career matters. Some even turned philosophical…"Let's face whatever comes our way", became the motto of those hardened souls.
By the next day, November 9, morning, the Exit Poll predictions, nothing more than an estimation, became gospel truth for the power brokers in Patna. The predictions being shouted out from TV Channels, newspapers, social media and digital platforms, started becoming an imaginary reality
for the majority and they started taking them as real and was bracing for a change. And bureaucrats were no exceptions. Not only people in the bureaucracy, even people from the political parties in the state started taking the Exit Poll analysis as true. Even NDA leaders, though publicly talked about waiting for actual poll results, but the Exit Poll demolished their confidence. On the other hand, leaders from RJD beamed with a newfound self-confidence and glory- a very natural ecstasy for somebody waiting to be sworn in. They started making their own list of favorable bureaucrats. The confidence of RJD power centre and it's cadre was a thing to be remembered for long, in the power corridors of Bihar. Equations were being drawn, i.e. who is to be given what post? And, to be placed where ? All the nuances and the detailing was in the making. The expectations of new Maharajas coming to power spread like a wildfire not only in the power corridors of Bihar and but also in the national capital. The disappointment and gloom were rife among bureaucrats considered close to the Nitish Government. And their only hope was the the D-Day, i.e. November 10. For many, many had harped on the hope that the final results could still be somewhat favorable for them.
Finally, the D- Day of November 10 arrived. The morning of November 10 was no different. The people in bureaucracy had hardened their heart and strengthened their soul by now, come what may, let's accept the situation bravely. By 8 AM on November 10, it was becoming gradually harder to wait for the final results. Those last moments before beginning of the counting and pouring in of election results were too tough to handle. When the initial trends started pouring in, they mere much on the expected lines, fairly in tune with the Exit Poll predictions. In the first 90 minutes of the counting, by 9.30 AM, it appeared like a losing battle for the state bureaucracy. TV Channels started running Senior JD ( U) leader K.C.Tyagi's statement, which was more like accepting his party's defeat. But, by 9.45 AM things started taking a different turn. After the initial trends indicating a landslide majority for RJD, now JDU led combine was on a leading path. But still, the shaken self-confidence of the state bureaucracy as a result of the crucial developments of last few days, was hard to restore. People still thought that trends might shift any moment in counting. But it was apparent that the final results are going to be interesting and this is going to be a battle to be remembered. The results are not going to be one sided or an easy win for any of the two political alliances and any one of them can form the government. Gradually the state bureaucracy, expecting a rout till a few hours back, started gaining its confidence.
The Covid-19 situation resulted in an increased number of counting centers, leading to a somewhat slower process of counting of votes and the declaration of final results. All this was proving to be a tough test of one's patience and people in the power corridors and bureaucracy were no exceptions. The tough contest between NDA and Mahagathbandhan must have raised the blood pressure of many in the bureaucratic circle . As the counting of votes progressed further, it became quite apparent and clear that, the results for the Bihar Assembly elections are not going to come as per the Exit Polls. By the mid of the D day of November 10 it became very clear, NDA was leading continuously since last 3 hours, even though the margins of the lead were narrow. There were moments when it looked that the results could have turned in anybody's favour. But after a brief spell, NDA regained its lead once again and maintained it till the very end. By now, the state bureaucracy, the wheeler's and dealers in the power corridors were completely re-assured of maintaining the status quo and that they would continue their power equations with the new government and it would be a LIFE AS USUAL IN BIHAR'S POWER CORRIDORS. (By-Vijay Shankar & Rajeev Singh)
Bihar Bureaucracy
Bihar Government
CM Nitish Kumar
Exit Poll
NDA Government
RJD
Tejaswi Yadav
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redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


Nationals got underway at 11:00 on Wednesday morning, 28th of March, in the Afridome in Parys, which was festively decked out in blue and red with white for contrast, and a few South African flags for decoration. Bob Gordon from the USA judged the Halter classes.
The show kicked off with two gorgeous fillies from the Stables of Jack Maritz as the lovely grey Egyptian El Shakel filly, Sidi Shaalina took the Filly Foal Championship with Sidi Annanidas (by MC Leonidas) in Reserve position.
The Colt foal Championship went to a very typey stable mate Sidi Red Bull, and Reserve to a Sidi Scorpio colt, Tarek Sultan, owned by Katherine Valkenburg.
The Sidi horses kept coming in a steady stream winning more often than not, and the progeny of sidi Scorpio made an indelible mark in all the Junior classes, with his daughter Sidi Palestina, proudly shown by owner Fanie Maritz, taking the Jun Mare Championship, and another Scorpio, the elegant bay TAJ Athina of EB Joubert, claiming Reserve.
Colt Championship was won by the handsome Shakir El Marwan colt LUA Kharif (out of FS Karina's Charm) belonging to JF van Huysteen, and Reserve went to yet another Scorpio, TAJ Taleb, owned by J du Plessis.
It was no surprise when Sidi Scorpio himself won Senior Stallion Championship, with SR Romonso (looking quite a bit like his sire Montserrat RTA) in Reserve position, and in the Senior Mare Championships Scorpio's dramatic dark bay daughter, Sidi Actress took Reserve Championship, beaten only by the stunning dark bay FS Karina's Charm.
Dressage Champion was ReB Magic Myst with Jean van Deventer riding, and Ebisu Shiraz with Virginia Klincharska Reserve. The judge was Allayne McLean.
On Thursday at 9:00 the English Ridden classes kicked off under the very experienced South African judge Sue Carter, and the first class was won by Jack Maritz on Sidi Annabella (a lovely daughter of the powerful old riding horse, Simeon Segev, which had won with Jack so many Championships in the past), a combination that finally also took the Open Riding Championship, with Andre Troost on Sadam Achilles Reserve. Slightly older breeders will remember the dams of both these Champions as riding champions in their own right – Sidi Ballalaika and Sidi Yadviga.
Anton van der Laan on the super smooth HA Rodrigo won the Junior Western Pleasure Horse, while Sone Graham on ReB Sharena won the Reserve Championship.
Youth Country Pleasure Horse classes were heavily contested by very capable young riders, but in the end Marcus Roode on the Appalanation son FS Casanova snatched up the Championship for owner Leon Botha, while Sone Graham took the Reserve on Smilde Aquarius.
Two relative newcomers to our Arabian shows won the Rider Championships – Jean van Deventer and Marleze Grobbelaar (Res).
The last class of the evening belonged to Jack Maritz who won Res Junior show Hack on his very elegant bay mare Sidi Actress while Dawid Brown rode Sidi Balana for him into the Champion position.
Friday morning kicked off with huge Novice Riding Horse classes and after much tense concentration the Championship was eventually won by HA Rosalita ridden by Anton van der Laan in the saddle and Reserve by Zamzikar Kleopatra from Evan Stud. The quality of the riding was so good that Sue Carter gave another two recommended ribbons apart from the top 5.
In Junior Hunter pleasure we had the privilege of seeing Claire Marcus Maloney back in the saddle in a moment of De Ja Vu as she took the Championship on the handsome Simply Red Son FS Huxley. Dawid took the Resereve on Sidi Balana.
Marcus Roode and Anshia Rothman were both on form taking home plenty of ribbons, among others the Champion and Reserve Younth Hunter Pleasure Horse – Marcus on Ebisu Monsieur and Anshia on a reliable old favourite El-Harem BHF Springsteen.
Then Jack collected another Championship on the lovely Sidi Annabella for Senior Show Hack, with Susan Rothman taking Reserve on Armika LiteMyFire. And when Jack did not win Championships himself, he had the very able rider Dawid Brown doing it for him, as was the case with the Junior Costume Horse, won by Sidi Balana, with the flashy Baywatch V son FS Monterey Bey in Reserve under Ocker Bruyns for JR Arabians.
The Youth classes are proving to be a great success and these classes are growing steadily – We are seeing very competent young riders coming into the show ring, with such wonderful horses. Youth Western Pleasure Horse is a good example, where the solid performer Ebisu Sharac, ridden by Makhutsi Moloi took the Championship, with Sone Graham in yet another Reserve Championship position on ReB Sharena.
FS Karina's Charm charmed herself into yet another Championship, winning Liberty with her 'look-at-me' movement, while El-Jamani Silvern Zeleeze took Reserve, showing off echo's of her famous old sire Silvern Gleam's floating trot.
Saturday morning started with Child/Junior Riding Horse. These English Ridden classes, judged by Sue Carter this year, are always large and this show was no exception. Little Anshia Rothman (like many of our child riders almost born in the saddle), rode the evergreen El-Harem BHF Springsteen into the Championship position, with Amicia-Ala Al Din taking Reserve under June Roode, the youngest in another family of Arabian show horse riders building further on their legacy.
The Senior Hunter Pleasure Championship just before lunch was a huge and powerful class that got a great round of applause when they lined up. Here Armika Justlike from Amal Hayati Arabians with Anton v d Laan riding, walked away triumphantly while Sidi Heavenly Dream ridden by Dawid secured the Reserve.
After another scrumptious lunch at the Dome's ringside Cafeteria the Senior Western Pleasure Championship was in. Fanie Maritz ride like he was driving a Cadillac on cruise control as he took the Championship on his incredible Shaheer Prince Cyclone daughter Shaheer Shakura. ReB Magic Myst with Thinus Sonnekus on her back took Reserve.
The young riders impressed once more as fearless and determined to ride their horses well. The Youth Costume Championship was won by Sone Graham with a great ride on Smilde Aquarius, while Reserve went to FS Casanova with Marcus Roode in the saddle.
Sefanja Moloi won the Junior English Pleasure Championship on the lovely FS Diamond Dream.
Keeping concentration after 4 days of showing becomes taxing, but the Junior Country Pleasure horses were still giving their best for their Championships at 5 in the afternoon. FS Monterey Bey won the Championship, and once again Sidi Balana, a constant champion took reserve with Dawid!
FS Monterey Bey was also doing exceptionally well under various riders, and in Youth show Hack it was the young Mohamed Docrat aboard taking the Championship, with Anshia on Springsteen taking yet another ribbon as Reserve.
Then the final Championship was once again quite a high note to end on, as it always is – Senior Costume Horse was won by the beautiful Asfour son Simeon Sach, ridden by Andre Troost and Reserve was MC Leonidas with Fanie Maritz in the saddle. For the final lap of honour for this class it has become a tradition to let the horses fly and Jack Maritz's Sidi Annabella looked very much like a nomadic War Mare, charging ahead of the stallions with costume flying in the wind!
The judge awarded Best Rider to Jean van Deventer and best handler to Tinus Sonnekus, and mentioned in his speech at the lovely awards ceremony that evening how tremendous the camaraderie and support for one another was among the participants. This was something quite unique he said – how there were no complaints or ill will at this show and how wonderful the Spirit was overall. It was great seeing the well known handlers, like Tinus Sonnekus, Anton van der Laan, Ocker Bruys, Jack and Fanie Maritz, John Longland, and others helping each other out and thus appearing almost in every class, and it was just as nice to see these people riding and being joined by other favourites like Johan du Plessis, Gauta November, Dawid Brown, Chanel Marais, Lori van der Laan, the wonderful talented Moloi family and Sheila Nortje, the Roodes, as well as Claire and Alex Maloney and Virginia Klincharska, the Troost siblings and the Rothmans, Dewald Malan and Hanlie Scott and Sone Graham, Stephen Serame and the handsome Docrat siblings, Amy Taylor, the Strauss family and so many others and also upcoming riders in so many classes. They all did a GREAT JOB in our Nationals!
Ina Botha with the help of Johan du Plessis, Daan Broodryk and many others excelled as always in organizing this show and every child that participated got a certificate and R200, sponsored by Monsanto. All the Champions and Reserves got a beautiful Arend Eloff horse statue as a trophy.
Gerda Phillipson (as gate steward) ran the Gate with almost military precision. And when the ring steward did not arrive, Jaco le Roux gave up his Junior Judge opportunity in order to steward, with some help from Leon Botha at times. This was just another example of the level of commitment and good will at this show.
And finally the whole Show was made possible due to generous sponsorships from Pieter Roode from Ebisu Arabians, Leon Botha from Victrio Training Centre, Francois and Lien van Huysteen personally and also their help in acquiring Dekalb and Monsanto as a sponsor, Chine Swart and also the Snyman Family from Inanna Ishtar Stud. Dries Venter from the Afridome also came to the party and help us with a sponsor for some rooms and a special price for the show.
THANK YOU TO ALL THAT MAKE THIS SHOW A SUCCSESS!


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The Machiavelli of Maryland
Military strategist, classical scholar, cattle rancher – and an adviser to presidents, prime ministers, and the Dalai Lama. Just who is Edward Luttwak? And why do very powerful people pay vast sums for his advice?
Thomas Meaney
Wed 9 Dec 2015 01.00 EST Last modified on Wed 29 Nov 2017 01.07 EST
Edward Luttwak earns $1m a year advising governments and writing books. Photograph: Jocelyn Augustino/Commissioned for The Guardian
People contact Edward Luttwak with unusual requests. The prime minister of Kazakhstan wants to find a way to remove ethnic Russians from a city on his northern border; a major Asian government wants a plan to train its new intelligence services; an Italian chemical company wants help settling an asbestos lawsuit with a local commune; a citizens' group in Tonga wants to scare away Japanese dolphin poachers from its shores; the London Review of Books wants a piece on the Armenian genocide; a woman is having a custody battle over her children in Washington DC – can Luttwak "reason" with her husband? And that is just in the last 12 months.
Luttwak is a self-proclaimed "grand strategist", who makes a healthy living dispensing his insights around the globe. He believes that the guiding principles of the market are antithetical to what he calls "the logic of strategy", which usually involves doing the least efficient thing possible in order to gain the upper hand over your enemy by confusing them. If your tank battalion has the choice of a good highway or a bad road, take the bad road, says Luttwak. If you can divide your fighter squadrons onto two aircraft carriers instead of one, then waste the fuel and do it. And if two of your enemies are squaring off in Syria, sit back and toast your good fortune.
Luttwak believes that the logic of strategy contains truths that apply to all times and places. His books and articles have devoted followings among academics, journalists, businessmen, military officers and prime ministers. His 1987 book Strategy: The Logic of War and Peace is a set text at universities and military academies across the world. His official – and unofficial – advisory work for the US government has been praised by generals and secretaries of state. He is a familiar figure at government ministries, in the pages of leading journals and on Italian television.
But his work is not limited to armchair theorising. Readers who have been treated to Luttwak's counterintuitive provocations on the op-ed page of the New York Times might be surprised to know that he considers writing an extra-curricular activity. For the past 30 years, Luttwak has run his own strategic consultancy – a sort of one-man security firm – that provides bespoke "solutions" to some very intractable problems. In his long career, Luttwak has been asked by the president of Mexico to help eliminate a street gang that was burning tourist buses in the city of Mexicali; the Dalai Lama has consulted him about relations with China, European governments have hired him to root out al-Qaida operatives, and the US army has commissioned him to update its counterinsurgency manual. He earns around $1m a year from his "jobs". "It's always important to get paid," he likes to insist. "It protects you from the liberal problem of good intentions and from being called an intriguer."
It is tempting to imagine Luttwak as a man exiled to the wrong place and time, whose fate, like a character in Nabokov, has been reduced from old-world brilliance to something less grand in 21st-century America. It is not hard, after all, to picture him conniving at the Congress of Vienna, or plotting murders in the Medici court. He has the air of the seasoned counsellor to the prince who is dispatched to deal with the Mongols and returns alone, on horseback, clutching advantageous terms on parchment.
But only in America was the career of Edward Luttwak possible. The perpetually renewable reservoir of naivety at the highest levels of the US government has been good for business. During the cold war, Luttwak was often identified as a peculiar American species known as the "defence intellectual". These were academics who served power, who were often impatient with democratic procedure, and who enraptured audiences – from thinktanks to military academies – with their elaborate projector-slide frescoes of nuclear apocalypse.
When he testified before Congress in the 1980s, Luttwak seemed to be the latest heir in the line of saturnine visionaries – from Herman Kahn to Henry Kissinger – who were sure about which way the world was going. "Most defence intellectuals are three-fourths defence and one-fourth intellectual," says Leon Wieseltier, the Washington fixture and literary impresario, who first met Luttwak during the Reagan years. "But Edward was this figure out of a Werner Herzog film. He was not some person who had read a bit of Tacitus and now worked at the Pentagon. He knew all the languages, the geographies, the cultures, the histories. He is the most bizarre humanist I have ever met."
Outside of Washington, Luttwak is best known for his writing. His reputation still rests on his 1968 book Coup d'Etat: A Practical Guide, published when Luttwak was 26. It is a tongue-in-cheek pastiche of a military manual that he wrote while working as an oil consultant in London. The book explains in clinical detail how to seize power in various types of states. It comes with elaborate charts and a typology of victorious communiques ("the Romantic/Lyrical", "the Messianic", "the Unprepared") drawn from successful African coups.
The book was praised by John le Carré and warmly reviewed by critics on the left and the right. "One suspects that, like Machiavelli himself, he enjoys truth not only because it is true but also because it shocks the naive," wrote Eric Hobsbawm. But for Luttwak the best notice came in 1972, when General Mohammad Oufkir was assassinated during an attempted coup against King Hassan in Morocco; it was rumoured, to Luttwak's delight, that a blood-spattered copy of Coup d'Etat was found on the general's corpse.
Luttwak is less a grand political theorist in the tradition of Machiavelli or Hobbes than a skilled bricoleur of historical strategic insights. But he is sometimes mentioned in the same breath as legendary military strategists. "He's a hell of a lot smarter than Clausewitz," says Merrill McPeak, the former chief of staff of the US air force, who sought Luttwak's advice in 1990 while planning the bombing of Iraq during the first Gulf war. "His main asset is just knowing more than everyone else." Other acquaintances are more circumspect. "When I think of Ed Luttwak," Zbigniew Brzezinski, who served as national security adviser to president Jimmy Carter, told me, "I think of a strong intellectual, inclined towards categorical assertions, penetrating in many of their insights, but occasionally undermined by the desire to have a shock effect on listeners. Nonetheless, he's almost always worth listening to."
In a world where almost every national government now makes use of "strategic consultants", Luttwak's services have only increased in value. The rise of a governing culture that does its best to mimic the "best practices" of the business world has been of great benefit to his business. The peculiar type of counter-intuition he offers seems to have never been more in demand. His provocative public persona only contributes to the sense, among the many world leaders, military commanders and others who purchase his services, that with Luttwak they are not dealing with a business school graduate tapping into a database, but something more deliciously old-fashioned. Luttwak sweats savoir faire. He projects the image of a wise man in intimate contact with a deeper, hidden level of reality. Listening to Luttwak discuss his clients, one has the impression that he is passed around from government to government like some pleasurable, illicit stimulant.
One has the impression that he is passed around from government to government like some pleasurable, illicit stimulant
But what makes Luttwak unusual is the fact that so many powerful people hire him in the first place. What does a 72-year-old Romanian emigre in the Washington suburbs provide that they cannot get elsewhere?
Outside Luttwak's house in Chevy Chase, Maryland, stands a tall metal statue of the would-be Hitler assassin Claus von Stauffenberg; a large wooden totem of Nietzsche stares out from a bay window. When I visited this spring, a helmeted figure appeared to be assembling something with industrial welding equipment through a basement window. The figure was Luttwak's elegant wife, Dalya, who greeted me at the door while Luttwak finished shearing the bushes outside. "I do sometimes worry that when I see a car moving slowly outside the house that someone has finally come to finish us off," she said. Dalya was preparing for a show in New York City, and the floor of her sculpture studio was strewn with tools and the steel rods she shapes into giant root-like structures.
Luttwak first came to Washington in 1969. After graduating from LSE, he followed his roommate Richard Perle – the neoconservative eminence grise and adviser to Ronald Reagan and George W Bush, known in the press as the "Prince of Darkness" – to work for a cold war thinktank called the Committee to Maintain a Prudence Defense Policy. Chaired by the former US secretary of state Dean Acheson, the committee was dedicated to wrapping rabid strategic proposals in the language of security and necessity. Luttwak now finds Washington to be a "pleasantly innocuous" town, but he hated it when he first arrived: "I remember going to Kissinger's favourite restaurant, Sans Souci, and eating food that would have been rejected by Italian PoWs."
Luttwak could never fully bend to the orthodoxies of the Beltway. "He has a way of thinking outside of the box, but it's so far outside of the box that you have to put a filter on it," says Paul Wolfowitz, another Iraq war architect who was also a member of Acheson's committee. "If you had asked Edward if he would have liked to be secretary of state, he would not have said no," says Perle, "but he didn't want to rise as a bureaucrat. He wanted access to power without going up ladders." Luttwak's relations with both men have cooled in recent decades. "In Washington you are considered frivolous if you write books," he said. "Wolfowitz and Perle were always supposed to be writing these great works, but they never did. I was considered unserious for knowing things."
Today, Luttwak's home office contains the better part of the Loeb classical library on its shelves, interspersed ostentatiously with helmets, pistols and stray pieces of artillery. A certificate congratulating him for his contribution to the design of the Israeli Merkava tank rests above a photo of his daughter, a former Israeli soldier, driving the same tank. Luttwak spends much of his time at the computer. He follows the news closely and interprets it as an ongoing comedy. At the time of my visit, Yemen's Houthi insurgents had just invaded the port city of Aden. "It's as if Scottish Highlanders were walking around with guns in Mayfair," he said.
"You know, I never gave George W Bush enough credit for what he's done in the Middle East," Luttwak continued. "I failed to appreciate at the time that he was a strategic genius far beyond Bismarck. He ignited a religious war between Shi'ites and Sunnis that will occupy the region for the next 1,000 years. It was a pure stroke of brilliance!"
Luttwak at home in Maryland in front of some of the books he has written and translated. Photograph: Jocelyn Augustino/The Guardian
Luttwak is square-jawed and has a close crew cut of grey hair. He is in remarkably good shape for a man in his 70s, which he attributes to a new sugarless diet. He has a mild, Mitteleuropean accent, which he supplements with a wide repertoire of gestures that call to mind the movements of an embattled crab: the fey flick of the index finger, the four-fingered pinch-of-salt jab, the fist-grenade that periodically explodes at chest level to punctuate a point.
He is the sort of man who is not satisfied with simply making an impression; he wants to mark his listener for life. As we walked through the house, he pulled 15th-century Byzantine-bound manuscripts, which he treats like paperbacks, from the shelves. He started to simmer every time Dalya took the reins of the conversation. "She started out so promisingly," he said as we reviewed her sculptures. "I met her when she was a 19-year-old Israeli prison guard, and she's the best driver of a Jeep I know." Next to the sculptures was a giant welding machine. "It's illegal to have that in a residential area," he said.
After we entered his office, Luttwak became momentarily absorbed by a YouTube video of a gaur, the largest bovine on earth. A young Yorkshire filmmaker appeared in the side of the frame. "It's a wild Indian gaur," he frantically whispered into the camera, "Every now and then it looks at me … But if I get any closer he might get really annoyed so I'm going to be very careful."
Luttwak jabbed childishly at the screen, emitting his standard derisive guttural – "Ah! Ah! Ah!" – and pointed to his desktop background, a picture of himself feeding and petting an enormous gaur in the Indian state of Nagaland. "I have an acute interest in bovines," he said with an impish smile. He went back to typing on his computer, pecking sharply at the keyboard. For a moment, I thought I could see a gun strap through his T-shirt, but it turned out to be the white braces that Luttwak always wears. "I was born without a bottom," he explained, a bit mournfully.
"The cow is the most complex machine on Earth," Luttwak told me when I met him one morning in February, at El Trompillo airport in Santa Cruz, the largest and wealthiest city in Bolivia. "It converts cellulose into bone, meat and hoof. My cows are closer to gazelles. You will see how they leap and jump. We are not like American farmers. We don't give them drugs and the alfalfa that makes them sick in order to get marbled meat. And we don't kill them early. Indians worship cows because of the way they congregate at the edge of the river in the evening. It is an undeniably mystical thing and it makes sense to worship it."
Luttwak first set his sights on Bolivia in 1998, when he convinced three wealthy partners that a recently signed South American free-trade agreement would make Bolivian land on the Brazilian border as valuable as that of its richer neighbour. Together they bought 19,000 hectares in a north-eastern province known as the Beni. Luttwak went on to buy cattle to graze the land. He now owns a herd of 3,000.
An expert who can explain the ballistic capabilities of a Tomahawk missile to a prime minister is one thing; but a man who can also debate bull-rearing methods with a hardened Bolivian cowboys in natural latex ponchos is something else. The combination of scholarly prowess and machismo is a much sought-after alloy in many high offices of the world, where extreme masculinity is still the coin of the realm. (In moments that threaten to be dull, Luttwak makes a habit of looking around for lethal objects. "This chopstick is perfect, for instance," he told me later at a hotel restaurant. "But you must remember to thrust it deep enough into the eye socket so that it punctures the frontal cortex.")
Edward Luttwak with Bolivian cowboys dressed in their natural latex ponchos. Photograph: Thomas Meaney
The Beni is a stubbornly defiant place of dense jungle and lowland plains that make it vulnerable to severe flooding. "You can't do anything without danger in the Beni," said Luttwak as we waited to board the hour-long turbo-prop flight north to the regional capital of Trinidad, the first stop on our way to Luttwak's farm. "The people are the true macho. Not the fake macho of Argentina and Texas. A wife in the Beni thinks nothing of knocking a jaguar out with a frying pan. A man will casually mention that he lost a finger that morning, but no bother." There are also several thousand Mennonite farmers in the Beni – descendents of German-speaking anabaptists exiled from Russia – whose antiquated farming techniques and pioneer grit Luttwak particularly admires.
In the Beni, politics belongs to the narco traffickers who work the border with Brazil, the new urban business class of the cities, and the cattlemen of the plains. It was one of the most powerful of these cattlemen, Winston Rodriguez Araya, that Luttwak had come to see. The previous year, Don Winston, as Luttwak calls him, lost hundreds of cattle to flooding, and had made arrangements to rent Luttwak's herd to replenish his own. But a misunderstanding had arisen. Don Winston had delayed returning the animals to Luttwak. Luttwak was coming to get his cows back.
After landing in Trinidad, we drove six hours further north, deeper into the Amazon basin, to San Joaquin, the closest town to Luttwak's farm. There were matters requiring immediate attention when we arrived. News of the terrorist attack on the offices of Charlie Hebdo had broken when Luttwak landed in Bolivia, and the last TV reports we had seen had included grainy footage of the gunmen. "It was done with AK-47s, which are very hard to get a hold of in Paris," Luttwak kept insisting during the long drive, though we knew almost nothing about the attacks. "In Poland you can get new AK-47s complete with the little oil canister for $800, but they are nearly impossible to get in Paris. These people have connections."
Luttwak wanted to write a piece about the future of Muslims in Europe. True to form, he wanted to infuriate liberals with the argument that western leaders, with their "fairytale collegiate view" of Islam, were in fact betraying the hard-working parents from the Middle East and Africa who had immigrated to the US and Europe in order to save their children from Islam. But there was no internet in town. We drove to the local military outpost. Luttwak entered the headquarters of the newly stationed commander and introduced himself. There was no internet. The colonel explained that in the Beni the army mostly concerns itself with protecting people from floods. "The problem is of course predicting when the floods will happen," he said. "If you had the internet," replied Luttwak, "that might be less of a problem."
The soldier at the checkpoint of the camp asked about the white letters on Luttwak's blue cap. He was wearing a NYPD cap – in "solidarity", he said, with US police after the killings of Michael Brown and Eric Garner. "I would really enjoy wearing this on a stroll through Manhattan," he told me. "The great stupidity of the Michael Brown trial was that they announced the verdict late at night, which was begging for riots. They should have announced it early the next morning when they could have been more prepared."
Later that day, after an exchange of greetings and gifts at the home of Luttwak's trusted friends and business partners Don and Donna Mandy, local ranchers who live in a red adobe Jesuit house off San Joaquin's main square, Luttwak and I huddled into their bedroom, where the Paris attacks followed reports on local political corruption and the weather as the fourth item on the Bolivian nightly news. Armed with these findings, Luttwak retired to the dining table, and wrote his dispatch in less than two hours. (When we reconnected to the internet three days later, he sent off the article. A few days after that, it appeared on the home page of Le Monde.)
Donna Mandy then prepared a dinner of paku fish and maize cakes, followed by a round of the Bolivian spirit singani, which Luttwak barely touched. Sitting at the table, he examined the medical instructions that came with the growth hormone tablets that Don Mandy's son, Alex Martinez, had set aside for his two adolescent daughters (they were healthy, but he wanted them to be taller). Stretching out the tiny paper of medical instructions like an accordion, Luttwak quickly reached a verdict. "Alex, you cannot give these drugs to the girls. The chance of cancer is too great. The effects of the growth protein is just too risky." This was Luttwak's specialism on display: the sudden flex of expertise, the pinpoint detail lanced across the room.
There is a passage in his 2009 book The Grand Strategy of the Byzantine Empire where Luttwak shows off this skill to the extreme. He digresses for 14 pages about the special weapon used across ancient central Asia called the "composite-reflex bow" – which he believes unlocks one of the mysteries of Homer's Odyssey. When Odysseus returns home to Ithaca to kill the suitors who have designs on his wife, he shoots them with a bow that none of them have been able to use out of what would appear to be a lack of strength. But Luttwak identifies it as a composite reflex bow that Odysseus presumably picked up on his foreign travels, and which only he knows how to string properly:
"The Ithaca provincials had tried to string the bow with brute strength, by forcing it to curve enough to receive the string – easy to do if one has at least three hands, two to pull back the limbs into position, one to tie or loop the string on each ear – but impossible to do with only two. Odysseus knew how to string reflex bows such as his own."
Translate this kind of scholarly detail into other areas – Indian national security, the Argentinian air force, Iraqi ground targets – and you can see the source of appeal in receiving a memo from Luttwak. If Luttwak had been present at the crucifixion of Christ, he would have begun his report with a note on the type of nails that were used. He brings literary flourish to fields that would seem the most resistant to them. The performance is partly contained in the rhetoric: in order to understand the Odyssey, you cannot go to museums, or consult academic commentaries, or trust your own judgment – instead you must go to Luttwak.
If Luttwak had been present at the crucifixion of Christ, he would have noted the type of nails that were used
Luttwak's idiosyncratic historical work often commands respect from academic experts. "Edward broke open a new academic field about the Roman frontier," the eminent classicist GW Bowersock told me, referring to Luttwak's book The Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire, which began life as his Johns Hopkins political science dissertation. "What makes him a great scholar is that his practical work and his scholarship constantly nourish each other." Bowersock is right, but there is an additional element. If there is one thing that separates Luttwak from other writers on strategy it is not only his ability to move between typically disconnected realms, but also his way of flattering the customer: he can make a head of state feel like an intellectual, the academic feel like a man of action, and the Bolivian rancher that they are in the presence of a man with terrifyingly powerful connections.
Luttwak has written 14 other books, ranging from studies of American capitalism to the Israeli Army. Kazakhstan: An Alphabetic Guide – drawn from the notes for a recent consultancy project for the country – will appear as soon as it is cleared by Kazakhstani censors. Another study, tentatively entitled The Marriage of Genghis Khan and Anna Karenina – about the way vast distances have determined Russian forms of rule – is currently under way. Luttwak is perhaps even better known for his journalistic insurgencies. For Prospect magazine, he once argued that the Middle East had no strategic importance and its "backward societies" should be ignored; in the New York Times, he advised savouring the onset of war in Syria, since America's sworn enemies were fighting each other.
Luttwak with some of the 3,000 cattle he owns in Bolivia. Photograph: Thomas Meaney
The morning after our dinner at Don and Donna Mandy's, we drove out to Luttwak's farm for a cattle roundup. Into two giant troughs, we dumped bags of salt that summoned the herd. "These are Indian cattle – the Portuguese brought them here from Goa," said Luttwak, as the cows approached. "They are not stupid. They instinctively sense that eventually we want to kill them." Dozens of cattle were now in a circle around Luttwak. He was elated. He massaged their heads, he whispered to them, but just as quickly he seemed to grow bored with them, as if disappointed that they had nothing to say.
Luttwak's earliest memory is of being carried, aged three, on the shoulders of a Red Army soldier who was billeted at his parents' villa in the region of Romania known as the Banat, where his father was a prominent merchant. Though the Banat was close to the epicentre of the second world war, it was never directly occupied by the Germans. Luttwak grew up speaking Romanian, Vlach and French, but his mother tongue, as was common among the Jewish population of the region, was German. He remembers his parents as courageous: "They were the sort of people who, if they saw water they liked, dove in without checking the depth."
Yet it was the Russians, not the Germans, who posed the greater threat to the Luttwaks as the war came to a close. As a businessman with capital, Luttwak's father stood to lose everything. The family shipped itself south in Luttwak & Co box cars and boarded one of the last ferries to Sicily, where Luttwak's father entered the orange export business, and successfully warded off the local mafia.
After Sicily, the Luttwaks moved to Milan, where Edward was miserable and got into fights at school. The magical childhood in Palermo had been abruptly replaced by adolescence in a city that celebrated stolidly efficient industrialists. "There was nowhere to play. The parks were a disgrace. I lost all my friends from Palermo. I found myself amid a bunch of very bourgeois kids," Luttwak once told the intellectual historian Corey Robin. Luttwak's parents decided to send him away to a Jewish boarding school, Carmel College, in Oxfordshire. (He got into fights at Carmel too, "but the English had a different attitude toward fighting; they not only tolerated it, but respected you if you held your own.")
In 1957, at the age of 15, he quit school, temporarily cut off contacts with his parents, and moved to London, where he worked in a teashop in Piccadilly and enlisted in the Honourable Artillery Company, a territorial regiment quartered in London. Luttwak claims to have first seen military action in 1958, as 16-year-old in the jungles of North Borneo, where a small British force was sent in a clandestine operation to prop up the native Dayaks against Chinese communists. But then, according to Luttwak, the world would be a very different place without him: he claims a significant hand in a large proportion of the most momentous events of the postwar era: from the decision to throw molotov cocktails at Soviet tanks in the Prague Spring, to Iran's 1981 release of American hostages, to the existence of the Toyota Prius.
Luttwak's talent for mythomania relies on his sensual appetite for detail, but it also gestures towards something beyond it. He tirelessly buffs the edges of his own legend; he is competitively interesting. When confronted by anyone who threatens to second-guess him, Luttwak responds either by burying them in a welter of technical detail, or crushing them with timeless, prophetic generalities. The result is that he is nearly invincible in conversation. Everything he has ever read or heard is ready for rapid deployment.
Luttwak's antagonisms, charms, and provocations are also a way for him to ward off his greatest fear: boredom. During the eight days I spent with him, in moments where nothing was happening, or when the focus of a conversation momentarily deserted him, Luttwak appeared almost in pain. But his war on boredom is more than a personal crusade. His mortal enemies are those who wish to rationalise the world, who want to make militaries and states and intelligence agencies run like businesses. This puts him at odds with many of the American conservatives who have, over the years, been his chief patrons in the form of thinktanks and military contractors. "I believe that one ought to have only as much market efficiency as one needs," Luttwak told Robin. "Because everything that we value in human life is within the realm of inefficiency – love, family, attachment, community, culture, old habits, comfortable old shoes."
The Luttwak family in Palermo when Edward was a small child Photograph: Edward Luttwak
For Luttwak, capitalism is synonymous with boring adulthood: ledgers, marginal returns and the expectation that the world will fundamentally remain the same. As a strategist, Luttwak sees the presumption of predictability as a damning vulnerability. As a historian of the ancient world, he is too alive to the prospect of civilisational ruin to put any faith in the idea that capitalism contains its own solution. Now that he is rich, making money for Luttwak has become a kind of pastime, and raising cattle is his attempt to make it in the least dreary, most archaic way possible. More and more it seemed we had come to the Amazon to provide Luttwak with another chance to "raise a thirst", and it was understood that I was there to experience an endangered sanctuary based on values such as honour and daring, in which Luttwak prowled around as a Homeric hero. "Take as many pictures as possible," he repeatedly told me. "Note everything down."
On our third day in the Amazon, we drove out to check on the cattle that Luttwak had lent to Don Winston. There were traces of Don Winston's empire – dairies, cattle, tenant farms – along the road for miles before we arrived at the ranch. "The man has more land than Belgium," Luttwak said. His elaborate descriptions of Don Winston's past exploits as a local kingpin had the effect, presumably intended, of making me slightly wary of meeting him.
Cowboys were rounding up the herd as we pulled up to the estate. Outside a white McMansion in a field of bright green, encircled by corrals, Don Winston ambled into vision: black slab of hair flattened back, obligatory moustache, shirt unbuttoned almost all the way in the Beni style, revealing a generous triangle of cured flesh.
Luttwak's negotiations with Don Winston started around a small kitchen table with Nescafes and farm milk. They sat at opposite ends of the room, surrounded by members of Don Winston's household. Crossbeams of sweat rapidly appeared on everyone's backs. Their opening statements were stage-whispered through cupped hands, as if they were loudly passing on secret information.
"Eduardo we would like a bit more time for the cattle."
"I want them today."
"We lost many in flooding and the cold chills last year, and we can give you calves right now."
"Not the pregnant cows?"
"We would like to amend the contract again," said Don Winston's son, Pito.
Luttwak made an elaborate grimace of disappointment and stood up and left the room, apparently to take a self-guided tour of the house. Together we walked to the veranda through Don Winston's bedroom. Luttwak took a picture off the wall. It was an old photo of Don Winston riding a horse, and below it were a series of exclamations: Courage! Honour! Perseverance!
"Don Winston, this is a wonderful picture of you riding!"
"Thank you, Eduardo!"
"Don Winston, I will be forced to steal your wife if you don't return my cattle by tomorrow!", Luttwak said with theatrical menace.
"We will try, Eduardo," said Don Winston, with theatrical penitence.
It was hard to tell how much of this performance was for my benefit, why Luttwak badly needed the cows now, and what the effect of walking around Don Winston's house had been. But something had registered. It was agreed that the cattle would be returned in a week. We moved back to the veranda in less tense spirits.
We had reached the denouement. Luttwak mock-threatened to steal Don Winston's wife once more. We exited the room. Outside the house, Luttwak pointed out a Mitsubishi Triton pick-up truck parked outside, which he cited as evidence of the company's fresh gains in Bolivia. A brief discussion about the merits of the Triton followed. Everyone started petting the truck. Luttwak said he would inform the board of Toyota about this unexpected threat to their business in South America.
"I don't particularly like serving states," Luttwak told me over dinner in the main square of Trinidad two days later. "I prefer peoples and clans to states. But after 9/11, I wanted to do something again for America." That opportunity did not arise. Instead, Luttwak continued, "I got a call from Nicolo Pollari" – the former head of Italy's military intelligence agency. "He said, 'Edward, I know what we're doing – but I want you to do what we're not doing." According to Luttwak, the Swiss government had helped fund an Italian security operation to keep al-Qaida operatives from entering western Europe. And the Italians wanted Luttwak's help.
Luttwak told me that he began by identifying the main entry points for al-Qaida members coming to Europe. In each of these locations, he put into action a carefully tailored plan. To deal with the operatives coming into Sicily by boat, Luttwak conducted town-hall-style meetings in cinemas near the harbours. Accompanied by his closest friend from childhood, the politician Calogero Mannino, Luttwak arranged a series of meetings with boat skippers, in which he explained they would not get into any kind of trouble – neither with the mafia nor the government – for following his instructions. "I told the ship captains that they would have to turn everyone in [who seemed suspicious]. I said, 'You'll know who they are because they will be young men, they won't have trouble paying, and they'll be less flea-bitten than the others.'" As part of his work for the Italians, Luttwak also claims to have conducted operations in Trieste and the Austrian city of Klagenfurt. In the Italian port city of Bari, Luttwak says his work included helping the police fight off the local mafia, who were helping Albanian smugglers deliver rafts that included al-Qaida operatives onto the country's shores.
Luttwak enlisted another old friend, a scholar of Arabic at the Catholic University in Milan, to conduct the interrogations of the captured suspects. "She could tell the accents of the men, search out the obvious lies, and determine their true origins," he said. "No one was tortured," Luttwak reassured me several times. "Instead we gave them speeches: 'We're going to take you out of solitary and put you in the main prison. You know Italian prisoners were very moved by September 11. Some of them cried while watching the towers go down. So they're going to rape you several times before they kill you.'" Luttwak claims his intelligence operation was spectacularly successful. "The Italians are frivolous about many things," he told me, "but not about counter-terrorism."
A couple of days later, we began the long return journey. The flight back to Santa Cruz was rocky. "The problem is that the pilots don't use radios with each other so you never quite know when you're going to get crashed into by another plane," said Luttwak, with his impish smile. On the flight he carefully paged through two back issues of the Times Literary Supplement, which he carries with him everywhere (he finds the London Review of Books is "too bulky"). "Why is Warnie Lewis 'the much maligned brother of CS Lewis?'" he asked me in the middle of some turbulence. "Why 'much-maligned'?"
From Santa Cruz, Luttwak was flying to Zurich, where he has a regular job advising the local police and a firm he did not want to make public. In the passport line, I found him standing with a Swiss man employed in the fast-food business. "This man works in an industry that has yet to have its Nuremberg trials," Luttwak declared. The Swiss man smiled weakly. "He's a chicken nugget consultant! If there's one point on which I agree with the leftist weaklings, it's 1) that McDonald's must go and 2) that American citizens should be forced en masse to take a course in phenomenology, so that they can develop the proper philosophical disposition necessary for understanding the incarnate evil of the chicken nugget." The Swiss man was flustered, trying to calculate to what degree he had just been insulted.
This man works in an industry that has yet to have its Nuremberg trials. He's a chicken nugget consultant!
Edward Luttwak
"Most people live such pointless lives," said Luttwak as we walked toward his gate. "Not desperate lives – they have cable television – but pointless. For politicians, it's not pointless, but it always ends in disappointment and bitterness. But meaningful? Their lives are not as meaningful as the Mennonites. The Mennonites are free in the Hegelian sense – they are self-consciously free. And they have unintentionally revealed the ongoing fraud of American agriculture. They don't destroy the land, they don't drug animals to death – they make vast profits using 18th-century technology. Personally, I cannot live that life, but I want it to flourish. I relate with Ulysses because I demand an interesting life. I demand it." And with that, Luttwak boarded his flight.
In April, two months after his trips to Bolivia and Switzerland and a stopover in Asia to help design a new intelligence agency for an Asian country that he insisted I refer to only as "the Asian country" whenever we were in public, Luttwak drove to New York to help prepare for his wife's art opening at a gallery in Chelsea. Don Winston still owed him eight mules, and Luttwak was in negotiations with a Mennonite colony in the Beni to sell a large chunk of his land. I met him at a small television studio on West 30th Street, where he was appearing on the popular Italian political talk show Servizio Pubblico. Luttwak sat in a black room at a small table in a dark grey suit, as a young woman applied makeup and a technician wired him up.
The segment was devoted to the refugee crisis in the Mediterranean. Four days earlier, another migrant boat had sunk off the coast of Libya, killing roughly 800 asylum seekers. The commentators on the show spoke about how it was a terrible tragedy and how Italy needed to do more. Luttwak's eyebrows raised in a mute appeal for mercy from this do-gooding nonsense. "This is what makes Italian leftists so vulnerable," he said to the room in New York between live segments. "English or French leftists would come on with coherent arguments and rebuttals prepared. But in Italy everyone just wants to be considered buonista – morally pure – so they're just easy to quash. I've said before that the Italians must destroy the boats before people board them on the Libya coast. You attach limpet mines to the hulls. The Renzi government is taking up my idea."
Afterwards, as we walked to Dalya's opening, I asked Luttwak once more why he was interested in strategy. "You seemed bored in there," I said. "Isn't it tiring to spend your day turning conventions on their head?"
"No," said Luttwak, "strategy is about looking for turning points. Politics is too predictable. Look at Hillary. She is an empty carapace with ambition rattling inside. You can predict everything she does. Strategy is about being unpredictable."
"But doesn't that unpredictability become predictable?" I asked. "What happens when every army in the world abides by strategic logic?"
"But they never will," said Luttwak, "because most people cannot master their emotions. Above all, strategy is about mastering your emotions." And the emotions of others, he might have added. For all of this commitment to the concrete, Luttwak sells something extremely abstract: a form of self-realisation that gives his clients the fleeting sense that they, and the agencies under their command, have achieved mastery not only of their emotions, but of the vicissitudes of their historical moment. Like psychoanalysts who identify meaningful patterns in their patients' idle chatter, Luttwak sees glaring chances for strategic mastery in the dullest bureaucratic reports and inventories.
In my time with Luttwak, it became clear that he didn't simply embody his own ideas, he overfilled them; his provocations and factual barrages were the spider's web he wrapped around his helpless listeners. But even his exaggerations – the "categorical assertions" that ruffle the likes of Brzezinski and Wolfowitz – contained something beyond strategic value: they advanced the sense that Luttwak was more daring than they were; that others have traded excitement for power, that they have traded the machete for the desk, whereas Luttwak has kept hold of both in a world that would not seem to tolerate such people, much less make them rich.
We were nearly at the gallery. Luttwak stopped to tie the laces of his black sneakers on a fire hydrant. "If I were starting out again now I would be a biologist," he said. "I would be a student of bacteria. Every second there is an Iliad unfolding in our intestines. The variables are infinite compared to strategy or politics."
When we reached the gallery, Dalya and Luttwak embraced. The room filled with more than 60 people. Family and friends and some art dealers arrived. Luttwak walked in circles around the room, providing a running commentary on the assembled guests. "This man's father was a graduate of the gulag and taught me everything about forgery," said Luttwak of one. "But he never came to anything."
Stories and lore flowed electrically around Luttwak, but for the moment he was resisting the current. He was on good behaviour. Tonight was about his wife. An old Israeli friend sidled up to him. "How are you holding up, Edward?"
"I'll be fine until peace breaks out."
• Follow the Long Read on Twitter at @gdnlongread, or sign up to the long read weekly email here.
This article was amended on 9 December. An earlier version of the piece referred to a certificate congratulating Edward Luttwak for his contribution to the design of the Israeli M-47 tank. The tank in question was, in fact, the Merkava.
This article was amended on 14 December 2015. It originally included a quote about moving to Milan from a 2001 interview with Luttwak, and stated that the quote had come from the writer's interviews with Luttwak. The quote was actually from an interview with Corey Robin, and was mistakenly used instead of one from the writer's own interviews with Luttwak about his childhood. The attribution has been corrected.


I am Ralf the Nightwatchman of Lucerne and I do Nightwatchman Walks and other tours for the Lucerne visitor since 2013. Before that I was working for an incoming tour operator in Lucerne for many years. My level of education is federally qualified tourism expert HF (In German: Eidgnössisch diplomierter Tourismusfachmann HF). I am a proper local. I live in Lucerne since my childhood.
The tour takes place in all weather conditions. Please bring an umbrella or a rain coat in case of rain. Most of the route is cobble stoned. Please wear comfortable shoes.
The tour operates in all wheater conditions. Please wear comfortable shows and bring an umbrella or rain coat in case of rain.


text:
Ардово (, ) — село, громада в окрузі Рожнява, Кошицький край, Словаччина. Кадастрова площа громади — 11,183 км². Населення — 160 осіб (за оцінкою на 31 грудня 2017 р.).

Знаходиться за ~17 км на південний захід від адмінцентра округу міста Рожнява та за ~6 км від кордону з Угорщиною.

Перша згадка 1293 року як Erdes. Історичні назви: 1318-го — Ordou, 1320 — Ardo, 1359 — Ardow, 1920 — Ardovo; .

Географія
Село Ардово лежить на західній околиці Сіліцкої планини. Висота села в центрі — 277, тетиторією — від 250 до 520 м.

Найвища вершина — гора Каменни копец (, 493 м, ).

Транспорт

Пам'ятки

Примітки

Посилання

  Registre obnovenej evidencie pozemkov . Bratislava : ÚGKK SR, 2011-12-31.

Села округу Рожнява

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaWikipedia


Anyone who read my council column, "Going Through the Motions," knows I'm above taking a dig at former Councilor Twanda Carlisle.
When Judge John Zottola gave her a one- to two-year sentence on public-corruption charges Feb. 4, it was a bit more than I thought she would get. But still, she had violated the public trust, even though she publicly blamed the media for blowing the whole stealing-public-money thing out of proportion.
But now I find myself almost sympathetic to Carlisle ... almost.
Incarceration of some period is necessary for what she has done. But then I compare her sentence to those of other public officials recently convicted of violating the public trust.
My expert analysis: It stinks.
Within 24 hours of Carlisle being sentenced, former state Rep. Frank LaGrotta and Mark Donley, a police chief from nearby Beaver County, were sentenced on corruption charges of their own. LaGrotta received six months of house arrest for paying close to $30,000 to his sister and her daughter to "work" at no-show state jobs. The sister (a kindergarten teacher in Ellwood City) and the niece were given probation. As for Conley, he pleaded guilty to taking bribes and was given probation.
Some people resent it when the race card is played, especially in defense of somebody who couldn't even defend herself in a courtroom. (Carlisle pled "no contest" to the charges.) But it's hard to ignore the fact that, of the three public officials sentenced recently, only one is black …. and that's the only one who will be doing hard time.
Other public officials in recent memory have also fared pretty well inside the legal system. Former Councilor Joe Cusick was convicted of extorting bribes and selling jobs while a member of Alcosan — he received six months in a halfway house and six months of house arrest. Former state Rep. Jeff Habay has faced a multitude of charges in recent years. On the first group of charges, that he had his state staff do campaign work, he spent a week in the county jail before being referred to an "alternative facility." He was recently given four to six months in the county jail, followed by 14 months house arrest for staging an anthrax threat at his office.
I don't want Twanda Carlisle to get special treatment. I think Zottola was on the money when he sentenced her to a maximum of two years in prison. Contrary to what Carlisle and some of her supporters allege, this wasn't a bookkeeping error.
But sentences ought to be even-handed … and these white, male public officials should have been given stiffer penalties too. LaGrotta is helping officials in other investigations … but he ought to do time for paying his family with our tax dollars for work they didn't do.
Twanda Carlisle stole from the city and from the people of her council district. She should and will pay for that. But for her to be going to prison while others get an anklet, their own bed and all the Judge Judy they can watch, is a crime in itself.


in Prince Edward County, Ontario.
for enjoying sunsets, campfires & stories to share.
with all the comforts of home.
The Nook is a charming, rustic, off-grid waterfront retreat located in Prince Edward County. Designed for a maximum of two people, the Nook is perfect for singles or couples seeking to be enveloped by nature. While just ten minutes from Picton, once you're at the Nook, you'll feel a million miles from anywhere.
The Nook is a seasonal rental and available to book from May 1 to November 30th, 2016.
If you are looking for 2017 dates, please contact me at ruth@ruthgangbar.com and I will be happy to help you.
in a cozy hideout for two.
with fully-equipped kitchen awaiting you.
amid an old stand of forest along the shores of Lake Ontario.
Miles from anywhere… only ten minutes from Picton.
Waterfront views from the wrap around deck.
A perfect place for sunset dinners.
Stroll in the forest, have a bonfire or dive into a novel in the claw-foot bathtub. Swim in the clear water off your own private waterfront. Enjoy spectacular sunsets and star-filled skies.
The Nook is most suitable for 2 adults (although good dogs are welcome, with permission). Children, parrots, and diesel trucks are not welcome….just kidding. Linens are supplied, however if you bring your own bed linens and towels you will receive a $15 discount on your stay.
Oh this place of blackberries, butterflies & sunsets that go on forever.What a treasure!! Thanks you to you, to this, to the lake, to all the forces that allowed me this beautiful oasis of Summer, sun, grass, long baths & deep sleeps. I'm leaving with everything I came for and more.
Every nook and cranny is a paradise here. Thank you for your great consideration to every detail; decor, kitchenware, and gear.We delighted to discover the magical moments of light displays in the cabin, new tricks to the off-grid workings and ways to play on this lovely land.on our bikes, we made it to Little Bluff Beach and had it all to ourselves.
Thank you for the respite and the clarity that comes from skipping stones, rowing across the lake at sunset, tromping through the woods with walking sticks, crickets, shooting stars, rain on the rooftop and the rhythm of waves on the shore.
The Nook is nestled in the heart of charming Prince Edward County. Although you will enjoy your own private waterfront with a sandy, pebbled beach on the Adolphus Reach, you can also discover nearby secluded beaches, including Sandbanks Provincial Park and Point Petre.
Prince Edward County boasts numerous wineries, breweries, and farm-fresh food stands. The Nook is close to Vicki's Veggies, the Black River Cheese Company, Fifth Town Cheese, County Cider, and Devil's Wishbone Winery. If you prefer to eat out rather than dine in, there are numerous pubs, inns and restaurants all within a fifteen-minute drive from The Nook, including Lake on the Mountain.
If you are looking for 2017 dates, please contact me at info@ruthgangbar.com and I will be happy to help you.


[Please note] Some known through press releases Galaxy S3 4 월 stand is not true. Once a specific launch date we will notify you via Twitter first.
The takeaway? The Galaxy S III, if Samsung calls it that, will be unveiled at some point this year before the end of June, and commercial availability will follow soon after. Of course, if you're salivating specifically for a US release timeframe, that's even more up in the air - given that the first Galaxy S II variants to land in the United States came a full 4 months after the international launch.
Let's hope Samsung and, let's not kid ourselves where the blame lies for this disparity, the "big four" carriers in the US can cut down on the release lag a bit this time around.


28th of June, 1919 - Facts, Nostalgia and Videos!
What Day: The 28th of June, 1919, fell on a Saturday.
On this exact date: The Treaty of Versailles is signed, signalling the end of World War One.
99 years, 9 months and 29 days have passed since the 28th of June, 1919.
Week Number: This date occurred during Week 26 of 1919.
Leap Year: 1919 was NOT a leap year.
Chinese Zodiac Animal: In the Chinese Zodiac, 1919 was the year of the Goat (Yin Metal).
Native American Zodiac: The 28th of June, 1919 falls under the Woodpecker.
Age: Anyone born on the 28th of June, 1919, will be 99 years of age.
American Format: 06-28-1919 (the MDY format is also used in Belize).
YMD Format: 1919-06-28. This format is often used by software applications, simply because numbers such as "19190628" are easier to sort.
Woodrow Wilson was the President of the United States on the 28th of June, 1919.
A baby that was born on the 28th of June, 1919 was probably conceived around the 18th of September, 1918. (Rough Estimate).
The due date for a baby that was conceived on the 28th of June, 1919 is the 6th of April, 1920. (Rough Estimate).
Enter your date of birth below to find out how old you were on the 28th of June, 1919.
Here are some Youtube videos relating to the 28th of June, 1919. Please note that videos are automatically selected by Youtube and that results may vary! Click on the "Load Next Video" button to view the next video in the search playlist. In many cases, you'll find episodes of old TV shows, documentaries, music videos and soap dramas.
Visualize the days that have passed since the 28th of June, 1919. Each day that has passed will be represented as a calendar icon.
Here are some fun statistics about the 28th of June, 1919.
36,462 days have passed since this date.
3,150,316,800 seconds have passed since the 28th of June, 1919.
If you were born on this day, your heart has beated approximately 3,675,369,600 times.
Since the 28th of June, 1919, earth has travelled approximately 1,625,563,468,800 miles through space.
If you were born on this day, your eyes have blinked approximately 525,052,800 times.
If you were born on this day, you have taken approximately 270,927,245 steps. That's about 120,412 miles!
Since this date, 37,803,802 meteors have entered the earth's atmosphere!
What does the 28th of June, 1919 mean to you? Were you born on this date? Did you finish school? A loved one passed away?


MANILA, Philippines – The October 2018 & November 2018 Psychometrician board exam results including the list of passers, top 10 examinees, top performing schools, performance of schools and related announcements are available at this website as PRC officially releases the results three (3) working days after the board examinations. The October 2018 Board Licensure Exam for Psychometricians were administered by PRC Board of Psychology headed by its Chairman, Ms. Miriam P. Cue and its members, Ms. Alexa P. Abrenica and Ms. Imelda Virginia G. Villar on October 29, 2018 and November 13, 2018 at PRC testing centers in Baguio.
As announced, 550 out of 1,010 examinees passed the exams.
The scheduled exams in Baguio scheduled on October 30, 2018 was postponed and later re-scheduled on November 13, 2018 due to the onslaught Typhoon "Rosita".
In the most recent exams conducted on October 2018 at other testing locations, 4,035 out of 8,453 examinees passed.
Here is the full list of passers in the October 2018 & November 2018 Psychometrician in Baguio, courtesy of PRC.
The October 2018 and November 2018 Psychometrician board exam results are expected to be released in 1-3 working days after the exams or by November 14-16, 2018.
During October 2017 Psychometrician board exams, results were released after four (4) working days.
The Psychometrician board exams covered the following topics.
To receive up-to-date news about October 2018, November 2018 Psychometrician board exam (Baguio) results, we advise our visitors to bookmark this page, visit PRC official website or follow us at our social media pages via Facebook and Twitter.


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Last edited by Kajigami
4 edition of Michael Collins found in the catalog.
Mackay, James A.
by Mackay, James A.
Published 1996 by Mainstream Publishing, Distributed by Trafalgar Square in Edinburgh, London, N. Pomfret, VT .
Collins, Michael, -- 1890-1922.,
Revolutionaries -- Ireland -- Biography.,
Ireland -- History -- Civil War, 1922-1923 -- Biography.
Statement James Mackay.
Pagination 320 p., [24] p. of plates :
The inscription reads, "To Suzae From Michael Collins all the best." The bok is in fine condition. The jacket is in very good, with shelf wear, circular scratches on the front, a small glue residue stain on the back, and bumping along top edges and corners. Nevertheless, Michael Collins satisfactorily achieves his objectives, by writing a book that the layman will understand completely and thoroughly enjoy. His test flying and astronaut career are comprehensively covered in a very skilled written style/5().
Michael Collins was born in Rome, Italy on Octo Inspired by John Glenn, he was chosen by NASA to be part of the third group of astronauts. His first spaceflight was the Gemini Michael Collins died during Ireland's Civil War at a place called Béal na mBláth - not far from Woodfield, Clonakilty, Co. Cork where he was born just over 31 year earlier. The ambush was commanded by Tom Hales and Liam Deasy, both of whom were former friends and comrades in arms of the 'Big Fella'.
COVID Resources. Reliable information about the coronavirus (COVID) is available from the World Health Organization (current situation, international travel).Numerous and frequently-updated resource results are available from this 's WebJunction has pulled together information and resources to assist library staff as they consider how to handle . View Michael Collins' profile on LinkedIn, the world's largest professional community. Michael has 4 jobs listed on their profile. Michael's latest book, Newman- A Short Biography is a page overview of Cardinal John Henry Newman's life and was published in September by Messenger : Author.
Decoying the yanks
EU-company law
Communications media, globalization and empire
A Forest Tragedy And Other Tales
Hail my Marys.
Seven precious gems.
history of the Jewish Federation of Greater Trenton
byrth of mankynd
The conquest of America
Essays on mankind and political arithmetic
Safeguarding the public
Wildlife Photographer of the Year Portfolio 15 (Wildlife Photographer of the Year)
North to the Night
Monster Manners
Respiration and metabolism in etiolated wheat seedlings as modified by phosphorus nutrition...
Squyer Meldrum.
Michael Collins by Mackay, James A. Download PDF EPUB FB2
Michael Collins tells his story self-deprecatingly and with some very welcome droll humour, but the reader is left in no doubt just how much skill and effort was needed to play the role he did. You may not learn a lot that's new from this book, but if you are a Cited by: This book is a very good, thorough biography of Collins and history of Ireland during an amazing periods.
I think, though, I would have preferred beginning with a less detailed account of Michael Collins's life because I have found myself somewhat confused at points by the many characters, treaties and events included by: View the profiles of people named Michael Collins.
Join Facebook to connect with Michael Collins and others you may know. Facebook gives people the power. Michael Collins has books on Goodreads with ratings.
Michael Collins's most popular book is The Keepers of Truth. Michael Collins, hero of the Irish struggle for independence, best remembered for his daring strategy in directing the campaign of guerrilla warfare during the intensification of the Anglo-Irish War (). Learn more about Collins's life and accomplishments in this article.
Michael Collins (born Octo ) is an American former astronaut who flew the Apollo 11 command module Columbia around the Moon while his crewmates, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, made the first crewed landing on the was a test pilot and major general in the U.S.
Air Force Reserves. Prior to becoming an astronaut, Collins graduated from the United Missions: Gem Apollo Michael Collins (Irish: Mícheál Ó Coileáin; 16 October – 22 August ) was an Irish revolutionary, soldier, and politician who was a leading figure in the earlyth-century Irish struggle for independence.
He was Chairman of the Provisional Government of the Irish Free State from January until his assassination in August Collins was born in Battles/wars: Easter Rising, Irish War of. Michael Collins, a NASA astronaut, was the third American to walk in space (Gemini 10) and the pilot of the command module during Apollo 11's mission to the moon in July, Following his career as an astronaut, he served as the director of the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC/5(4).
This latest book on Michael Collins is not a biography, but a provocation to consider all facets of the man. It is all the richer for its wealth of magnificent photographs, illustrations, and. Michael Collins 1. A YOUNG WORLD TRAVELER When he was a kid, Michael Collins didn't grow up wanting to be an astronaut.
There was a good reason for that. There were no astronauts when he was a kid. In fact, the first airplane had flown just twenty-seven years before his ed on: Aug Looking for books by Michael Collins.
See all books authored by Michael Collins, including Most Wanted, and Carrying the Fire: An Astronaut's Journeys: 50th Anniversary Edition, and more on A new book exploring the assassination of the Big Fella insists much of what we have been told about Béal na Bláth is pure fabrication.
W ho shot Michael Collins. That is a question that can. Michael Collins has been flying for over forty years on everything from military helicopters to Boeings mighty With hours all over the world it is no surprise that aviation is a common thread.
'The Body Snatchers' is the third in â. Michael Collins was born near Clonakilty, County Cork, Ireland, on Octoto a successful farmer, Michael John Collins, and Mary Anne O'Brien. When the couple married, she was twenty-three years old and he was sixty.
The couple would have eight children, with Michael being the youngest. "Blue Collar, Blue Scrubs is a gripping, humane, humorous and an enlightening read." —Abraham Verghese, author of Cutting for Stone.
"Collins' gritty memoir traces his journey from a grimy construction pit to the hallowed halls of medicine. An engaging read." —Sandeep Jauhar, author of Intern: A Doctor's Initiation. Read more about the book. Michael Collins was, for good or ill, his compromised, awkward Gift to the Nation.
Released just a year later, The Butcher Boy is his finest work 4/5. Collins Big Cat (28) Laff-O-Tronic Joke Books (9) Michael Dahl Presents Mysteries (6) In Charge (4) Linford Mystery Library (3) Serie Noire 1 (3) Michael Dahl Presents Screams in Space 4D (3) New Studies in Economic and Social History (2) Religion in North America (2).
Michael Collins. Recently I've been trying to make an effort to write up fairly comprehensive notes for topics I teach in statistical NLP. The following notes follow weeks one and two of my spring Coursera course very closely: Week 1: Language models Week 2: Tagging problems, and Hidden Markov models Week 3: Probabilistic context-free grammars (PCFGs).
Looking for books by Michael Collins. See all books authored by Michael Collins, including Act Of Fear, and Walk a Black Wind, and more on With I Love You, Michael Collins, Lauren Baratz-Logsted has created a heartwarming story about family and being true to yourself.
A Margaret Ferguson Book "Baratz-Logsted weaves in just enough history to root Mamie's story in her time, a moment when a nation came together and felt proud of human possibilitiesBrand: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
View the profiles of people named Michael J Collins. Join Facebook to connect with Michael J Collins and others you may know. Facebook gives people the. Michael Collins in (Eric Baradat / AFP / Getty Images) This is the part of the mission, the hours of isolation, that journalists always .His most successful pen names were Michael Collins and Mark Sadler.
In fact, books written under those two names were added to the list of Best Mysteries in the years they came out. Interestingly enough, even with the popularity the Collins and Sadler Pseudonyms elicited, a lot of prolific reviewers and critics didn't know that those two.
evenousaccess.com - Michael Collins book © 2020


The Civic Party had its genesis in the awakening in 2003 of Hong Kong professionals who had refused to participate in politics. We no longer wanted to be penalized by being governed by our inferiors. On July 1, 2003, more than 500,000 people marched the streets of Hong Kong to protest against poor governance and, in particular, the imminent passing into law of the National Security Bill that was an affront to our core values and institutions. These values and institutions Hong Kong has shared with liberal democracies of the world. They include the Rule of Law, Separation of Powers, Freedoms of information and speech, Liberties guaranteed to individuals, Openness, Equality, Fair Competition and Market Economy, just to mention a few.
In the 12 years since its inauguration on 19 March 2006, the Civic Party has been doing our utmost to defend these values and institutions we in Hong Kong, alongside liberal democracies of the world, have believed in and trusted for centuries. We believe the price of freedom is eternal vigilence. These efforts of ours are, however, becoming increasingly less effective given President Xi Jinping's confidence in the China Model. The President, by his latest constitutional amendments passed by the 13th National People's Congress, has undone attempts by Deng Xiaoping to institutionalize machineries of the Chinese Communist Party and the country. The high degree autonomy and universal suffrage promised by the mini constitution of Hong Kong, The Basic Law, are respectively under threat and nowhere in sight.
It cannot be emphasized more that despite setbacks caused by treacherous behaviour of the sovereign and pressure from an administration that has become more and more authoritarian, we have not despaired and are definitely not giving up. When values and institutions practised by liberal democracies of the world are being challenged, we hope Hong Kong will continue to showcase not only that these are practical and practicable, but that they can prosper and flourish in a city that has been culturally and ethnically Chinese.
The Civic Party has always been eager and ready to share our Hong Kong experience with the world. It is time the world's liberal democracies watched this city and instructed on their interactions with China.


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Lieberths selected as foster parents of year
WOOSTER -- Praised for being strong advocates for children in their care, transporting them to numerous occupational, physical and speech/language therapies, Jeff and Phyllis Lieberth were recognized as the Wayne County Children Services Foster Parents of the Year.The Doylestown couple was chosen from 57 families who provide foster care through Children Services. They have been licensed for eight years, have adopted four children since 2000 and would like to adopt a fifth child soon. Additionally, they have three grown children and have provided short term care to six foster children."They juggle a demanding schedule for their kids and still manage to keep things in perspective," said placement supervisor Joanne Walker, who said she admires the Lieberths for their dependability and sense of humor.Walker also complimented the Lieberths on their ability to overcome the challenges that blended families often face.Sharing their experiences of living in the foster care system, Tami Timmons and Armisha Stephens spoke at the awards banquet on Thursday.Timmons, now 27 and a college graduate, said her foster mom stepped in and became a mother to her and later an involved grandmother to Timmons' son."Through all my struggles my foster mom, Carolyn Auckerman, has stood by my side. She stepped in and became a mother to me during those years when a young woman really needs her mom. She is the only grandmother my son knows, and I know she loves him just as much as she would if they had the same blood running through their veins. And for that I am blessed," she said, adding, "If anyone asks who she is, I tell them she's my foster mom and I love her."Stephens, 18 and preparing to graduate from Waynedale High School, talked about how far she has come since first becoming a foster child at 15 years old."For the first time I got to see something different. I got to see two parents. I got to see people that really cared," she said.Timmons and Stephens both said they want to use their experiences to help children in need. Timmons recently became a licensed social worker, and Stephens mentioned the possibility of becoming a foster parent someday.Receiving certificates for 20 years of service were Charlie and Darlene Ray, Apple Creek, and Dave and Anne Imhof, Wooster. Steve and Judy Kuhns, Fredericksburg, received a certificate for 15 years of service.Recipients of certificates for five years of service were: Don and Cheryl Clark, Big Prairie; Doug and Connie Green, Wooster; John and Debbie Shetler, Fredericksburg; Joe and Lydia Swartzentruber, Danville; Rick and Sarah Zoker, Doylestown; Sheila Bennett, Canton; and Retha and Charlie Brechmacher, Orrville.


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Norma Minkowitz:
Body to Soul
Fairfield University Art Museum
Bellarmine Hall Galleries
Scroll To Learn More
Norma Minkowitz: Body to Soul is a solo exhibition surveying the artist's four-decade engagement with the physical and symbolic properties of thread. Minkowitz reinvents traditional needlework by crocheting fantastical forms, coating them in resin and shellac to create rigid sculptures and hangings. The delicate, mesh-like surfaces of her artworks break down oppositions between soft and hard, inside and outside, body and soul.
The poetic title Body to Soul is borrowed from just one of the sculptures that will be on view, but it is a broader theme that reverberates across the exhibition's selection of over thirty vessels, sculptures, wall hangings, wearables, and works on paper – including never-before-seen examples coming from the artist's studio.
Norma Minkowitz lives and works in Connecticut. Her work is represented in private and public collections across the United States and internationally, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, New York; The Renwick Gallery, National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; the Museum of Arts and Design, New York, New York; the De Young Memorial Museum, San Francisco, California; The Philadelphia Museum of Art, Pennsylvania; and the Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut. The James Renwick Alliance named her a Master of the Medium, and she has also been recognized by the American Craft Council and the National Endowment for the Arts. She is unique among fiber artists creating hard sculptures from soft materials, and for using thread to invoke universal themes of mortality, memory, nature, and writing.
About the Curator
Sarah Parrish holds a PhD from Boston University and is currently Assistant Professor of Art History at Plymouth State University, New Hampshire. Specializing in contemporary American fiber art, she served as the Andrew W. Mellon-funded Curatorial Research Fellow and catalog author for the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston's landmark textile exhibition Fiber: Sculpture 1960-Present. Her writing on twentieth-century craft also appears in Art Papers magazine, The Burlington Magazine, Phaidon's Vitamin T: Threads and Textiles in Contemporary Art, and the peer-reviewed Journal of Design and Culture. She is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Humanities' Humanities Connections grant, and was named the American Craft Council's Emerging Voices Scholar in 2017.
Image: Norma Minkowitz, Body to Soul, 2003, fiber, metal, resin, paint, mirror, crocheted. Museum of Arts and Design, New York; purchased with funds by the Windgate Charitable Foundation, 2004. Photography © Tom Grotta, Courtesy browngrotta arts
Browse Selected Images
Events listed below with a location are live, in-person programs. When possible, those events will also be streamed on thequicklive.com and the recordings posted to our YouTube channel.
Opening Lecture: Body to Soul
Thursday, January 26, 5 p.m.
Sarah Parrish, PhD, Assistant Professor of Art History, Plymouth State University, and Curator of the Exhibition
Part of the Edwin L. Weisl, Jr. Lectureships in Art History, funded by the Robert Lehman Foundation
Bellarmine Hall, Diffley Board Room and streaming (registration required)
Opening Reception: Body to Soul
Thursday, January 26, 6-8 p.m.
Bellarmine Hall Galleries and Great Hall
Gallery Talk: Norma Minkowitz
Wednesday, February 1, 12 noon
This event is in-person only and will not be recorded
Lecture: A Cut at the Heart of Womanhood
Tuesday, February 7, 5 p.m.
Stephanie Welsh DNP, CNM, FACNM, Assistant Professor of the Practice, Clinical Faculty Specialist in Midwifery and winner of 1996 Pulitzer Prize in Feature Photography
Kelley Theatre and streaming on thequicklive.com
Pop-up Shop: Woven Community
Saturday, February 11, 2-4 p.m.
Bellarmine Hall, Museum Classroom
Workshop: Unusual Materials: Interweaving and Interleaving
Wednesday, February 15, 11 a.m. - 1:30 p.m.
Jo Yarrington, Professor of Studio Art
Bellarmine Hall Galleries and Museum Classroom
Space is limited and registration is required
Family Day: Fantastical Fibers
Saturday, February 18, 12:30-2 p.m. and 2:30-4 p.m.
Art in Focus: Norma Minkowitz, Goodbye Goddess, 2003, paint and resin on fiber
Thursday, March 2, 11 a.m. (in person) and 12 noon (streaming)
Knit Night
Thursday, March 2, 7 –9 p.m.
Kate Wellen, Museum Educator
Museum Classroom
Meditation and Mindfulness with Jackie DeLise
Wednesday, March 22, 5 p.m.
Special session focusing on the "body and soul"
Drawing Party
Wednesday, May 3, 7 –9 p.m.
Bellarmine Hall Galleries and Walsh Gallery Hours:
Tuesday through Saturday, 11 a.m. – 4 p.m. We are closed for national and university holidays and during inclement weather.
The FUAM's main galleries are located on the lower level of Bellarmine Hall. For GPS please use the following address: 200 Barlow Road, Fairfield, CT 06824 (or click the map at right for directions).
Free parking is available in front of Bellarmine Hall. Handicap parking is available next to the museum's service and classroom entrance on the lower level of Bellarmine Hall.
The museum is open to the public and admission is free.
Private tours with a curator are available for a fee; please contact museum@fairfield.edu or 203-254-4046.
Reach Us By train:
Take Metro-North, New Haven Line, to Fairfield Station (approximately 70 minutes from Grand Central Station).
www.mta.info/mnr
For further information or to schedule a visit or tour, please contact
museum@fairfield.edu
Become a Member Today →