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About Us Bitcoin.com

Posted on March 3, 2019 by Danzig

Purchasing managerHas over 15 years of purchasing experience in multiple industries across various disciplines. Certified professional in supply management and a degree in Information Technology. Career began in the military, working on supply chain & logistics, responsible for all forms of equipment to ensure unit's battle readiness. Have traveled throughout the United States and lived in South Korea for a time during my tenure. After the military, worked for a couple investment banking firms, a media/news organization and a real estate company procuring anything from networking gear, mobile devices, hardware/software, office equipment, office services, cloud services, consultants, programmers, construction, and security among others.

My crypto journey began in 2011, mainly as a speculator and miner of litecoin and dogecoin. Over time my feelings towards crypto as a whole changed from merely being an investment vehicle to a technological breakthrough that will one day change the definition of what currency is supposed to be. Although adoption will not be easy, it is a challenge that I gladly accept.

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WW3 – Russia says Trump plotted Syria missile strike BEFORE …

Posted on March 2, 2019 by Danzig

A staunch ally of President Bashar al-Assad, Russian leader Vladimir Putin said he regarded the US action as "aggression against a sovereign nation" on a "made-up pretext.

And he savaged the cynical attempt to distract the world from civilian deaths in Iraq, according to spokesman Dmitry Peskov.

Just hours after the strikes, he announced the attacks had seriously damaged ties between Washington and Moscow - which a spokesman claims was already in tatters.

Adding the missile strike broke international law, Russias foreign ministry also said it was obvious that the US strikes had been prepared before the chemical attack.

Two US warships fired 59 cruise missiles from the eastern Mediterranean Sea at the Syrian airbase today following a poison gas attack in a rebel-held area on Tuesday.

At least 70 people, many of them children, were killed in the chemical attack in the Syrian town of Khan Sheikhoun - but the Syrian government has denied it was behind the atrocity.

Now the US has launched its toughest direct action so far during Syria's six-year-old civil war.

DONALD TRUMP ANNOUNCES SYRIA AIRSTRIKES - SPEECH IN FULL

And the move has left Donald Trump facing his biggest foreign policy crisis since his inauguration, further heightening tension with Russia and Iran.

Announcing the attack, President Trump said: "Years of previous attempts at changing Assad's behaviour have all failed and failed very dramatically.

US officials said they informed Russian forces ahead of the missile attacks and took great pains to avoid hitting Russian troops at the base.

But Russian strongman Vladimir Putin has lashed out at the controversial decision - which Trump claims was in Americas vital national security interest.

Kremlin and pro-Kremlin lawmakers have since suggested the missile launch had dealt a significant blow to any hopes of doing business with Trump.

Mr Peskov said: Putin views the U.S. strikes on Syria as aggression against a sovereign state in violation of the norms of international law and on a made-up up pretext.

"Washington's step will inflict major damage on US-Russia ties.

He added Russia did not believe that Syria possessed chemical weapons and that the move would cause a serious obstacle to creating an international coalition to fight terrorism.

Russia is now expected to call for an urgent meeting of the UN Security Council to discuss the matter.

Iran also denounced the "destructive and dangerous" strike, the Students News Agency ISNA quoted a Foreign Ministry spokesman as saying.

The spokesman added: Iran strongly condemns any such unilateral strikes ... Such measures will strengthen terrorists in Syria ... and will complicate the situation in Syria and the region.

However Britain gave its backing to the military action in thebeleagueredregion.

A government spokesman said: The UK government fully supports the U.S. action, which we believe was an appropriate response to the barbaric chemical weapons attack launched by the Syrian regime and is intended to deter further attacks.

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WW3 - Russia says Trump plotted Syria missile strike BEFORE ...

Chillingly accurate 200-year-old letter predicts WW3 and …

Posted on March 2, 2019 by Danzig

Albert Pike, who was a captain for the US army during the American Civil War, is said to have written a doctrine to an Italian politician outlining plans for the trio global conflicts.

The letter plots how and why the first and second world wars broke out in the 1900s and provides an even more chilling prophecy over a third and final battle.

The document allegedly suggested World War One was planned to overthrow the Tsars in Russia and make the country a communist stronghold.

The Second World War was sparked as a catalyst to destroy Nazism, according to the letter, so communism could take over wearier governments and for a sovereign state of Israel to be set up in Palestine.

A third world war, according to Mr Pike, will be fought against the West and leaders of the Islamic war.

Mr Pike warned the third war would be "the most bloody turmoil".

The document, revealed by the Daily Star, features heavily in the book Satan, Prince of this World, by former naval officer William Guy Carr.

Mr Pike is said to have written, according to Mr Carr's book: "The First World War must be brought about in order to permit the Illuminati to overthrow the power of the Tsars in Russia and of making that country a fortress of atheistic Communism."

It was reportedly sent by Pike, a freemason, to Italian politician Giuseppe Mazzini and was dated August 15, 1871.

The letter allegedly said: "The Third World War must be fomented by taking advantage of the differences caused by the 'agentur' of the 'Illuminati' between the political Zionists and the leaders of Islamic World.

"The war must be conducted in such a way that Islam (the Moslem Arabic World) and political Zionism (the State of Israel) mutually destroy each other.

"Meanwhile the other nations, once more divided on this issue will be constrained to fight to the point of complete physical, moral, spiritual and economical exhaustion.

"We shall unleash the Nihilists and the atheists, and we shall provoke a formidable social cataclysm which in all its horror will show clearly to the nations the effect of absolute atheism, origin of savagery and of the most bloody turmoil."

It was originally claimed the text was on show at the British Museum's Library and was mysteriously taken down in the 1970s and never seen again.

Both the British Museum and the British Library confirmed there is no record of the letter being in the establishment's possession.

Private Islands – Official Site

Posted on March 2, 2019 by Danzig

Episode 1

Did you know that there are 12 thousand private islands in the world? On this episode of Private Islands we're showing you how to find your own secluded paradise.

Escape from the pressures of everyday life with Private Islands. On this episode were showing you how your front yard can be miles of palm trees and glittering coastline.

Join us as we explore the most magical and luxurious private resort island in the world. Owned by famed illusionist David Copperfield, Musha Cay provides a memorable one-of-a-kind experience like nowhere else on earth.

We're traveling 1,000 miles away from anywhere in search of the perfect private island. Forget about the jet lag because when you land in paradise, your dream becomes reality. It's first-class service on the private island of Desroches.

The Bahamas has grown into private island real estates most in-demand market. Escape to the most exotic and remote islands a multi-millionaire buyer, celebrity, or luxury-seeking tourist can find on this episode of Private Islands!

There's nothing like it in the Caribbean, or even in the world! The result of seven years of construction, Emerald Cay in Turks and Caicos combines pristine natural beauty with state-of-the-art luxury to provide the ultimate private island paradise.

Come see how the affluent are rediscovering themselves in the private island of Turks and Caicos. Immerse yourself in sunshine, sea and surf, just 500 miles off the coast of Florida. Life's short, but your quality time doesn't have to be!

Join host Christina Cindrich as she takes you on a magical journey through the private island of French Polynesia. Discover heaven on earth in your own utopian paradise full of beauty, adventure and above all, sheer escapism.

Tales of pirates, betrayal and hidden treasure all share a part of this island's past. There are some places on earth that simply must be experienced to fully understand and Peter Island in the British Virgin Islands is one of those places.

Roatan is one of the best kept secrets of the Caribbean. We take viewers on an underwater adventure and show the most luxurious private islands Honduras has to offer.

From Miami to colorful Key West, the Florida Keys have become one of the America's favorite tropical escapes. Join host Christina Cindrich as she takes you to some of the most secluded private islands for an experience that cannot be beat.

Join host Christina Cindrich in a country that combines both adventure and luxury into one complete island experience. With one foot planted in the mysterious jungles and the other dipped in the Caribbean Sea, Belize will awaken all of your senses.

Located off the coast of "The Spice Isle" Granada in the Caribbean is one of the most luxurious private islands you'll ever see. Calivigny Island is truly the ultimate escape for the affluent traveler in search of their own slice of paradise.

Youll live as few have lived before in a place where the finest luxuries co-exist in absolute harmony with nature. This is Little Bokeelia Island, a private island paradise that could be yours!

Join host Christina Cindrich as she takes you to one of the worlds most exotic destinations, Fiji! Noted for its magical landscape, stunning beaches, and friendly people, these islands are a spectacular taste of heaven right here on Earth.

Join host Christina Cindrich in the postcard perfect island nation of Fiji. With its white sandy beaches, fascinating culture and magical underwater world, this is an unforgettable Private Island experience that youll never want to be rescued from!

Join host Christina Cindrich on a 300-acre private island paradise off the coast of Antigua. With its gorgeous villas and multi-million dollar estates, Jumby Bay's beauty will cast an unforgettable spell of serene enchantment.

Join host Christina Cindrich for an unforgettable experience on two Four Seasons luxury island resorts in the Maldives. Your postcard perfect paradise will come to life right before your eyes in a destination that will surely take your breath away.

Experience the romance of the South Pacific, the laid-back beauty of the Caribbean, the adventure of Central America and the exotic splendor of Asia. Host Christina Cindrich takes you to her top 10 most incredible private islands in the world.

Perhaps nowhere else in Thailand can you enjoy the combination of sun, beach and nightlife quite like in Phuket. Thailand's largest and most popular island seduces its visitors with a vibrant mix of nighttime entertainment and beach culture.

Isla Simca is a jungle hideaway where natural beauty, art, adventure and architecture fuse into a one-of-a-kind retreat. Join host Christina Cindrich on this Panamanian island that until now has been hidden away from the world's prying eyes!

The Grenadines, an island chain deep in the Caribbean. The name alone elicit visions of exotic and peaceful scenery. St. Vincent being the largest, but away from the hustle and traffic, become mesmerized by the beauty of these castaway islands.

The name Laucala is whispered in all the best circles partly because only the best know how to pronounce it. Owned by the co-founder of Red Bull, this Fijian paradise is one of the worlds top island resorts and once there its easy to see why.

Conjuring up postcard-perfect images of South Pacific indulgence and breathtaking scenery, Bora Bora is a haven of exclusive luxury in French Polynesia. Join host Christina Cindrich in this exclusive Private Islands episode you wont want to miss!

Join host Christina Cindrich in a destination known as the real Africa. With its private river islands and abundance of wildlife, Zambia gives an authentic feeling of a wilderness that is wild, beautiful, and slightly unpredictable.

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Mars Colonization Timeline | human Mars

Posted on March 2, 2019 by Danzig

Inspired from FutureTimeline.net and the Integrated Space Plan we have created a speculated timeline of human exploration and colonization of Mars. Predictions are based on a reasonably optimistic evaluation of technological and social progress of humanity. Only the most important and innovative events are mentioned. Timeline is regularly updated taking into account latest developments.Last update was made on 12th February, 2019.

Go to: 2020s 2030s 2040s 2050s 2060s 2070s 2080s 2090s 22nd century

Mars becomes practically self-sufficient, having to import only the most complex goods and intellectual property.

The self-sufficiency results in Mars becoming an independent nation-state. The Martian government has to buy up the non-Martian governmental assets located on Mars.

As a technologically advanced frontier society Mars and orbital stations around it become the primary source of specialists and workers needed for human bases and missions further in Main asteroid belt and outer Solar system.

Air pressure and temperature on Mars is increased to the level where there is flowing water on the surface and simple plants can be introduced into newly created biosphere of the planet.

As one of the lower regions on Mars close to the equator Valles Marineris is seeing the most benefits from terraformation activities and Phobos space elevator; cities and farming communities are spreading throughout the valleys and at the end of the 22nd century there are nearly 5 million people living in Valles Marineris. It's the most populous urban area on Mars.

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Timeline of abolition of slavery and serfdom – Wikipedia

Posted on March 2, 2019 by Danzig

DateJurisdictionDescription1800United StatesAmerican citizens banned from investment and employment in the international slave trade in an additional Slave Trade Act.1802FranceNapoleon re-introduces slavery in sugarcane-growing colonies.[66] OhioState constitution abolishes slavery.1803Denmark-NorwayAbolition of transatlantic slave trade takes effect on January 1.1804New JerseyAll the Northern states abolished slavery; New Jersey in 1804 was the last to act. None of the Southern or border states abolished slavery before the American Civil War.[67]HaitiHaiti declares independence and abolishes slavery.[48]18041813 SerbiaLocal slaves emancipated.1805United KingdomA bill for abolition passes in House of Commons but is rejected in the House of Lords.1806United StatesIn a message to Congress, Thomas Jefferson calls for criminalizing the international slave trade, asking Congress to "withdraw the citizens of the United States from all further participation in those violations of human rights which the morality, the reputation, and the best of our country have long been eager to proscribe."1807United StatesInternational slave trade made a felony in Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves; this act takes effect on 1 January 1808, the earliest date permitted under the Constitution.[68]United KingdomAbolition of the Slave Trade Act abolishes slave trading in British Empire. Captains fined 120 per slave transported. Patrols sent to the African coast to arrest slaving vessels. The West Africa Squadron (Royal Navy) is established to suppress slave trading; by 1865, nearly 150,000 people freed by anti-slavery operations.[69] WarsawConstitution abolishes serfdom.[70]PrussiaThe Stein-Hardenberg Reforms abolish serfdom.[70] Michigan TerritoryJudge Augustus Woodward denies the return of two slaves owned by a man in Windsor, Upper Canada. Woodward declares that any man "coming into this Territory is by law of the land a freeman."[71]1808United StatesImportation and exportation of slaves made a crime.[72]1810 New SpainIndependence leader Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla demands the abolition of slavery.1811United KingdomSlave trading made a felony punishable by transportation for both British subjects and foreigners.SpainThe Cdiz Cortes abolish the last remaining seigneurial rights.[43]East India CompanyThe Company issued regulations 10 of 1811, prohibiting the transport of slaves into Company territory, adding to the 1774 restrictions.[46]ChileThe First National Congress approves a proposal of Manuel de Salas that declares Freedom of Wombs, freeing the children of slaves born in Chilean territory, regardless of their parents' condition. The slave trade is banned and the slaves who stay for more than six months in Chilean territory are automatically declared freedmen.1812SpainThe Cdiz Constitution gives citizenship and equal rights to all residents in Spain and her territories, excluding slaves. Deputies Jos Miguel Guridi y Alcocer and Agustn Argelles argue for the abolition of slavery unsuccessfully.[43]1813 New SpainIndependence leader Jos Mara Morelos y Pavn declares slavery abolished in the documents Sentimientos de la Nacin. La PlataLaw of Wombs passed by the Assembly of Year XIII. Slaves born after 31 January 1813 will be granted freedom when they are married, or on their 16th birthday for women and 20th for men, and upon their manumission will be given land and tools to work it.[73]1814 La PlataAfter the occupation of Montevideo, all slaves born in modern Uruguayan territory are declared free.NetherlandsSlave trade abolished.1815PortugalSlave trade banned north of the Equator in return for a 750,000 payment by Britain.[74] FloridaBritish withdrawing after the War of 1812 leave a fully armed fort in the hands of maroons, escaped slaves and their descendents, and their Seminole allies. Becomes known as Negro Fort.United KingdomPortugal Sweden-NorwayFrance AustriaRussiaSpainPrussiaThe Congress of Vienna declares its opposition to slavery.[75]1816 EstoniaSerfdom abolished. FloridaNegro Fort destroyed in the Battle of Negro Fort by U.S. forces under the command of General Andrew Jackson. AlgeriaAlgiers bombarded by the British and Dutch navies in an attempt to end North African piracy and slave raiding in the Mediterranean. 3,000 slaves freed.1817 CourlandSerfdom abolished.SpainFerdinand VII signs a cedula banning the importation of slaves in Spanish possessions beginning in 1820,[43] in return for a 400,000 payment from Britain.[74] However, some slaves are still smuggled in after this date. VenezuelaSimon Bolivar calls for the abolition of slavery.[43] New York4 July 1827 set as date to free all ex-slaves from indenture.[76] La PlataConstitution supports the abolition of slavery, but does not ban it.[43]1818United KingdomSpainBilateral treaty abolishing the slave trade.[77]United KingdomPortugalBilateral treaty abolishing the slave trade.[77]FranceSlave trade banned.United KingdomNetherlandsBilateral treaty taking additional measures to enforce the 1814 ban on slave trading.[77]1819 LivoniaSerfdom abolished. Upper CanadaAttorney-General John Robinson declares all black residents free.HawaiiThe ancient Hawaiian kapu system is abolished during the Ai Noa, and with it the distinction between the kauw slave class and the makainana (commoners).[78]1820United StatesThe Compromise of 1820 bans slavery north of the 36 30' line; the Act to Protect the Commerce of the United States and Punish the Crime of Piracy is amended to consider the maritime slave trade as piracy, making it punishable with death. IndianaThe supreme court orders almost all slaves in the state to be freed in Polly v. Lasselle.SpainThe 1817 abolition of the slave trade takes effect.[79]1821 MexicoThe Plan of Iguala frees the slaves born in Mexico.[43]United StatesSpainIn accordance with AdamsOns Treaty of 1819, Florida becomes a territory of the United States. A main reason was Spain's inability or unwillingness to capture and return escaped slaves. PeruAbolition of slave trade and implementation of a plan to gradually end slavery.[43]Gran ColombiaEmancipation for sons and daughters born to slave mothers, program for compensated emancipation set.[80]1822 HaitiJean Pierre Boyer annexes Spanish Haiti and abolishes slavery there. LiberiaFounded by the American Colonization Society as a colony for emancipated slaves. GreeceSlavery abolished with independence.1823ChileSlavery abolished.[48]United KingdomThe Anti-Slavery Society is founded.1824MexicoThe new constitution effectively abolishes slavery. Central AmericaSlavery abolished.1825 UruguayImportation of slaves banned. HaitiFrance, with warships at the ready, demanded Haiti compensate France for its loss of slaves and its slave colony1827United Kingdom Sweden-NorwayBilateral treaty abolishing the slave trade.[77] New YorkLast vestiges of slavery abolished. Children born between 1799 and 1827 are indentured until age 25 (females) or age 28 (males).[81]1828IllinoisIn Phoebe v. Jay, the Illinois Supreme Court rules that indentured servants in Illinois cannot be treated as chattel and bequeathing them by will is illegal.[82]1829MexicoLast slaves freed just as the first president of partial African ancestry (Vicente Guerrero) is elected.[48]

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Love146 | The Abolition of Child Trafficking & Exploitation.

Posted on March 2, 2019 by Danzig

Love146 | The Abolition of Child Trafficking & Exploitation.

give

For 16 years, Love146 has been helping grow the movement to end child trafficking while providing effective and thoughtful solutions, including:

At Love146, were not quick fix people. We believe weve got to be ready to journey with a child for the long haul, and monthly givers allow us to do just that. Because of regular donors, we can show up for children month after month.

Through prevention education, we give children the advantage. We teach them how to spot traffickers even when they dont look like youd expect, and were building skills to decrease their vulnerability. Not A Number is an in-depth prevention program informed by survivors and written with the help of some of the leading anti-trafficking and child protection experts.

Watch the Video and Get Involved with Prevention

Understand the Problem

Trafficking and exploitation depend on vulnerability. How are children vulnerable? What tactics do traffickers use? Go deeper into the issue and hear accounts from children Love146 has served.

Earlier this year, police say New England Patriots Owner Robert Kraft was filmed receiving sexual services at the Orchids of Asia Day Spa in Jupiter, Florida. I think a year from now, Kraft will be filmed sitting in his box seats at the Superbowl, as though nothing happened. I have a hunch that next year, my family will be watching the NFL championships again and just like this year, Kraft will be up there in the box clapping. Hell probably pay criminal fines that amount to what he might pay for a few nice bottles of wine; another expense in a luxury budget.

Are you or someone you know in need of urgent help? Call the US National Trafficking Hotline: 1-888-3737-888

(stuff that makes you smile and never clogs your inbox)

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There are a number of ways through which we can create a partnership:

Please email info@love146.org.uk us for more information.

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NanoEngineering (NANO) Courses – University of California …

Posted on March 1, 2019 by Danzig

[ undergraduate program | graduate program | faculty ]

All courses, faculty listings, and curricular and degree requirements described herein are subject to change or deletion without notice.

For course descriptions not found in the UC San Diego General Catalog 201819, please contact the department for more information.

The department website is http://nanoengineering.ucsd.edu/undergrad-programs

All students enrolled in NanoEngineering courses or admitted to the NanoEngineering major are expected to meet prerequisite and performance standards, i.e., students may not enroll in any NanoEngineering courses or courses in another department that are required for the major prior to having satisfied prerequisite courses with a C or better. (The department does not consider D or F grades as adequate preparation for subsequent material.) Additional details are given under the program outline, course descriptions, and admission procedures for the Jacobs School of Engineering in this catalog.

NANO 1. NanoEngineering Seminar (1)

Overview of NanoEngineering. Presentations and discussions of basic knowledge and career opportunities in nanotechnology for professional development. Introduction to campus library resources. P/NP grades only.

NANO 4. ExperienceNanoEngineering(1)

Introduction to NanoEngineering lab-based skills. Hands-on training and experimentation with nanofabrication techniques, integration, and analytical tools. This class is for NANO majors who are incoming freshmen, to be taken their first year.This class is for NanoEngineering majors who are incoming freshmen, to be taken their first year. P/NP grades only. Prerequisites: department approval required.

NANO 15. Engineering Computation Using Matlab (4)

Introduction to the solution of engineering problems using computational methods. Formulating problem statements, selecting algorithms, writing computer programs, and analyzing output using Matlab. Computational problems from NanoEngineering, chemical engineering, and materials science are introduced. The course requires no prior programming skills. Cross-listed with CENG 15.

NANO 15R. Engineering Computation Using Matlab Online

Introduction to solution of engineering problems using computational methods. Formulating problem statements, selecting algorithms, writing computer programs, and analyzing output using Matlab. Computational problems from NanoEngineering, chemical engineering, and materials science are introduced. This is a fully online, self-paced course that utilizes multi-platform instructional techniques (video, text, and instructional coding environments). The course requires no prior programming skills. Students may not receive credit for both CENG 15 and NANO 15. Cross-listed with CENG 15R. Students may only receive credit for one of the following: NANO 15R, NANO 15, CENG 15R, or CENG 15.

NANO 100L. Physical Properties of Materials Lab (4)

Experimental investigation of physical properties of materials such as: thermal expansion coefficient, thermal conductivity, glass transitions in polymers, resonant vibrational response, longitudinal and shear acoustic wave speeds, Curie temperatures, UV-VIS absorption and reflection. Prerequisites: NANO 108.

NANO 101. Introduction to NanoEngineering (4)

Introduction to NanoEngineering; nanoscale fabrication: nanolithography and self-assembly; characterization tools; nanomaterials and nanostructures: nanotubes, nanowires, nanoparticles, and nanocomposites; nanoscale and molecular electronics; nanotechnology in magnetic systems; nanotechnology in integrative systems; nanoscale optoelectronics; nanobiotechnology: biomimetic systems, nanomotors, nanofluidics, and nanomedicine. Priority enrollment given to NanoEngineering majors. Prerequisites: NANO 1 or NANO 4, Chem 6B, Phys 2B, Math 20C, and CENG 15 or CENG 15R or NANO 15 or NANO 15R or MAE 8. Department approval required.

NANO 102. Foundations in NanoEngineering: Chemical Principles (4)

Chemical principles involved in synthesis, assembly, and performance of nanostructured materials and devices. Chemical interactions, classical and statistical thermodynamics of small systems, diffusion, carbon-based nanomaterials, supramolecular chemistry, liquid crystals, colloid and polymer chemistry, lipid vesicles, surface modification, surface functionalization, catalysis. Priority enrollment given to NanoEngineering majors. Prerequisites: Chem 6C, Math 20D, NANO 101, PHYS 2D, and NANO 106. Restricted to NanoEngineering majors or by department approval.

NANO 103. Foundations in NanoEngineering: Biochemical Principles (4)

Principles of biochemistry tailored to nanotechnologies. The structure and function of biomolecules and their specific roles in molecular interactions and signal pathways. Detection methods at the micro and nano scales. Priority enrollment will be given to NanoEngineering majors. Prerequisites: BILD 1, Chem 6C, NANO 101, and NANO 102. Department approval required.

NANO 104. Foundations in NanoEngineering: Physical Principles (4)

Introduction to quantum mechanics and nanoelectronics. Wave mechanics, the Schroedinger equation, free and confined electrons, band theory of solids. Nanosolids in 0D, 1D, and 2D. Application to nanoelectronic devices. Priority enrollment given to NanoEngineering majors Prerequisites: Math 20D, NANO 101. Department approval required.

NANO 106. Crystallography of Materials (4)

Fundamentals of crystallography, and practice of methods to study material structure and symmetry. Curie symmetries. Tensors as mathematical description of material properties and symmetry restrictions. Introduction to diffraction methods, including X-ray, neutron, and electron diffraction. Close-packed and other common structures of real-world materials. Derivative and superlattice structures. Prerequisites: Math 20F.

NANO 107.Electronic Devices and Circuits for Nanoengineers (4)

Overview of electrical devices and CMOS integrated circuits emphasizing fabrication processes, and scaling behavior. Design, and simulation of submicron CMOS circuits including amplifiers active filters digital logic, and memory circuits. Limitations of current technologies and possible impact of nanoelectronic technologies.Prerequisites: NANO 15, NANO 101, Math 20B or Math 20D, and Phys 2B.

NANO 108. Materials Science and Engineering (4)

Structure and control of materials: metals, ceramics, glasses, semiconductors, polymers to produce useful properties. Atomic structures. Defects in materials, phase diagrams, micro structural control. Mechanical, rheological, electrical, optical and magnetic properties discussed. Time temperature transformation diagrams. Diffusion. Scale dependent material properties. Prerequisites: upper-division standing.

NANO 110. Molecular Modeling of Nanoscale Systems (4)

Principles and applications of molecular modeling and simulations toward NanoEngineering. Topics covered include molecular mechanics, energy minimization, statistical mechanics, molecular dynamics simulations, and Monte Carlo simulations. Students will get hands-on training in running simulations and analyzing simulation results. Prerequisites: Math 20F, NANO 102, NANO 104, and NANO 15 or CENG 15 or MAE 8. Restricted to NanoEngineering majors or by department approval.

NANO 111. Characterization of NanoEngineering Systems (4)

Fundamentals and practice of methods to image, measure, and analyze materials and devices that are structured at the nanometer scale. Optical and electron microscopy; scanning probe methods; photon-, ion-, electron-probe methods, spectroscopic, magnetic, electrochemical, and thermal methods. Prerequisites: NANO 102.

NANO 112. Synthesis and Fabrication of NanoEngineering Systems (4)

Introduction to methods for fabricating materials and devices in NanoEngineering. Nano-particle, -vesicle, -tube, and -wire synthesis. Top-down methods including chemical vapor deposition, conventional and advanced lithography, doping, and etching. Bottom-up methods including self-assembly. Integration of heterogeneous structures into functioning devices. Prerequisites: NANO 102, NANO 104, NANO 111.

NANO 114. Probability and Statistical Methods for Engineers (4)

Probability theory, conditional probability, Bayes theorem, discrete random variables, continuous random variables, expectation and variance, central limit theorem, graphical and numerical presentation of data, least squares estimation and regression, confidence intervals, testing hypotheses. Cross-listed with CENG 114. Students may not receive credit for both NANO 114 and CENG 114. Prerequisites: Math 20F and NANO 15 or CENG 15 or MAE 8.

NANO 120A. NanoEngineering System Design I (4)

Principles of product design and the design process. Application and integration of technologies in the design and production of nanoscale components. Engineering economics. Initiation of team design projects to be completed in NANO 120B. Prerequisites: NANO 110.

NANO 120B. NanoEngineering System Design II (4)

Principles of product quality assurance in design and production. Professional ethics. Safety and design for the environment. Culmination of team design projects initiated in NANO 120A with a working prototype designed for a real engineering application. Prerequisites: NANO 120A.

NANO 134. Polymeric Materials (4)

Foundations of polymeric materials. Topics: structure of polymers; mechanisms of polymer synthesis; characterization methods using calorimetric, mechanical, rheological, and X-ray-based techniques; and electronic, mechanical, and thermodynamic properties. Special classes of polymers: engineering plastics, semiconducting polymers,photoresists, and polymers for medicine. Cross-listed with CENG 134.Students may not receive credit for bothCENG134 andNANO134. Prerequisites:Chem 6Cand Phys2C.

NANO 141A. Engineering Mechanics I: Analysis of Equilibrium (4)

Newtons laws. Concepts of force and moment vector. Free body diagrams. Internal and external forces. Equilibrium of concurrent, coplanar, and three-dimensional system of forces. Equilibrium analysis of structural systems, including beams, trusses, and frames. Equilibrium problems with friction. Prerequisites:Math 20C and Phys 2A.

NANO 141B.Engineering Mechanics II: Analysis of Motion (4)

Newtons laws of motion. Kinematic and kinetic description of particle motion. Angular momentum. Energy and work principles. Motion of the system of interconnected particles.Mass center. Degrees of freedom. Equations of planar motion of rigid bodies. Energy methods. Lagranges equations of motion. Introduction to vibration. Free and forced vibrations of a single degree of freedom system. Undamped and damped vibrations. Application to NanoEngineering problems.Prerequisites:Math 20D and NANO 141A.

NANO 146. Nanoscale Optical Microscopy and Spectroscopy (4)

Fundamentals in optical imaging and spectroscopy at the nanometer scale. Diffraction-limited techniques, near-field methods, multi-photon imaging and spectroscopy, Raman techniques, Plasmon-enhanced methods, scan-probe techniques, novel sub-diffraction-limit imaging techniques, and energy transfer methods. Prerequisites: NANO 103 and 104.

NANO 148. Thermodynamics of Materials (4)

Fundamental laws of thermodynamics for simple substances; application to flow processes and to non-reacting mixtures; statistical thermodynamics of ideal gases and crystalline solids; chemical and materials thermodynamics; multiphase and multicomponent equilibria in reacting systems; electrochemistry. Prerequisites: upper-division standing.

NANO 150. Mechanics of Nanomaterials (4)

Introduction to mechanics of rigid and deformable bodies. Continuum and atomistic models, interatomic forces and intermolecular interactions. Nanomechanics, material defects, elasticity, plasticity, creep, and fracture. Composite materials, nanomaterials, biological materials. Prerequisites: NANO 108.

NANO 156. Nanomaterials (4)

Basic principles of synthesis techniques, processing, microstructural control, and unique physical properties of materials in nanodimensions. Nanowires, quantum dots, thin films, electrical transport, optical behavior, mechanical behavior, and technical applications of nanomaterials. Cross-listed with MAE 166. Prerequisites: upper-division standing.

NANO 158. Phase Transformations and Kinetics (4)

Materials and microstructures changes. Understanding of diffusion to enable changes in the chemical distribution and microstructure of materials, rates of diffusion. Phase transformations, effects of temperature and driving force on transformations and microstructure. Prerequisites: NANO 108 and NANO 148.

NANO 158L.Materials Processing Laboratory(4)

Metal casting processes, solidification, deformation processing, thermal processing: solutionizing, aging, and tempering, joining processes such as welding and brazing. The effect of processing route on microstructure and its effect on mechanical and physical properties will be explored.NanoEngineering majors have priority enrollment. Prerequisites:NANO 158.

NANO 161. Material Selection in Engineering (4)

Selection of materials for engineering systems, based on constitutive analyses of functional requirements and material properties. The role and implications of processing on material selection. Optimizing material selection in a quantitative methodology. NanoEngineering majors receive priority enrollment. Prerequisites: NANO 108. Department approval required. Restricted to major code NA25.

NANO 164. Advanced Micro- and Nano-materials for Energy Storage and Conversion (4)

Materials for energy storage and conversion in existing and future power systems, including fuel cells and batteries, photovoltaic cells, thermoelectric cells, and hybrids. Prerequisites: NANO 101, NANO 102, NANO 148.

NANO 168. Electrical, Dielectric, and Magnetic Properties of Engineering Materials (4)

Introduction to physical principles of electrical, dielectric, and magnetic properties. Semiconductors, control of defects, thin film, and nanocrystal growth, electronic and optoelectronic devices. Processing-microstructure-property relations of dielectric materials, including piezoelectric, pyroelectric and ferroelectric, and magnetic materials. Prerequisites: NANO 102 and NANO 104.

NANO 174. Mechanical Behavior of Materials (4)

Microscopic and macroscopic aspects of the mechanical behavior of engineering materials, with emphasis on recent development in materials characterization by mechanical methods. The fundamental aspects of plasticity in engineering materials, strengthening mechanisms, and mechanical failure modes of materials systems. Prerequisites: NANO 108.

NANO 174L. Mechanical Behavior Laboratory (4)

Experimental investigation of mechanical behavior of engineering materials. Laboratory exercises emphasize the fundamental relationship between microstructure and mechanical properties, and the evolution of the microstructure as a consequence of rate process. Prerequisites: NANO 174.

NANO 199. Independent Study for Undergraduates (4)

Independent reading or research on a problem by special arrangement with a faculty member. P/NP grades only. Prerequisites: upper division and department stamp.

NANO 200. Graduate Seminar in Chemical Engineering (1)

Each graduate student in NANO is expected to attend three seminars per quarter, of his or her choice, dealing with current topics in chemical engineering. Topics will vary. Cross-listed with CENG 205. S/U grades only. May be taken for credit four times. Prerequisites: graduate standing.

NANO 201. Introduction to NanoEngineering (4)

Understanding nanotechnology, broad implications, miniaturization: scaling laws; nanoscale physics; types and properties of nanomaterials; nanomechanical oscillators, nano(bio)electronics, nanoscale heat transfer; fluids at the nanoscale; machinery cell; applications of nanotechnology and nanobiotechnology. Students may not receive credit for both NANO 201 and CENG 211. Prerequisites: graduate standing.

NANO 202. Intermolecular and Surface Forces (4)

Development of quantitative understanding of the different intermolecular forces between atoms and molecules and how these forces give rise to interesting phenomena at the nanoscale, such as flocculation, wetting, self-assembly in biological (natural) and synthetic systems. Cross-listed with CENG 212. Students may not receive credit for both NANO 202 and CENG 212. Prerequisites: consent of instructor.

NANO 203. Nanoscale Characterization (4)

Examination of nanoscale characterization approaches including imaging, scattering, and spectroscopic techniques and their physical operating mechanisms. Microscopy (optical and electron: SEM, TEM); scattering and diffraction; spectroscopies (EDX, SIMS, mass spec, Raman, XPS, XAS); scanning probe microscopes (SPM, AFM); particle size analysis.

NANO 204. Nanoscale Physics and Modeling (4)

This course will introduce students to analytical and numerical methods such as statistical mechanisms, molecular simulations, and finite differences and finite element modeling through their application to NanoEngineering problems involving polymer and colloiod self-assembly, absorption, phase separation, and diffusion. Cross-listed with CENG 214. Students may not receive credit for both NANO 204 and CENG 214. Prerequisites: NANO 202 or consent ofinstructor.

NANO 205. Nanosystems Integration (4)

Scaling issues and hierarchical assembly of nanoscale components into higher order structures which retain desired properties at microscale and macroscale levels. Novel ways to combine top-down and bottom-up processes for integration of heterogeneous components into higher order structures. Cross-listed with CENG 215. Students may not receive credit for both NANO 205 and CENG 215. Prerequisites: consent of instructor.

NANO 208. Nanofabrication (4)

Basic engineering principles of nanofabrication. Topics include: photo-electronbeam and nanoimprint lithography, block copolymers and self-assembled monolayers, colloidal assembly, biological nanofabrication. Cross-listed with CENG 208. Students may not receive credit for both NANO 208 and CENG 208. Prerequisites: consent of instructor.

NANO 210. Molecular Modeling and Simulations of Nanoscale Systems (4)

Molecular and modeling and simulation techniques like molecular dynamics, Monte Carlo, and Brownian dynamics to model nanoscale systems and phenomena like molecular motors, self-assembly, protein-ligand binding, RNA, folding. Valuable hands-on experience with different simulators.Prerequisites: consent of instructor.

NANO 212. Computational Modeling of Nanosystems (4)

Various modeling techniques like finite elements, finite differences, and simulation techniques like molecular dynamics and Monte Carlo to model fluid flow, mechanical properties, self-assembly at the nanoscale, and protein, RNA and DNA folding.Prerequisites: consent of instructor.

NANO 227. Structure and Analysis of Solids (4)

Key concepts in the atomic structure and bonding of solids such as metals, ceramics, and semiconductors. Symmetry operations, point groups, lattice types, space groups, simple and complex inorganic compounds, structure/property comparisons, structure determination with X-ray diffraction. Ionic, covalent, metallic bonding compared with physical properties. Atomic and molecular orbitals, bands verses bonds, free electron theory. Cross-listed with MATS 227, MAE 251 and Chem 222.Prerequisites: consent of instructor.

NANO 230. Synchrotron Characterization of Nanomaterials (4)

Advanced topics in characterizing nanomaterials using synchrotron X-ray sources. Introduction to synchrotron sources, X-ray interaction with matter, spectroscopic determination of electronic properties of nanomagnetic, structural determination using scattering techniques and X-ray imaging techniques. Cross-listed with CENG 230. Students may not receive credit for both NANO 230 and CENG 230. Prerequisites: consent of instructor.

NANO 234. Advanced Nanoscale Fabrication (4)

Engineering principles of nanofabrication. Topics include: photo-, electron beam, and nanoimprint lithography, block copolymers and self-assembled monolayers, colloidal assembly, biological nanofabrication. Relevance to applications in energy, electronics, and medicine will be discussed.Prerequisites: consent of instructor.

NANO 238. Scanning Probe Microscopy (4)

Scanning electron microscopy (SEM) detectors, imaging, image interpretation, and artifacts, introduction to lenses, electron beam-specimen interactions. Operating principles and capabilities for atomic force microscopy and scanning tunneling microscopy, scanning optical microscopy and scanning transmission electron microscopy.Prerequisites: consent of instructor.

NANO 239. Nanomanufacturing (4)

Fundamental nanomanufacturing science and engineering, top-down nanomanufacturing processes, bottom-up nanomanufacturing processes, integrated top-down and bottom-up nanofabrication processes, three-dimensional nanomanufacturing, nanomanufacturing systems, nanometrology, nanomanufactured devices for medicine, life sciences, energy, and defense applications.Prerequisites: department approval required.

NANO 241. Organic Nanomaterials (4)

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Nano Engineering Jobs, Employment | Indeed.com

Posted on March 1, 2019 by Danzig

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$76,000 - $86,000 a year

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NSA applies advanced technical concepts to create groundbreaking solutions for safeguarding U.S. information and collecting foreign signals.

Chemical Engineer salaries in United States

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Overview | Comets Solar System Exploration: NASA Science

Posted on March 1, 2019 by Danzig

Comets are cosmic snowballs of frozen gases, rock and dust that orbit the Sun. When frozen, they are the size of a small town. When a comet's orbit brings it close to the Sun, it heats up and spews dust and gases into a giant glowing head larger than most planets. The dust and gases form a tail that stretches away from the Sun for millions of miles. There are likely billions of comets orbiting our Sun in the Kuiper Belt and even more distant Oort Cloud.

The current number of known comets is:

Go farther. Explore Comets in Depth

Key Science Targets

Kid-Friendly Comets

Comets orbit the Sun just like planets and asteroids do, except a comet usually has a very elongated orbit.

As the comet gets closer to the Sun, some of the ice starts to melt and boil off, along with particles of dust. These particles and gases make a cloud around the nucleus, called a coma.

The coma is lit by the Sun. The sunlight also pushes this material into the beautiful brightly lit tail of the comet.

Visit NASA Space Place for more kid-friendly facts.

Additional Resources

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Overview | Comets Solar System Exploration: NASA Science

Donald Trump – biography.com

Posted on February 27, 2019 by Danzig

Who Is Donald Trump?

Donald John Trump is the 45th and current President of the United States; he took office January 20, 2017. Previously, he was a real estate mogul, and a former reality TV star.

Born in Queens, New York, in 1971, Trump became involved in large, profitable building projects in Manhattan. In 1980, he opened the Grand Hyatt New York, which made him the city's best-known developer.

In 2004, Trump began starring in the hit NBC reality series The Apprentice, which also spawned the offshoot The Celebrity Apprentice. Trump turned his attention to politics, and in 2015 he announced his candidacy for president of the United States on the Republican ticket.

After winning a majority of the primaries and caucuses, Trump became the official Republican candidate for president on July 19, 2016. That November, Trump was elected the 45th President of the United States, after defeating Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton.

Donald Trump was born on June 14, 1946, in Queens, New York.

According to a September 2017 Forbes estimate, Donald Trumps net worth is $3.1 billion. Of that, $1.6 billion is in New York real estate; $570 million is in golf clubs and resorts; $500 million is in non-New York real estate; $290 million is in cash and personal assets; and $200 million is in brand businesses. Thats down from $3.7 billion in 2016, according to Fortune, mostly due to declining New York real estate values.

Over the years, Trumps net worth has been a subject of public debate. In 1990, Trump asserted his own net worth in the neighborhood of $1.5 billion. However the real estate market was in decline, reducing the value of and income from Trump's empire; a Forbes magazine investigation into his assets revealed that his existing debt likely brought the number closer to $500 million.

In any event, the Trump Organization required a massive infusion of loans to keep it from collapsing, a situation which raised questions as to whether the corporation could survive bankruptcy. Some observers saw Trump's decline as symbolic of many of the business, economic and social excesses that had arisen in the 1980s.

Donald Trump eventually managed to climb back from a reported deficit of nearly $900 million, claiming to have reached a zenith of more than $2 billion. However, independent sources again questioned his math, estimating his worth at something closer to $500 million by 1997.

Over the course of his 2016 presidential run, Trumps net worth was questioned and he courted controversy after repeatedly refusing to release his tax returns while they were being audited by the Internal Revenue Service. He did not release his tax returns before the November election the first time a major party candidate had not released such information to the public since Richard Nixon in 1972.

Donald Trump attends the 'All Star Celebrity Apprentice' finale in2013 in New York City. (Photo: Michael Stewart/WireImage)

Donald Trump was raised Presbyterian by his mother, and he identifies as a mainline Protestant.

The fourth of five children, Donald Trumps parents were Frederick C. and Mary Anne MacLeod Trump. Frederick Trump was a builder and real estate developer who specialized in constructing and operating middle-income apartments in Queens, Staten Island and Brooklyn.

Mary MacLeod immigrated from Tong, Scotland, in 1929 at the age of 17. She married Fred Trump in 1936, and the couple settled in Jamaica, Queens, a neighborhood that was, at the time, filled with Western European immigrants.

In the 1950s the Trumps wealth increased with the postwar real estate boom, and Mary became a New York socialite and philanthropist. Fred died in 1999, and Mary passed away the following year.

Donald J. Trump has had three wives and is currently married to former Slovenian model Melania Trump(ne Knauss), over 23 years his junior. In January 2005, the couple married in a highly-publicized and lavish wedding.

Among the many celebrity guests at the wedding were Hillary Clinton and former President Bill Clinton. Melania gave birth to their son, Barron William Trump, in March 2006.

In 1977, Trump married his first wife Ivana Trump, (ne Zelnickova Winklmayr) a New York fashion model who had been an alternate on the 1972 Czech Olympic Ski Team. After the 1977 birth of the couple's first of three children, Donald Trump Jr., Ivana Trump was named vice president in charge of design in the Trump Organization and played a major role in supervising the renovation of the Commodore and the Plaza Hotel.

The couple had two more children together Ivanka Trump (born 1981) and Eric Trump (born 1984) and went through a highly publicized divorce which was finalized in 1992.

In 1993 Trump married his second wife, Marla Maples, an actress with whom he had been involved for some time and already had a daughter, Tiffany Trump (born in 1993).

Trump would ultimately file for a highly publicized divorce from Maples in 1997, which became final in June 1999. A prenuptial agreement allotted $2 million to Maples.

Trump's sons Donald Jr. and Eric work as executive vice presidents for The Trump Organization, and took over the family business while their father serves as president.

Trump's daughter Ivanka was also an executive vice president of The Trump Organization, but left the business and her own fashion label to join her father's administration and become an unpaid assistant to the president. Her husband, Jared Kushner, is also a senior adviser to President Trump.

Donald Trump gives two thumbs up to the crowd on the fourth day of the Republican National Convention on July 21, 2016 at the Quicken Loans Arena in Cleveland, Ohio. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

Donald was an energetic, assertive child. His parents sent him to the New York Military Academy at age 13, hoping the discipline of the school would channel his energy in a positive manner.

Trump did well at the academy, both socially and academically, rising to become a star athlete and student leader by the time he graduated in 1964.

He then entered Fordham University and two years later transferred to the Wharton School of Finance at the University of Pennsylvania, from which he graduated in 1968 with a degree in economics.

During his years at college, Trump worked at his fathers real estate business during the summer. He also secured education deferments for thedraftfor theVietnam Warand ultimately a 1-Y medical deferment after he graduated.

Trump began his political career by seeking the nomination for the Reform Party for the 2000 presidential race and withdrew; he again publicly announced he would be running for president in the 2012 election.

However, it wasnt until the 2016 election that Trump became the official Republican nominee for president and, defying polls and media projections, won the majority of electoral college votes in a stunning victory on November 8, 2016.

Despite losing the popular vote to Hillary Clinton by almost 2.9 million votes, Trump's electoral win 306 electoral college votes to Clinton's 232 clinched his victory as the 45th president of the United States.

After one of the most contentious presidential races in U.S. history, Trump's rise to the office of president was considered a resounding rejection of establishment politics by blue-collar and working-class Americans.

In his victory speech, Trump said: I pledge to every citizen of our land that I will be president for all Americans." About his supporters, he said: "As Ive said from the beginning, ours was not a campaign, but rather an incredible and great movement made up of millions of hard-working men and women who love their country and want a better, brighter future for themselves and for their families.

On July 21, 2016, Trump accepted the presidential nomination at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland. In a speech lasting one hour and 15 minutes, one of the longest in recent history, Trump outlined the issues he would tackle as president, including violence in America, the economy, immigration, trade, terrorism, and the appointment of Supreme Courtjustices.

On immigration, he said: We are going to build a great border wall to stop illegal immigration, to stop the gangs and the violence, and to stop the drugs from pouring into our communities.

He also promised supporters that he would renegotiate trade deals, reduce taxes and government regulations, repeal the Affordable Care Act (otherwise known as Obamacare), defend Second Amendment gun rights, and rebuild our depleted military, asking the countries the U.S. is protecting "to pay their fair share."

On October 7, 2016, just two days before the second presidential debate between Trump and Clinton, the Republican presidential nominee was embroiled in another scandal when theWashington Post released a 2005 recording in which he lewdly described kissing and groping women, and trying to have sex with then-married television personality Nancy ODell.

The three-minute recording captured Trump speaking to Billy Bush, co-anchor of Access Hollywood, as they prepared to meet soap opera actress Arianne Zucker for a segment of the show.

"Ive gotta use some Tic Tacs, just in case I start kissing her, Trump said in the recording which was caught on a microphone that had not been turned off. You know Im automatically attracted to beautiful I just start kissing them. Its like a magnet. Just kiss. I dont even wait. And when youre a star they let you do it. You can do anything."

He also said that because of his celebrity status he could grab women by their genitals. In response, Trump released a statement saying: This was locker room banter, a private conversation that took place many years ago. Bill Clinton has said far worse to me on the golf course not even close. I apologize if anyone was offended.

Trump later posted a videotaped apology on Facebook in which he said: Ive never said Im a perfect person, nor pretended to be someone that Im not. Ive said and done things I regret, and the words released today on this more than a decade-old video are one of them. Anyone who knows me knows these words dont reflect who I am. I said it, I was wrong, and I apologize.

The backlash was immediate with some top Republicans, including Senators John McCain, Kelly Ayotte, Mike Crapo, Shelley Moore Capito and Martha Roby, withdrawing their support for Trump. House Speaker Paul Ryan reportedly told fellow GOP lawmakers that he would not campaign with or defend the presidential candidate.

Some GOP critics also called for Trump to withdraw from the race, including former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. Trump remained defiant, tweeting that he would stay in the race.

Around the same time as the video leak, numerous women began speaking publicly about their past experiences with Trump, alleging he had either sexually assaulted or harassed them based on their looks.

Throughout the election, Trump vehemently denied allegations he had a relationship with Russian PresidentVladimir Putin and was tied to the hacking of the DNC emails.

In January 2017, a U.S. intelligence report prepared by the CIA, FBI and NSA concluded that Putin had ordered a campaign to influence the U.S. election. Russias goals were to undermine public faith in the U.S. democratic process, denigrate Secretary Clinton, and harm her electability and potential presidency. We further assess Putin and the Russian Government developed a clear preference for President-elect Trump," the report said.

Prior to the release of the report, President-elect Trump had cast doubt on Russian interference and the intelligence communitys assessment. Trump received an intelligence briefing on the matter, and in his first press conference as president-elect on January 11, he acknowledged Russias interference.

However, in subsequent comments he again refused to condemn Russia for such activity, notably saying on multiple occasions that he believed Putin's denials.

In March 2018, the Trump administration formally acknowledged the charges by issuing sanctions on 19 Russians for interference in the 2016 presidential election and alleged cyberattacks. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin delivered the announcement, with thepresident remaining silent on the matter.

In July, days before President Trump was to meet with Putin in Finland, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein announced additional charges against12 Russian intelligence officers accused of hacking the DNC and the Clinton campaign.

On January 20, 2017, Trump was sworn in as the 45th president of the United States by Chief Justice of the United States John Roberts. Trump took the oath of office placing his hand on the Bible that was used at Abraham Lincoln's inauguration and his own family Bible, which was presented to him by his mother in 1955 when he graduated from Sunday school at his family's Presbyterian church.

In his inaugural speech on January 20th, Trump sent a populist message that he would put the American people above politics. What truly matters is not which party controls our government, but whether our government is controlled by the people, he said. January 20, 2017, will be remembered as the day the people became the rulers of this nation again.

He went on to paint a bleak picture of an America that had failed many of its citizens, describing families trapped in poverty, an ineffective education system, and crime, drugs and gangs. This American carnage stops right here and stops right now," he said.

The day after Trump's inauguration, millions of protesters demonstrated across the United States and around the world. The Women's March on Washington drew over half a million people to protest President Trump's stance on a variety issues ranging from immigration to environmental protection.

Activists and celebrities taking part in the protests includedGloria Steinem, Angela Davis, Madonna,Cher, Ashley Judd, Scarlett Johansson, America Ferrera, Alicia Keys and Janelle Mone. The president tweeted in response:

The first 100 days of Trumps presidency lasted from January 20, 2017 until April 29, 2017. In the first days of his presidency, President Trump issued a number of back-to-back executive orders to make good on some of his campaign promises, as well as several orders aimed at rolling back policies and regulations that were put into place during the Obama administration.

Several of Trumps key policies that got rolling during Trumps first 100 days in office include his Supreme Court nomination; steps toward building a wall on the Mexico border; a travel ban for several predominantly Muslim countries; the first moves to dismantle the Affordable Care Act; and the U.S. withdrawal from the Paris Climate Agreement.

In addition, Trump signed orders to implement a federal hiring freeze, withdraw from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, and reinstate the Mexico City policy that bans federal funding of nongovernmental organizations abroad that promote or perform abortions.

He signed an order to scale back financial regulation under the Dodd-Frank Act, created by the Obama administration and passed by Congress after the financial crisis of 2008. And he called for a lifetime foreign-lobbying ban for members of his administration and a five-year ban for all other lobbying.

On March 16, 2017, the president released his proposed budget. The budget outlined his plans for increased spending for the military, veterans affairs and national security, including building a wall on the border with Mexico.

It also made drastic cuts to many government agencies including the Environmental Protection Agency and the State Department, as well as the elimination of the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the Community Development Block Grant program which supports Meals on Wheels.

On January 31, 2017, President Trump nominated Judge Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court. The 49-year-old conservative judge was appointed by President George W. Bush to the United States Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit in Denver.

Judge Gorsuch was educated at Columbia, Harvard and Oxford and clerked for Justices Byron White and Anthony Kennedy. The nomination came after Merrick Garland, President Obama's nominee to replace the late Antonin Scalia, was denied a confirmation hearing by Senate Republicans.

As Gorsuch's legal philosophy was considered to be similar to Scalia's, the choice drew strong praise from the conservative side of the aisle. "Millions of voters said this was the single most important issue for them when they voted for me for president," President Trump said. "I am a man of my word. Today I am keeping another promise to the American people by nominating Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court."

After Gorsuch gave three days of testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee in March, the Senate convened on April 6 to advance his nomination. Democrats mostly held firm to deny the 60 votes necessary to proceed, resulting in the first successful partisan filibuster of a Supreme Court nominee.

But Republicans quickly countered with another historic move, invoking the "nuclear option" to lower the threshold for advancing Supreme Court nominations from 60 votes to a simple majority of 50. On April 7, Gorsuch was confirmed by the Senate to become the 113th justice of the Supreme Court.

The following year, President Trump had another opportunity to continue the rightward push of the Supreme Court with the retirement of Justice Kennedy. On July 9, 2018, he nominated Brett Kavanaugh, another textualist and orginalist in the mold of Scalia. Democrats vowed to fight the nomination, and Kavanaugh was nearly derailed by accusations of sexual assault, before earning confirmation in a close vote that October.

Trump issued an executive order to build a wall at the United States border with Mexico. In his first televised interview as president, President Trump said the initial construction of the wall would be funded by U.S. taxpayer dollars, but that Mexico would reimburse the U.S. 100 percent in a plan to be negotiated and might include a suggested import tax on Mexican goods.

In response to the new administration's stance on a border wall, Mexican president Enrique Pea Nieto cancelled a planned visit to meet with President Trump. "Mexico does not believe in walls," the Mexican president said in a video statement. "I've said time again; Mexico will not pay for any wall."

After funding for the wall failed to materialize, from either Mexico or Congress, Trump in April 2018 announced that he wouldreinforce security along the U.S. border with Mexico by using American troops because of the "horrible, unsafe laws" that left the country vulnerable. The following day, the president signed a proclamation that directed National Guard troops to the U.S.-Mexico border.

The Department of Homeland Security said that the deployment would be in coordination with governors, that the troops would "support federal law enforcement personnel, including [Customs and Border Protection]," and that federal immigration authorities would "direct enforcement efforts."

In December 2018, shortly before a newly elected Democratic majority was set to take control of the House, Trump announced he would not sign a bill to fund the government unless Congress allocated $5.7 billion toward building his long-promised border wall. With Democrats refusing to give in to his demand, a partial government shutdown ensued for a record 35 days, until all sides agreed to another attempt at striking a compromise.

On February 14, 2019, one day before the deadline, Congress passed a $333 billion spending package that allocated $1.375 billion for 55 miles of steel-post fencing. After indicating that he would sign the bill, the President made good on his threat to declare a national emergency the following day, enabling him to funnel $3.6 billion slated for military construction projects toward building the wall.

In response, a coalition of 16 states filed a lawsuit that challenged Trump's power to circumvent Congress on this issue.

"Contrary to the will of Congress, the president has used the pretext of a manufactured 'crisis' of unlawful immigration to declare a national emergency and redirect federal dollars appropriated for drug interdiction, military construction and law enforcement initiatives toward building a wall on the United States-Mexico border," the lawsuit said.

As part of attempts to seal the U.S. border with Mexico, the Trump administration in 2018 began following through on a "zero-tolerance" policy to prosecute anybody found to have crossed the border illegally. As children were legally not allowed to be detained with their parents, this meant that they were to be held separately as family cases wound through immigration courts.

A furor ensued after reports surfaced that nearly 2,000 children had been separated from their parents over a six-week period that ended in May 2018, compounded by photos of toddlers crying in cages. President Trump initially deflected blame for the situation, insisting it resulted from the efforts of predecessors and political opponents."The Democrats are forcing the breakup of families at the Border with their horrible and cruel legislative agenda," he tweeted.

The president ultimately caved to pressure from the bad PR, and on June 20 he signed an executive order thatdirected the Department of Homeland Security to keep families together.

"I didnt like the sight or the feeling of families being separated," he said, adding that it remained important to have "zero tolerance for people that enter our country illegally" and for Congress to find a permanent solution to the problem. In the meantime, the DHS essentially revived the "catch-and-release" system that the zero-tolerance policy was meant to eradicate, while dealing with the logistics of reuniting families.

President Trump signed one of his most controversial executive orders on January 27, 2017, at the Pentagon, calling for "extreme vetting" to "keep radical Islamic terrorists out of the United States of America." The president's executive order was put into effect immediately, and refugees and immigrants from seven predominantly Muslim countries traveling to the U.S. were detained at U.S. airports.

The order called for a ban on immigrants from Iraq, Syria, Iran, Sudan, Libya, Somalia and Yemen for at least 90 days, temporarily suspended the entry of refugees for 120 days and barred Syrian refugees indefinitely. In an interview with the Christian Broadcasting Network, President Trump also said he would give priority to Christian refugees trying to gain entry into the United States.

After facing multiple legal hurdles, President Trump signed a revised executive order on March 6, 2017,calling for a 90-day ban on travelers from six predominantly Muslim countries including Sudan, Syria, Iran, Libya, Somalia and Yemen. Iraq, which was included in the original executive order, was removed from the list.

Travelers from the six listed countries, who hold green cards or have valid visas as of the signing of the order, will not be affected. Religious minorities would not get special preference, as was outlined in the original order, and an indefinite ban on Syrian refugees was reduced to 120 days.

On March 15, just hours before the revised ban was going to be put into effect, Derrick Watson, a federal judge in Hawaii, issued a temporary nationwide restraining order in a ruling that stated the executive order did not prove that a ban would protect the country from terrorism and that it was issued with a purpose to disfavor a particular religion, in spite of its stated, religiously neutral purpose. At a rally in Nashville, President Trump responded to the ruling, saying: "This is, in the opinion of many, an unprecedented judicial overreach.

Judge Theodore D. Chuang of Maryland also blocked the ban the following day, and in subsequent months, the ban was impeded in decisions handed down by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit in Richmond, Virginia, and the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals once again.

However, on June 26, 2017, Trump won a partial victory when the Supreme Court announced it was allowing the controversial ban to go into effect for foreign nationals who lacked a "bona fide relationship with any person or entity in the United States." The court agreed to hear oral arguments for the case in October, but with the 90-to-120-day timeline in place for the administration to conduct its reviews, it was believed the case would be rendered moot by that point.

On September 24, 2017, Trump issued a new presidential proclamation, which permanently bans travel to the United States for most citizens from seven countries. Most were on the original list, including Iran, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, while the new order included Chad, North Korea and some citizens of Venezuela (certain government officials and their families). The tweak did little to pacify critics, who argued that the order was still heavily biased toward Islam.

The fact that Trump has added North Korea with few visitors to the U.S. and a few government officials from Venezuela doesnt obfuscate the real fact that the administrations order is still a Muslim ban, said Anthony D. Romero, the executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union.

On October 10, the Supreme Court cancelled a planned hearing on an appeal of the original travel ban. On October 17, the day before the order was to take effect, Judge Watson of Hawaii issued a nationwide order freezing the Trump administrations new travel ban, writing that the order was a poor fit for the issues regarding the sharing of public-safety and terrorism-related information that the president identifies.

On December 4, 2017, the Supreme Court allowed the third version of the Trump administrations travel ban to go into effect despite the ongoing legal challenges. The courts orders urged appeals courts to determineas quickly as possible whether theban was lawful.

Under the ruling, the administration could fully enforce its new restrictions on travel from eight nations, six of them predominantly Muslim. Citizens of Iran, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Chad and North Korea, along with some groups of people from Venezuela, would be unable to unable to emigrate to the United States permanently, with many barred from also working, studying or vacationing in the country.

On June 26, 2018, the Supreme Court upheld the president's travel ban by a 5-4 vote.Writing for the majority, Chief Justice John Roberts said that Trump had the executive authority to make national security judgments in the realm of immigration, regardless of his previous statements about Islam. In a sharply worded dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor said that the outcome was equivalent to that of Korematsu v. United States, which permitted the detention of Japanese-Americans during World War II.

The Valentine's Day 2018 shooting atMarjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, which left a total of 17 students and faculty dead, sparked a strong response from President Trump.

He ordered the Justice Department to issue regulations banning bump stocks, and suggested he was willing to consider a range of measures, from strengthening background checks to raising the minimumage for buying rifles. He also backed an NRA-fueled proposal for arming teachers, which drew backlash from many in the profession.

The president remained invested in the issue even as the usual cycle of outrage began diminishing: In a televised February 28 meeting with lawmakers, he called for gun control legislation that would expand background checks to gun shows and internet transactions, secure schools and restrict sales for some young adults.

At one point he called outPennsylvania Senator Pat Toomey for being "afraid of the NRA," and at another he suggested thatauthorities should seize guns from mentally ill or other potentially dangerous peoplewithout first going to court. "I like taking the guns early," he said. "Take the guns first, go through due process second."

His stances seemingly stunned the Republican lawmakers at the meeting, as well as the NRA, which previously considered the president as a strong supporter. However, within a few days, Trump was walking back his proposal to raise the age limit and mainly pushing for arming select teachers.

In early August 2017, intelligence experts confirmed that North Korea successfully produced a miniaturized nuclear warhead that fits inside its missiles, putting it one step closer to becoming a nuclear power. Around the same time, the North Korean state news agency said they were "examining the operational plan" to strike areas around the U.S. territory of Guam with medium-to-long-range strategic ballistic missiles.

U.S. experts estimated North Koreas nuclear warheads at 60 and that the country could soon have an intercontinental ballistic missile capable of reaching the United States. Trump responded that North Korea would be met with fire and fury if the threats continued and that the U.S. military was locked and loaded.

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TOP500 – Wikipedia

Posted on February 26, 2019 by Danzig

The TOP500 project ranks and details the 500 most powerful non-distributed computer systems in the world. The project was started in 1993 and publishes an updated list of the supercomputers twice a year. The first of these updates always coincides with the International Supercomputing Conference in June, and the second is presented at the ACM/IEEE Supercomputing Conference in November. The project aims to provide a reliable basis for tracking and detecting trends in high-performance computing and bases rankings on HPL,[1] a portable implementation of the high-performance LINPACK benchmark written in Fortran for distributed-memory computers.

China currently dominates the list with 229 supercomputers, leading the second place (United States) by a record margin of 121. Since June 2018, the American Summit is the world's most powerful supercomputer, reaching 143.5 petaFLOPS on the LINPACK benchmarks.

The TOP500 list is compiled by Jack Dongarra of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, Erich Strohmaier and Horst Simon of the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), and from 1993 until his death in 2014, Hans Meuer of the University of Mannheim, Germany.

Combined performance of 500 largest supercomputers

Fastest supercomputer

Supercomputer in 500th place

In the early 1990s, a new definition of supercomputer was needed to produce meaningful statistics. After experimenting with metrics based on processor count in 1992, the idea arose at the University of Mannheim to use a detailed listing of installed systems as the basis. In early 1993, Jack Dongarra was persuaded to join the project with his LINPACK benchmarks. A first test version was produced in May 1993, partly based on data available on the Internet, including the following sources:[2][3]

The information from those sources was used for the first two lists. Since June 1993, the TOP500 is produced bi-annually based on site and vendor submissions only.

Since 1993, performance of the No.1 ranked position has grown steadily in accordance with Moore's law, doubling roughly every 14 months. As of June2018[update], Summit was fastest with an Rpeak[6] of 187.6593PFLOPS. For comparison, this is over 1,432,513 times faster than the Connection Machine CM-5/1024 (1,024 cores), which was the fastest system in November 1993 (twenty-five years prior) with an Rpeak of 131.0GFLOPS.[7]

As of November2018[update], all supercomputers on TOP500 are 64-bit, mostly based on x86-64 CPUs (Intel EMT64 and AMD AMD64 instruction set architecture), with few exceptions (all based on reduced instruction set computing (RISC) architectures). Thirteen supercomputers are based on the Power Architecture used by IBM POWER microprocessors and six on Fujitsu-designed SPARC64 chips (one of which the K computer was 1st in 2011 without any GPUs (and is still 3rd on the HPCG list[8]). A further two computers are based on seemingly related Chinese designs: ShenWei and Sunway SW26010 also using Chinese co-processors; the latter ascended to 1st in 2016 (it has since been superseded by an IBM POWER-based system). Further, a few computers use another non-US design, the PEZY-SC (based on ARM[9]) as an accelerator paired with Intel's Xeon.

Two computers which first appeared on the list in 2018 are based on architectures never before seen on the Top500. One was a new x86-64 microarchitecture from Chinese vendor Sugon, using Hygon Dhyana CPUs (a collaboration between AMD and the Chinese, based on Zen) and is ranked 38th,[10] and the other was the first ever ARM-based computer on the list using Cavium ThunderX2 CPUs.[11] Before the ascendancy of 32-bit x86 and later 64-bit x86-64 in the early 2000s, a variety of RISC processor families made up most TOP500 supercomputers, including RISC architectures such as SPARC, MIPS, PA-RISC, and Alpha.

In recent years heterogeneous computing, mostly using Nvidia's graphics processing units (GPU) or Intel's x86-based Xeon Phi as coprocessors, has dominated the TOP500 because of better performance per watt ratios and higher absolute performance; it is almost required to make the top 10; the only recent exception being the aforementioned K computer.

All the fastest supercomputers in the decade since the Earth Simulator supercomputer have used operating systems based on Linux. Since November2017[update], all the listed supercomputers use an operating system based on the Linux kernel.[12][13]

Since November 2015, no computer on the list runs Windows. In November 2014, Windows Azure[14] cloud computer was no longer on the list of fastest supercomputers (its best rank was 165 in 2012), leaving the Shanghai Supercomputer Center's Magic Cube as the only Windows-based supercomputer on the list, until it also dropped off the list. It was ranked 436 in its last appearance on the list released in June 2015, while its best rank was 11 in 2008.[15]

It has been well over a decade since MIPS systems dropped entirely off the list[16] but the Gyoukou supercomputer that jumped to 4th place in November 2017 (after a huge upgrade) has MIPS as a small part of the coprocessors. Use of 2,048-core coprocessors (plus 8 6-core MIPS, for each, that "no longer require to rely on an external Intel Xeon E5 host processor"[17]) make the supercomputer much more energy efficient than the other top 10 (i.e. it is 5th on Green500 and other such ZettaScaler-2.2-based systems take first three spots).[18] At 19.86 million cores, it is by far the biggest system: almost double that of the best manycore system in the TOP500, the Chinese Sunway TaihuLight, ranked 3rd.

Legend:

Numbers below represent the number of computers in the TOP500 that are in each of the listed countries.

By number of systems as of November2018[update][31]:

Note: All operating systems of the TOP500 systems use Linux, but Linux above is generic Linux.

In November 2014, it was announced that the United States was developing two new supercomputers to exceed China's Tianhe-2 in its place as world's fastest supercomputer. The two computers, Sierra and Summit, will each exceed Tianhe-2's 55 peak petaflops. Summit, the more powerful of the two, will deliver 150300 peak petaflops.[32] On 10 April 2015, US government agencies banned selling chips, from Nvidia, to supercomputing centers in China as "acting contrary to the national security ... interests of the United States";[33] and Intel Corporation from providing Xeon chips to China due to their use, according to the US, in researching nuclear weapons research to which US export control law bans US companies from contributing "The Department of Commerce refused, saying it was concerned about nuclear research being done with the machine."[34]

On 29 July 2015, President Obama signed an executive order creating a National Strategic Computing Initiative calling for the accelerated development of an exascale (1000 petaflop) system and funding research into post-semiconductor computing.[35]

In June 2016, Japanese firm Fujitsu announced at the International Supercomputing Conference that its future exascale supercomputer will feature processors of its own design that implement the ARMv8 architecture. The Flagship2020 program, by Fujitsu for RIKEN plans to break the exaflops barrier by 2020 (and "it looks like China and France have a chance to do so and that the United States is content for the moment at least to wait until 2023 to break through the exaflops barrier."[36]) These processors will also implement extensions to the ARMv8 architecture equivalent to HPC-ACE2 that Fujitsu is developing with ARM Holdings.[36]

Inspur has been one of the largest HPC system manufacturer based out of Jinan, China. As of May2017[update], Inspur has become the third manufacturer to have manufactured 64-way system a record which has been previously mastered by IBM and HP. The company has registered over $10B in revenues and have successfully provided a number of HPC systems to countries outside China such as Sudan, Zimbabwe, Saudi Arabia, Venezuela. Inspur was also a major technology partner behind both the supercomputers from China, namely Tianhe-2 and Taihu which lead the top 2 positions of Top500 supercomputer list up to November 2017. Inspur and Supermicro released a few platforms aimed at HPC using GPU such as SR-AI and AGX-2 in May 2017.[37]

Some major systems are not listed on the list. The largest example is the NCSA's Blue Waters which publicly announced the decision not to participate in the list[38] because they do not feel it accurately indicates the ability for any system to be able to do useful work.[39] Other organizations decide not to list systems for security and/or commercial competitiveness reasons. Additional purpose-built machines that are not capable or do not run the benchmark were not included, such as RIKEN MDGRAPE-3 and MDGRAPE-4.

IBM Roadrunner[40] is no longer on the list (nor is any other using the Cell coprocessor, or PowerXCell).

Although Itanium-based systems reached second rank in 2004,[41][42] none now remain.

Similarly (non-SIMD-style) vector processors (NEC-based such as the Earth simulator that was fastest in 2002[43]) have also fallen off the list. Also the Sun Starfire computers that occupied many spots in the past now no longer appear.

The last non-Linux computers on the list the two AIX ones running on POWER7 (in July 2017 ranked 494th and 495th[44] originally 86th and 85th), dropped off the list in November 2017.

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TOP500 - Wikipedia

HSE Advisor – Offshore, Competitive Salary plus benefits …

Posted on February 26, 2019 by Danzig

Our client, a leading company in the UAE is looking for an HSE Advisor Offshore to join their growing team in Dubai.

As an HSE Advisor, you will be responsible to provide HSE advice to designated offshore operations teams and the HSE team. You will also act as principal point of contact on HSE matters for the offshore OIM and ensure compliance with the company and regulatory authority standards via the compliance audit schedule.

To qualify for this role, ideal candidate must have a Bachelor degree and with at least five years of experience in environmental, safety or health fields with primary focus on safety. Offshore operations experience and NEBOSH certificate and/or other safety diploma requiring testing are highly essential for this role. Candidate must have a sound knowledge of PTW Systems and medically and physically fit for offshore and hot climates.

If you have all the skills and experience required please apply now! Due to high volume of received applications, we are unable to respond to each application on individual basis therefore only successful candidates will be contacted.

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HSE Advisor - Offshore, Competitive Salary plus benefits ...

Tax haven – Wikipedia

Posted on February 26, 2019 by Danzig

Parts of this article (those related to Methodology Section) need to be updated. Please update this article to reflect recent events or newly available information. (February 2019)

low "effective" tax rates for foreigners

A tax haven is generally defined as a country or place with very low "effective" rates of taxation for foreigners ("headline" rates may be higher[a]).[1][2][3][4][5] In some traditional definitions, a tax haven also offers financial secrecy.[b][6] However, while countries with high levels of secrecy but also high rates of taxation (e.g. the United States and Germany in the Financial Secrecy Index ("FSI") rankings),[c] can feature in some tax haven lists, they are not universally considered as tax havens. In contrast, countries with lower levels of secrecy but also low "effective" rates of taxation (e.g. Ireland in the FSI rankings), appear in most Tax haven lists.[9] The consensus around effective tax rates has led academics to note that the term "tax haven" and "offshore financial centre" are almost synonymous.[10]

Traditional tax havens, like Jersey, are open about zero rates of taxation, but as a consequence have limited bilateral tax treaties. Modern corporate tax havens have non-zero "headline" rates of taxation and high levels of OECDcompliance, and thus have large networks of bilateral tax treaties. However, their base erosion and profit shifting ("BEPS") tools enable corporates to achieve "effective" tax rates closer to zero, not just in the haven but in all countries with which the haven has tax treaties; putting them on tax haven lists. According to modern studies, the Top 10 tax havens include corporate-focused havens like Ireland, the Netherlands, Singapore, and the U.K., while Switzerland, Luxembourg, Hong Kong, and the Caribbean (the Caymans, Bermuda, and the British Virgin Islands), feature as both major traditional tax havens and major corporate tax havens. Corporate tax havens often serve as "conduits" to traditional tax havens.[11][12][13]

Use of tax havens, traditional and corporate, results in a loss of tax revenues to countries which are not tax havens. Estimates of total amounts of taxes avoided vary, but the most credible have a range of US$100250 billion per annum.[14][15][16] In addition, capital held in tax havens can permanently leave the tax base (base erosion). Estimates of capital held in tax havens also vary: the most credible estimates are between $710 trillion (up to 10% of global assets).[17] The harm of traditional and corporate tax havens has been particularly noted in developing nations, where the tax revenues are needed to build infrastructure.[18]

At least 15%[d] of countries are tax havens.[4][9] Tax havens are mostly successful and well-governed economies, and being a haven has often brought prosperity.[21][22] The top 1015 GDP-per-capita countries, excluding oil and gas exporters, are tax havens. Because of Inflated GDP-per-capita (due to accounting BEPS flows), havens are prone to over-leverage (international capital misprice the artificial debt-to-GDP). This can lead to severe credit cycles and/or property/banking crises when international capital flows are repriced. Ireland's Celtic Tiger, and the subsequent financial crisis in 200913, is an example.[23] Jersey is another.[24] Research shows the U.S. as the largest beneficiary, and U.S. multinational use of tax havens, has maximised long-term U.S. exchequer receipts;[25] however experts note OECD jurisdictions accommodated the U.S. to overcome shortcomings in the U.S. "worldwide" tax system (others use "territorial" systems, and don't need havens).

The focus on combating tax havens (e.g. OECDIMF projects) has been on common standards, transparency and data sharing.[26] The rise of OECD-compliant corporate tax havens, whose BEPS tools are responsible for most of the quantum of lost taxes,[16] has led to criticism of this focus, versus actual taxes paid.[27] Higher-tax jurisdictions, such as the United States and many member states of the European Union, departed from the OECD BEPS Project in 201718, to introduce anti-BEPS tax regimes, targeted raising net taxes paid by corporations in corporate tax havens (e.g. the U.S. Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 ("TCJA") GILTIBEATFDII tax regimes and move to a hybrid "territorial" tax system, and the proposed EU Digital Services Tax regime and the proposed EU Common Consolidated Corporate Tax Base).

The consensus regarding a specific and exact definition of what constitutes a tax haven, is that there is none. This is the conclusion from non-governmental organisations, such as the Tax Justice Network,[30] from the 2008 investigation by the U.S. Government Accountability Office,[31] from the 2015 investigation by the U.S. Congressional Research Service,[32] from the 2017 investigation by the European Parliament,[33] and from leading academic researchers of tax havens.[34]

The issue, however, is material, as being labelled a "tax haven" has consequences for a country seeking to develop and trade under bilateral tax treaties. When Ireland was "blacklisted" by G20 member Brazil in 2016, bilateral trade declined.[35][36] It is even more onerous for corporate tax havens, whose foreign multinationals rely on the haven's extensive network of bilateral tax treaties, through which the foreign multinationals execute BEPS transactions, re-routing global untaxed income to the haven.

One of the first Important papers on tax havens,[37] was the 1994 HinesRice paper by James R. Hines Jr.[38] It is the most cited paper on tax haven research,[28] even in late 2017,[29] and Hines is the most cited author on tax haven research.[28] As well as offering insights into tax havens, it took the view that the diversity of countries that become tax havens was so great that detailed definitions were inappropriate. Hines merely noted that tax havens were: a group of countries with unusually low tax rates. Hines reaffirmed this approach in a 2009 paper with Dhammika Dharmapala.[4] He refined it in 2016 to incorporate research on Incentives for tax havens on governance, which is broadly accepted in the academic lexicon.[10][39][37]

Tax havens are typically small, well-governed states that impose low or zero tax rates on foreign investors.

In April 1998, the OECD produced a definition of a tax haven, as meeting "three of four" criteria.[40][41] It was produced as part of their "Harmful Tax Competition: An Emerging Global Issue" initiative.[42] By 2000, when the OECD published their first list of tax havens,[19] it included no OECD member countries as they were now all considered to have engaged in the OECD's new Global Forum on Transparency and Exchange of Information for Tax Purposes, and therefore would not meet Criteria ii and Criteria iii. Because the OECD has never listed any of its 35 members as tax havens, Ireland, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and Switzerland are sometimes defined as the "OECD tax havens".[43] In 2017, only Trinidad & Tobago met the 1998 OECD definition, and it has fallen into disrepute.[44][45][46]

() The 4th criterion was withdrawn after objections from the new U.S. Bush Administration in 2001,[26] and in the OECD's 2002 report the definition became "two of three criteria".[9]

The 1998 OECD definition is most frequently invoked by the "OECD tax havens".[47] However, it has been discounted by tax haven academics,[34][39][48] including the 2015 U.S. Congressional Research Service investigation into tax havens, as being restrictive, and enabling Hines low-tax havens (e.g. to which the first criterion applies), to avoid the OECD definition by improving OECD corporation (so the second and third criteria do not apply).[32]

Thus, the evidence (limited though it undoubtedly is) does not suggest any impact of the OECD initiative on tax-haven activity. [..] Thus, the OECD initiative cannot be expected to have much impact on corporate uses of tax havens, even if (or when) the initiative is fully implemented

In April 2000, the Financial Stability Forum (or FSF) defined the related concept of an offshore financial centre (or OFC),[49] which the IMF adopted in June 2000.[50] An OFC is similar to a "tax haven" and the terms are sometimes used interchangeably, but the term OFC is less controversial and pejorative.[10][51][52] The FSFIMF definition focused on the BEPS tools havens offer, and on Hines' observation that the accounting flows from BEPS tools distort the economic statistics of the haven. The FSFIMF list captured new corporate tax havens, such as the Netherlands, which Hines considered too small in 1994.[9]

In December 2008, Dharmapala wrote that the OECD process had removed much of the need to include "bank secrecy" in any definition of a tax haven and that it was now "first and foremost, low or zero corporate tax rates",[34] and this has become the general "financial dictionary" definition of a tax haven.[1][2][3]

In October 2009, the Tax Justice Network introduced the Financial Secrecy Index ("FSI") and the term "secrecy jurisdiction",[30] to highlight issues in regard to OECD-compliant countries who have high tax rates and do not appear on academic lists of tax havens, but have transparency issues. The FSI does not assess tax rates or BEPS flows in its calculation; but it is often misinterpreted as a tax haven definition in the financial media,[c] particularly when it lists the USA and Germany as major "secrecy jurisdictions".[53][54][55] However, many types of tax havens also rank as secrecy jurisdictions.

In October 2010, Hines published a list of 52 tax havens, scaled by analysing corporate investment flows.[20] Hines' largest havens were dominated by corporate tax havens, who Dharmapala noted in 2014 accounted for the bulk of global tax haven activity from BEPS tools.[56] The Hines 2010 list was the first to estimate the ten largest global tax havens, only two of which, Jersey and the British Virgin Isles, were on the OECD's 2000 list.

In July 2017, the University of Amsterdam's CORPNET group ignored any definition of a tax haven and focused on a purely quantitive approach, analysing 98 million global corporate connections on the Orbis database. CORPNET's lists of top five Conduit OFCs, and top five Sink OFCs, matched 9 of the top 10 havens in Hines' 2010 list, only differing in the United Kingdom, which only transformed their tax code in 200912. CORPNET's Conduit and Sink OFCs study split the understanding of a tax haven into two classifications:[57]

In June 2018, tax academic Gabriel Zucman (et alia) published research that also ignored any definition of a tax haven, but estimated the corporate "profit shifting" (i.e. BEPS), and "enhanced corporate profitability" that Hines and Dharmapala had noted.[58] Zucman pointed out that the CORPNET research under-represented havens associated with US technology firms, like Ireland and the Cayman Islands, as Google, Facebook and Apple do not appear on Orbis.[59] Even so, Zucman's 2018 list of top 10 havens also matched 9 of the top 10 havens in Hines' 2010 list, but with Ireland as the largest global haven.[60] These lists (Hines 2010, CORPNET 2017 and Zucman 2018), and others, which followed a purely quantitive approach, showed a firm consensus around the largest corporate tax havens.

Three main types of tax haven lists have been produced to date:[32]

Research also highlights proxy indicators, of which the two most prominent are:

The post2010 rise in quantitative techniques of identifying tax havens has resulted in relatively consistent identification of the ten largest tax havens. Dharmapala notes that as corporate BEPS flows dominate tax haven activity, these are mostly corporate tax havens.[56] Nine of the top ten tax havens in Gabriel Zucman's June 2018 study appear in the top ten lists of the two other quantitative studies since 2010. Four of the top five Conduit OFCs are represented; however, the United Kingdom only transformed its tax code in 20092012. All five of the top 5 Sink OFCs are represented, although Jersey only appears in the Hines 2010 list.

The studies capture the rise of Ireland and Singapore, both major regional headquarters for some of the largest BEPS tool users, Apple, Google and Facebook.[70][71][72]

In Q1 2015, Apple completed the largest BEPS action in history, when it shifted US$300 billion of IP to Ireland, which Nobel-prize economist Paul Krugman called "leprechaun economics".

In September 2018, using TCJA repatriation tax data, the NBER listed the key tax havens as: "Ireland, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Switzerland, Singapore, Bermuda and [the] Caribbean havens".[73][74]

(*) Appears as a top ten tax haven in all three lists; 9 major tax havens meet this criterion, Ireland, Singapore, Switzerland and the Netherlands (the Conduit OFCs), and the Cayman Islands, British Virgin Islands, Luxembourg, Hong Kong and Bermuda (the Sink OFCs).() Also appears as one of 5 Conduit OFC (Ireland, Singapore, Switzerland, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom), in CORPNET's 2017 research; or() Also appears as a Top 5 Sink OFC (British Virgin Islands, Luxembourg, Hong Kong, Jersey, Bermuda), in CORPNET's 2017 research.() Identified on the first, and largest, OECD 2000 list of 35 tax havens (the OECD list only contained Trinidad & Tobago by 2017).[19]

The strongest consensus amongst academics regarding the world's largest tax havens is therefore: Ireland, Singapore, Switzerland and the Netherlands (the major Conduit OFCs), and the Cayman Islands, British Virgin Islands, Luxembourg, Hong Kong and Bermuda (the major Sink OFCs), with the United Kingdom (a major Conduit OFC) still in transformation.

Of these ten major havens, all except the United Kingdom and the Netherlands featured on the original HinesRice 1994 list. The United Kingdom was not a tax haven in 1994, and Hines estimated the Netherlands's effective tax rate in 1994 at over 20% (he estimated Ireland's at 4%). Four of them, Ireland, Singapore, Switzerland (3 of the 5 top Conduit OFCs), and Hong Kong (a top 5 Sink OFC), featured in the HinesRice 1994 list's 7 major tax havens subcategory; highlighting a lack of progress in curtailing tax havens.[38]

In terms of proxy indicators, this list, excluding Canada, contains all seven of the countries that received more than one US tax inversion since 1982 (see here).[69] In addition, six of these major tax havens are in the top 15 GDP-per-capita, and of the four others, three of them, the Caribbean locations, are not included in IMF-World Bank GDP-per-capita tables.

In a June 2018 joint IMF report into the effect of BEPS flows on global economic data, eight of the above (excluding Switzerland and the United Kingdom) were cited as the world's leading tax havens.[75]

The longest list from Nongovernmental, Quantitative research on tax havens is the University of Amsterdam CORPNET July 2017 Conduit and Sink OFCs study, at 29 (5 Conduit OFCs and 25 Sink OFCs). The following are the 20 largest (5 Conduit OFCs and 15 Sink OFCs), which reconcile with other main lists as follows:

(*) Appears in as a Top 10 tax havens in all three quantitative lists, Hines 2010, ITEP 2017 and Zucman 2018 (above); all nine such Top 10 tax havens are listed below.() Appears on the James Hines 2010 list of 52 tax havens; seventeen of the twenty locations below, are on the James Hines 2010 list.() Identified on the largest OECD 2000 list of 35 tax havens (the OECD list only contained Trinidad & Tobago by 2017); only four locations below were ever on an OECD list.[19]() Identified on the European Union's first 2017 list of 17 tax havens;[62] only one location below is on the EU 2017 list.

Sovereign states that feature mainly as major corporate tax havens are:

Sovereign states that feature as both major corporate tax havens and major traditional tax havens, include:

Sovereign or semi-sovereign states that feature mainly as traditional tax havens (but have non-zero tax rates), include:

Sub-national states that are very traditional tax havens (i.e. explicit 0% rate of tax) include (fuller list in table opposite):

Post2010 research on tax havens is focused on quantitative analysis (which can be ranked), and tends to ignore very small tax havens where data is limited as the haven is used for individual tax avoidance rather than corporate tax avoidance. The last credible broad unranked list of global tax havens is the James Hines 2010 list of 52 tax havens. It is shown below but expanded to 55 to include havens identified in the July 2017 Conduit and Sink OFCs study that were not considered havens in 2010, namely the United Kingdom, Taiwan, and Curaao. The James Hines 2010 list contains 34 of the original 35 OCED tax havens;[19] and compared with the Top 10 tax havens and Top 20 tax havens above, show OECD processes focus on the compliance of tiny havens.

() Identified as one of the 5 Conduits by CORPNET in 2017; the above list has 5 of the 5.() Identified as one of the largest 24 Sinks by CORPNET in 2017; the above list has 23 of the 24 (Guyana missing).() Identified on the European Union's first 2017 list of 17 tax havens; the above list contains 8 of the 17.[62]() Identified on the first, and the largest, OECD 2000 list of 35 tax havens (the OECD list only contained Trinidad & Tobago by 2017); the above list contains 34 of the 35 (U.S. Virgin Islands missing).[19]

U.S. dedicated entities:

Major sovereign States which feature on financial secrecy lists (e.g. the Financial Secrecy Index), but not on corporate tax haven or traditional tax haven lists, are:

Neither the U.S. or Germany have appeared on any tax haven lists by the main academic leaders in tax haven research, namely: James R. Hines Jr., Dhammika Dharmapala or Gabriel Zucman. There are no known cases of foreign firms executing tax inversions to the U.S. or Germany for tax purposes, a basic characteristic of a corporate tax haven.[69]

While incomplete, and with the limitations discussed below, the available statistics nonetheless indicate that offshore banking is a very sizable activity. The OECD estimated in 2007 that capital held offshore amounted to between $5 trillion and $7 trillion, making up approximately 68% of total global investments under management.[106]

A more recent study by Gabriel Zucman of the London School of Economics estimated the amount of global cross-border wealth held in tax havens (including the Netherlands and Luxembourg as tax havens for this purpose) at US$7.6 trillion, of which US$2.46 trillion was held in Switzerland alone.[17][18] The Tax Justice Network (an anti-tax haven pressure group) estimated in 2012 that capital held offshore amounted to between $21 trillion and $32 trillion (between 2432% of total global investments),[107][108][109] although those estimates have been challenged.[110]

In 2000, the International Monetary Fund calculated based on Bank for International Settlements data that for selected offshore financial centres, on-balance sheet cross-border assets held in offshore financial centres reached a level of $4.6 trillion at the end of June 1999 (about 50 percent of total cross-border assets). Of that $4.6 trillion, $0.9 trillion was held in the Caribbean, $1 trillion in Asia, and most of the remaining $2.7 trillion accounted for by the major international finance centres (IFCs), namely London, the U.S. IBFs, and the Japanese offshore market.[111] The U.S. Department of Treasury estimated that in 2011 the Caribbean Banking Centers, which include Bahamas, Bermuda, Cayman Islands, Netherlands Antilles and Panama, held almost $2 trillion in United States debt.[112] Of this, approximately US$1.4 trillion is estimated to be held in the Cayman Islands alone.[106]

The Wall Street Journal in a study of 60 large U.S. companies found that they deposited $166 billion in offshore accounts in 2012, sheltering over 40% of their profits from U.S. taxes.[113] Similarly, Desai, Foley and Hines found that: "in 1999, 59% of U.S. firms with significant foreign operations had affiliates in tax haven countries", although they did not define "significant" for this purpose.[114] In 2009, the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) reported that 83 of the 100 largest U.S. publicly traded corporations and 63 of the 100 largest contractors for the U.S. federal government were maintaining subsidiaries in countries generally considered havens for avoiding taxes. The GAO did not review the companies' transactions to independently verify that the subsidiaries helped the companies reduce their tax burden, but said only that historically the purpose of such subsidiaries is to cut tax costs.[115]

James Henry, former chief economist at consultants McKinsey & Company, in his report for the Tax Justice Network gives an indication of the amount of money that is sheltered by wealthy individuals in tax havens. The report estimated conservatively that a fortune of $21 trillion is stashed away in off-shore accounts with $9.8 trillion alone by the top tierless than 100,000 peoplewho each own financial assets of $30 million or more. The report's author indicated that this hidden money results in a "huge" lost tax revenuea "black hole" in the economyand many countries would become creditors instead of being debtors if the money of their tax evaders would be taxed.[107][108][109]

The Tax Justice Network estimated in 2012 that global tax revenue lost to tax havens was circa $190 to $255 billion per year (assuming a 3% capital gains rate, a 30% capital gains tax rate, and $21 to $32 trillion hidden in tax havens.[116] The Zucman study uses different methodology, but also estimates $190 billion in lost revenue.[17]

The UN Economic Commission for Africa estimates that illegal financial flows cost the continent around $50 billion per year. The OECD estimates that two-thirds ($30 billion) occur from tax avoidance and evasion from non-African firms.[117] The avoidance of taxation by international corporations through legal and illegal methods stifles development in African countries. The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) will be difficult to obtain if these losses persist.[118]

In 2016 a massive data leak known as the "Panama Papers" cast some doubt on the size of previous estimates of lost revenue.[119]

However, the tax policy director of the Chartered Institute of Taxation expressed skepticism over the accuracy of the figures.[120] If true, those sums would amount to approximately 5 to 8 times the total amount of currency presently in circulation in the world. Daniel J. Mitchell of the Cato Institute says that the report also assumes, when considering notional lost tax revenue, that 100% money deposited offshore is evading payment of tax.[121]

In October 2009, research commissioned from Deloitte for the Foot Review of British Offshore Financial Centres said that much less tax had been lost to tax havens than previously had been thought. The report indicated "We estimate the total UK corporation tax potentially lost to avoidance activities to be up to 2 billion per annum, although it could be much lower." An earlier report by the U.K. Trades Union Congress, concluded that tax avoidance by the 50 largest companies in the FTSE 100 was depriving the UK Treasury of approximately 11.8 billion.[122] The report also stressed that British Crown Dependencies make a "significant contribution to the liquidity of the UK market". In the second quarter of 2009, they provided net funds to banks in the UK totaling $323 billion (195 billion), of which $218 billion came from Jersey, $74 billion from Guernsey and $40 billion from the Isle of Man.[122]

The Tax Justice Network reports that this system is "basically designed and operated" by a group of highly paid specialists from the world's largest private banks (led by UBS, Credit Suisse, and Goldman Sachs), law offices, and accounting firms and tolerated by international organizations such as Bank for International Settlements, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the OECD, and the G20. The amount of money hidden away has significantly increased since 2005, sharpening the divide between the super-rich and the rest of the world.[107][108][109]

The World Bank, in its 2019 World Development Report on the future of work supports increased government efforts to curb tax avoidance in order to create fiscal space for human capital investments.

Tax havens, traditional and corporate, have high GDP-per-capita rankings, because the haven's national economic statistics are artificially inflated by the BEPS accounting flows that add to the haven's GDP (and even GNP), but are not taxable in the haven.[75][123] As the largest facilitators of BEPS flows, corporate-focused tax havens, in particular, make up most of the top 10-15 GDP-per-capita tables, excluding oil and gas nations (see table below). Research into tax havens suggest a high GDP-per-capita score, in the absence of material natural resources, as an important proxy indicator of a tax haven.[124] At the core of the FSF-IMF definition of an offshore financial centre is a country where the BEPS flows are out of proportion to the size of the indigenous economy. Apple's Q1 2015 "leprechaun economics" BEPS transaction in Ireland was a dramatic example, which caused Ireland to abandon its GDP and GNP metrics in February 2017, in favour of a new metric, modified gross national income, or GNI*.

This artificial inflation of GDP can attract excess foreign capital, who misprice their capital by using a Debt-to-GDP metric for the haven, thus producing phases of stronger economic growth.[22] However, the increased leverage leads to more severe credit cycles, particularly where the artificial nature of the GDP is exposed to foreign investors.[125] An example is the Irish financial crisis in 20092013.[23]

Notes:

In several research papers, James R. Hines Jr. showed that tax havens were typically small but well-governed nations and that being a tax haven had brought significant prosperity.[21][22] In 2009, Hines and Dharmapala suggested that roughly 15% of countries are tax havens, but they wondered why more countries had not become tax havens given the observable economic prosperity it could bring.[4]

There are roughly 40 major tax havens in the world today, but the sizable apparent economic returns to becoming a tax haven raise the question of why there are not more.

Hines and Dharmapala concluded that governance was a major issue for smaller countries in trying to become tax havens. Only countries with strong governance and legislation which was trusted by foreign corporates and investors, would become tax havens.[4] Hines and Dharmapala's positive view on the financial benefits of becoming a tax haven, as well as being two of the major academic leaders into tax haven research, put them in sharp conflict with non-governmental organisations advocating tax justice, such as the Tax Justice Network, who accused them as promoting tax avoidance.[128][129][130]

A finding of the 1994 Hines-Rice paper, re-affirmed by others,[131] was that: low foreign tax rates [from tax havens] ultimately enhance U.S. tax collections.[38] Hines showed that as a result of paying no foreign taxes by using tax havens, U.S. multinationals avoided building up foreign tax credits that would reduce their U.S. tax liability. Hines returned to this finding several times, and in his 2010 Important papers on tax havens, Treasure Islands, where he showed how U.S. multinationals used tax havens and BEPS tools to avoid Japanese taxes on their Japanese investments, noted that this was being confirmed by other empirical research at a company-level.[25] Hines's observations would influence U.S. policy towards tax havens, including the 1996 "check-the-box"[g] rules, and U.S. hostility to OECD attempts in curbing Ireland's BEPS tools,[h][26] and why, in spite of public disclosure of tax avoidance by firms such as Google, Facebook, and Apple, with Irish BEPS tools, little has been done by the U.S. to stop them.[131]

Lower foreign tax rates entail smaller credits for foreign taxes and greater ultimate U.S. tax collections (Hines and Rice, 1994).[38] Dyreng and Lindsey (2009),[25] offer evidence that U.S. firms with foreign affiliates in certain tax havens pay lower pay lower foreign taxes and higher U.S. taxes than do otherwise-similar large U.S. companies.

Research in JuneSeptember 2018, confirmed U.S. multinationals as the largest global users of tax havens and BEPS tools.[132][133]

U.S. multinationals use tax havens[i] more than multinationals from other countries which have kept their controlled foreign corporations regulations. No other non-haven OECD country records as high a share of foreign profits booked in tax havens as the United States. [...] This suggests that half of all the global profits shifted to tax havensare shifted by U.S. multinationals. By contrast, about 25% accrues to E.U. countries, 10% to the rest of the OECD, and 15% to developing countries (Trslv et al., 2018).

In 2019, non-academic groups, such as the Council on Foreign Relations, realised the scale of U.S. corporate use of tax havens:

Well over half the profits that American companies report earning abroad are still booked in only a few low-tax nations places that, of course, are not actually home to the customers, workers and taxpayers facilitating most of their business. A multinational corporation can route its global sales through Ireland, pay royalties to its Dutch subsidiary and then funnel income to its Bermudian subsidiary taking advantage of Bermudas corporate tax rate of zero.

Tax justice groups interpreted Hines' research as the U.S. engaging in tax competition with higher-tax nations (i.e. the U.S. exchequer earning excess taxes at the expense of others). The 2017 TCJA seems to support this view with the U.S. exchequer being able to levy a 15.5% repatriation tax on over $1 trillion of untaxed offshore profits built up by U.S. multinationals with BEPS tools from non-U.S. revenues. Had these U.S. multinationals paid taxes on these non-U.S. profits in the countries in which they were earned, there would have been the little further liability to U.S. taxation. Research by Zucman and Wright (2018) estimated that most of the TCJA repatriation benefit went to the shareholders of U.S. multinationals, and not the U.S. exchequer.[73][j]

Academics who study tax havens, attribute Washington's support of U.S. corporate use of tax havens to a "political compromise" between Washington, and other higher-tax OECD nations, to compensate for shortcomings of the U.S. "worldwide" tax system.[135][136] Hines had advocated for a switch to a "territorial" tax system, as most other nations use, which would remove U.S. multinational need for tax havens. In 2016, Hines, with German tax academics, showed that German multinationals make little use of tax havens because their tax regime, a "territorial" system, removes any need for it.[137]

Hines' research was cited by the Council of Economic Advisors ("CEA") in drafting the TCJA legislation in 2017, and advocating for moving to a hybrid "territorial" tax system framework.[138][139]

A controversial area of research into tax havens is the suggestion that tax havens actually promote global economic growth by solving perceived issues in the tax regimes of higher-taxed nations (e.g. the above discussion on the U.S. "worldwide" tax system as an example). Important academic leaders in tax haven research, such as Hines,[141] Dharmapala,[34] and others,[131] cite evidence that, in certain cases, tax havens appear to promote economic growth in higher-tax countries, and can support beneficial hybrid tax regimes of higher taxes on domestic activity, but lower taxes on international sourced capital or income:

The effect of tax havens on economic welfare in high tax countries is unclear, though the availability of tax havens appears to stimulate economic activity in nearby high-tax countries.

Tax havens change the nature of tax competition among other countries, very possibly permitting them to sustain high domestic tax rates that are effectively mitigated for mobile international investors whose transactions are routed through tax havens. [..] In fact, countries that lie close to tax havens have exhibited more rapid real income growth than have those further away, possibly in part as a result of financial flows and their market effects.

The most cited paper on research into offshore financial centres ("OFCs"),[142] a closely related term to tax havens, noted the positive and negative aspects of OFCs on neighbouring high-tax, or source, economies, and marginally came out in favour of OFCs.[143]

CONCLUSION: Using both bilateral and multilateral samples, we find empirically that successful offshore financial centers encourage bad behavior in source countries since they facilitate tax evasion and money laundering [...] Nevertheless, offshore financial centers created to facilitate undesirable activities can still have unintended positive consequences. [...] We tentatively conclude that OFCs are better characterized as "symbionts".

However, other notable tax academics strongly dispute these views, such as work by Slemrod and Wilson, who in their Important papers on tax havens, label tax havens as parasitic to jurisdictions with normal tax regimes, that can damage their economies.[140] In addition, tax justice campaign groups have been equally critical of Hines, and others, in these views.[129][130] Research in June 2018 by the IMF showed that much of the foreign direct investment ("FDI") that came from tax havens into higher-tax countries, had really originated from the higher-tax country,[75] and for example, that the largest source of FDI into the United Kingdom, was actually from the United Kingdom, but invested via tax havens.[144]

The boundaries with wider contested economic theories on the effects of corporate taxation on economic growth, and whether there should be corporate taxes, are easy to blur. Other major academic leaders in tax haven research, such as Zucman, highlight the injustice of tax havens and see the effects as lost income for the development of society.[145] It remains a controversial area with advocates on both sides.[146]

The way tax havens operate can be viewed in the following principal contexts:[147][pageneeded]

Since the early 20th century, wealthy individuals from high-tax countries have sought to relocate themselves in low-tax countries. In most countries in the world, residence is the primary basis of taxationsee tax residence. The low-tax country chosen may levy no, or only very low, income tax and may not levy capital gains tax, or inheritance tax. Individuals are normally unable to return to their previous higher-tax country for more than a few days a year without reverting their tax residence to their former country. They are sometimes referred to as tax exiles.[147][pageneeded]

Corporations can establish subsidiary corporations and/or regional headquarters in corporate tax havens for tax planning purposes. Where a corporate moves their legal headquarters to a haven, it is known as a corporate tax inversion.[69][148] The rise of intellectual property, or IP, as a major BEPS tax tool, has meant that corporates can achieve much of the benefits of a tax inversion, without needing to move their headquarters. Apple's $300 billion quasi-inversion to Ireland in 2015 (see leprechaun economics) is a good example of this.

Asset holding involves utilizing an offshore trust or offshore company, or a trust owning a company. The company or trust will be formed in one tax haven, and will usually be administered and resident in another. The function is to hold assets, which may consist of a portfolio of investments under management, trading companies or groups, physical assets such as real estate or valuable chattels. The essence of such arrangements is that by changing the ownership of the assets into an entity which is not tax resident in the high-tax country, they cease to be taxable in that country.[147][pageneeded]

Often the mechanism is employed to avoid a specific tax. For example, a wealthy testator could transfer his house into an offshore company; he can then settle the shares of the company on trust (with himself being a trustee with another trustee, whilst holding the beneficial life estate) for himself for life, and then to his daughter. On his death, the shares will automatically vest in the daughter, who thereby acquires the house, without the house having to go through probate and being assessed with inheritance tax.[149] Most countries assess inheritance tax, and all other taxes, on real estate within their jurisdiction, regardless of the nationality of the owner, so this would not work with a house in most countries. It is more likely to be done with intangible assets.[147][pageneeded]

Many businesses which do not require a specific geographical location or extensive labor are set up in a country to minimize tax exposure. Perhaps the best illustration of this is the number of reinsurance companies which have migrated to Bermuda over the years. Other examples include internet-based services and group finance companies. In the 1970s and 1980s corporate groups were known to form offshore entities for the purposes of "reinvoicing". These reinvoicing companies simply made a margin without performing any economic function, but as the margin arose in a tax-free country, it allowed the group to "skim" profits from the high-tax country. Most sophisticated tax codes now prevent transfer pricing schemes of this nature.[147][pageneeded]

Much of the economic activity in tax havens today consists of professional financial services such as mutual funds, banking, life insurance and pensions. Generally, the funds are deposited with the intermediary in the low-tax country, and the intermediary then on-lends or invests the money in another location. Although such systems do not normally avoid tax in the principal customer's country, it enables financial service providers to provide international products without adding another layer of taxation. This has proved particularly successful in the area of offshore funds. It has been estimated over 75% of the world's hedge funds, probably the riskiest form of collective investment vehicle, are domiciled in the Cayman Islands, with nearly $1.1 trillion US Assets under management[150] although statistics in the hedge fund industry are notoriously speculative.

Bearer shares allow for anonymous ownership, and thus have been criticized for facilitating money laundering and tax evasion; these shares are also available in some OECD countries as well as in the U.S. state of Wyoming.[151]:7 In a 2010 study in which the researcher attempted to set-up anonymous corporations found that 13 of the 17 attempts were successful in OECD countries, such as the United States and the United Kingdom, while only 4 of 28 attempts were successful in countries typically labeled tax havens.[152] The last two states in America permitting bearer shares, Nevada and Delaware made them illegal in 2007. In 2011, an OECD peer review recommended that the United Kingdom improve its bearer share laws.[153] The UK abolished the use of bearer shares in 2015.[citation needed]

In 2012 the Guardian wrote that there are 28 persons as directors for 21,500 companies.[154][155]

Most tax havens have a double monetary control system, which distinguish residents from non-resident as well as foreign currency from the domestic, the local currency one. In general, residents are subject to monetary controls, but not non-residents. A company, belonging to a non-resident, when trading overseas is seen as non-resident in terms of exchange control. It is possible for a foreigner to create a company in a tax haven to trade internationally; the company's operations will not be subject to exchange controls as long as it uses foreign currency to trade outside the tax haven. Tax havens usually have currency easily convertible or linked to an easily convertible currency. Most are convertible to US dollars, euro or to pounds sterling.[citation needed]

The Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA) was passed by the US Congress to stop the outflow of money from the country into tax haven bank accounts. With the strong backing of the Obama Administration, Congress drafted the FATCA legislation and added it into the Hiring Incentives to Restore Employment Act (HIRE) signed into law by President Obama in March 2010.

FATCA requires foreign financial institutions (FFI) of broad scope banks, stock brokers, hedge funds, pension funds, insurance companies, trusts to report directly to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) all clients who are U.S. persons. Starting January 2014, FATCA requires FFIs to provide annual reports to the IRS on the name and address of each U.S. client, as well as the largest account balance in the year and total debits and credits of any account owned by a U.S. person.[156] If an institution does not comply, the U.S. will impose a 30% withholding tax on all its transactions concerning U.S. securities, including the proceeds of sale of securities.[citation needed]

In addition, FATCA requires any foreign company not listed on a stock exchange or any foreign partnership which has 10% U.S. ownership to report to the IRS the names and tax identification number (TIN) of any U.S. owner. FATCA also requires U.S. citizens and green card holders who have foreign financial assets in excess of $50,000 to complete a new Form 8938 to be filed with the 1040 tax return, starting with fiscal year 2010.[157] The delay is indicative of a controversy over the feasibility of implementing the legislation as evidenced in this paper from the Peterson Institute for International Economics.[158]

An unintended consequence of FATCA and its cost of compliance for non-US banks is that some non-US banks are refusing to serve American investors.[159] Concerns have also been expressed that, because FATCA operates by imposing withholding taxes on U.S. investments, this will drive foreign financial institutions (particularly hedge funds) away from investing in the U.S. and thereby reduce liquidity and capital inflows into the US.[160]

A 2012 report by the British Tax Justice Network estimated that between US$21 trillion and $32 trillion is sheltered from taxes in unreported tax havens worldwide.[161] If such wealth earns 3% annually and such capital gains were taxed at 30%, it would generate between $190 billion and $280 billion in tax revenues, more than any other tax shelter.[116] If such hidden offshore assets are considered, many countries with governments nominally in debt are shown to be net creditor nations.[162] However, despite being widely quoted, the methodology used in the calculations has been questioned,[110] and the tax policy director of the Chartered Institute of Taxation also expressed skepticism over the accuracy of the figures.[120] Another recent study estimated the amount of global offshore wealth at the smallerbut still sizablefigure of US$7.6 trillion. This estimate included financial assets only: "My method probably delivers a lower bound, in part because it only captures financial wealth and disregards real assets. After all, high-net-worth individuals can stash works of art, jewelry, and gold in 'freeports,' warehouses that serve as repositories for valuablesGeneva, Luxembourg, and Singapore all have them. High-net-worth individuals also own real estate in foreign countries."[17] A study of 60 large US companies found that they deposited $166 billion in offshore accounts during 2012, sheltering over 40% of their profits from U.S. taxes.[113]

Details of thousands of owners of offshore companies were published in April 2013 in a joint collaboration between The Guardian and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists.[163] The data was later published on a publicly accessible website in an attempt to "crowd-source" the data.[164] The publication of the list appeared to be timed to coincide with the 2013 G8 summit chaired by British Prime Minister David Cameron which emphasised tax evasion and transparency.

Germany announced in February 2008 that it had paid 4.2 million to Heinrich Kieber[de],[165][166] a former data archivist of LGT Treuhand, a Liechtenstein bank, for a list of 1,250 customers of the bank and their accounts' details. Investigations and arrests followed relating to charges of illegal tax evasion. The German authorities shared the data with U.S. tax authorities, but the British government paid a further 100,000 for the same data.[167] Other governments, notably Denmark and Sweden, refused to pay for the information regarding it as stolen property.[168] The Liechtenstein authorities subsequently accused the German authorities of espionage.[169]

However, regardless of whether unlawful tax evasion was being engaged in, the incident has fuelled the perception among European governments and the press that tax havens provide facilities shrouded in secrecy designed to facilitate unlawful tax evasion, rather than legitimate tax planning and legal tax mitigation schemes. This in turn has led to a call for "crackdowns" on tax havens.[170] Whether the calls for such a crackdown are mere posturing or lead to more definitive activity by mainstream economies to restrict access to tax havens is yet to be seen. No definitive announcements or proposals have yet been made by the European Union or governments of the member states.[citation needed]

Peer Steinbrck, the former German finance minister, announced in January 2009 a plan to amend fiscal laws. New regulations would disallow that payments to companies in certain countries that shield money from disclosure rules to be declared as operational expenses. The effect of this would make banking in such states unattractive and expensive.[171]

In November 2009, Sir Michael Foot, a former Bank of England official and Bahamas bank inspector, delivered a report on the British Crown Dependencies and Overseas Territories for HM Treasury.[172] The report indicated that while many of the territories "had a good story to tell", others needed to improve their abilities to detect and prevent financial crime. The report also stressed the view that narrow tax bases presented long term strategic risks and that the economies should seek to diversify and broaden their tax bases.[173]

It indicated that tax revenue lost by the UK government appeared to be much smaller than had previously been estimated (see above under Lost tax revenue), and also stressed the importance of the liquidity provided by the territories to the United Kingdom. The Crown Dependencies and Overseas Territories broadly welcomed the report.[173] The pressure group Tax Justice Network, unhappy with the findings, commented that "[a] weak man, born to be an apologist, has delivered a weak report."[174]

At the London G20 summit on 2 April 2009, G20 countries agreed to define a blacklist for tax havens, to be segmented according to a four-tier system, based on compliance with an "internationally agreed tax standard."[175] The list as per 2 April 2009 can be viewed on the OECD website.[176] The four tiers were:

Those countries in the bottom tier were initially classified as being 'non-cooperative tax havens'. Uruguay was initially classified as being uncooperative. However, upon appeal the OECD stated that it did meet tax transparency rules and thus moved it up. The Philippines took steps to remove itself from the blacklist and Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak had suggested earlier that Malaysia should not be in the bottom tier.[177]

See more here:

Tax haven - Wikipedia

Atlas Shrugged: Part I (2011) – Rotten Tomatoes

Posted on February 26, 2019 by Danzig

Billing itself as part one of an intended trilogy, Atlas Shrugged is an adaptation of Ayn Rand's famous 1200-page book on the merits of self-interest. Rand has become resurgent in the last few years, a favorite author of the Tea Party, as her anti-government, anti-regulation, anti-union, and anti-poor perspective has found a new legion of fuming followers. I can't imagine anyone else buying a ticket to the big screen version of Atlas Shrugged, a resoundingly tiresome and didactic enterprise. If this is what Part One brings, I can already predict the extensive yawning exercises I'll have to do to get in shape for Parts Two and Three.In the not too distant future, America's airline industry has ground to a halt due to rising gas prices ($35 a gallon we're told). The country has gone back to rail and leading that charge is Taggart Railway, lead by Dagny Taggart (Taylor Schilling). She's trying to save her company from her lazy brother, James (Matthew Marsden), who wants to rely on bribery and his Washington friends to get by. Dagny wants to join forces with steel tycoon Henry Reardon (Grant Bowler), who has staked his company's future on special new extra shiny steel. Other companies want to block Dagny and Reardon's efforts, relying on Washington to write strict laws penalizing the rich and successful and spreading the wealth around to those less unfortunate. At the same time, powerful businessmen seem to be vanishing and the only connection seems to be the identity of John Galt, a mysterious capitalist with an offer no rugged man of industry will refuse. Maybe Atlas shrugged because he got tired of how unbelievably boring this movie is. Oh my goodness, I was rolling my eyes and checking my watch every five minutes. The vast majority of this film involves ideologues disguised as characters talking about esoteric business practices. A full 80 percent of the dialogue has to be about railways and steel and this manufacturing and ore mines and... I'm sorry I fell asleep in the middle of writing that sentence. Seriously, this movie could be a cure for insomnia. It's so crushingly boring that it makes you wonder how anyone could ever pick up Rand's novel and think, "This deserves to be a film." There are segments where characters will talk this corporate gobblety-gook in unbroken reams, the actors behaving like androids. Now technical talk is not necessarily a one-way ticket to snoozeville, as political and corporate dramas can be quite invigorating in the right hands (see: Margin Call). It helps when you have a story, but with Atlas Shrugged all we have are mouthpieces for a political ideology. Regardless of political opinion, the movie fails because it never makes the story feel like it matters. The dialogue is perfunctory, labored, and inert, bogged down with lazy philosophical jabs. It's all tedious expository dialogue with no room for character. Who wouldn't want to watch a movie completely around the conflict of whether a train will get its steel tracks? That's it. You wouldn't know any of this mattered without the helpful inclusion of an overly enthusiastic dramatic score. Who cares about any of this junk? If you're looking for the most high-profile movie of 2011 to talk about the infrastructure dynamics of railways, your long wait ends here.Dagny and Reardon are supposed to be our heroes, the champions of the not-so-little guy, and thus we're intended to root for their romantic coupling. Never mind that Reardon is married because, in that age-old point of rom/com rationalization, his wife is a bitch. The two have one of the most robotic lovemaking scenes I've seen in recent memory, and this flash of sexuality and a few dirty words are the sole reason this film earned a PG-13 rating. These characters remain one-note and vacant, including icy heroine Dagny casually admitting, "I don't know how to feel." And then there's Reardon, who admits, "My only goal is to make money." What better antagonists than unfeeling heads of huge corporations who just want to be left alone so they can make their untold millions? What a great entry point for the empathy of the audience. None of these characters grow, change, learn, or even seem to reflect recognizable emotions beyond venom-filled anger. The villainous government stooges act shady, plotting the downfall of those laudable titans of industry, but it all just becomes indistinguishable chatter, villains clucking to themselves. Set in the near future of 2016, this adaptation feels strangely dated, most notably in its ascent of railroads. There's some ham-handed throwaway line about the cost of gas being so high so America just reverted back to the good old locomotive. I find this deeply implausible. It would have made more sense to actually make this a 1950s period piece, the original setting of Rand's novel. We're constantly told about the instability in the world via newscasters and announcers, but we don't ever see the effects of this world in crisis. Mostly that's because we're hobnobbing with the rich in their boardrooms and cocktail parties, but there's a scene where Dagny exits her limo and walks in a huff down the streets, which are empty of those dirty hordes of bottom-dwellers we've been hearing about. Apparently a world in crisis has done little to upset the disadvantaged, or the cities have just been very adamant about cleaning up the riffraff. The world depicted does not seem realistic. Would the country so easily go back to train travel where Dagny's super train can cross 200 miles in a single hour? What about international freight and travel? I guess that still has to run on all that precious petrol. I'd assume that by 2016 the world will still be an interdependent, globalized economy, so I would think that the United States would face more dramatic tension than the oversight over a railroad company.I've noticed that when it comes to a mostly conservative, mostly Christian fan base, the quality of movies is almost irrelevant. Movies like Left Behind, The Omega Code, Fireproof, or the recent Courageous are not expected to be good movies by traditional standards. They are sermons packaged in the guise of popular entertainment, which means that the artistic particulars come second to the message, and often do. Atlas Shrugged seems to fall into this same category. The production is very low budget, hence all those conversations in offices, and the CGI that is utilized looks pretty chintzy. The acting is profoundly bad, with Schilling (TV's Mercy) giving a flat, monotone performance throughout, closer resembling a well-dressed mannequin than a human being. She is a horrible actress, resembling a bug-eyed Botox addict who has forgotten the correct muscles to express emotion. And naturally subtlety goes out the window in favor of reconfirming the belief system of the people buying the tickets. I have no issue with movies that adhere to an ideology, whatever that may be, as long as the message doesn't get in the way of telling a good story. Atlas Shrugged is not a good story, not even close, and the message can be all too bludgeoning at times, like when Dagny incredulously remarks, "What's with all these foolish altruistic notions?" The movie seems to be bristling with anger and many a character spits venom at the very idea of government involvement, unions demanding safe working conditions, and regulation in any form, red meat for the Tea Party faithful. Without that red meat, or the film's strident message, there would be no reason to watch this mess. And now I'll shed my objective reviewer cap briefly to get on my own little soapbox and denounce the dangers of Randian politics. To be fair, I've never read an Ayn Rand book and honestly have no inclination of ever reading one of this woman's polemics. I just feel I have better uses of my time than reading a justification for sociopathic greed. Rand's extreme philosophy has been described as reverse Marxism, wherein the social elite is being sucked dry by the lechers of the world, those who do not contribute to the value of society. And for Rand the only value is money. The world, Rand posits, would be a better place if man would only think of himself. I fundamentally disagree with this notion. Remember that part in the bible where Jesus gives money to the rich and tells the poor to suck it up? Rand's self-involved philosophy seems like a round of consumerist Calvanism, rehashing a skewed religious perspective that was popular with the upper classes because it provided celestial reasoning why the rich were so rich and the poor were so poor. You see God wanted you to be rich, that is why you were born into a wealthy family, and he wanted all those miserable poor people to suffer. To help out the poor would therefore be blaspheming God's infinitely unknowable plan. The basic plotline of Atlas Shrugged, though only teased in Part One, is that the rich will get tired of being burdened by societal constraints and up and leave us all. Here's a good question: if all the billionaires in the world were to vanish, do you think everything would grind to a halt? Would we all be so out of luck without the super wealthy telling us what to buy? It's like the reverse of 2006's social satire A Day Without a Mexican, proposing that the American economic engine would be severely stalled if all the undocumented workers were to vanish. Under Rand's narrow line of thinking, the rich are that way because they are the best and brightest, the innovators. Nowhere in that equation does Rand leave room for the rich being rich due to lies, cheating, nepotism, and rigging the system for the continued benefit of a select few. I'm not meaning to begin a screed here, but I think the 2008 economic meltdown proved what happens when business is left to regulate itself. The economic collapse also proved that just because you've got some letters in your title (CEO, CFO, etc.) does not mean you're the smartest egg. Cronyism and a scoiopathic desire to look out for one's self-interest above all else is what brought the world on the brink of economic collapse. For me, recent history is a rejection of Rand's theories, not corroboration. Okay, soapbox put away. Atlas Shrugged the film seems almost like an unintended ironic statement on Ayn Rand's belief of the superiority of the individual. That's because movies are a profoundly collaborative medium, where many hands toil away to create a work of art. It is not the result of one man or woman but the results of hundreds of men and women working together, each knowing their role, playing their part, and working toward something greater than individual self-interest. Huh, how about that? It pretty much doesn't matter that Atlas Shrugged is a powerfully boring, braying, incoherent, tedious chore that is merely a message disguised as a movie. The intended audiences will more than likely hail the final product, ignoring "details" like the talky exposition-heavy dialogue, horrible acting, laughable special effects, and plodding pacing, and overall poor production. The Rand faithful are not going to this movie to be entertained, they are going to see their beliefs reflected upon the big screen. The overall quality of Atlas Shrugged is an afterthought to them. I just wish it wasn't an afterthought to the people making the movie. Nate's Grade: D

Originally posted here:

Atlas Shrugged: Part I (2011) - Rotten Tomatoes

Atlas Shrugged | Libertarianism Wiki | FANDOM powered by Wikia

Posted on February 26, 2019 by Danzig

This article is about the novel. For the film adaptations, see Atlas Shrugged: Part I or Atlas Shrugged: Part II.

Atlas Shrugged is a novel by Ayn Rand, first published in 1957 in the United States. Rand's fourth and last novel, it was also her longest, and the one she considered to be her magnum opus in the realm of fiction writing.[4] Atlas Shrugged includes elements of romance,[1][2][3] mystery, and science fiction,[5] and it contains Rand's most extensive statement of Objectivism in any of her works of fiction.

The book explores a dystopian United States where many of society's most productive citizens refuse to be exploited by increasing taxation and government regulations and go on strike. The refusal evokes the imagery of what would happen if the mythological Atlas refused to continue to hold up the world. They are led by John Galt. Galt describes the strike as "stopping the motor of the world" by withdrawing the minds that drive society's growth and productivity. In their efforts, these people "of the mind" hope to demonstrate that a world in which the individual is not free to create is doomed, that civilization cannot exist where every person is a slave to society and government, and that the destruction of the profit motive leads to the collapse of society. The protagonist, Dagny Taggart, sees society collapse around her as the government increasingly asserts control over all industry.

The novel's title is a reference to Atlas, a Titan of Greek mythology, who in the novel is described as "the giant who holds the world on his shoulders".[6] The significance of this reference is seen in a conversation between the characters Francisco d'Anconia and Hank Rearden, in which d'Anconia asks Rearden what sort of advice he would give to Atlas upon seeing that "the greater [the titan's] effort, the heavier the world bore down on his shoulders". With Rearden unable to answer, d'Anconia gives his own response: "To shrug".

The theme of Atlas Shrugged, as Rand described it, is "the role of man's mind in existence". The book explores a number of philosophical themes that Rand would subsequently develop into the philosophy of Objectivism.[7][8] It advocates the core tenets of Rand's philosophy of Objectivism and expresses her concept of human achievement. In doing so, it expresses many facets of Rand's philosophy, such as the advocacy of reason, individualism, capitalism, and the failures of government coercion.

Atlas Shrugged received largely negative reviews after its 1957 publication, but achieved enduring popularity and consistent sales in the following decades.[9]

Rand referred to Atlas Shrugged as a mystery novel, "not about the murder of man's body, but about the murder and rebirth of man's spirit".[10] Her stated goal for writing the text was "to show how desperately the world needs prime movers and how viciously it treats them" and to portray "what happens to a world without them".[10] Nonetheless, when asked by film producer Albert S. Ruddy if a screenplay could focus on the love story, Rand agreed and said, "That's all it ever was."[1][2][3]

Rand remarked that the core idea for the book came to her after a 1943 telephone conversation with a friend, who asserted that Rand owed it to her readers to write a nonfiction book about her philosophy. Rand replied, "What if I went on strike? What if all the creative minds of the world went on strike?"[9] Rand then set out to create a work of fiction that explored the role of the mind in human life and the morality of rational self-interest,[11] by exploring the consequences when the people "of the mind" go on strike, refusing to allow their inventions, art, business leadership, scientific research, or new ideas to be taken from them by the government or by the rest of the world. The working title throughout her writing was The Strike, but Rand thought this title would have revealed the mystery element of the novel prematurely,[12] so she was pleased when her husband suggested Atlas Shrugged, previously the title of one of the chapters, as a better title for the book.[13]

To produce Atlas Shrugged, Rand conducted research on American industry, specifically the railroad industry, which forms a key element in her novel. Her previous work on a proposed (but never realized) screenplay based on the development of the atomic bomb, including her interviews of J. Robert Oppenheimer, was used in the portrait of the character Robert Stadler and the novel's depiction of the development of "Project X". To do further background research, Rand toured and inspected a number of industrial facilities, such as the Kaiser Steel plant, rode the locomotives of the New York Central Railroad, and even learned to operate the locomotive of the Twentieth Century Limited (and proudly reported that when operating it, "nobody touched a lever except me").[9][14]

Rand's self-identified literary influences include Victor Hugo, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Edmond Rostand, and O. Henry.[15] In addition, Justin Raimondo has observed similarities between Atlas Shrugged and the 1922 novel The Driver, written by Garet Garrett,[16] which concerns an idealized industrialist named Henry Galt, who is a transcontinental railway owner trying to improve the world and fighting against government and socialism. In contrast, Chris Matthew Sciabarra found Raimondo's "claims that Rand plagiarized... The Driver" to be "unsupported",[17] and Stephan Kinsella doubts that Rand was in any way influenced by Garrett.[18] Writer Bruce Ramsey observed, "Both The Driver and Atlas Shrugged have to do with running railroads during an economic depression, and both suggest pro-capitalist ways in which the country might get out of the depression. But in plot, character, tone, and theme they are very different."[19]

To persuade Rand to publish her novel with Random House, publisher Bennet Cerf proposed a "philosophic contest" in which Rand would submit her work to various publishers to judge their response to its ideas, so she could evaluate who might best promote her work.[20] Because of the success of Rand's 1943 novel The Fountainhead, the initial print run was 100,000 copies. It marked a turning point in her life, ending her career as novelist and beginning her tenure as a popular philosopher.[21]

Atlas Shrugged is set in an alternative dystopian United States at an unspecified time, in which the country has a "National Legislature" instead of Congress and a "Head of State" instead of President. Writer Edward Younkins noted, "The story may be simultaneously described as anachronistic and timeless. The pattern of industrial organization appears to be that of the late 1800s the mood seems to be close to that of the depression-era 1930s. Both the social customs and the level of technology remind one of the 1950s."[22] Many early 20th-century technologies are available, and the steel and railroad industries are especially significant; jet planes are described as a relatively new technology, and television is a novelty significantly less influential than radio. While many other countries are mentioned in passing, there is no mention of the Soviet Union, no reference to World War II or the Cold War. It is implied that the countries of the world are converting to big government statism, along vaguely Marxist lines, in references to "People's States" in Europe and South America. Plot elements also refer to nationalization of businesses in these "People's States", as well as in America. The "mixed economy" of the book's present is often contrasted with the "pure" capitalism of 19th century America, wistfully recalled as a lost Golden Age.

The novel is divided into three parts consisting of ten chapters each. Robert James Bidinotto noted "the titles of the parts and chapters suggest multiple layers of meaning. The three parts, for example, are named in honor of Aristotle's laws of logic... Part One is titled 'Non-Contradiction'... Part Two, titled 'Either-Or'... [and] Part Three is titled 'A Is A,' a reference to 'the Law of Identity'."[23]

Template:See alsoAs the novel opens, protagonist Dagny Taggart, the Operating Vice President of Taggart Transcontinental, a giant railroad company originally pioneered by her grandfather, attempts to keep the company alive during difficult economic times marked by collectivism and statism. While Dagny runs the company from behind the scenes, her brother, James Taggart, the railroad's President, is peripherally aware of the company's troubles, but will not make any difficult choices, preferring to avoid responsibility for any actions while watching his company go under. He seems to make irrational decisions, such as preferring to buy steel from Orren Boyle's Associated Steel, rather than Hank Rearden's Rearden Steel, despite the former continually delaying delivery of vital rail. In this as in other decisions, Dagny simply goes ahead with her own policy and challenges him to repeal it. As this unfolds, Dagny is disappointed to discover that Francisco d'Anconia, a true genius and her only childhood friend, first love, and king of the copper industry, appears to have become a worthless playboy who is destroying his family's international copper company, which has made him into one of the richest and most powerful men in the world.

Hank Rearden, a self-made steel magnate of great integrity, has recently developed a metal alloy called Rearden Metal, now the strongest and most reliable metal in the world. Hank chooses to keep the instructions to its creation a secret, sparking jealousy and uproar among competitors. False claims are made about the danger of the alloy and are backed by government agencies. As a result of this, pressure is put on Dagny to use conventional steel, but she refuses. Hank's career is hindered by his feelings of obligation toward his manipulative wife, mother, and ungrateful younger brother, who show no appreciation for everything he provides for them. Dagny also becomes acquainted with Wesley Mouch, a Washington lobbyist initially working for Rearden, whom he betrays. Mouch eventually leads the government's efforts in controlling all commerce and enterprise, intentionally destroying the common man's opportunity to build a largely successful, free-market business. The reader also becomes acquainted with Ellis Wyatt, the sole founder and supervisor of the successful enterprise Wyatt Oil. He is a young, self-possessed, hard-working man one of the few men still loyal to Dagny and Hank's efforts in pushing for a system of business free of government meddling and control.

While economic conditions worsen and government agencies continue to enforce their control on successful businesses, the nave, yet weary mass of citizens are often heard reciting the new, popular street phrase, "Who is John Galt?" This sarcastic phrase is given in response to what tend to be sincere questions about heavy subjects, wherein the individual can find no answer. It sarcastically means, "Don't ask important questions, because we don't have answers", or more broadly, "What's the point?" or "Why bother?"

Dagny begins to notice the nation's brightest innovators and business leaders abruptly disappearing, one by one, under mysterious circumstances, all leaving their top industrial businesses to certain failure. The most recent of these leaders to have vanished is Dagny's friend Ellis Wyatt, who, like the others, has suddenly disappeared into thin air with no warning, leaving nothing behind except an empty office and his most successful oil well now spewing petroleum and fire high into the air (later to be named "Wyatt's Torch"). Each of these men proves to be absent despite a thorough search put on by ever-anxious politicians, who have now found themselves trapped within a government that has been "left to dry", by its leaders in business utterly helpless without them.

In a romantic subplot, Dagny and Hank fall deeply in love. Rand refers to their love as a purer kind of love than the one that most men and women experience. These two people have a similar purpose in life, and they see in each other a kindred soul. In the universe of the novel, men and women with purpose are rare and, to an extent, deified thus making their love especially sacred. Hank (who is still married to another woman) goes on vacation with Dagny on a drive across the United States. They discover, amongst the ruins of an abandoned factory, an incomplete motor that transforms atmospheric static electricity into kinetic electricity. Deeply moved by the significance of a motor which has the potential to completely transform the world, Dagny sets out to find the inventor.

In addition to the inventor of the motor, Dagny also makes it her mission to find the reason so many important people keep disappearing. These two quests converge when Dagny flies to Utah to speak with a scientist she has working on reverse-engineering the motor. While still at the airfield, she discovers the scientist has just flown off with a mysterious man. Dagny follows the plane to where it mysteriously disappears, eventually crash-landing through a "ray screen" used to hide Galt's Gulch - the hidden Atlantis where John Galt has been bringing those he recruits. John Galt proceeds to explain the series of events which led to an organized "strike" against those who use the force of law and moral guilt to confiscate the accomplishments of society's productive members.

Unable to give up her railroad to destruction, Dagny leaves the valley as soon as she can. As the nation is collapsing, Galt follows Dagny back to New York City (where she learns he has been working in plain sight for her railroad as a lowly laborer), where he hacks into a national radio broadcast to deliver a long speech to the people (70 pages in the first edition), serving to explain the novel's theme and Rand's philosophy of Objectivism.[24] As the government begins to collapse following Galt's message, the leaders decide the only way to restore order is to capture Galt and force him to save them. While they succeed in following Dagny to him and subsequently taking him prisoner, they are unable to turn Galt, who is eventually freed in a rescue mission by a group of friends. While they are flying back to their hidden valley, they see the lights go out in New York City - the indication that their mission has been completed. The novel closes with a brief section where the strikers complete their preparations and Galt announces that they will return to the world.

The story of Atlas Shrugged dramatically expresses Rand's philosophy of Objectivism: Rand's ethical egoism, her advocacy of "rational selfishness", is perhaps her most well-known position. For Rand, all of the principal virtues and vices are applications of the role of reason as man's basic tool of survival (or a failure to apply it): rationality, honesty, justice, independence, integrity, productiveness, and pride each of which she explains in some detail in "The Objectivist Ethics".[25] Rand's characters often personify her view of the archetypes of various schools of philosophy for living and working in the world. Robert James Bidinotto wrote, "Rand rejected the literary convention that depth and plausibility demand characters who are naturalistic replicas of the kinds of people we meet in everyday life, uttering everyday dialogue and pursuing everyday values. But she also rejected the notion that characters should be symbolic rather than realistic."[23] and Rand herself stated, "My characters are never symbols, they are merely men in sharper focus than the audience can see with unaided sight. ... My characters are persons in whom certain human attributes are focused more sharply and consistently than in average human beings."[23]

In addition to the plot's more obvious statements about the significance of industrialists to society, and the sharp contrast it provides to the Marxist version of exploitation and the labor theory of value, this explicit conflict is used by Rand to draw wider philosophical conclusions, both implicit in the plot and via the characters' own statements. Atlas Shrugged portrays fascism, socialism and communism any form of state intervention in society as systemically and fatally flawed. In addition, positions are expressed on a variety of other topics, including sex, politics, friendship, charity, childhood, and many others. Rand said it is not a fundamentally political book, but a demonstration of the individual mind's position and value in society.[26]

Rand argues that independence and individual achievement enable society to survive and thrive, and should be embraced. But this requires a rational moral code. She argues that, over time, coerced self-sacrifice must cause any society to self-destruct.

Similarly, Rand rejects faith (that "short-cut to knowledge", she writes in the novel, which in fact is only a "short-circuit" destroying knowledge), along with any sort of a god or higher being. Rand urges the rejection of anything claiming "authority" over one's own mind apart from the absolute of existence, itself. The book positions itself against religion specifically, often directly within the characters' dialogue.

The concept "sanction of the victim" is defined by Leonard Peikoff as "the willingness of the good to suffer at the hands of the evil, to accept the role of sacrificial victim for the 'sin' of creating values".[27] Rand holds that evil is a parasite on the good and can only exist if the good tolerates it. Atlas Shrugged can be seen as an answer to the question of what would happen if this sanction were revoked. When Atlas shrugs, relieving himself of the burden of carrying the world, he is revoking his sanction.

Throughout Atlas Shrugged, numerous characters admit there is something wrong with the world that they cannot identify; frequently, they are struggling with the idea of sanction of the victim. We first glimpse the concept when Hank Rearden feels he is duty-bound to support his family, despite their hostility towards him; later, the principle is stated explicitly by Dan Conway: "I suppose somebody's got to be sacrificed. If it turned out to be me, I have no right to complain." John Galt vows to stop the motor of the world by persuading the creators of the world to withhold their sanction: "Evil is impotent and has no power but that which we let it extort from us", and, "I saw that evil was impotent... and the only weapon of its triumph was the willingness of the good to serve it".

In Rand's view, morality requires we do not sanction our own victimhood. She assigns virtue to the trait of rational self-interest. However, Rand contends moral selfishness does not mean a license to do whatever one pleases, guided by whims. It means the exacting discipline of defining and pursuing one's rational self-interest. A code of rational self-interest rejects every form of human sacrifice, whether of oneself to others or of others to oneself.

Atlas Shrugged endorses the belief that a society's best hope rests on adopting a system of pure laissez-faire. Rand's view of the ideal government is expressed by John Galt, who says, "The political system we will build is contained in a single moral premise: no man may obtain any values from others by resorting to physical force", and claims that "no rights can exist without the right to translate one's rights into reality to think, to work and to keep the results which means: the right of property". Galt himself lives a life of laissez-faire capitalism as the only way to live consistently with his beliefs.

In the world of Atlas Shrugged, society stagnates when independent productive achievers are socially demonized and even punished for their accomplishments.[28] Independence and personal happiness had flourished to the extent that people were free, and achievement was rewarded to the extent that individual ownership of private property was strictly respected. This is in line with an excerpt from a 1964 interview with Playboy magazine in which Rand states "What we have today is not a capitalist society, but a mixed economy that is, a mixture of freedom and controls, which, by the presently dominant trend, is moving toward dictatorship. The action in Atlas Shrugged takes place at a time when society has reached the stage of dictatorship. When and if this happens, that will be the time to go on strike, but not until then."[29]

Rand characterizes the actions of government employees in a way that is consistent with public choice theory, describing how the language of altruism is used to pass legislation that is nominally in the public interest (e.g., the "Anti-Dog-Eat-Dog Rule", and "The Equalization of Opportunity Bill") but which in reality serves special interests and government agencies at the expense of the public and the producers of value.[30]

"Run for your life from any man who tells you that money is evil. That sentence is the leper's bell of an approaching looter."[31]

Francisco d'Anconia, Atlas Shrugged

Rand's heroes must continually fight against "parasites", "looters", and "moochers" who demand the benefits of the heroes' labor. Edward Younkins describes Atlas Shrugged as "an apocalyptic vision of the last stages of conflict between two classes of humanity the looters and the non-looters. The looters are proponents of high taxation, big labor, government ownership, government spending, government planning, regulation, and redistribution."[32]

"Looters" confiscate others' earnings by force ("at the point of a gun") and include government officials, whose demands are backed by the implicit threat of force. Some officials are merely executing government policy, such as those who confiscate one state's seed grain to feed the starving citizens of another; others are exploiting those policies, such as the railroad regulator who illegally sells the railroad's supplies for his own profit. Both use force to take property from the people who produced or earned it.

"Moochers" demand others' earnings on behalf of the needy and those unable to earn themselves; however, they curse the producers who make that help possible and are jealous and resentful of the talented upon whom they depend. They are ultimately as destructive as the looters destroying the productive through guilt, and appealing to "moral right" while enabling the "lawful" looting performed by governments.

Looting and mooching are seen at all levels of the world Atlas Shrugged portrays, from the looting officials Dagny Taggart must work around and the mooching brother Hank Rearden struggles with, to the looting of whole industries by companies like Associated Steel and the mooching demands for foreign aid by the starving countries of Europe.

One of the novel's heroes, Francisco d'Anconia, indicates the role of "looters" in relation to money itself:

"So you think that money is the root of all evil?... Have you ever asked what is the root of money? Money is a tool of exchange, which can't exist unless there are goods produced and men able to produce them. Money is the material shape of the principle that men who wish to deal with one another must deal by trade and give value for value. Money is not the tool of the moochers, who claim your product by tears, or the looters who take it from you by force. Money is made possible only by the men who produce. Is this what you consider evil? ...Not an ocean of tears nor all the guns in the world can transform those pieces of paper in your wallet into bread you need to survive tomorrow. ...Whenever destroyers appear among men, they start by destroying money, for money is men's protection and the base of a moral existence. Destroyers seize gold and leave its owners a counterfeit pile of paper. This kills all objective standards and delivers men into the arbitrary power of an arbitrary setter of values... Paper is a mortgage on wealth that does not exist, backed by a gun aimed at those who are expected to produce it. Paper is a check drawn by legal looters upon an account which is not theirs: upon the virtue of the victims. Watch for the day when it bounces, marked: 'Account Overdrawn.'"[31]

"Through Dagny's associations... Rand illustrates what a relationship between two self-actualized, equal human beings can be... Rand denies the existence of a split between the physical and the mental, the desires of the flesh and the longings of the spirit."[33]

In Atlas Shrugged, characters are sexually attracted to those who embody or seem to embody their values, be they higher or lower values by Rand's standards. Characters who lack clear purpose find sex devoid of meaning. This is illustrated in the contrasting relationships of Hank Rearden with Lillian Rearden and Dagny Taggart, by the relationships of James Taggart with Cherryl Brooks and with Lillian Rearden, and finally in the relationship between Dagny and John Galt.

Adultery is committed by three characters throughout the course of the novel. The first and predominate act is that of Hank Rearden, who sleeps with Dagny after the opening of the John Galt Line, to celebrate the success of his metal and her determination to have the line built. The affair continues for some time - even including a cross-country vacation for the two - until Hank's wife finds out; his wife does not want to divorce him, but instead wants to maintain her image as Mrs. Rearden and allows the affair to continue until Hank manipulates the judicial system to obtain a divorce. Later in the novel, as Mrs. Rearden knows the divorce will be processed shortly, she has sex with Dagny's brother James (who is also married, and despises Hank), as an act of revenge for them both against him. Having caught them, James' wife proceeds to commit suicide. Yet adultery is never addressed on moral grounds; the sex is addressed on its own, either as celebration of accomplishment or as an act of revenge.

Technological progress and intellectual breakthroughs in scientific theory both figure prominently in Atlas Shrugged, leading some observers to classify Atlas in the genre of science fiction. Writer Jeff Riggenbach notes, "Galt's motor is one of the three inventions that propel the action of Atlas Shrugged", the other two being Rearden Metal and the government's sonic weapon, Project X.[34] Other fictional technologies included in the story are refractor rays (Gulch mirage), a sophisticated electrical torture device (the Ferris Persuader), voice activated door locks (Gulch power station), palm-activated door locks (Galt's New York lab), Galt's means of quietly turning the entire contents of his laboratory into a fine powder when a lock is breached, and a means of taking over all radio stations worldwide. Riggenbach adds, "Rand's overall message with regard to science seems clear: the role of science in human life and human society is to provide the knowledge on the basis of which technological advancement and the related improvements in the quality of human life can be realized. But science can fulfill this role only in a society in which human beings are left free to conduct their business as they see fit."[35]

Atlas Shrugged debuted on The New York Times Bestseller List at #13 three days after its publication. It peaked at #3 on December 8, 1957, and was on the list for 22 consecutive weeks.[9]

"Both conservatives and liberals were unstinting in disparaging the book; the right saw promotion of godlessness, and the left saw a message of greed is good. Rand is said to have cried every day as the reviews came out."

Atlas Shrugged was generally disliked by critics, despite being a popular success. The book was dismissed by some as "a homage to greed", while author Gore Vidal described its philosophy as "nearly perfect in its immorality".[10] Helen Beal Woodward, reviewing Atlas Shrugged for The Saturday Review, opined that the novel was written with "dazzling virtuosity" but that it was "shot through with hatred".[36] This was echoed by Granville Hicks, writing for The New York Times Book Review, who also stated that the book was "written out of hate".[37] The reviewer for Time magazine asked: "Is it a novel? Is it a nightmare? Is it Superman in the comic strip or the Nietzschean version?"[38] In the magazine National Review, Whittaker Chambers called Atlas Shrugged "sophomoric" and "remarkably silly", and said it "can be called a novel only by devaluing the term".[39] Chambers argued against the novel's implicit endorsement of atheism, whereby "Randian man, like Marxian man is made the center of a godless world".[39] Chambers also wrote that the implicit message of the novel is akin to "Hitler's National Socialism and Stalin's brand of Communism" ("To a gas chamber go!").[39]

The negative reviews produced responses from some of Rand's admirers, including a letter by Alan Greenspan to The New York Times Book Review, in which he responded to Hicks' claim that "the book was written out of hate" by saying, "...Atlas Shrugged is a celebration of life and happiness. Justice is unrelenting. Creative individuals and undeviating purpose and rationality achieve joy and fulfillment. Parasites who persistently avoid either purpose or reason perish as they should."[40] Greenspan had read unpublished drafts of the work in Rand's salon at least three years earlier.[41] In an unpublished[42] letter to the National Review, Leonard Peikoff wrote, "...Mr. Chambers is an ex-Communist. He has attacked Atlas Shrugged in the best tradition of the Communists by lies, smears, and cowardly misrepresentations. Mr. Chambers may have changed a few of his political views; he has not changed the method of intellectual analysis and evaluation of the Party to which he belonged."

Positive reviews appeared in a number of publications. Richard McLaughlin, reviewing the novel for The American Mercury, compared it to Uncle Tom's Cabin in importance.[43] Well-known journalist and book reviewer John Chamberlain, writing in The New York Herald Tribune, found Atlas Shrugged satisfying on many levels: science fiction, a "Dostoevsky" detective story and, most importantly, a "profound political parable".[44][45] However, Mimi Reisel Gladstein writes that reviewers who have "appreciated not only Rand's writing style but also her message" have been "far outweighed by those who have been everything from hysterically hostile to merely uncomprehending".[46]

Former Rand friend, associate, business partner and lover Nathaniel Branden, to whom the book was originally dedicated, has had differing views of Atlas Shrugged in his life. He was initially quite favorable to it, praising it in the book he and Barbara Branden wrote in 1962 called Who is Ayn Rand?[47] After he and Ayn Rand ended their relationship in 1968, both he and Barbara Branden repudiated their book in praise of Rand and her novels.[48] As of 1971 though, in an interview he gave to "Reason" he listed some critiques, but concluded, "But what the hell, so there are a few things one can quarrel with in the book, so what? ATLAS SHRUGGED is the greatest novel that has ever been written, in my judgment, so let's let it go at that."[49]

But years later, in 1984, two years after Rand's death, he argued that Atlas Shrugged "encourages emotional repression and self-disowning" and that her works contained contradictory messages. Branden claimed that the characters rarely talk "on a simple, human level without launching into philosophical sermons". He criticized the potential psychological impact of the novel, stating that John Galt's recommendation to respond to wrongdoing with "contempt and moral condemnation" clashes with the view of psychologists who say this only causes the wrongdoing to repeat itself.[50] Rand herself, however, would not have regarded a novel as needing to portray such "ordinary" human interaction at all, even if an entire philosophy of life does need to address this.[51]

Template:DetailsOver the years, Atlas Shrugged has attracted an energetic and committed fan base. Each year the Ayn Rand Institute donates 400,000 copies of works by Ayn Rand, including Atlas Shrugged, to high school students.[10] According to a 1991 survey done for the Library of Congress and the Book of the Month Club, Atlas Shrugged was situated between the Bible and M. Scott Peck's The Road Less Traveled as the book that made the most difference in the lives of 5,000 Book-of-the-Month club members surveyed, with a "large gap existing between the #1 book and the rest of the list".[52] Modern Library's 1998 nonscientific online poll of the 100 best novels of the 20th century[53][54] found Atlas rated #1 although it was not included on the list chosen by the Modern Library board of authors and scholars.[55]

In 1997, the libertarian Cato Institute held a joint conference with The Atlas Society, an Objectivist organization, to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of the publication of Atlas Shrugged.[56] At this event, Howard Dickman of Reader's Digest stated that the novel had "turned millions of readers on to the ideas of liberty" and said that the book had the important message of the readers' "profound right to be happy".[56]

The C-SPAN television series American Writers listed Rand as one of twenty-two surveyed figures of American literature, though primarily mentioning The Fountainhead rather than Atlas Shrugged.[57]

Rand's impact on contemporary libertarian thought has been considerable, and it is noteworthy that the title of the leading libertarian magazine, Reason: Free Minds, Free Markets, is taken directly from John Galt, the hero of Atlas Shrugged, who argues that "a free mind and a free market are corollaries".

The Austrian School economist Ludwig von Mises admired the unapologetic elitism of Rand's work. In a private letter to Rand written a few months after the novel's publication, he declared, "...Atlas Shrugged is not merely a novel. It is also (or may I say: first of all) a cogent analysis of the evils that plague our society, a substantiated rejection of the ideology of our self-styled "intellectuals" and a pitiless unmasking of the insincerity of the policies adopted by governments and political parties... You have the courage to tell the masses what no politician told them: you are inferior and all the improvements in your conditions which you simply take for granted you owe to the efforts of men who are better than you."[58]

Acclaim has not been unanimous. Nobel Prize-winning economist and liberal commentator Paul Krugman alluded to an oft-quoted quip[59] by John Rogers in his blog: "There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs."[60]

"I know from talking to a lot of Fortune 500 C.E.O.'s that Atlas Shrugged has had a significant effect on their business decisions, even if they don't agree with all of Ayn Rand's ideas."

In the late 2000s, the book gained more media attention and conservative commentators suggested the book as a warning against a socialistic reaction to the finance crisis. Conservative commentators Neal Boortz,[61] Glenn Beck, and Rush Limbaugh[62] have offered high praise of the book on their respective radio and television programs. In 2006 Associate Justice of the Supreme Court Clarence Thomas cited Atlas Shrugged as among his favorite novels.[63] Republican Congressman John Campbell said for example: "People are starting to feel like we're living through the scenario that happened in [the novel]... We're living in Atlas Shrugged", echoing Stephen Moore in an article published in The Wall Street Journal on January 9, 2009, titled "Atlas Shrugged From Fiction to Fact in 52 Years".[64]

The sales of Atlas Shrugged have since then sharply increased, according to The Economist magazine and The New York Times. The Economist reported that the fifty-two-year-old novel ranked #33 among Amazon.com's top-selling books on January 13, 2009 and that its thirty day sales average showed the novel selling three times faster than during the same period of the previous year. With an attached sales chart, The Economist reported that sales "spikes" of the book seemed to coincide with the release of economic data. Subsequently, on April 2, 2009, Atlas Shrugged ranked #1 in the "Fiction and Literature" category at Amazon and #15 in overall sales.[65][66][67] Total sales of the novel in 2009 exceeded 500,000 copies.[68] The book sold 445,000 copies in 2011, the second-strongest sales year in the novel's history. At the time of publication the novel was on the New York Times best-seller list and was selling at roughly a third the volume of 2011.[69]

A film adaptation of Atlas Shrugged was in "development hell" for nearly 40 years.[70] In 1972, Albert S. Ruddy approached Rand to produce a cinematic adaptation. Rand agreed that Ruddy could focus on the love story. "That's all it ever was," Rand said.[1][2][3] Rand insisted on having final script approval, which Ruddy refused to give her, thus preventing a deal. In 1978, Henry and Michael Jaffe negotiated a deal for an eight-hour Atlas Shrugged television miniseries on NBC. Michael Jaffe hired screenwriter Stirling Silliphant to adapt the novel and he obtained approval from Rand on the final script. However, in 1979, with Fred Silverman's rise as president of NBC, the project was scrapped.[71]

Rand, a former Hollywood screenwriter herself, began writing her own screenplay, but died in 1982 with only one-third of it finished. She left her estate, including the film rights to Atlas, to her student Leonard Peikoff, who sold an option to Michael Jaffe and Ed Snider. Peikoff would not approve the script they wrote, and the deal fell through. In 1992, investor John Aglialoro bought an option to produce the film, paying Peikoff over $1 million for full creative control.[71]

In 1999, under Aglialoro's sponsorship, Ruddy negotiated a deal with Turner Network Television (TNT) for a four-hour miniseries, but the project was killed after the AOL Time Warner merger. After the TNT deal fell through Howard and Karen Baldwin obtained the rights while running Phillip Anschutz's Crusader Entertainment. The Baldwins left Crusader and formed Baldwin Entertainment Group in 2004, taking the rights to Atlas Shrugged with them. Michael Burns of Lions Gate Entertainment approached the Baldwins to fund and distribute Atlas Shrugged.[71] A draft screenplay was written by James V. Hart[72] and re-written by Randall Wallace,[73] but was never produced.

In May 2010, Brian Patrick O'Toole and Aglialoro wrote a screenplay, intent on filming in June 2010. Stephen Polk was set to direct.[74] However, Polk was fired and principal photography began on June 13, 2010 under the direction of Paul Johansson and produced by Harmon Kaslow and Aglialoro.[75] This resulted in Aglialoro's retention of his rights to the property, which were set to expire on June 15, 2010. Filming was completed on July 20, 2010,[76] and the movie was released on April 15, 2011.[77] Dagny Taggart was played by Taylor Schilling and Hank Rearden by Grant Bowler.[78]

The film was met with a generally negative reception from professional critics, getting an 11% (rotten) rating, however audience and user reviews rate it at a 74% rating, on movie review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes,[79] and had less than $5 million in total box office receipts.[80] The producer and screenwriter John Aglialoro blamed critics for the film's paltry box office take and said he might go on strike.[81]

However, on February 2, 2012, Kaslow and Aglialoro announced Atlas Shrugged: Part II was fully funded and that principal photography was tentatively scheduled to commence in early April 2012.[82] The film was released on October 12, 2012.[83] Critics gave the film a 5% rating on Rotten Tomatoes based on 19 reviews, while audiences gave the film an 84% rating.[84] Film critics were not impressed with the film based on several reviews: one reviewer gave the film a "D" rating;[85] while another reviewer gave the film a "1" rating (of 4).[86]

Template:Ayn Rand

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Atlas Shrugged | Libertarianism Wiki | FANDOM powered by Wikia

Book Summary

Posted on February 26, 2019 by Danzig

The story of Atlas Shrugged takes place in the United States at an unspecified future time. Dagny Taggart, vice president in charge of operations for Taggart Transcontinental Railroad, seeks to rebuild the crumbling track of the Rio Norte Line that serves Ellis Wyatt's oil fields and the booming industrial areas of Colorado. The country is in a downward economic spiral with businesses closing and men out of work. Other countries in the world have become socialist Peoples' States and are destitute. Colorado, based on Wyatt's innovative method of extracting oil from shale, is the last great industrial center on earth. Dagny intends to provide Colorado the train service it requires, but her brother James Taggart, president of Taggart Transcontinental, tries to block her from getting new rails from Rearden Steel, the last reliable steel manufacturer. James wants to do business with the inefficient Associated Steel, which is run by his friend Orren Boyle. Dagny wants the new rail to be made of Rearden Metal, a new alloy that Hank Rearden developed after ten years of experiment. Because the metal has never been tried and has been denounced by metallurgists, James won't accept responsibility for using it. Dagny, who studied engineering in college, has seen the results of Rearden's tests. She accepts the responsibility and orders the rails made of Rearden Metal.

Worsening the economic depression in the U.S. is the unexplained phenomenon of talented men retiring and disappearing. For example, Owen Kellogg, a bright young Taggart employee for whom Dagny had great hopes, tells her that he is leaving the railroad. McNamara, a contractor who was supposed to rebuild the Rio Norte Line, retires unexpectedly. As more great men disappear, the American people become increasingly pessimistic. Dagny dislikes the new phrase that has crept into the language and signifies people's sense of futility and despair. Nobody knows the origin or exact meaning of the question "Who is John Galt?," but people use the unanswerable question to express their sense of hopelessness. Dagny rejects the widespread pessimism and finds a new contractor for the Rio Norte Line.

The crisis for Taggart Transcontinental worsens when the railroad's San Sebastian Line proves to be worthless and is nationalized by the Mexican government. The line, which cost millions of dollars, was supposed to provide freight service for the San Sebastian Mines, a new venture by Francisco d'Anconia, the wealthiest copper industrialist in the world. Francisco was Dagny's childhood friend and her former lover, but she now regards him as a worthless playboy. In this latest venture, d'Anconia has steered investors completely wrong, causing huge financial losses and a general sense of unrest.

James Taggart, in an attempt to recover the railroad's losses on the San Sebastian Line, uses his political friendships to influence the vote of the National Alliance of Railroads. The Alliance passes what's known as the "Anti-dog-eat-dog rule," prohibiting "cutthroat" competition. The rule puts the superb Phoenix-Durango Railroad, Taggart Transcontinental's competitor for the Colorado freight traffic, out of business. With the Phoenix-Durango line gone, Dagny must rebuild the Rio Norte Line quickly.

Dagny asks Francisco, who is in New York, what his purpose was in building the worthless Mexican mines. He tells her that it was to damage d'Anconia Copper and Taggart Transcontinental, as well as to cause secondary destructive consequences. Dagny is dumbfounded, unable to reconcile such a destructive purpose from the brilliant, productive industrialist Francisco was just ten years earlier. Not long after this conversation, Francisco appears at a celebration for Hank Rearden's wedding anniversary. Rearden's wife Lillian, his mother, and his brother are nonproductive freeloaders who believe that the strong are morally obliged to support the weak. Rearden no longer loves and cannot respect them, but he pities their weakness and carries them on his back. Francisco meets Rearden for the first time and warns him that the freeloaders have a weapon that they are using against him. Rearden questions why Francisco has come to the party, but Francisco says that he merely wished to become acquainted with Rearden. He won't explain his presence any further.

Although public opinion and an incompetent contractor are working against them, Dagny and Rearden build the Rio Norte Line. Rearden designs an innovative bridge for the line that takes advantage of the properties that his new metal possesses. The State Science Institute, a government research organization, tries to bribe and threaten Rearden to keep his metal off the market, but he won't give in. The Institute then issues a statement devoid of factual evidence that alleges possible weaknesses in the structure of Rearden Metal. Taggart stock crashes, the contractor quits, and the railroad union forbids its employees to work on the Rio Norte Line. When Dr. Robert Stadler, a brilliant theoretical scientist in whose name the State Science Institute was founded, refuses to publicly defend Rearden Metal even though he knows its value, Dagny makes a decision. She tells her brother that she will take a leave of absence, form her own company, and build the Rio Norte Line on her own. She signs a contract saying that when the line is successfully completed, she'll turn it back over to Taggart Transcontinental. Dagny chooses to name it the John Galt Line in defiance of the general pessimism that surrounds her.

Rearden and the leading businessmen of Colorado invest in the John Galt Line. Rearden feels a strong sexual attraction to Dagny but, because he regards sex as a demeaning impulse, doesn't act on his attraction. The government passes the Equalization of Opportunity Bill that prevents an individual from owning companies in different fields. The bill prohibits Rearden from owning the mines that supply him with the raw materials he needs to make Rearden Metal. However, Rearden creates a new design for the John Galt Line's Rearden Metal Bridge, realizing that if he combines a truss with an arch, it will enable him to maximize the best qualities of the new metal.

Dagny completes construction of the Line ahead of schedule. She and Rearden ride in the engine cab on the Line's first train run, which is a resounding success. Rearden and Dagny have dinner at Ellis Wyatt's home to celebrate. After dinner, Dagny and Rearden make love for the first time. The next day, Rearden is contemptuous of them both for what he considers their low urges, but Dagny is radiantly happy. She rejects Rearden's estimate, knowing that their sexual attraction is based on mutual admiration for each other's noblest qualities.

Dagny and Rearden go on vacation together, driving around the country looking at abandoned factories. At the ruins of the Twentieth Century Motor Company's factory in Wisconsin, they find the remnant of a motor with the potential to change the world. The motor was able to draw static electricity from the atmosphere and convert it to usable energy, but now it is destroyed.

Realizing how much the motor would benefit the transportation industry, Dagny vows to find the inventor. At the same time, she must fight against new proposed legislation. Various economic pressure groups, seeking to cash in on the industrial success of Colorado, want the government to force the successful companies to share their profits. Dagny knows that the legislation would put Wyatt Oil and the other Colorado companies out of business, destroy the Rio Norte Line, and remove the profit she needs to rebuild the rest of the transcontinental rail system, but she's powerless to prevent the legislation.

Dagny continues her nationwide quest to find the inventor of the motor, and she finally finds the widow of the engineer who ran the automobile company's research department. The widow tells Dagny that a young scientist working for her husband invented the motor. She doesn't know his name, but she provides a clue that leads Dagny to a cook in an isolated Wyoming diner. The cook tells Dagny to forget the inventor of the motor because he won't be found until he chooses. Dagny is shocked to discover that the cook is Hugh Akston, the world's greatest living philosopher. She goes to Cheyenne and discovers that Wesley Mouch, the new economic coordinator of the country, has issued a series of directives that will result in the strangling of Colorado's industrial success. Dagny rushes to Colorado but arrives too late. Ellis Wyatt, in defiance of the government's edict, set fire to his oil wells and retired.

Months later, the situation in Colorado continues to deteriorate. With the Wyatt oil wells out of business, the economy struggles. Several of the other major industrialists have retired and disappeared; nobody knows where they've gone. Dagny is forced to cut trains on the Colorado schedule. The one bright spot of her work is her continued search for the inventor of the motor. She speaks to Robert Stadler who recommends a young scientist, Quentin Daniels of the Utah Institute of Technology, as a man capable of undertaking the motor's reconstruction.

The State Science Institute orders 10,000 tons of Rearden Metal for a top-secret project, but Rearden refuses to sell it to them. Rearden sells to Ken Danagger, the country's best producer of coal, an amount of Rearden Metal that the law deems illegal. Meanwhile, at the reception for James Taggart's wedding, Francisco d'Anconia publicly defends the morality of producing wealth. Rearden overhears what Francisco says and finds himself increasingly drawn to this supposedly worthless playboy. The day following the reception, Rearden's wife discovers that he's having an affair, but she doesn't know with whom. A manipulator who seeks control over her husband, Lillian uses guilt as a weapon against him.

Dr. Ferris of the State Science Institute tells Rearden that he knows of the illegal sale to Ken Danagger and will take Rearden to trial if he refuses to sell the Institute the metal it needs. Rearden refuses, and the government brings charges against himself and Danagger. Dagny, in the meantime, has become convinced that a destroyer is loose in the world some evil creature that is deliberately luring away the brains of the world for a purpose she cannot understand. Her diligent assistant, Eddie Willers, knows that Dagny's fears are justified. He eats his meals in the workers' cafeteria, where he has befriended a nameless worker. Eddie tells the worker about Dagny's fear that Danagger is next in line for the destroyer that he'll be the next to retire and disappear. Dagny races to Pittsburgh to meet with Danagger to convince him to stay, but she's too late. Someone has already met with Danagger and convinced him to retire. In a mood of joyous serenity, Danagger tells Dagny that nothing could convince him to remain. The next day, he disappears.

Francisco visits Rearden and empathizes with the pain he has endured because of the invention of Rearden Metal. Francisco begins to ask Rearden what could make such suffering worthwhile when an accident strikes one of Rearden's furnaces. Francisco and Rearden race to the scene and work arduously to make the necessary repairs. Afterward, when Rearden asks him to finish his question, Francisco says that he knows the answer and departs.

At his trial, Rearden states that he doesn't recognize his deal with Danagger as a criminal action and, consequently, doesn't recognize the court's right to try him. He says that a man has the right to own the product of his effort and to trade it voluntarily with others. The government has no moral basis for outlawing the voluntary exchange of goods and services. The government, he says, has the power to seize his metal by force, and they have the power to compel him at the point of a gun. But he won't cooperate with their demands, and he won't pretend that the process is civil. If the government wishes to deal with men by compulsion, it must do so openly. Rearden states that he won't help the government pretend that his trial is anything but the initiation of a forced seizure of his metal. He says that he's proud of his metal, he's proud of his mills, he's proud of every penny that he's earned by his own hard work, and he'll not cooperate by voluntarily yielding one cent that is his. Rearden says that the government will have to seize his money and products by force, just like the robber it is. At this point, the crowd bursts into applause. The judges recognize the truth of what Rearden says and refuse to stand before the American people as open thieves. In the end, they fine Rearden and suspend the sentence.

Because of the new economic restrictions, the major Colorado industrialists have all retired and disappeared. Freight traffic has dwindled, and Taggart Transcontinental has been forced to shut down the Rio Norte Line. The railroad is in terrible condition: It is losing money, the government has convinced James Taggart to grant wage raises, and there is ominous talk that the railroad will be forced to cut shipping rates. At the same time, Wesley Mouch is desperate for Rearden to cooperate with the increasingly dictatorial government. Because Rearden came to Taggart's wedding celebration, Mouch believes that Taggart can influence Rearden. Mouch implies that a trade is possible: If Taggart can convince Rearden to cooperate, Mouch will prevent the government from forcing a cut in shipping rates. Taggart appeals to Lillian for help, and Lillian discovers that Dagny Taggart is her husband's lover.

In response to devastating economic conditions, the government passes the radical Directive 10-289, which requires that all workers stay at their current jobs, all businesses remain open, and all patents and inventions be voluntarily turned over to the government. When she hears the news, Dagny resigns from the railroad. Rearden doesn't resign from Rearden Steel, however, because he has two weeks to sign the certificate turning his metal over to the government, and he wants to be there to refuse when the time is up. Dr. Floyd Ferris of the State Science Institute comes to Rearden and says that the government has evidence of his affair with Dagny Taggart and will make it public dragging Dagny's name through the gutter if he refuses to sign over his metal. Rearden now knows that his desire for Dagny is the highest virtue he possesses and is free of all guilt regarding it, but he's a man who pays his own way. He knows that he should have divorced Lillian long ago and openly declared his love for Dagny. His guilt and error gave his enemies this weapon. He must pay for his own error and not allow Dagny to suffer, so he signs.

Dagny has retreated to a hunting lodge in the mountains that she inherited from her father. She's trying to decide what to do with the rest of her life when word reaches her that a train wreck of enormous proportions has destroyed the famed Taggart Tunnel through the heart of the Rockies, making all transcontinental traffic impossible on the main track. She rushes back to New York to resume her duties, and she reroutes all transcontinental traffic. She receives a letter from Quentin Daniels telling her that, because of Directive 10-289, he's quitting. Dagny plans to go west to inspect the track and to talk to Daniels.

On the train ride west, Dagny rescues a hobo who is riding the rails. He used to work for the Twentieth Century Motor Company. He tells her that the company put into practice the communist slogan, "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need," a scheme that resulted in enslaving the able to the unable. The first man to quit was a young engineer, who walked out of a mass meeting saying that he would put an end to this once and for all by "stopping the motor of the world." The bum tells her that as the years passed and they saw factories close, production drop, and great minds retire and disappear, they began to wonder if the young engineer, whose name was John Galt, succeeded.

On her trip west, Dagny's train is stalled when the crew abandons it. She finds an airplane and continues on to Utah to find Daniels, but she learns at the airport that Daniels left with a visitor in a beautiful plane. Realizing that the visitor is the "destroyer," she gives chase, flying among the most inaccessible peaks of the Rockies. Her plane crashes.

Dagny finds herself in Atlantis, the hidden valley to which the great minds have gone to escape the persecution of a dictatorial government. She finds that John Galt does exist and that he's the man she's been seeking in two ways: He is both the inventor of the motor and the "destroyer," the man draining the brains of the world. All the great men she admires are here inventors, industrialists, philosophers, scientists, and artists. Dagny learns that the brains are on strike. They refuse to think, create, and work in a world that forces them to sacrifice themselves to society. They're on strike against the creed of self-sacrifice, in favor of a man's right to his own life.

Dagny falls in love with Galt, who has loved and watched her for years. But Dagny is a scab, the most dangerous enemy of the strike, and Galt won't touch her yet. Dagny has the choice to join the strike and remain in the valley or go back to her railroad and the collapsing outside world. She is torn, but she refuses to give up the railroad and returns. Although Galt's friends don't want him to expose himself to the danger, he returns as well, so he can be near at hand when Dagny decides she's had enough.

When she returns, Dagny finds that the government has nationalized the railroad industry and controls it under a Railroad Unification Plan. Dagny can no longer make business decisions based on matters of production and profit; she is subject to the arbitrary whims of the dictators. The government wants Dagny to make a reassuring speech to the public on the radio and threatens her with the revelation of her affair with Rearden. On the air, Dagny proudly states that she was Rearden's lover and that he signed his metal over to the government only because of a blackmail threat. Before being cut off the air, Dagny succeeds in warning the American people about the ruthless dictatorship that the United States government is becoming.

Because of the government's socialist policies, the collapse of the U. S. economy is imminent. Francisco d'Anconia destroys his holdings and disappears because his properties worldwide are about to be nationalized. He leaves the "looters" the parasites who feed off the producers nothing, wiping out millions of dollars belonging to corrupt American investors like James Taggart. Meanwhile, politicians use their economic power to create their own personal empires. In one such scheme, the Taggart freight cars needed to haul the Minnesota wheat harvest to market are diverted to a project run by the relatives of powerful politicians. The wheat rots at the Taggart stations, the farmers riot, farms shut down (as do many of the companies providing them with equipment), people lose their jobs, and severe food shortages result.

During an emergency breakdown at the Taggart Terminal in New York City, Dagny finds that John Galt is one of the railroad's unskilled laborers. She sees him in the crowd of men ready to carry out her commands. After completing her task, Dagny walks into the abandoned tunnels, knowing that Galt will follow. They make love for the first time, and he then returns to his mindless labor.

The government smuggles its men into Rearden's mills, pretending that they're steelworkers. The union of steelworkers asks for a raise, but the government refuses, making it sound as if the refusal comes from Rearden. When Rearden rejects the Steel Unification Plan the government wants to spring on him, they use the thugs they've slipped into his mills to start a riot. The pretense of protecting Rearden is the government's excuse for taking over his mills. But Francisco d'Anconia, under an assumed name, has taken a job at Rearden's mills. He organizes the workers, and they successfully defend the mills against the government's thugs. Afterward, Francisco tells Rearden the rest of the things he wants him to know. Rearden retires, disappears, and joins the strike.

Mr. Thompson, the head of state, is set to address the nation regarding its dire economic conditions. But before he begins to speak, he is preempted, cut off the air by a motor of incalculable power. John Galt addresses the nation instead. Galt informs citizens that the men of the mind are on strike, that they require freedom of thought and action, and that they refuse to work under the dictatorship in power. The thinkers won't return, Galt says, until human society recognizes an individual's right to live his own life. Only when the moral code of self-sacrifice is rejected will the thinkers be free to create, and only then will they return.

The government rulers are desperate. Frantically, they seek John Galt. They want him to become economic dictator of the country so the men of the mind will come back and save the government, but Galt refuses. Realizing that Dagny thinks the same way that Galt does, the government has her followed. Mr. Thompson makes clear to Dagny that certain members of the government fear and hate Galt, and that if they find him first, they may kill him. Terrified, Dagny goes to Galt's apartment to see if he's still alive. The government's men follow her and take Galt into custody, and the rulers attempt to convince Galt to take charge of the country's economy. He refuses. They torture him, yet still he refuses. In the end, the strikers come to his rescue. Francisco and Rearden, joined now by Dagny, assault the grounds of the State Science Institute where Galt is held captive. They kill some guards and incapacitate others, release Galt, and return to the valley. Dagny and Galt are united. Shortly after, the final collapse of the looters' regime occurs, and the men of the mind are free to return to the world.

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Book Summary

Atlas Shrugged | Folio Society

Posted on February 26, 2019 by Danzig

Rand was born in Russia in 1905, and saw her family driven to the brink of starvation by the Soviet revolution. The experience left her with a deeply felt scepticism for socialism and the notion of altruism. With her arrival in America, a land famous for its pioneering spirit and celebration of the single-minded genius, she was inspired to formulate a new way of thinking about work and achievement. Filled with admiration for entrepreneurs such as Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla, Rand began work on her magnum opus, through which she would champion competition, creativity and the role of the mind in mans existence.

The heroic characters who rise to the top in Atlas Shrugged espouse Rands philosophy of objectivism: the determined pursuit of personal happiness and the development of unfettered capitalism. Her philosophy would, she was certain, make America and therefore the world great again. Atlas Shrugged remains a controversial text, both for its ideas about economics and industry, and for its popularity among libertarian movements around the world. Whichever side of the fence one is on and no one remains sitting on it for long after reading this novel one cannot deny the sheer scale of Rands ambition: she pulls at the roots of mans existence and derives radical, original solutions.

The book saw a huge surge of popularity during the recent financial crisis, selling hundreds of thousands of copies in the first few months of 2009 alone. Never far from discussions of economics and industry, the events of Atlas Shrugged seemed strangely prescient, and it has again become a vital text as people seek to question the role of government, and how a new financial future can be built outside of subsidies and handouts. Often called the most influential book in America after the Bible, Rands epic still regularly tops the polls when readers are asked to vote for the best novel of the 20th century.

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Atlas Shrugged | Folio Society

Zara Loses Its Skirt Over Pepe the Frog – The New York Times

Posted on February 25, 2019 by Danzig

Digital activists have claimed another head. Or, rather, skirt.

On Tuesday, Zara, the Spanish chain owned by Inditex that has more than 2,100 stores in 88 countries around the world and was rated No. 53 on the Forbes 2016 list of the worlds most valuable brands, quietly withdrew a distressed denim miniskirt printed with a cartoon face from its websites and stores in the United States and Britain after it became a subject of social media controversy for the graphics resemblance to Pepe the Frog.

You know, the green amphibian that was originally intended as a peaceful frog-dude, according to Matt Furie, the man who created him, but that was co-opted by anti-Jewish and bigoted groups and designated an alt-right hate symbol by the Anti-Defamation League last September.

The skirt had been on sale as part of Zaras limited-edition oil on denim offering of spring-fling artist partnerships.

Twitter got on it pretty fast. Zara is really out there trying to sell a P*pe the frog skirt, apparently unaware (?) of its current implications, @meaganrosae wrote. Added @ccarella, Hmm Pepe on a Zara skirt.

There is a lot of how did this happen? and how deluded could they be? going around the cybersphere, but the answer may come down to a blunt collision of globalism and cultural ignorance.

A spokeswoman for Zara said: The skirt is part of the limited Oil-on-Denim collection, which was created through collaborations with artists and is only available in selected markets. The designer of the skirt is Mario de Santiago, known online as Yimeisgreat. There is absolutely no link to the suggested theme.

Mr. de Santiago is a Spanish artist based in London whose biography on his official web page states, I like to explore social interactions and gather them into quirky and colourful storytelling compositions. According to Zara, he said the frog face came from a wall painting I drew with friends four years ago. It is not hard to imagine he was unaware a similar frog face had been used for a somewhat different purpose in the United States.

Unfortunately for Zara, however, the brand has a history with public pressure over a product with potentially offensive implications especially anti-Semitic implications which may have exacerbated the reaction. In 2014, it apologized for offering, and then withdrew, a set of childrens striped pajamas with a yellow star on the breast that was widely seen as resembling a concentration camp uniform (the star was supposed to be a sheriffs badge). In 2007, it withdrew a handbag printed with folkloric designs, one of which happened to look a lot like a swastika.

(To be fair, the brand also gets in trouble for non-Jewish issues: Earlier this year, a campaign with the tagline Love Your Curves that featured two notably skinny models got a lot of tweeters pretty worked up.)

All of this may add up to something of a teachable moment for the fast-fashion model. Because the business is based on the constant turnover of new products that are effectively tested on the shop floor, so that companies can respond quickly to what sells and drop less popular items without much cost, it involves a higher than usual amount of churn. This may mean designs are subject to less stringent vetting than they might be in, say, a traditional fashion brand in which products are created and assessed more than six months ahead of production.

Add to that the recent commercialization of the summer festival circuit, in which corporate giants are leveraging the fashion appeal of sartorial rebellion (always a dangerous game, since it co-opts symbols without really understanding their use), and the pitfalls were potentially pretty big. Just think for a minute of the absurdity implicit in choosing a hate symbol to stick on a garment seemingly meant for a summer-of-love/dancing-in-the-muddy-fields-type event. Oops.

Given the increasing role of the internet in policing brands and companies, it was probably only a matter of time before a company attempting to make hay while the music played made a mistake instead.

Consider it a cautionary tale.

Original post:

Zara Loses Its Skirt Over Pepe the Frog - The New York Times

Leviticus 1927: A Law of Performances and Ordinances …

Posted on February 25, 2019 by Danzig

(16-2) Leviticus 19:218. Ye Shall Be Holy: For I the Lord Your God Am Holy

The last chapter examined in some detail the laws of cleanliness and uncleanliness in both their physical and spiritual senses. The closing chapters of Leviticus focus on laws that defined how one under the Mosaic law lived righteously and in a manner pleasing to God. Leviticus ends with essentially the same message with which it began, namely, the all-important admonition that men are to be holy, even as God is holy. The laws that follow this commandment may seem at first to be without logical arrangement or interconnection, but they are unified when one considers them in light of the injunction to be holy given in verse2. Note also the strong relationship to the Ten Commandments in what immediately follows (see vv.312). The fifth commandment (honoring parents) and the fourth commandment (keeping the Sabbath day holy) are joined in verse3, followed immediately by the second commandment (no graven images). In verse11 the eighth commandment (stealing) is joined with the ninth (bearing false witness), and then again is immediately connected to the third commandment (taking Gods name in vain) in verse12. By this means the Lord seems to indicate that what follows the commandment to be holy is directly related to these fundamental principles of righteousness. The specific laws that follow the commandments define principles of righteousness that follow naturally from the Ten Commandments. For example, the commandment is not to steal, but these laws show that the commandment means far more than not robbing a man or burglarizing his home. One can steal through fraud or by withholding wages from a laborer (v.13). The commandment is to honor ones parents, but here the Lord used the word fear (v.3), which connotes a deep respect, reverence, and awe, the same feelings one should have for God Himself. The example of the gossiping talebearer (v.16) shows that there are ways to bear false witness other than under oath in court. And the concluding principle summarizes the whole purpose of the law. If one is truly holy, as God is holy, then he will love his neighbor as himself (see v.18).

Moses the Lawgiver

During His earthly ministry, the Master was asked by a scribe which of all the commandments was the greatest. The Saviors reply is well known: Love God and love your neighbor. Then He said: On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets (Matthew 22:40; see also vv.3539). Or, to put it another way, those two principles are the foundation for all the writings of the Old Testament. All principles and commandments stem either from the need to love God or to love our neighbor.

Both of the laws cited by Jesus are found in the Old Testament, but not together. The first is found in Deuteronomy 6:5 and the second in Leviticus 19:18. The wording of the second commandment is instructive. The statement that one is to love his neighbor as himself moves the idea of love in this case from a state of emotion to one of will. Love is that emotion which one naturally feels for oneself. Simply expressed, it is a desire one has for his own good. To love or care for oneself is natural and good, but in addition, one must feel this same emotion for others. Each must desire the good of others as well as his own. This desire is not innate but comes through a conscious act of will or agency. The commandment thus implies that one should work both for his own good and the good of others. He should not aggrandize himself at anothers expense. This commandment is at the heart of all social interaction and becomes the standard by which every act can be judged.

Any person who truly understands the implications for daily living that are part of the commandment to love God with all his heart, might, mind, and strength, and to love his neighbor as himself, can function well with no additional laws. One does not need to warn a person who loves God properly about idolatry, for any act of worship not devoted to God would be naturally offensive to him. The prohibitions against stealing, adultery, murder, and so on are not required if a person truly loves his neighbor as himself, for to injure his neighbor in such ways would be unthinkable. But, of course, the vast majority of men fail to understand and keep these two commandments, and so the Lord has revealed many additional laws and rules to show specifically what the commandments require. But truly, all such commandments do nothing more than define and support the two basic principles: all the law and the prophets are summarized in the two great commandments.

The metaphorical use of circumcision is thus explained by the text itself: it denotes the fruit as disqualified or unfit. In [Leviticus 26:41] the same metaphor is used for the heart which is stubborn or not ripe to listen to the Divine admonitions. And in other passages of Scripture it is used with reference to lips [Exodus 6:12, 30] and ears [Jeremiah 6:10] which do not perform their proper functions. (C.D. Ginsburg, in Rushdoony, Institutes of Biblical Law, pp.14748.)

Exactly why the fruit produced for the first three years of the tree was to be treated as unfit is not clear, but in this context of laws of righteousness and sanctification, this prohibition could suggest that until the first-fruits of the tree were dedicated to God, just as the firstborn of animals and men were (see Exodus 13:12), the tree was not viewed as sanctified, or set apart, for use by Gods people. Because the ground had been cursed for mans sake when Adam fell (see Genesis 3:17), this law could have served as a simple reminder that until dedicated to God and His purposes, all things remained unfit for use by Gods holy people.

At first, the laws found in these verses may seem to have little application for the modern Saint, and may even seem puzzling as requirements for ancient Israel. What, for example, would the cutting of ones hair and beard have to do with righteousness? But in the cultural surroundings of ancient Israel, these specific prohibitions taught a powerful lesson related to the practices of Israels heathen neighbors.

For example, the Hebrew word nachash, translated as enchantment (v.26), meant to practice divination, and the phrase observe times (v.26) comes from the Hebrew word meaning to observe clouds (Wilson, Old Testament Word Studies, s.v.enchantment, p.144). In the ancient world, sorcerers and necromancers often claimed to read the future through various omens or objects. Their methods included watching the stars (astrology), observing the movements of clouds and certain animals, tying knots, casting lots, tossing arrows into the air and then reading the pattern of how they fell, and so on. (See Hastings, Dictionary of the Bible, s.v.magic, divination, and sorcery, pp.56670.) Thus, verse26 forbade any use of the occult to read the future.

Another Bible scholar gave an important insight about why cutting the hair and beard was forbidden.

[Leviticus 19:27] and the following verse evidently refer to customs which must have existed among the Egyptians when the Israelites sojourned in Egypt; and what they were it is now difficult, even with any probability, to conjecture. Herodotus observes that the Arabs shave or cut their hair round, in honour of Bacchus [the god of wine] who, they say, had his hair cut in this way. He says also that the Macians, a people of Libya, cut their hair round, so as to leave a tuft on the top of the head. In this manner the Chinese cut their hair to the present day. This might have been in honour of some idol, and therefore forbidden to the Israelites.

The hair was much used in divination among the ancients, and for purposes of religious superstition among the Greeks; and particularly about the time of the giving of this law, as this is supposed to have been the era of the Trojan war. We learn from Homer that it was customary for parents to dedicate the hair of their children to some god; which, when they came to manhood, they cut off and consecrated to the deity. Achilles, at the funeral of Patroclus, cut off his golden locks which his father had dedicated to the river god Sperchius, and threw them into the flood.

If the hair was rounded, and dedicated for purposes of this kind, it will at once account for the prohibition in this verse. (Clarke, Bible Commentary, 1:575.)

In forbidding the cutting of the flesh and the tattooing of marks in the flesh, the Lord again clearly signaled that Israel was to be different from their heathen neighbors. Wounds were self-inflicted in times of grief for the dead and during worship (see 1Kings 18:28). Also, it was a very ancient and a very general custom to carry marks on the body in honour of the object of their worship. All the castes of the Hindoos bear on their foreheads or elsewhere what are called the sectarian marks, which distinguish them, not only in a civil but also in a religious point of view, from each other.

Most of the barbarous nations lately discovered have their faces, arms, breasts, &c., curiously carved or tatooed, probably for superstitious purposes. Ancient writers abound with accounts of marks made on the face, arms, &c., in honour of different idols; and to this the inspired penman alludes [Revelation 13:1617; 14:9, 11; 15:2; 16:2; 19:20; 20:4], where false worshippers are represented as receiving in their hands and in their forehead the marks of the beast. (Clarke, Bible Commentary, 1:575.)

Sacred prostitution was a common practice among heathen worshipers, and often priestesses in the temples to such goddesses of love as Venus or Aphrodite were there only to satisfy and give religious sanction to immoral sexual desires. God strictly forbade these practices.

Familiar spirits (Leviticus 19:31) connoted those who today would be called spiritualists, or spirit mediums. They supposedly had the power to communicate through a seance with departed spirits. The Hebrew word for familiar spirit means ventriloquist, suggesting in the very name itself the fraudulent character of such people (see Wilson, Old Testament Word Studies, s.v.ventriloquist, p.157).

Clearly, the laws prohibiting such idolatrous practices were designed to set Israel apart from the world and its false worship. And therein is an important lesson for modern Saints. The world has not changed, although the specific practices of evil and debauchery may be different. Today the Lord still directs His people through living prophets to avoid the customs and practices of the world. It should be no surprise, then, that prophets speak out against certain hair styles, fashions in clothing, passing fads, or such practices as sensitivity groups, gambling, couples living together without marriage, and so on.

A meteyard signified such Hebrew measures of length as the reed, the span, and the cubit, while the ephah and the hin were measures of volume. By specifying both kinds of measures, the Lord clearly taught that honesty in all transactions was required. (See Bible Dictionary, s.v.weights and measures.)

This chapter specifies some of the sins so serious that they were worthy of death. (For an explanation of what it means to give ones seed to Molech, see Reading 15-11.) The Lord clearly stated again and again that the purpose of these laws was to separate Israel from other people so that they could be sanctified and become holy unto God (see vv.78, 24, 26).

When the Jaredites were brought to the land of promise, the Lord warned them that if they did not worship the God of the land, who is Jesus Christ, they would be swept off (Ether 2:10). Lehis colony was also warned that they would occupy the promised land only on condition of obedience; otherwise, they too would be cut off (1Nephi 2:21; see also v.20). The Israelites were warned that if they were not willing to separate themselves from the world, the land would spue them out (Leviticus 20:22).

Nephi told his brothers that the only reason Israel was given the land and the Canaanites driven out was that the Canaanites had rejected every word of God, and they were ripe in iniquity (1Nephi 17:35). Because of their extreme wickedness God required Israel to utterly destroy them (Deuteronomy 7:2; for further discussion about why God required the Canaanites to be destroyed, see Reading 19-15). Nephi asked, Do you suppose that our fathers [the Israelites] would have been more choice than they [the Canaanites] if they had been righteous? I say unto you, Nay. (1Nephi 17:34.) The same message was clearly revealed to Israel. The Canaanites were cast out because of their wickedness. Either Israel would remain separated from that wickedness, or they would suffer the same consequence.

In these two chapters are special rules and requirements for the Levitical Priesthood, especially the high priest. Here, for the first time, the title high priest was used (Leviticus 21:10). The Hebrew literally means the Priest, the great one. As the chief priest, he was the representative of Jehovah among the people. As such, he was required to guard against all defilement of his holy office. (The Old Testament high priest was an office in the Aaronic Priesthood, not an office in the Melchizedek Priesthood as it is today. The high priest was the presiding priest, or head, of the Aaronic Priesthood. Today the presiding bishop holds that position.) All members of the priesthood had to marry virgins of their own people. Prostitutes, adulterous women, or even divorced women, were excluded, thus avoiding the least doubt about personal purity. The priests could not marry profane women (non-Israelites; v.7), be defiled by contact with a dead person other than close relatives (see vv.13), or allow a daughter to be a prostitute (see v.9).

In other words, all of Israel was called to a special life of separation and holiness, but the priests who served as Gods authorized representatives to the people had to maintain an even higher level of separation and sanctification. The high priest, who was a symbol or type of Jesus, the great high priest, had to meet a still stricter code (Hebrews 4:14). In addition to meeting the requirements of the regular priesthood for marriage and defilement, he had to be without any physical defects (see Leviticus 21:1621). Such strictness was to remind the people that Christ, the true Mediator between God and His children, was perfect in every respect.

In this chapter the Lord indicated five holy days or feasts that were to be observed by all Israel. These were the Sabbath (see vv.13), the Passover and the feast of Unleavened Bread (see vv.414), the feast of Weeks, or Pentecost, as it was called in the New Testament (see vv.1523), the day of Atonement (see vv.2632), and the feast of Tabernacles (see vv.3344).

The sabbaths, of course, were weekly; the others are listed in the order in which they occurred. Passover was in late March or early April (corresponding to Easter), and Pentecost followed seven weeks later in May. The day of Atonement, which occurred in late September or early October, was followed five days later by the feast of Tabernacles, or feast of Booths. (For more details on the feasts and festivals, see Enrichment SectionD and the Hebrew calendar in Maps and Charts.)

To afflict the soul means to be humble or submissive to the Lord. The Hebrew term carries with it the idea of discipline. Therefore, on these days, Israelites were to devote themselves completely to the Lord in fasting and prayer.

The offerings specified for the feast days were all voluntary. These were the times to celebrate and freely show ones gratitude to the Lord.

This passage has come to be regarded by many as the substance and summary of the Mosaic law: eye for eye, tooth for tooth (v.20). This misunderstanding is unfortunate because it makes the law appear cold, unbending, and revengeful. This misconception has resulted from a failure to distinguish between the social law and the criminal law. The social law was based on love and concern for ones neighbor (see Leviticus 19:18). The criminal law was not outside that love, but was made to stress absolute justice. Even then, however, three things must be noted about this eye-for-an-eye application:

First, it was intended to be a law of exact justice, not of revenge. Secondly, it was not private vengeance, but public justice. Thirdly, by excluding murder from the crimes for which ransom is permissible (Nu. 35:31f.) it makes it probable that compensation for injuries was often or usually allowed to take the form of a fine. (Guthrie and Motyer, Bible Commentary: Revised, p.164.)

The same law that required just retribution and payment also required a farmer to leave portions of his field unharvested so the poor could glean therein (see Leviticus 19:910; 23:22), demanded that the employer pay his hired labor at nightfall rather than wait even until the next day (see 19:13), commanded men, Thou shalt not hate thy brother in thine heart (19:17), and summarized the ideal by saying, Be ye holy (20:7).

Many today look upon the law of Moses as a primitive, lesser law designed for a spiritually illiterate and immature people. This chapter illustrates the commitment of faith and trust in God that was required of one who truly followed the law. The Israelite was told that once in every seven years he was to trust wholly in God rather than in the fruits of his own labor for sustenance. The land, too, was to have its sabbath rest, and no plowing, sowing, reaping, or harvesting was to take place. Further, once each fifty years the land would have a double rest. The seventh sabbatical year (the forty-ninth year) was to be followed by a jubilee year. God had delivered Israel from the bondage of Egypt, forgiven their numerous debts to Him, and given them an inheritance in the land of promise. To demonstrate their love of God and fellow men, Israel was to follow that example during the jubilee year. Slaves or servants were to be freed, the land returned to its original owner, and debts forgiven (see vv.10, 13, 3536).

Modern followers of the higher gospel law would do well to assess their own commitment to God and their own love of neighbor by asking themselves if they could live such a law. Is their faith sufficient to trust in the Lord for three years sustenance as was asked of Israel? (Note vv.1822.)

One Bible scholar suggested two important ideas symbolized in the requirements of the jubilee year:

The jubilee seems to have been typical, 1. Of the great time of release, the Gospel dispensation, when all who believe in Christ Jesus are redeemed from the bondage of sinrepossess the favour and image of God, the only inheritance of the human soul, having all debts cancelled, and the right of inheritance restored. To this the prophet Isaiah seems to allude [Isaiah 26:13], and particularly [61:13]. 2. Of the general resurrection. It is, says Mr.Parkhurst, a lively prefiguration of the grand consummation of time, which will be introduced in like manner by the trump of God [1Corinthians 15:52], when the children and heirs of God shall be delivered from all their forfeitures, and restored to the eternal inheritance allotted to them by their Father; and thenceforth rest from their labours, and be supported in life and happiness by what the field of God shall supply.

It is worthy of remark that the jubilee was not proclaimed till the tenth day of the seventh month, on the very day when the great annual atonement was made for the sins of the people; and does not this prove that the great liberty or redemption from thraldom, published under the Gospel, could not take place till the great Atonement, the sacrifice of the Lord Jesus, had been offered up? (Clarke, Bible Commentary, p.1:592.)

Or, as C.D. Ginsburg put it: On the close of the great Day of Atonement, when the Hebrews realised that they had peace of mind, that their heavenly Father had annulled their sins, and that they had become re-united to Him through His forgiving mercy, every Israelite was called upon to proclaim throughout the land, by nine blasts of the cornet, that he too had given the soil rest, that he had freed every encumbered family estate, and that he had given liberty to every slave, who was now to rejoin his kindred. Inasmuch as God has forgiven his debts, he also is to forgive his debtors. (In Rushdoony, Institutes of Biblical Law, p.141.)

Leviticus 26 is one of the most powerful chapters in the Old Testament. The Lord put the options facing Israel so clearly that they could not be misunderstood. If Israel was obedient, they would be blessed with the bounties of the earth, safety and security, peace and protection from enemies. Even more important, the Lord promised: My soul shall not abhor you. And I will walk among you, and will be your God, and ye shall be my people. (vv.1112) Those promises could be summarized in one word: Zion. If Israel was obedient, she would achieve a Zion condition.

If Israel refused to hearken unto me, and will not do all these commandments (v.14), however, then the blessings would be withdrawn, and sorrow, hunger, war, disease, exile, tragedy, and abandonment would result.

Modern Israel has been given the same options.

In the winter of 197677, the western United States faced a serious drought. A living prophet saw in that and other natural phenomena a warning related to that given in the Old Testament.

Early this year when drouth conditions seemed to be developing in the West, the cold and hardships in the East, with varying weather situations all over the world, we felt to ask the members of the Church to join in fasting and prayer, asking the Lord for moisture where it was so vital and for a cessation of the difficult conditions elsewhere.

Perhaps we may have been unworthy in asking for these greatest blessings, but we do not wish to frantically approach the matter but merely call it to the attention of our Lord and then spend our energy to put our lives in harmony.

One prophet said:

When heaven is shut up, and there is no rain, because they have sinned against thee; if they pray toward this place, and confess thy name, and turn from their sin, when thou afflictest them:

Then hear thou in heaven, and forgive the sin of thy servants, and of thy people Israel, that thou teach them the good way wherein they should walk, and give rain upon thy land, which thou hast given to thy people for an inheritance. (1Kings 8:3536.)

The Lord uses the weather sometimes to discipline his people for the violation of his laws. He said to the children of Israel: [Leviticus 26:36.]

With the great worry and suffering in the East and threats of drouth here in the West and elsewhere, we asked the people to join in a solemn prayer circle for moisture where needed. Quite immediately our prayers were answered, and we were grateful beyond expression. We are still in need and hope that the Lord may see fit to answer our continued prayers in this matter.

Perhaps the day has come when we should take stock of ourselves and see if we are worthy to ask or if we have been breaking the commandments, making ourselves unworthy of receiving the blessings.

The Lord gave strict commandments: Ye shall keep my sabbaths, and reverence my sanctuary: I am the Lord. (Lev. 19:30.)

Innumerous times we have quoted this, asking our people not to profane the Sabbath; and yet we see numerous cars lined up at merchandise stores on the Sabbath day, and places of amusement crowded, and we wonder.

The Lord makes definite promises. He says:

Then I will give you rain in due season, and the land shall yield her increase, and the trees of the field shall yield their fruit. (Lev. 26:4.)

God does what he promises, and many of us continue to defile the Sabbath day. He then continues:

And your threshing shall reach unto the vintage, and the vintage shall reach unto the sowing time: and ye shall eat your bread to the full, and dwell in your land safely. (Lev. 26:5.)

These promises are dependable.

The Lord warns: [Leviticus 26:1417, 1920.]

The Lord goes further and says:

I will destroy your cattle, and make you few in number; and your high ways shall be desolate. (Lev. 26:22.)

Can you think how the highways could be made desolate? When fuel and power are limited, when there is none to use, when men will walk instead of ride?

Have you ever thought, my good folks, that the matter of peace is in the hands of the Lord who says:

And I will bring a sword upon you (Lev. 26:25.)

Would that be difficult? Do you read the papers? Are you acquainted with the hatreds in the world? What guarantee have you for permanent peace?

and ye shall be delivered into the hand of the enemy. (Lev. 26:25.)

Are there enemies who could and would afflict us? Have you thought of that?

And I will make your cities waste, he says, and bring your sanctuaries unto desolation.

Then shall the land enjoy her sabbaths, as long as it lieth desolate, and ye be in your enemies land; even then shall the land rest, and enjoy her sabbaths.

As long as it lieth desolate it shall rest; because it did not rest [when it could] in your sabbaths, when ye dwelt upon it. (Lev. 26:31, 3435.)

Those are difficult and very serious situations, but they are possible.

And the Lord concludes:

These are the statutes and judgments and laws, which the Lord made between him and the children of Israel in Mount Sinai by the hand of Moses. (Lev. 26:46.)

This applies to you and me.

Would this be a good time to deeply concern ourselves with these matters? Is this a time when we should return to our homes, our families, our children? Is this the time we should remember our tithes and our offerings, a time when we should desist from our abortions, our divorces, our Sabbath breaking, our eagerness to make the holy day a holiday?

Is this a time to repent of our sins, our immoralities, our doctrines of devils?

Is this a time for all of us to make holy our marriages, live in joy and happiness, rear our families in righteousness?

Certainly many of us know better than we do. Is this a time to terminate adultery and homosexual and lesbian activities, and return to faith and worthiness? Is this a time to end our heedless pornographies?

Is this the time to set our face firmly against unholy and profane things, and whoredoms, irregularities, and related matters?

Is this the time to enter new life? (SpencerW. Kimball, The Lord Expects His People to Follow the Commandments, Ensign, May 1977, pp.46.)

President SpencerW. Kimball warned that Leviticus applies to Latter-day Saints.

To see how this prophecy was fulfilled, see Jeremiah 25:9, 1112; 29:10; 2Chronicles 36:21.

Special vows were a part of the Mosaic law. In that day it was possible for a man or woman to dedicate a person to the Lord, for example, Jephthahs daughter or the child Samuel (see Judges 11:3031; 1Samuel 1:11). Here the Lord was saying that when a man made such a vow, the persons involved had to be reckoned as the Lords and could not be taken by another. A person could also vow (that is, dedicate to the Lord) his personal property. These laws governed the making of such vows.

The signification of this verse is well given by the rabbins: When a man was to give the tithe of his sheep or calves to God, he was to shut up the whole flock in one fold, in which there was one narrow door capable of letting out one at a time. The owner, about to give the tenth to the Lord, stood by the door with a rod in his hand, the end of which was dipped in vermilion or red ochre. The mothers of those lambs or calves stood without: the door being opened, the young ones ran out to join themselves to their dams; and as they passed out the owner stood with his rod over them, and counted one, two, three, four, five, &c., and when the tenth came, he touched it with the coloured rod, by which it was distinguished to be the tithe calf, sheep, &c., and whether poor or lean, perfect or blemished, that was received as the legitimate tithe. It seems to be in reference to this custom that the Prophet Ezekiel, speaking to Israel, says: I will cause you to pass under the rod, and will bring you into the bond of the covenantyou shall be once more claimed as the Lords property, and be in all things devoted to his service, being marked or ascertained, by especial providences and manifestations of his kindness, to be his peculiar people. (Clarke, Bible Commentary, 1:604.)

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