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The new BBC horror film brings back to life the demon barber once again. Hollywood Reporter Ray Bennett gives this movie very good reviews. "Ray Winstone brings Sweeney Todd, the mythical demon barber of Fleet Street made famous in Stephen Sondheim's 1979 Broadway musical, vividly and scarily to life." According to Bennett, supporting actors Essie Davis as Mrs. Lovett, Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire Tom Hardy as a young Bow Street runner, David Bradley as Todd's father and David Warner as magistrate Fielding "do exceptional work to match that of Winstone, who gets behind the eyes of a madman to reveal hauntingly how he might have become that way."
"Attend the tale of Sweeney Todd
His skin was pale and his eye was odd
He shaved the faces of gentlemen
Who never thereafter were heard of again
He trod a path that few have trod
Did Sweeney Todd
The Demon Barber of Fleet Street."
"The Ballad of Sweeney Todd" By Stephen Sondheim
Stephen Sondheim
Stephen Sondheim
In the introduction to Stephen Sondheim's musical thriller Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street, playwright Christopher Bond begins by telling readers "Sweeney Todd is pure fiction." For two centuries theater-goers and penny dreadful fans have been thrilled with Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire the exploits of Sweeney Todd, the murderous barber who dispatched his customers with a flick of the razor and then had his lover serve up the remains in a tasty meat pie, but few gave much thought to whether or not it was a true story.
Long before there was Freddy Krueger, or even Jack the Ripper, there was the legend of the Demon Barber of Fleet Street, and most readers assumed it was just that — legend. Bond's statement that Sweeney Todd is pure fiction is correct in one respect: the Sondheim musical, which has played to critical acclaim on both sides of the Atlantic, is a fictional account of the life of Sweeney Todd.
Sondheim, who penned the music and lyrics, and playwright Hugh Wheeler adapted an earlier work by Bond, who tailored yet another (much) earlier work by one George Dibdin-Pitt. The melodrama by Pitt had its foundation in a contemporary account of Todd's arrest, trial and execution. Bond asserts while Fleet Street was the home of many unstable and unsavory characters over the years, "no one has ever succeeded in finding a shred of evidence as to the existence of a Demon Barber thereabouts."
That's why Bond is a playwright, not an investigator.
Monday, November 16, 2009
Sunday, August 2, 2009
Rising Sun Companies 3.boss.0001 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
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THE "MAGIC" BACKGROUND OF PEARL HARBOR
596. President Wang Takes Active Part in Japanese-American Negotiations
As Nanking's various economic and political situations grew to international importance because of their relation to Japan, President Wang increased his interest in the progress of Japanese-American relations. In a letter to Prime Minister Konoye sent in October, 1941, via Consul-General Hidaka, Mr. Wang asked for information regarding this matter. In his message Mr. Wang summarized diplomatic conversations among Mr. Hidaka, Admiral Koga and himself in relation to the United States.
A later dispatch on October 16, 1941 revealed that President Wang's motives regarding this problem were governed by the desire to have the Nanking government officially consulted in any agreement reached with Washington. Actually Mr. Wang wanted Nanking to be part of any alliance between Japan and the United States. Tokyo found Mr. Wang's demands justifiable, and Japan agreed to contact Nanking on all future details involving occupied China.[1410]
[1410] III, 1109.
[287] [288 blank]
THE "MAGIC" BACKGROUND OF PEARL HARBOR
PART C—JAPANESE DIPLOMATIC ACTIVITIES THROUGHOUT THE WORLD
(m) Japanese Netherlands East Indies Relations
597. Zoku Nomoto Instructs Telegraphic Clerks in New Code Systems
During August Japan enforced stricter measures to safeguard the secrecy of its plans. Since these additional security precautions had resulted in more complicated code and telegraphic duties, Mr. Yutaka Ishizawa, the Japanese Consul-General, in Batavia suggested on August 6, 1941 that Mr. Zoku Nomoto be permitted to remain in that city for a few months in order to instruct Mr. Yamaguchi and other telegraphic clerks in the new Japanese code systems. Mr. Ishizawa urged that his government be prepared for any emergency.[1411]
Later in the month Japanese offices throughout the world were furnished with the new code which Mr. Nomoto was teaching to Japanese communicators in Batavia since it was replacing the old code.[1412]
598. Japanese Finance Officials Negotiate for Circulation of Japanese Currency
Since the circulation of Japanese funds had been greatly curtailed by the Netherlands Indies freezing order, Mr. Masatsune Ogura, the Japanese Minister of Finance, and the authorities of the Yokohama Specie Bank were anxious to conclude some agreement with the Netherlands government. With this goal in mind, Tokyo intended to have Mr. Imagawa, a Japanese member of the Yokohama Specie Bank in Batavia on this trade mission, present certain of Japan's problems to the Dutch officials.[1413]
To regain some semblance of its former trade with the Netherlands East Indies, Japan was particularly anxious that an account designated as the "A" account be restored. However, since the Netherlands Indies had already established the Central Afolh Japan Trade, Tokyo was not optimistic concerning the realization of its plan. Attempting to clear up back shipments of goods, Tokyo directed its ships to load the cargo already contracted for up to and including August 1, 1941. As a reciprocal measure Japan was to fill orders made by the Netherlands East Indies prior to that date.
The present trade situation existing between the two countries could not be termed beneficial to the Japanese government because the Netherlands authorities only issued permits for the purchase of such goods as the Dutch government was willing to sell. Since the payment of goods in guilders protected the buyer from exorbitant export duties, the Tokyo commercial officials suggested that the payment of the petroleum costs be made in this way. To accomplish such a plan the Mitsui Company conducted negotiations in Tokyo with two Batavian officials.[1414]
599. Mr. Imagawa Discusses Japanese Currency Problems With Mr. Hoogstraten (August 7, 1941) Attempting to establish Japanese currency in the Netherlands East Indies on a more stable
basis in spite of the freezing order, Mr. Imagawa and Mr. Kotani met in a conference with Mr. Hoogstraten and Controller Purena on August 7, 1941.[1415] At this meeting Mr. Hoogstraten, speaking in an official capacity, stated that his government would liquidate all of Japan's frozen assets with the exception of a small amount to cover the losses sustained by Indonese merchants provided that the newly liquidated assets be used as payment for the purchase of materials in the Netherlands East Indies. Furthermore, Mr. Hoogstraten stated that even that money which was to remain frozen for the time being would be eventually liquidated. At a
[1411] III, 1110.
[1412] III, 1111-1112.
[1413] III, 1113.
[1414] Ibid.
[1415] III, 1114.
[289]
future conference details concerning the settlement of frozen assets through bahts or Shanghai dollars would be considered. In return for the concessions which the Dutch government was willing to make, Mr. Hoogstraten requested that he be notified of the extent to which Japan would export merchandise to the Netherlands East Indies in the future. If reciprocal measures were adopted, the Netherlands government promised to keep Japan informed on the maximum amount of East Indies goods it would be permitted to purchase.[1416]
Speaking of the difficulties encountered by Dutch firms in Japan, Mr. Hoogstraten reminded the Japanese representatives that these merchants had contracted for approximately Y180,000,000 in Japanese goods before the retaliatory freezing order was put into effect by Japan. Between fifteen and twenty million yen had been paid on these goods, but only cargoes amounting to Y3,000,000 had been loaded for shipment to the East Indies. Since Mr. Imagawa's and the Dutch bank official's figures differed, the amounts stated were to be checked and reported on.[1417]
Realizing that the purchase of petroleum was of prime importance to Japan, Mr. Hoogstraten dealt at great length on the conditions effecting its export from the Indies. Japan already owed between one and two million United States dollars for petroleum purchased and to expedite its payment, the Dutch government was willing to liquidate some of the frozen Japanese funds. As an added assistance to future negotiations, the local exchange branch which had formerly refused permission to the Yokohama Specie Bank for new payments on petroleum, was now willing to grant this privilege. These advance payments for exports were to be placed in a special "C" account. Moreover Dutch authorities decided to permit the local branch of the Specie Bank to use the funds on hand, known as the "B" account, to make payments to exporters and to engage in domestic enterprises. Netherlands officials further agreed that about thirty or forty guilders could be liquidated from the old "A" account while a new "D" account was being established at the Specie Bank, from which the exporter would draw the advance payments already agreed upon. By the conclusion of the conference, Mr. Hoogstraten and Controller Purena had unofficially guaranteed to maintain a status quo in the exchange market.[1418] From the report of the Japanese officials who had attended the conferences in Batavia, it would appear that the Dutch were equally desirous of disposing of the various commercial problems which resulted from the Netherlands freezing order. Therefore, Tokyo was asked to give the Dutch banks and merchants any necessary permits that would enable them to transact business with the Japanese.[1419]
600. Second Trade Conference Ends in Disagreement Over Japanese-Dutch Contracts (August 8, 1941)
On August 8, 1941, Japanese and Dutch commercial officials held a second conference. Returning to the discussion of Dutch trade transactions in Japan, Mr. Hoogstraten, Chief of the Netherlands Commercial Bureau in Batavia, stated that Netherlands companies had already contracted for goods in the excess of Y190,000,000 on which Y3,000,000 had already been paid. Since both these sums were large, Mr. Kotani and Mr. Imagawa, the chief officials resenting Tokyo in trade negotiations, decided that the figures must be checked more closely. However, Mr. Hoogstraten insisted that, according to a message from the Netherlands Consul-General at Kobe, orders amounting to over Y50,000,000 had passed over his desk, in that city alone.[1420]
[1416] Ibid.
[1417] Ibid.
[1418] Ibid.
[1419] Ibid.
[1420] III, 1115.
[290]
THE "MAGIC" BACKGROUND OF PEARL HARBOR
After listening to Mr. Hoogstraten's quotation of Dutch trade transactions with Japanese merchants, Mr. Kotani and Mr. Imagawa reiterated their belief that the sums quoted were too large to be considered feasible.[1421]
601. Dutch Indecision on Petroleum Exports Delay Japanese Tankers
Since the Netherlands East Indies authorities had not taken an official stand on Japanese payment of petroleum exports by August 18, 1941, Tokyo resorted to information contained in an intelligence report from the Japanese Fuel Bureau.[1422]According to a message which arrived at the Mitsui Company in Tokyo from the branch in Batavia, the Netherlands East Indies government had decided to refer this freight question involving the Zuiyo Maru, Teiyo Maru and San Diego Maru, en route to the Netherlands East Indies, to the New York Purchase Permit Control board.
However, when the Mitsui Company in Batavia demanded that New York furnish the permit necessary for the exportation of crude oil, it was informed that for the present no permits would be issued. Therefore because the Yokohama Specie Bank and the Mitsui Company could not obtain duplicated permits, Tokyo was forced to postpone the sailing of the three tankers pending further action by the Netherlands East Indies government.[1423]
602. Japan Published Conversations with Finance Authorities
Even though the Netherlands government had already taken strong economic measures against the Japanese, the government at Tokyo realized that more effectively damaging restrictions might still be passed by the Dutch. Early in August 1941 Mr. Ishizawa informed Foreign Minister Toyoda that the Netherlands East Indies regulation froze only Japanese funds and not the assets while the retaliatory order issued by Japan froze both the funds and the assets of the Dutch. In order then, to offset the enactment of a stronger freezing measure by the Netherlands government, Mr. Ishizawa urged that Foreign Minister Toyoda assure Minister Pabst that Japan's freezing order would not be applied to Dutch assets.[1424]
As the result of Mr. Ishizawa's suggestion, Foreign Minister Toyoda decided to lighten the restrictions on the activities and reports made for the purpose of controlling the transactions among the foreigners interested in Holland and Dutch East Indies commerce. Therefore Foreign Minister Toyoda published the conversations with the Finance Department authorities and on August 8, 1941 put into effect the results of this conference.[1425]
603. Native Indonese Leaders Pledge Support to Netherlands Government
Not only by official economic restrictions but by a new strengthening of its own internal unity the Netherlands East Indies sought to impede further Japanese aggression. At a meeting of the Gerindo Party on August 4, 1941 the native population suggested open opposition to Japan's New Order in East Asia, and proposed forbidding any Japanese to enter the islands. According to Kubangunan,[1426] the native language newspaper, native leaders were convinced that this was the time for cooperation with the Netherlands government.[1427] In a report of this native activity sent to Tokyo on August 10, 1941 Mr. Ishizawa stated that the Dutch government bolstered native morale and loyalty by praising the capabilities of their organization and troops.[1428] Nevertheless realizing that the Netherlands government's system of conscrip-
[1421] Ibid.
[1422] III, 1116.
[1423] Ibid.
[1424] II, 1123.
[1425] III, 1117.
[1426] Kana spelling.
[1427] III, 1118.
[1428] Ibid.
[291]
ting natives on the islands remained a possible obstacle to complete cooperation between the Dutch factions, Mr. Ishizawa urged that Tokyo pay close attention to this question in hopes of using the natives for advancing Japanese propaganda among the islanders.[1429]
But less than a week later at a national conference held to draft proposals for discussion at a future meeting, six hundred members of the Gerindo Party voted that Japan's alliance with Nazi and Fascist nations as well as its aggressive actions against China and French Indo China constituted a threat to the Netherlands East Indies and the entire South Seas area. Although this native party, composed of ten thousand people from the lower and working classes, had been opposed to the Netherlands East Indies government with the result that many of its leaders had been banished, it now resolved to align its efforts with the Netherlands East Indies government in forming a popular democratic front embracing all Indonesia. Furthermore, the Gerindo party intended to arouse the rest of the population to the necessity for complete unity by establishing a volunteer army.[1430]
604. Japan Proposes Reciprocal Financial Guarantees
On August 11, 1941 the Japanese government instructed its officials in Batavia to forward certain reciprocal agreements which Japan would make if the Netherlands East Indies permitted Japanese business houses and individuals on the islands to make use of the newly created "D" account for payments on exports, particularly of petroleum.[1431] Under this proposed program of financial reciprocation the Japanese government would attempt to evolve some plan for placing Dutch funds on deposit in Japanese currency at Tokyo. In the hope of realizing the adoption of such a financial agreement Foreign Minister Toyoda asked that Mr. Imakawa negotiate for the permits necessary to transfer Japanese money to the "D" account. The Japanese government wished that the Netherlands government allow the depositing of profits gathered through Japanese enterprises in the Netherlands East Indies into this "D" account in the same manner.
While these negotiations were under way, the utmost secrecy was to be observed in order to prevent Japanese nationals residing in the East Indies from learning of Tokyo's plans.
From previous conversations held between Japanese and Dutch officials in Batavia, the Japanese government realized that the Netherlands authorities were indignant over the losses inflicted upon Dutch merchants in Japan by the Japanese control order of July 7, 1941. To counteract this argument against cooperation with Japan, Foreign Minister Toyoda suggested that the Japanese officials in Batavia investigate the losses sustained by Japanese nationals as a result of the new Netherlands East Indies licensing system and to use the results of their findings as reasons for Japan's attitude in the trade negotiations.[1432]
605. Japanese Officials Meet with Mr. Hoogstraaten in Fourth Trade Conference (August 12, 1941)
After receiving this reciprocal financial proposal from Tokyo,[1433] Mr. Ishizawa, assisted by Mr. Kotani and Mr. Imagawa, conferred with Mr. Hoogstraaten for three hours on August 12, 1941.[1434]
Before discussing Japan's proposed agreement, Mr. Kotani emphasized certain points connected with the recent Netherlands Indies freezing order. Ostensibly the purpose of this restriction was to cover the Y190,000,000 loss on contracts already drawn up with the Japanese and the 12,000,000 guilders of freight paid for by Dutch merchants in Japan but never delivered.
[1429] Ibid.
[1430] III, 1119.
[1431] III, 1120.
[1432] Ibid.
[1433] Ibid.
[1434] III, 1121.
[292]
THE "MAGIC" BACKGROUND OF PEARL HARBOR
Because there was a great difference between the trade statistics of the Netherlands and those of Japanese Commercial officials, Mr. Kotani felt that it was absurd to continue the enactment of a freezing order on the basis of inaccurate evidence. Therefore, the Japanese officials asked that the Netherlands freezing act be revoked.
Furthermore Mr. Kotani pointed out that not only had the Netherlands East Indies government abolished the old exchange agreement existing between the Japanese and the Dutch, but it had neglected to conclude a new agreement as it had formerly promised. Even when the Japanese government attempted to meet the Dutch export license system, the Netherlands East Indies government continued to regard Japan with suspicion, automatically assuming that by the advance into French Indo-China the Japanese were actually threatening the integrity of the Netherlands East Indies.
But although he remained convinced that Japan's recently acquired bases imperiled Indonese defenses, Chief Hoogstraten admitted that the figures stating the losses of the Dutch merchants through trade transactions with the Japanese were inaccurate. However, assuring Mr. Ishizawa that he had not misquoted these figures with any malicious intention, Mr. Hoogstraaten explained that he had merely made use of the trade figures at hand.
At this point in the conversation, Mr. Ishizawa described the reciprocal plan which the Japanese government intended to offer the Netherlands East Indies in exchange for the permission to transfer deposits of Japanese business houses and individuals to the "D" account in the Yokohama Specie Bank for use as advance payments on certain exports and on petroleum shipments. Although he could not make any definite statement until the Netherlands East Indies government had decided its policy regarding the export license system, Mr. Hoogstraaten assured the Japanese Consul that his government would give the plan careful consideration.[1435]
606. Thaiese Consul-General Visits Mr. Ishizawa
During a conference with Mr. B. C. Cheeppensock on August 12, 1941 Mr. Ishizawa commented on the Indonese newspaper attacks against Japanese pressure in Thailand. Because Mr. Ishizawa recognized the danger of this propaganda, he, himself, had denied the rumors at every opportunity and he questioned Mr. Cheeppensock concerning similar rumors in Thailand. Mr. Cheeppensock stated that three code messages just received from the Chief of the Bangkok Intelligence Bureau were evidence that Thailand was maintaining its neutrality policy and that it had received no demands whatever for military bases from any country.
When Mr. Ishizawa suggested that this information be made known to the Netherlands Indies press, Mr. Cheeppensock replied that he intended to inform both the press and the Netherlands Indies government. Since Japanese relations with Thailand had already produced a decisive effect on negotiations with the Netherlands Indies, Mr. Ishizawa requested that Tokyo inform him of the official attitude to be taken toward Bangkok.[1436]
607. Dutch Firms Complain of Japanese Trade Practices
Foreign Minister Toyoda reported to Japanese officials in Batavia that on August 12, 1941 Mr. Pabst, the Netherlands Minister to Tokyo, complained that Japanese firms were selling to export regulatory organizations certain articles which had been promised to Dutch merchants. As a result, the Dutch merchants would possibly be unable to load their ships to the capacity originally reserved for them. Therefore, in lodging an official complaint, Mr. Pabst requested that the Japanese government end this trade practice. If these export regulatory organizations and development companies had already purchased these articles, the Netherlands Minister
[1435] III, 1121.
[1436] III, 1122.
[293]
asked that they be resold to the Dutch merchants to enable them to carry out the terms of their agreement with Japanese guilds.
On August 14, 1941 a Japanese official in charge of this matter strongly insisted that it was highly improbable that Japanese merchants resold their articles to export organizations in violation of their contracts. If, however, such trade practices had taken place, the Japanese Trade Bureau intended to warn the organizations against continuing them.
Nevertheless, it was pointed out that when Dutch merchants failed to take over those articles contracted for, even after paying for them, the Japanese merchants held the right to cancel the transaction and freely dispense of the merchandise in question. Since there would be an increasing number of cases in which the Dutch merchants would be unable to take over certain articles, Japan wished that the Netherlands government be informed that the Japanese firms were permitted unrestricted disposal of those articles. If the Dutch merchants then wished to repurchase the material that had been sold to the export organizations by the Japanese merchants, they would be forced to pay new prices. The Japanese government refused to order small export businesses to resell these articles to Dutch merchants under the old price level.
As a solution to this trade difficulty, Foreign Minister Toyoda suggested that an agreement be drawn up in Batavia providing for a conversion of Japanese funds amounting to 80,000,000 yen. These converted funds would be then used for the payment of Netherlands East Indies products. After the question of Japanese finances in the East Indies had been settled, the Japanese government promised to act on the question of the 20,000,000 yen which the Netherlands East Indies wished to use for making purchases from Japan.[1437]
608. The Netherlands East Indies Prepares for War
On August 14, 1941 Japanese intelligence sources in Batavia reported that the Netherlands East Indies government was making preparations for war.
To facilitate the commandeering of certain essential items by the military authorities, the Indonese government ordered that all automobiles used by the people of Batavia be registered. Similar investigation was made of the number of horses available.[1438]
In case of invasion by an enemy, the Netherlands East Indies ordered that anything of value be demolished or burned. Specified persons were assigned to take charge of the destruction of all villages and towns within the rice producing areas of Java, and to burn all unhulled rice in this vicinity. Rice mills, bean processing plants, coconut processing plants, iron mills and petroleum refineries were to destroy their machines and any products being held in storage.
In order to facilitate the evacuation of inhabitants, the East Indies was divided up into three areas:
(1) Fighting areas—the evacuation of inhabitants from the areas where fighting was most likely to occur had already been completed;
(2) Possible areas in which military activities might be conducted—preparations were still underway for handling the evacuation of inhabitants from areas in this category.
(3) Non-combat areas—the Netherlands East Indies foresaw no need to evacuate inhabitants from this area.
Although the Netherlands East Indies government did not require the withdrawal of residents from any of these areas until it became absolutely necessary, it had no intention of prohibiting voluntary evacuation.[1439]
[1437] III, 1123.
[1438] III, 1124.
[1439] Ibid.
[294]
THE "MAGIC" BACKGROUND OF PEARL HARBOR
609. Japan Seeks Ratification of Mining Agreement
For convenience in handling wires from the B. O. M., a Japanese concern in the Netherlands East Indies, Tokyo requested on August 14, 1941 that its messages be sent directly to the Fuel Bureau because the South Seas Industrial Company was dissolved and its functions taken over by the Imperial Petroleum interests. In view of its new responsibility, the Fuel Bureau requested that this Japanese concern report on the progress made in securing permits for future prospecting and mining after the expiration of the present mining contract, and the possibility of securing rights for the operation of machines used in drilling. The Fuel Bureau believed that the B.O.M. should transport the petroleum from the Sapt Company operating in Timor on schedule. However, the B.O.M.'s opinion on the advisability of this action was requested. Finally, the Japanese Fuel Bureau asked for a full report on the desirability of scheduling an evacuation of Japanese employees residing in Soerabaja.[1440]
Three days later, the B.O.M. summarized the prospects for continuing the exploration and exploitation of East Indies mines. In a written request to the head of the Bureau of Mines, on August 11, 1941 Japanese officials of this company had asked permission to exploit new mine areas.[1441]
In view of the strained relations between Japan and the Netherlands East Indies however, the Director of the Bureau of Mines replied on August 14, 1941 that the signing of a mine agreement between Japan and Batavia was impossible. Nevertheless, the Japanese firm representatives requested an audience with the Batavian director on August 16, 1951. However, although the Netherlands East Indies apparently had no strong objections to signing a mining agreement, Dutch officials insisted that unsatisfactory Japanese-Dutch trade relations made the ratification of such an agreement impossible. In fact, for the present, the Netherlands government even believed it necessary to postpone reaching an agreement over the Sankuriran mines.
During the previous negotiations with the Dutch government, the Japanese official had attempted to bring about an agreement regarding the No. 1 "A" mine in Sankuriran but although the Japanese proposals governing this agreement had been submitted in June, 1941, as yet no reply had been forthcoming. While this delay might possibly have resulted from the fact that the Batavian Minister had been constantly traveling since its submission, the Japanese officials still doubted if the ratification of this mining agreement would take place.
Nevertheless, Mr. Ishizawa, accompanied by the Japanese mining officials, intended to confer with Mr. Hoogstraten in the near future. However, in view of these obstacles to the mining industry, the Japanese official requested that the new mining machinery not be sent in spite of the fact that the machinery in Soerabaya was already loaded for shipment to Batavia.[1442]
610. Mr. Ishizawa Confers with Mr. Hoogstraten on Petroleum Questions (August 16, 1941)
On August 16, 1941, Mr. Ishizawa conferred with Mr. Hoogstraten on the possibility of obtaining export permits for petroleum to be carried aboard the Mitsui Bussan's oil tankers, and for material being loaded on the IYO Maru for the Rising Sun Company. Mr. Hoogstraten wished to delay any decision on this question until August 18, 1941 when he would receive instructions from London and would be able to determine the attitude of the PRM and K companies. Furthermore, Mr. Van Mook was too ill at present to issue any instructions on this matter.[1443] In a special message to Mr. Keki, Manager of the Yokohama Specie Bank, Mr. Imagawa pointed out that if the petroleum were loaded from storage tanks within British ter-
[1440] III, 1125.
[1441] III, 1126.
[1442] Ibid.
[1443] III, 1127.
[295]
ritory instead of that under Netherlands control, the export permits could be secured from the Malayan government and the Netherlands East Indies would be powerless to act upon it. Mr. Imagawa emphasized this point.
In regard to the unpaid balances on the shipment of petroleum exports yet to be made, Mr. Purena, Chief of the Netherlands Control Board, suggested that Japan debts to the BPM, the Colonial and the Rising Sun Companies be paid by means of the deposits held in the Yokohama Specie Bank or the Java Bank. A detailed statement of the present balances on the petroleum accounts owed by Japan was to be submitted by the control officials on Tuesday, August 19, 1941. Mr. Imigawa asked that Mr. Seki study the advisability of paying petroleum bills in this manner. At the same time Mr. Imagawa reminded Mr. Seki that unless Japan consent to these conditions the Netherlands East Indies might suspend entirely the exports of petroleum in the future.
Because the Handels Bank played such an important part in these negotiations, the Batavian control director asked that Japan consent to the establishment of "free guilders" in the Netherlands East Indies' monetary exchange. Originally the Handels Bank was to have sent 350,000 ticals to Japan but since the foreign money dealers could not send more than 5,000 at that time, Mr. Purena suggested that Japan accommodate the Handels Bank with the additional 400,000 ticals. Mr. Imagawa was willing to consent to such a financial exchange provided that the Batavian control director guarantee Japanese merchants export permits for rubber and tin. Since the granting of such permits would naturally effect the whole export problem, Mr. Purena did not feel authorized to agree to this proposal.
But even though Controller Purena refused to guarantee export permits in return, Mr. Imagawa suggested that his government consent to the Dutch use of free guilders since there was always the possibility that Japanese banks in the Netherlands East Indies would be in a similar predicament sometime in the future without any means of relief. As a result of this request, a credit of 400,000 ticals was arranged at the Japanese Branch of the Handels Bank for rubber and tin. In order to avoid any delay in carrying out this financial arrangement, Mr. Imagawa asked that Mr. Ogura, the Japanese Finance Minister, make arrangements for the special transfer of this money. From the negotiations conducted so far, the Dutch government was unwilling to state its official position regarding the export of all commodities and therefore the Japanese officials anticipated difficulty in incidental negotiations such as the fundamental question of regulating barter exchange.[1444]
611. Mr. Imagawa Emphasizes Importance of Handels Bank Problem
Since it was generally felt in Tokyo that problems connected with the Handels Bank could be disposed of as soon as Japanese export permits were obtained from the Netherlands East Indies, the Yokohama Specie Bank urged Mr. Imagawa not to waste his efforts on this financial question.[1445] However, in his reply on the following day, Mr. Imagawa pointed out that the attitude of Netherlands East Indies officials toward the trade negotiations had grown constantly worse since the Japanese occupation of French Indo China and it did not seem likely that a satisfactory agreement could be reached on the exportation of such important raw materials as tin and rubber. If the Tokyo decided that an agreement on general terms was essential before considering any specific problems, stipulations for the securing of export permits from the East Indies would never be decided.
At the present time, Mr. Imagawa reported, the Japanese branch of the Mitsui Bank in Batavia was threatening to close down because of insufficient funds. Consequently the Handels Bank would close, complicating the Japanese banking system to such an extent that it would be impossible to dispose of any export problems. Although indignant at the attitude taken by
[1444] III, 1127-1128.
[1445] III, 1129.
[296]
THE "MAGIC" BACKGROUND OF PEARL HARBOR
Indonese officials, Mr. Imagawa still believed that the Japanese government would have to agree to a settlement of the Handels Bank question in order to liquidate a small amount of its frozen funds and use them to purchase Netherlands East Indies products.[1446]
In a later report on the Handels Bank officials, Mr. Imagawa revealed that unless a specific guarantee were furnished the Netherlands East Indies, oil companies would refuse to load oil on Japanese tankers even if the Netherlands government itself granted export permits. Apparently the Netherlands East Indies' real intention was to cancel the funds of the oil company frozen by Japan. Therefore, Mr. Imagawa advised that the Yokohama Specie bank continue to study this problem.[1447]
612. Dutch Merchants in Kobe are Dissatisfied
On August 20, 1941, Mr. Hoogstraten reported to Mr. Ishizawa that the Dutch merchants in the Osaka Kobe region of Japan were aroused over the treatment accorded them. Although Mr. Hoogstraten admitted that the Batavian Consul General, Pennink, might have exaggerated the situation, he nevertheless felt that the unfriendly attitude of both the Tokyo central authorities and the Japanese officials in Kobe had been a source of concern to the East Indian merchants. In attempting to smooth over this minor incident, Mr. Ishizawa promised that future trade negotiations in that area would be handled entirely through the Japanese legation.[1448]
613. Netherlands Indies Places Restrictions on Japanese Business
a. Suppression of Japanese Newspapers
Nevertheless retaliatory measures were taken against the Japanese on the islands by the Netherlands government. On August 21, 1941 local Batavian police arrested the editors of the Chinese language edition of the To-Indo Nippo and the Shinarusutan, two Japanese-subsidized newspapers, and suspended the printing of both papers for one week.[1449]
b. Java Prohibits Japanese-Language Phone Calls
On the same day Dutch officials in Java ordered that all telephone calls to and from the islands be made only in the Dutch, Malayan or English languages. Although Mr. Ishizawa had not yet learned whether this ban on the use of the Japanese language had been extended to other islands in the Indies, he asked that the Tokyo Foreign Office use its influence to have the order rescinded, since its effect on Japanese business in Java alone impaired Japanese trade as a whole.[1450] Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
THE "MAGIC" BACKGROUND OF PEARL HARBOR
596. President Wang Takes Active Part in Japanese-American Negotiations
As Nanking's various economic and political situations grew to international importance because of their relation to Japan, President Wang increased his interest in the progress of Japanese-American relations. In a letter to Prime Minister Konoye sent in October, 1941, via Consul-General Hidaka, Mr. Wang asked for information regarding this matter. In his message Mr. Wang summarized diplomatic conversations among Mr. Hidaka, Admiral Koga and himself in relation to the United States.
A later dispatch on October 16, 1941 revealed that President Wang's motives regarding this problem were governed by the desire to have the Nanking government officially consulted in any agreement reached with Washington. Actually Mr. Wang wanted Nanking to be part of any alliance between Japan and the United States. Tokyo found Mr. Wang's demands justifiable, and Japan agreed to contact Nanking on all future details involving occupied China.[1410]
[1410] III, 1109.
[287] [288 blank]
THE "MAGIC" BACKGROUND OF PEARL HARBOR
PART C—JAPANESE DIPLOMATIC ACTIVITIES THROUGHOUT THE WORLD
(m) Japanese Netherlands East Indies Relations
597. Zoku Nomoto Instructs Telegraphic Clerks in New Code Systems
During August Japan enforced stricter measures to safeguard the secrecy of its plans. Since these additional security precautions had resulted in more complicated code and telegraphic duties, Mr. Yutaka Ishizawa, the Japanese Consul-General, in Batavia suggested on August 6, 1941 that Mr. Zoku Nomoto be permitted to remain in that city for a few months in order to instruct Mr. Yamaguchi and other telegraphic clerks in the new Japanese code systems. Mr. Ishizawa urged that his government be prepared for any emergency.[1411]
Later in the month Japanese offices throughout the world were furnished with the new code which Mr. Nomoto was teaching to Japanese communicators in Batavia since it was replacing the old code.[1412]
598. Japanese Finance Officials Negotiate for Circulation of Japanese Currency
Since the circulation of Japanese funds had been greatly curtailed by the Netherlands Indies freezing order, Mr. Masatsune Ogura, the Japanese Minister of Finance, and the authorities of the Yokohama Specie Bank were anxious to conclude some agreement with the Netherlands government. With this goal in mind, Tokyo intended to have Mr. Imagawa, a Japanese member of the Yokohama Specie Bank in Batavia on this trade mission, present certain of Japan's problems to the Dutch officials.[1413]
To regain some semblance of its former trade with the Netherlands East Indies, Japan was particularly anxious that an account designated as the "A" account be restored. However, since the Netherlands Indies had already established the Central Afolh Japan Trade, Tokyo was not optimistic concerning the realization of its plan. Attempting to clear up back shipments of goods, Tokyo directed its ships to load the cargo already contracted for up to and including August 1, 1941. As a reciprocal measure Japan was to fill orders made by the Netherlands East Indies prior to that date.
The present trade situation existing between the two countries could not be termed beneficial to the Japanese government because the Netherlands authorities only issued permits for the purchase of such goods as the Dutch government was willing to sell. Since the payment of goods in guilders protected the buyer from exorbitant export duties, the Tokyo commercial officials suggested that the payment of the petroleum costs be made in this way. To accomplish such a plan the Mitsui Company conducted negotiations in Tokyo with two Batavian officials.[1414]
599. Mr. Imagawa Discusses Japanese Currency Problems With Mr. Hoogstraten (August 7, 1941) Attempting to establish Japanese currency in the Netherlands East Indies on a more stable
basis in spite of the freezing order, Mr. Imagawa and Mr. Kotani met in a conference with Mr. Hoogstraten and Controller Purena on August 7, 1941.[1415] At this meeting Mr. Hoogstraten, speaking in an official capacity, stated that his government would liquidate all of Japan's frozen assets with the exception of a small amount to cover the losses sustained by Indonese merchants provided that the newly liquidated assets be used as payment for the purchase of materials in the Netherlands East Indies. Furthermore, Mr. Hoogstraten stated that even that money which was to remain frozen for the time being would be eventually liquidated. At a
[1411] III, 1110.
[1412] III, 1111-1112.
[1413] III, 1113.
[1414] Ibid.
[1415] III, 1114.
[289]
future conference details concerning the settlement of frozen assets through bahts or Shanghai dollars would be considered. In return for the concessions which the Dutch government was willing to make, Mr. Hoogstraten requested that he be notified of the extent to which Japan would export merchandise to the Netherlands East Indies in the future. If reciprocal measures were adopted, the Netherlands government promised to keep Japan informed on the maximum amount of East Indies goods it would be permitted to purchase.[1416]
Speaking of the difficulties encountered by Dutch firms in Japan, Mr. Hoogstraten reminded the Japanese representatives that these merchants had contracted for approximately Y180,000,000 in Japanese goods before the retaliatory freezing order was put into effect by Japan. Between fifteen and twenty million yen had been paid on these goods, but only cargoes amounting to Y3,000,000 had been loaded for shipment to the East Indies. Since Mr. Imagawa's and the Dutch bank official's figures differed, the amounts stated were to be checked and reported on.[1417]
Realizing that the purchase of petroleum was of prime importance to Japan, Mr. Hoogstraten dealt at great length on the conditions effecting its export from the Indies. Japan already owed between one and two million United States dollars for petroleum purchased and to expedite its payment, the Dutch government was willing to liquidate some of the frozen Japanese funds. As an added assistance to future negotiations, the local exchange branch which had formerly refused permission to the Yokohama Specie Bank for new payments on petroleum, was now willing to grant this privilege. These advance payments for exports were to be placed in a special "C" account. Moreover Dutch authorities decided to permit the local branch of the Specie Bank to use the funds on hand, known as the "B" account, to make payments to exporters and to engage in domestic enterprises. Netherlands officials further agreed that about thirty or forty guilders could be liquidated from the old "A" account while a new "D" account was being established at the Specie Bank, from which the exporter would draw the advance payments already agreed upon. By the conclusion of the conference, Mr. Hoogstraten and Controller Purena had unofficially guaranteed to maintain a status quo in the exchange market.[1418] From the report of the Japanese officials who had attended the conferences in Batavia, it would appear that the Dutch were equally desirous of disposing of the various commercial problems which resulted from the Netherlands freezing order. Therefore, Tokyo was asked to give the Dutch banks and merchants any necessary permits that would enable them to transact business with the Japanese.[1419]
600. Second Trade Conference Ends in Disagreement Over Japanese-Dutch Contracts (August 8, 1941)
On August 8, 1941, Japanese and Dutch commercial officials held a second conference. Returning to the discussion of Dutch trade transactions in Japan, Mr. Hoogstraten, Chief of the Netherlands Commercial Bureau in Batavia, stated that Netherlands companies had already contracted for goods in the excess of Y190,000,000 on which Y3,000,000 had already been paid. Since both these sums were large, Mr. Kotani and Mr. Imagawa, the chief officials resenting Tokyo in trade negotiations, decided that the figures must be checked more closely. However, Mr. Hoogstraten insisted that, according to a message from the Netherlands Consul-General at Kobe, orders amounting to over Y50,000,000 had passed over his desk, in that city alone.[1420]
[1416] Ibid.
[1417] Ibid.
[1418] Ibid.
[1419] Ibid.
[1420] III, 1115.
[290]
THE "MAGIC" BACKGROUND OF PEARL HARBOR
After listening to Mr. Hoogstraten's quotation of Dutch trade transactions with Japanese merchants, Mr. Kotani and Mr. Imagawa reiterated their belief that the sums quoted were too large to be considered feasible.[1421]
601. Dutch Indecision on Petroleum Exports Delay Japanese Tankers
Since the Netherlands East Indies authorities had not taken an official stand on Japanese payment of petroleum exports by August 18, 1941, Tokyo resorted to information contained in an intelligence report from the Japanese Fuel Bureau.[1422]According to a message which arrived at the Mitsui Company in Tokyo from the branch in Batavia, the Netherlands East Indies government had decided to refer this freight question involving the Zuiyo Maru, Teiyo Maru and San Diego Maru, en route to the Netherlands East Indies, to the New York Purchase Permit Control board.
However, when the Mitsui Company in Batavia demanded that New York furnish the permit necessary for the exportation of crude oil, it was informed that for the present no permits would be issued. Therefore because the Yokohama Specie Bank and the Mitsui Company could not obtain duplicated permits, Tokyo was forced to postpone the sailing of the three tankers pending further action by the Netherlands East Indies government.[1423]
602. Japan Published Conversations with Finance Authorities
Even though the Netherlands government had already taken strong economic measures against the Japanese, the government at Tokyo realized that more effectively damaging restrictions might still be passed by the Dutch. Early in August 1941 Mr. Ishizawa informed Foreign Minister Toyoda that the Netherlands East Indies regulation froze only Japanese funds and not the assets while the retaliatory order issued by Japan froze both the funds and the assets of the Dutch. In order then, to offset the enactment of a stronger freezing measure by the Netherlands government, Mr. Ishizawa urged that Foreign Minister Toyoda assure Minister Pabst that Japan's freezing order would not be applied to Dutch assets.[1424]
As the result of Mr. Ishizawa's suggestion, Foreign Minister Toyoda decided to lighten the restrictions on the activities and reports made for the purpose of controlling the transactions among the foreigners interested in Holland and Dutch East Indies commerce. Therefore Foreign Minister Toyoda published the conversations with the Finance Department authorities and on August 8, 1941 put into effect the results of this conference.[1425]
603. Native Indonese Leaders Pledge Support to Netherlands Government
Not only by official economic restrictions but by a new strengthening of its own internal unity the Netherlands East Indies sought to impede further Japanese aggression. At a meeting of the Gerindo Party on August 4, 1941 the native population suggested open opposition to Japan's New Order in East Asia, and proposed forbidding any Japanese to enter the islands. According to Kubangunan,[1426] the native language newspaper, native leaders were convinced that this was the time for cooperation with the Netherlands government.[1427] In a report of this native activity sent to Tokyo on August 10, 1941 Mr. Ishizawa stated that the Dutch government bolstered native morale and loyalty by praising the capabilities of their organization and troops.[1428] Nevertheless realizing that the Netherlands government's system of conscrip-
[1421] Ibid.
[1422] III, 1116.
[1423] Ibid.
[1424] II, 1123.
[1425] III, 1117.
[1426] Kana spelling.
[1427] III, 1118.
[1428] Ibid.
[291]
ting natives on the islands remained a possible obstacle to complete cooperation between the Dutch factions, Mr. Ishizawa urged that Tokyo pay close attention to this question in hopes of using the natives for advancing Japanese propaganda among the islanders.[1429]
But less than a week later at a national conference held to draft proposals for discussion at a future meeting, six hundred members of the Gerindo Party voted that Japan's alliance with Nazi and Fascist nations as well as its aggressive actions against China and French Indo China constituted a threat to the Netherlands East Indies and the entire South Seas area. Although this native party, composed of ten thousand people from the lower and working classes, had been opposed to the Netherlands East Indies government with the result that many of its leaders had been banished, it now resolved to align its efforts with the Netherlands East Indies government in forming a popular democratic front embracing all Indonesia. Furthermore, the Gerindo party intended to arouse the rest of the population to the necessity for complete unity by establishing a volunteer army.[1430]
604. Japan Proposes Reciprocal Financial Guarantees
On August 11, 1941 the Japanese government instructed its officials in Batavia to forward certain reciprocal agreements which Japan would make if the Netherlands East Indies permitted Japanese business houses and individuals on the islands to make use of the newly created "D" account for payments on exports, particularly of petroleum.[1431] Under this proposed program of financial reciprocation the Japanese government would attempt to evolve some plan for placing Dutch funds on deposit in Japanese currency at Tokyo. In the hope of realizing the adoption of such a financial agreement Foreign Minister Toyoda asked that Mr. Imakawa negotiate for the permits necessary to transfer Japanese money to the "D" account. The Japanese government wished that the Netherlands government allow the depositing of profits gathered through Japanese enterprises in the Netherlands East Indies into this "D" account in the same manner.
While these negotiations were under way, the utmost secrecy was to be observed in order to prevent Japanese nationals residing in the East Indies from learning of Tokyo's plans.
From previous conversations held between Japanese and Dutch officials in Batavia, the Japanese government realized that the Netherlands authorities were indignant over the losses inflicted upon Dutch merchants in Japan by the Japanese control order of July 7, 1941. To counteract this argument against cooperation with Japan, Foreign Minister Toyoda suggested that the Japanese officials in Batavia investigate the losses sustained by Japanese nationals as a result of the new Netherlands East Indies licensing system and to use the results of their findings as reasons for Japan's attitude in the trade negotiations.[1432]
605. Japanese Officials Meet with Mr. Hoogstraaten in Fourth Trade Conference (August 12, 1941)
After receiving this reciprocal financial proposal from Tokyo,[1433] Mr. Ishizawa, assisted by Mr. Kotani and Mr. Imagawa, conferred with Mr. Hoogstraaten for three hours on August 12, 1941.[1434]
Before discussing Japan's proposed agreement, Mr. Kotani emphasized certain points connected with the recent Netherlands Indies freezing order. Ostensibly the purpose of this restriction was to cover the Y190,000,000 loss on contracts already drawn up with the Japanese and the 12,000,000 guilders of freight paid for by Dutch merchants in Japan but never delivered.
[1429] Ibid.
[1430] III, 1119.
[1431] III, 1120.
[1432] Ibid.
[1433] Ibid.
[1434] III, 1121.
[292]
THE "MAGIC" BACKGROUND OF PEARL HARBOR
Because there was a great difference between the trade statistics of the Netherlands and those of Japanese Commercial officials, Mr. Kotani felt that it was absurd to continue the enactment of a freezing order on the basis of inaccurate evidence. Therefore, the Japanese officials asked that the Netherlands freezing act be revoked.
Furthermore Mr. Kotani pointed out that not only had the Netherlands East Indies government abolished the old exchange agreement existing between the Japanese and the Dutch, but it had neglected to conclude a new agreement as it had formerly promised. Even when the Japanese government attempted to meet the Dutch export license system, the Netherlands East Indies government continued to regard Japan with suspicion, automatically assuming that by the advance into French Indo-China the Japanese were actually threatening the integrity of the Netherlands East Indies.
But although he remained convinced that Japan's recently acquired bases imperiled Indonese defenses, Chief Hoogstraten admitted that the figures stating the losses of the Dutch merchants through trade transactions with the Japanese were inaccurate. However, assuring Mr. Ishizawa that he had not misquoted these figures with any malicious intention, Mr. Hoogstraaten explained that he had merely made use of the trade figures at hand.
At this point in the conversation, Mr. Ishizawa described the reciprocal plan which the Japanese government intended to offer the Netherlands East Indies in exchange for the permission to transfer deposits of Japanese business houses and individuals to the "D" account in the Yokohama Specie Bank for use as advance payments on certain exports and on petroleum shipments. Although he could not make any definite statement until the Netherlands East Indies government had decided its policy regarding the export license system, Mr. Hoogstraaten assured the Japanese Consul that his government would give the plan careful consideration.[1435]
606. Thaiese Consul-General Visits Mr. Ishizawa
During a conference with Mr. B. C. Cheeppensock on August 12, 1941 Mr. Ishizawa commented on the Indonese newspaper attacks against Japanese pressure in Thailand. Because Mr. Ishizawa recognized the danger of this propaganda, he, himself, had denied the rumors at every opportunity and he questioned Mr. Cheeppensock concerning similar rumors in Thailand. Mr. Cheeppensock stated that three code messages just received from the Chief of the Bangkok Intelligence Bureau were evidence that Thailand was maintaining its neutrality policy and that it had received no demands whatever for military bases from any country.
When Mr. Ishizawa suggested that this information be made known to the Netherlands Indies press, Mr. Cheeppensock replied that he intended to inform both the press and the Netherlands Indies government. Since Japanese relations with Thailand had already produced a decisive effect on negotiations with the Netherlands Indies, Mr. Ishizawa requested that Tokyo inform him of the official attitude to be taken toward Bangkok.[1436]
607. Dutch Firms Complain of Japanese Trade Practices
Foreign Minister Toyoda reported to Japanese officials in Batavia that on August 12, 1941 Mr. Pabst, the Netherlands Minister to Tokyo, complained that Japanese firms were selling to export regulatory organizations certain articles which had been promised to Dutch merchants. As a result, the Dutch merchants would possibly be unable to load their ships to the capacity originally reserved for them. Therefore, in lodging an official complaint, Mr. Pabst requested that the Japanese government end this trade practice. If these export regulatory organizations and development companies had already purchased these articles, the Netherlands Minister
[1435] III, 1121.
[1436] III, 1122.
[293]
asked that they be resold to the Dutch merchants to enable them to carry out the terms of their agreement with Japanese guilds.
On August 14, 1941 a Japanese official in charge of this matter strongly insisted that it was highly improbable that Japanese merchants resold their articles to export organizations in violation of their contracts. If, however, such trade practices had taken place, the Japanese Trade Bureau intended to warn the organizations against continuing them.
Nevertheless, it was pointed out that when Dutch merchants failed to take over those articles contracted for, even after paying for them, the Japanese merchants held the right to cancel the transaction and freely dispense of the merchandise in question. Since there would be an increasing number of cases in which the Dutch merchants would be unable to take over certain articles, Japan wished that the Netherlands government be informed that the Japanese firms were permitted unrestricted disposal of those articles. If the Dutch merchants then wished to repurchase the material that had been sold to the export organizations by the Japanese merchants, they would be forced to pay new prices. The Japanese government refused to order small export businesses to resell these articles to Dutch merchants under the old price level.
As a solution to this trade difficulty, Foreign Minister Toyoda suggested that an agreement be drawn up in Batavia providing for a conversion of Japanese funds amounting to 80,000,000 yen. These converted funds would be then used for the payment of Netherlands East Indies products. After the question of Japanese finances in the East Indies had been settled, the Japanese government promised to act on the question of the 20,000,000 yen which the Netherlands East Indies wished to use for making purchases from Japan.[1437]
608. The Netherlands East Indies Prepares for War
On August 14, 1941 Japanese intelligence sources in Batavia reported that the Netherlands East Indies government was making preparations for war.
To facilitate the commandeering of certain essential items by the military authorities, the Indonese government ordered that all automobiles used by the people of Batavia be registered. Similar investigation was made of the number of horses available.[1438]
In case of invasion by an enemy, the Netherlands East Indies ordered that anything of value be demolished or burned. Specified persons were assigned to take charge of the destruction of all villages and towns within the rice producing areas of Java, and to burn all unhulled rice in this vicinity. Rice mills, bean processing plants, coconut processing plants, iron mills and petroleum refineries were to destroy their machines and any products being held in storage.
In order to facilitate the evacuation of inhabitants, the East Indies was divided up into three areas:
(1) Fighting areas—the evacuation of inhabitants from the areas where fighting was most likely to occur had already been completed;
(2) Possible areas in which military activities might be conducted—preparations were still underway for handling the evacuation of inhabitants from areas in this category.
(3) Non-combat areas—the Netherlands East Indies foresaw no need to evacuate inhabitants from this area.
Although the Netherlands East Indies government did not require the withdrawal of residents from any of these areas until it became absolutely necessary, it had no intention of prohibiting voluntary evacuation.[1439]
[1437] III, 1123.
[1438] III, 1124.
[1439] Ibid.
[294]
THE "MAGIC" BACKGROUND OF PEARL HARBOR
609. Japan Seeks Ratification of Mining Agreement
For convenience in handling wires from the B. O. M., a Japanese concern in the Netherlands East Indies, Tokyo requested on August 14, 1941 that its messages be sent directly to the Fuel Bureau because the South Seas Industrial Company was dissolved and its functions taken over by the Imperial Petroleum interests. In view of its new responsibility, the Fuel Bureau requested that this Japanese concern report on the progress made in securing permits for future prospecting and mining after the expiration of the present mining contract, and the possibility of securing rights for the operation of machines used in drilling. The Fuel Bureau believed that the B.O.M. should transport the petroleum from the Sapt Company operating in Timor on schedule. However, the B.O.M.'s opinion on the advisability of this action was requested. Finally, the Japanese Fuel Bureau asked for a full report on the desirability of scheduling an evacuation of Japanese employees residing in Soerabaja.[1440]
Three days later, the B.O.M. summarized the prospects for continuing the exploration and exploitation of East Indies mines. In a written request to the head of the Bureau of Mines, on August 11, 1941 Japanese officials of this company had asked permission to exploit new mine areas.[1441]
In view of the strained relations between Japan and the Netherlands East Indies however, the Director of the Bureau of Mines replied on August 14, 1941 that the signing of a mine agreement between Japan and Batavia was impossible. Nevertheless, the Japanese firm representatives requested an audience with the Batavian director on August 16, 1951. However, although the Netherlands East Indies apparently had no strong objections to signing a mining agreement, Dutch officials insisted that unsatisfactory Japanese-Dutch trade relations made the ratification of such an agreement impossible. In fact, for the present, the Netherlands government even believed it necessary to postpone reaching an agreement over the Sankuriran mines.
During the previous negotiations with the Dutch government, the Japanese official had attempted to bring about an agreement regarding the No. 1 "A" mine in Sankuriran but although the Japanese proposals governing this agreement had been submitted in June, 1941, as yet no reply had been forthcoming. While this delay might possibly have resulted from the fact that the Batavian Minister had been constantly traveling since its submission, the Japanese officials still doubted if the ratification of this mining agreement would take place.
Nevertheless, Mr. Ishizawa, accompanied by the Japanese mining officials, intended to confer with Mr. Hoogstraten in the near future. However, in view of these obstacles to the mining industry, the Japanese official requested that the new mining machinery not be sent in spite of the fact that the machinery in Soerabaya was already loaded for shipment to Batavia.[1442]
610. Mr. Ishizawa Confers with Mr. Hoogstraten on Petroleum Questions (August 16, 1941)
On August 16, 1941, Mr. Ishizawa conferred with Mr. Hoogstraten on the possibility of obtaining export permits for petroleum to be carried aboard the Mitsui Bussan's oil tankers, and for material being loaded on the IYO Maru for the Rising Sun Company. Mr. Hoogstraten wished to delay any decision on this question until August 18, 1941 when he would receive instructions from London and would be able to determine the attitude of the PRM and K companies. Furthermore, Mr. Van Mook was too ill at present to issue any instructions on this matter.[1443] In a special message to Mr. Keki, Manager of the Yokohama Specie Bank, Mr. Imagawa pointed out that if the petroleum were loaded from storage tanks within British ter-
[1440] III, 1125.
[1441] III, 1126.
[1442] Ibid.
[1443] III, 1127.
[295]
ritory instead of that under Netherlands control, the export permits could be secured from the Malayan government and the Netherlands East Indies would be powerless to act upon it. Mr. Imagawa emphasized this point.
In regard to the unpaid balances on the shipment of petroleum exports yet to be made, Mr. Purena, Chief of the Netherlands Control Board, suggested that Japan debts to the BPM, the Colonial and the Rising Sun Companies be paid by means of the deposits held in the Yokohama Specie Bank or the Java Bank. A detailed statement of the present balances on the petroleum accounts owed by Japan was to be submitted by the control officials on Tuesday, August 19, 1941. Mr. Imigawa asked that Mr. Seki study the advisability of paying petroleum bills in this manner. At the same time Mr. Imagawa reminded Mr. Seki that unless Japan consent to these conditions the Netherlands East Indies might suspend entirely the exports of petroleum in the future.
Because the Handels Bank played such an important part in these negotiations, the Batavian control director asked that Japan consent to the establishment of "free guilders" in the Netherlands East Indies' monetary exchange. Originally the Handels Bank was to have sent 350,000 ticals to Japan but since the foreign money dealers could not send more than 5,000 at that time, Mr. Purena suggested that Japan accommodate the Handels Bank with the additional 400,000 ticals. Mr. Imagawa was willing to consent to such a financial exchange provided that the Batavian control director guarantee Japanese merchants export permits for rubber and tin. Since the granting of such permits would naturally effect the whole export problem, Mr. Purena did not feel authorized to agree to this proposal.
But even though Controller Purena refused to guarantee export permits in return, Mr. Imagawa suggested that his government consent to the Dutch use of free guilders since there was always the possibility that Japanese banks in the Netherlands East Indies would be in a similar predicament sometime in the future without any means of relief. As a result of this request, a credit of 400,000 ticals was arranged at the Japanese Branch of the Handels Bank for rubber and tin. In order to avoid any delay in carrying out this financial arrangement, Mr. Imagawa asked that Mr. Ogura, the Japanese Finance Minister, make arrangements for the special transfer of this money. From the negotiations conducted so far, the Dutch government was unwilling to state its official position regarding the export of all commodities and therefore the Japanese officials anticipated difficulty in incidental negotiations such as the fundamental question of regulating barter exchange.[1444]
611. Mr. Imagawa Emphasizes Importance of Handels Bank Problem
Since it was generally felt in Tokyo that problems connected with the Handels Bank could be disposed of as soon as Japanese export permits were obtained from the Netherlands East Indies, the Yokohama Specie Bank urged Mr. Imagawa not to waste his efforts on this financial question.[1445] However, in his reply on the following day, Mr. Imagawa pointed out that the attitude of Netherlands East Indies officials toward the trade negotiations had grown constantly worse since the Japanese occupation of French Indo China and it did not seem likely that a satisfactory agreement could be reached on the exportation of such important raw materials as tin and rubber. If the Tokyo decided that an agreement on general terms was essential before considering any specific problems, stipulations for the securing of export permits from the East Indies would never be decided.
At the present time, Mr. Imagawa reported, the Japanese branch of the Mitsui Bank in Batavia was threatening to close down because of insufficient funds. Consequently the Handels Bank would close, complicating the Japanese banking system to such an extent that it would be impossible to dispose of any export problems. Although indignant at the attitude taken by
[1444] III, 1127-1128.
[1445] III, 1129.
[296]
THE "MAGIC" BACKGROUND OF PEARL HARBOR
Indonese officials, Mr. Imagawa still believed that the Japanese government would have to agree to a settlement of the Handels Bank question in order to liquidate a small amount of its frozen funds and use them to purchase Netherlands East Indies products.[1446]
In a later report on the Handels Bank officials, Mr. Imagawa revealed that unless a specific guarantee were furnished the Netherlands East Indies, oil companies would refuse to load oil on Japanese tankers even if the Netherlands government itself granted export permits. Apparently the Netherlands East Indies' real intention was to cancel the funds of the oil company frozen by Japan. Therefore, Mr. Imagawa advised that the Yokohama Specie bank continue to study this problem.[1447]
612. Dutch Merchants in Kobe are Dissatisfied
On August 20, 1941, Mr. Hoogstraten reported to Mr. Ishizawa that the Dutch merchants in the Osaka Kobe region of Japan were aroused over the treatment accorded them. Although Mr. Hoogstraten admitted that the Batavian Consul General, Pennink, might have exaggerated the situation, he nevertheless felt that the unfriendly attitude of both the Tokyo central authorities and the Japanese officials in Kobe had been a source of concern to the East Indian merchants. In attempting to smooth over this minor incident, Mr. Ishizawa promised that future trade negotiations in that area would be handled entirely through the Japanese legation.[1448]
613. Netherlands Indies Places Restrictions on Japanese Business
a. Suppression of Japanese Newspapers
Nevertheless retaliatory measures were taken against the Japanese on the islands by the Netherlands government. On August 21, 1941 local Batavian police arrested the editors of the Chinese language edition of the To-Indo Nippo and the Shinarusutan, two Japanese-subsidized newspapers, and suspended the printing of both papers for one week.[1449]
b. Java Prohibits Japanese-Language Phone Calls
On the same day Dutch officials in Java ordered that all telephone calls to and from the islands be made only in the Dutch, Malayan or English languages. Although Mr. Ishizawa had not yet learned whether this ban on the use of the Japanese language had been extended to other islands in the Indies, he asked that the Tokyo Foreign Office use its influence to have the order rescinded, since its effect on Japanese business in Java alone impaired Japanese trade as a whole.[1450] Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
Saturday, July 4, 2009
calling 4.cal.00300 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
Synopsis
Cartman wins a national environmental essay contest by plagiarizing Thoreau's Walden. The prize is getting on live TV with Kathy Lee Gifford, who visits South Park. This causes Mr. Garrison to relive a traumatic childhood memory when young Kathy Lee beat him in a talent show. Mr. Hat convinces Mr. Garrison that he must kill her. Meanwhile, Cartman decides to take Weight Gain 4000 so that he can "bulk up" for his big appearance. He becomes so fat that when he is accepting the award from Kathy Lee, the stage collapses at the same moment Mr. Garrison fires at her, hitting Kenny instead. Cartman gets to be on Geraldo, Mr. Hat is committed to a mental hospital, and Chef gives Kathy Lee some sweet lovin'.
Full Recap
Cartman wins a contest for having the best environmental essay, but he can't remember what he wrote about. Wendy suspects that Cartman has cheated and she is going to prove it. Kathie Lee Gifford is coming to South Park to give Cartman a trophy. Cartman prepares for the event by bulking up with Weight Gain 4000. Mr. Garrison is supposed to be directing the children in a play about the history of their town, but Kathie Lee’s pending arrival distracts him. Back when he was in grade school with Kathie Lee he believes she cheated to win the talent show. Mr. Garrison gets a gun and goes to the book depository with plans for revenge. Meanwhile, Cartman has expanded to 150 pounds or more because of the Weight Gain 4000 and everyone has begun calling him "Wide Load." The award proceedings are interrupted when Mr. Garrison tries to kill Kathie Lee Gifford, but kills Kenny instead. Wendy exposes the truth about Cartman's paper; Chef makes sweet love to Kathie Lee and Cartman goes on Geraldo.
Kenny dies when he's catapulted into the air and gets shot by Mr. Garrison (who's trying to kill Kathy Lee Gifford) and lands on the flagpole, thus impaling him.
Synopsis
Cartman wins a national environmental essay contest by plagiarizing Thoreau's Walden. The prize is getting on live TV with Kathy Lee Gifford, who visits South Park. This causes Mr. Garrison to relive a traumatic childhood memory when young Kathy Lee beat him in a talent show. Mr. Hat convinces Mr. Garrison that he must kill her. Meanwhile, Cartman decides to take Weight Gain 4000 so that he can "bulk up" for his big appearance. He becomes so fat that when he is accepting the award from Kathy Lee, the stage collapses at the same moment Mr. Garrison fires at her, hitting Kenny instead. Cartman gets to be on Geraldo, Mr. Hat is committed to a mental hospital, and Chef gives Kathy Lee some sweet lovin'.
Full Recap
Cartman wins a contest for having the best environmental essay, but he can't remember what he wrote about. Wendy suspects that Cartman has cheated and she is going to prove it. Kathie Lee Gifford is coming to South Park to give Cartman a trophy. Cartman prepares for the event by bulking up with Weight Gain 4000. Mr. Garrison is supposed to be directing the children in a play about the history of their town, but Kathie Lee’s pending arrival distracts him. Back when he was in grade school with Kathie Lee he believes she cheated to win the talent show. Mr. Garrison gets a gun and goes to the book depository with plans for revenge. Meanwhile, Cartman has expanded to 150 pounds or more because of the Weight Gain 4000 and everyone has begun calling him "Wide Load." The award proceedings are interrupted when Mr. Garrison tries to kill Kathie Lee Gifford, but kills Kenny instead. Wendy exposes the truth about Cartman's paper; Chef makes sweet love to Kathie Lee and Cartman goes on Geraldo.
Kenny dies when he's catapulted into the air and gets shot by Mr. Garrison (who's trying to kill Kathy Lee Gifford) and lands on the flagpole, thus impaling him.
Wednesday, May 20, 2009
substitutes to animals j.883.002 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
An Associated Press story in the morning paper, today, described a move by animal activists to make attacks on researchers who work with animals increasingly personal. Teams that used to hold placards outside conferences and labs now picket scientists’ homes. Some “animal rights” groups use bullhorns to send neighbors the message that “Your neighbor kills animals,” the story said.
These reports rile me up. On lots of levels. First, so-called animal-rights groups seek to compel change through brutish intimidation. They are, in a word, bullies. The goal here is not to change the minds of scientists about the value of their labors but to intimidate their families and annoy — if not enrage — their neighbors. (I don’t like neighbors’ dogs barking all day or night; bullhorn-bleating activists are just a human corollary.)
If these activists have a beef with scientists, they ought to compel with data or the law. If those don’t work, maybe the argument they’ve been trumpeting isn’t all that compelling after all.
Actually, I’d like to see someone probe the behaviors of these alleged animal guardians to see how well they practice what they preach. For instance, I strongly suspect that when the animal crusaders (and especially their loved ones) become ill or injured, they don’t eschew life-saving medicines and procedures that were first pioneered through animal research. And if they don’t, they’re hypocrites to picket, harass — and occasionally even destroy the research of — toxicologists and biomedical scientists.
The animal researchers I know truly love animals. Many trained as veterinarians. Their goal, indeed their passion, is the humane treatment of animals, often in service of understanding — and ultimately eliminating — threats to the health and well being of wildlife.
Another suspicion: Animal rights crusaders don’t have an abiding respect for all fauna. Indeed, I’d like to see some organization — perhaps a major biomedical research group — finance detectives to investigate how deeply animal-protection attitudes run in all members of the movement.
I suspect we’d find that if their homes were under siege by marauding termites or carpenter bees, they wouldn’t let the insects destroy those structures. If activists moved into a roach-infested apartment, they probably would not willingly let these pests share their food, beds, and their infants’ eyebrows (because yes, roaches will eat nails and brows). If their kindergartners were sent home with lice, what do you want to bet they’d just accept the infestation and resort to home schooling these kids?
This morning’s news story quoted Jerry Vlasak of the Animal Liberation Front as saying that although he would not advocate an animal-scientist’s murder, “if you had to hurt somebody or intimidate them or kill them, it would be morally justifiable.” I can’t begin to fathom what moral compass would lead him to that assessment. Such a comment also goes a long way toward undercutting the basic premise of protecting animals (of which Homo sapiens is but one).
I support every American’s first amendment right to free speech. But bullying and harassment is not protected by law in many jurisdictions. Moreover, if we’re talking morality here, which is more moral: to threaten the safety and life of a researcher engaged in studies that may improve the health, well-being, and longevity of millions of people or to threaten the lives of several dozen animals that were bred for the express purpose of being humanely sacrificed for highly regulated and well-supervised health studies?
Where good substitutes to animals in toxicology exist, I support their use. But initially validating even those may require the use of some animals for comparison purposes. And in many instances, good substitutes do not exist (for technical reasons). In those instances, I see no reason to substitute toddlers, grandpa, or college co-eds as our initial hypothesis-testing guinea pigs.
Instead of targeting scientists and harassing their families, I’d like to see animal activists focus their attention on those who not only encourage animal research but also provide most of its funding: Uncle Sam and Big Pharma. If the charge is that animal research is amoral, activists should engage constructively and deliberatively with those responsible for balancing the risks and benefits of research. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
But we should never give activists even tacit license to bully researchers, because in short order it may escalate to terrorism.
An Associated Press story in the morning paper, today, described a move by animal activists to make attacks on researchers who work with animals increasingly personal. Teams that used to hold placards outside conferences and labs now picket scientists’ homes. Some “animal rights” groups use bullhorns to send neighbors the message that “Your neighbor kills animals,” the story said.
These reports rile me up. On lots of levels. First, so-called animal-rights groups seek to compel change through brutish intimidation. They are, in a word, bullies. The goal here is not to change the minds of scientists about the value of their labors but to intimidate their families and annoy — if not enrage — their neighbors. (I don’t like neighbors’ dogs barking all day or night; bullhorn-bleating activists are just a human corollary.)
If these activists have a beef with scientists, they ought to compel with data or the law. If those don’t work, maybe the argument they’ve been trumpeting isn’t all that compelling after all.
Actually, I’d like to see someone probe the behaviors of these alleged animal guardians to see how well they practice what they preach. For instance, I strongly suspect that when the animal crusaders (and especially their loved ones) become ill or injured, they don’t eschew life-saving medicines and procedures that were first pioneered through animal research. And if they don’t, they’re hypocrites to picket, harass — and occasionally even destroy the research of — toxicologists and biomedical scientists.
The animal researchers I know truly love animals. Many trained as veterinarians. Their goal, indeed their passion, is the humane treatment of animals, often in service of understanding — and ultimately eliminating — threats to the health and well being of wildlife.
Another suspicion: Animal rights crusaders don’t have an abiding respect for all fauna. Indeed, I’d like to see some organization — perhaps a major biomedical research group — finance detectives to investigate how deeply animal-protection attitudes run in all members of the movement.
I suspect we’d find that if their homes were under siege by marauding termites or carpenter bees, they wouldn’t let the insects destroy those structures. If activists moved into a roach-infested apartment, they probably would not willingly let these pests share their food, beds, and their infants’ eyebrows (because yes, roaches will eat nails and brows). If their kindergartners were sent home with lice, what do you want to bet they’d just accept the infestation and resort to home schooling these kids?
This morning’s news story quoted Jerry Vlasak of the Animal Liberation Front as saying that although he would not advocate an animal-scientist’s murder, “if you had to hurt somebody or intimidate them or kill them, it would be morally justifiable.” I can’t begin to fathom what moral compass would lead him to that assessment. Such a comment also goes a long way toward undercutting the basic premise of protecting animals (of which Homo sapiens is but one).
I support every American’s first amendment right to free speech. But bullying and harassment is not protected by law in many jurisdictions. Moreover, if we’re talking morality here, which is more moral: to threaten the safety and life of a researcher engaged in studies that may improve the health, well-being, and longevity of millions of people or to threaten the lives of several dozen animals that were bred for the express purpose of being humanely sacrificed for highly regulated and well-supervised health studies?
Where good substitutes to animals in toxicology exist, I support their use. But initially validating even those may require the use of some animals for comparison purposes. And in many instances, good substitutes do not exist (for technical reasons). In those instances, I see no reason to substitute toddlers, grandpa, or college co-eds as our initial hypothesis-testing guinea pigs.
Instead of targeting scientists and harassing their families, I’d like to see animal activists focus their attention on those who not only encourage animal research but also provide most of its funding: Uncle Sam and Big Pharma. If the charge is that animal research is amoral, activists should engage constructively and deliberatively with those responsible for balancing the risks and benefits of research. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
But we should never give activists even tacit license to bully researchers, because in short order it may escalate to terrorism.
receptor sites 8.sit.33402 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
Elderly people with excess amounts of the protein fetuin-A are more likely than others to develop type 2 diabetes, a new study finds. Because earlier work showed that the protein may interfere with the action of insulin, the new findings potentially implicate fetuin-A in diabetes and suggest the protein may make a good target for drug therapy.
Scientists have found fetuin-A tantalizing ever since lab experiments showed it competed with insulin to bind to receptor proteins on cells. By doing so, fetuin-A seems to crowd out insulin and prevent it from making glucose available to muscle cells.
“We don’t understand why one person who’s obese develops diabetes and another doesn’t,” says Joachim Ix, a nephrologist at the University of California, San Diego and coauthor on the study. Fetuin-A may play a role since it seems to operate irrespective of weight, he notes. That could help doctors to identify people at hidden risk of developing diabetes. “Ultimately that might lead to different therapies in these two different kinds of people,” Ix says.
Further research in mice genetically engineered to lack fetuin-A showed that the animals were the mirror opposites of mice with diabetes. “They were lean, mean mice machines,” Ix says.
Those early findings led Ix and his colleagues to assess the protein’s role in people. The researchers identified healthy elderly individuals who had participated in a medical study starting in the late 1990s while they were all still in their 70s. Each volunteer had given a blood sample at the start of the study. Ix and his team identified 135 people in the study who had developed type 2 diabetes during the six-year study period and another 384 who hadn’t.
High levels of fetuin-A in the blood increased the risk of diabetes by 70 percent.
The researchers accounted for differences between the groups in age, gender, obesity, lifestyle, blood pressure, blood sugar, cholesterol and proteins associated with inflammation. The study appears in the July 9 Journal of the American Medical Association.
“We think fetuin-A is a bad guy,” says Suresh Mathews, a molecular biologist at Auburn University in Alabama. He and his colleagues did much of the initial work establishing fetuin-A’s link to the insulin receptor.
Mathews says the new study breaks ground. A link to diabetes in a longitudinal study in which people are tracked over time hadn’t been shown before, he says.
Several groups are currently studying fetuin-A’s actions in the body. While there is keen interest in developing a drug that neutralizes fetuin-A, a drug doesn’t exist yet. “I think that has a lot for potential to be useful, but it’s not quite ready for prime time,” Ix says.Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
Mathews’ working hypothesis is that the protein serves as a brake for insulin, to keep people from becoming hypoglycemic if the hormone doesn’t shut off appropriately.
But treatment may not be as simple as turning off the fetuin-A spigot, Mathews says. The protein also seems to regulate calcium levels in the blood. Disturbing that role could cause crystallization of calcium in blood vessels and other part of the body, causing other health problems. Ideally, he says, a drug would disable fetuin-A’s ability to crowd out insulin at the receptor sites while not disrupting its blood-calcium duties.
Elderly people with excess amounts of the protein fetuin-A are more likely than others to develop type 2 diabetes, a new study finds. Because earlier work showed that the protein may interfere with the action of insulin, the new findings potentially implicate fetuin-A in diabetes and suggest the protein may make a good target for drug therapy.
Scientists have found fetuin-A tantalizing ever since lab experiments showed it competed with insulin to bind to receptor proteins on cells. By doing so, fetuin-A seems to crowd out insulin and prevent it from making glucose available to muscle cells.
“We don’t understand why one person who’s obese develops diabetes and another doesn’t,” says Joachim Ix, a nephrologist at the University of California, San Diego and coauthor on the study. Fetuin-A may play a role since it seems to operate irrespective of weight, he notes. That could help doctors to identify people at hidden risk of developing diabetes. “Ultimately that might lead to different therapies in these two different kinds of people,” Ix says.
Further research in mice genetically engineered to lack fetuin-A showed that the animals were the mirror opposites of mice with diabetes. “They were lean, mean mice machines,” Ix says.
Those early findings led Ix and his colleagues to assess the protein’s role in people. The researchers identified healthy elderly individuals who had participated in a medical study starting in the late 1990s while they were all still in their 70s. Each volunteer had given a blood sample at the start of the study. Ix and his team identified 135 people in the study who had developed type 2 diabetes during the six-year study period and another 384 who hadn’t.
High levels of fetuin-A in the blood increased the risk of diabetes by 70 percent.
The researchers accounted for differences between the groups in age, gender, obesity, lifestyle, blood pressure, blood sugar, cholesterol and proteins associated with inflammation. The study appears in the July 9 Journal of the American Medical Association.
“We think fetuin-A is a bad guy,” says Suresh Mathews, a molecular biologist at Auburn University in Alabama. He and his colleagues did much of the initial work establishing fetuin-A’s link to the insulin receptor.
Mathews says the new study breaks ground. A link to diabetes in a longitudinal study in which people are tracked over time hadn’t been shown before, he says.
Several groups are currently studying fetuin-A’s actions in the body. While there is keen interest in developing a drug that neutralizes fetuin-A, a drug doesn’t exist yet. “I think that has a lot for potential to be useful, but it’s not quite ready for prime time,” Ix says.Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
Mathews’ working hypothesis is that the protein serves as a brake for insulin, to keep people from becoming hypoglycemic if the hormone doesn’t shut off appropriately.
But treatment may not be as simple as turning off the fetuin-A spigot, Mathews says. The protein also seems to regulate calcium levels in the blood. Disturbing that role could cause crystallization of calcium in blood vessels and other part of the body, causing other health problems. Ideally, he says, a drug would disable fetuin-A’s ability to crowd out insulin at the receptor sites while not disrupting its blood-calcium duties.
Monday, May 4, 2009
calcium 3.cal.223 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
Children born to older fathers might have an increased risk of developing bipolar disorder, Swedish researchers report in the September Archives of General Psychiatry.
The finding is a statistical association drawn from a large population survey. But it falls in line with earlier studies suggesting that children sired by older men face a greater-than-average risk of being stillborn, miscarried or having schizophrenia, cancer or autism.
The theory linking paternal age with an offspring’s health rests on the genetics of aging sperm. Spontaneous mutations can accumulate in the genes of a man’s sperm cells as he ages. These cells divide as many as 660 times by the time a man reaches 40, by some estimates. Each division increases the risk of acquiring a harmful mutation from erroneous gene copying, the theory holds.
Women don’t face this risk since the number of eggs a woman carries is set at birth, each having divided 23 times at that point and no more. But older women do face a higher risk of having a child with Down syndrome.
In the new study, epidemiologist Emma Frans of the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm and her colleagues used a national registry to identify 13,428 people who had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder during at least two hospital admissions. For comparison purposes, each of these individuals was matched with five randomly selected people of the same gender and year of birth.
People fathered by men 55 or older had a 37 percent greater risk of being bipolar than those sired by men age 20 through 24. If the father was age 30 through 54, he imparted only a modestly increased risk. Being sired by a father age 25 through 29 did not add a risk. The researchers accounted for education level, age of the mother, family history of psychotic disorders and the number of children the mother had.
For people diagnosed with bipolar disorder before age 20, the late paternity effect was even more pronounced. Researchers found that people born to men over age 40 seemed to incur double the risk of being bipolar in youth as those fathered by men in their early 20s. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
Other studies have suggested that having a close, personal relative with bipolar disorder increases a person’s risk of developing the condition. That association’s increase is much greater than any risk from merely having an older father, Frans says.
Bipolar disorder appears to have a clear genetic component, particularly when the condition shows up in youth, says epidemiologist Ronald Kessler of Harvard Medical School in Boston. But this study may not catch all men with bipolar disorder, and many bipolar men go through multiple marriages and often father children as they go along, he says. http://LOUIS-J-SHEEHAN-ESQUIRE.US
“I wonder whether men who have more severe bipolar disorder are just more likely to have kids at 40 or 50?” he asks. If so, that would exaggerate any risk seemingly imparted by aging itself, he says. The explanation “may be a psychosocial one,” he says.
Children born to older fathers might have an increased risk of developing bipolar disorder, Swedish researchers report in the September Archives of General Psychiatry.
The finding is a statistical association drawn from a large population survey. But it falls in line with earlier studies suggesting that children sired by older men face a greater-than-average risk of being stillborn, miscarried or having schizophrenia, cancer or autism.
The theory linking paternal age with an offspring’s health rests on the genetics of aging sperm. Spontaneous mutations can accumulate in the genes of a man’s sperm cells as he ages. These cells divide as many as 660 times by the time a man reaches 40, by some estimates. Each division increases the risk of acquiring a harmful mutation from erroneous gene copying, the theory holds.
Women don’t face this risk since the number of eggs a woman carries is set at birth, each having divided 23 times at that point and no more. But older women do face a higher risk of having a child with Down syndrome.
In the new study, epidemiologist Emma Frans of the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm and her colleagues used a national registry to identify 13,428 people who had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder during at least two hospital admissions. For comparison purposes, each of these individuals was matched with five randomly selected people of the same gender and year of birth.
People fathered by men 55 or older had a 37 percent greater risk of being bipolar than those sired by men age 20 through 24. If the father was age 30 through 54, he imparted only a modestly increased risk. Being sired by a father age 25 through 29 did not add a risk. The researchers accounted for education level, age of the mother, family history of psychotic disorders and the number of children the mother had.
For people diagnosed with bipolar disorder before age 20, the late paternity effect was even more pronounced. Researchers found that people born to men over age 40 seemed to incur double the risk of being bipolar in youth as those fathered by men in their early 20s. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
Other studies have suggested that having a close, personal relative with bipolar disorder increases a person’s risk of developing the condition. That association’s increase is much greater than any risk from merely having an older father, Frans says.
Bipolar disorder appears to have a clear genetic component, particularly when the condition shows up in youth, says epidemiologist Ronald Kessler of Harvard Medical School in Boston. But this study may not catch all men with bipolar disorder, and many bipolar men go through multiple marriages and often father children as they go along, he says. http://LOUIS-J-SHEEHAN-ESQUIRE.US
“I wonder whether men who have more severe bipolar disorder are just more likely to have kids at 40 or 50?” he asks. If so, that would exaggerate any risk seemingly imparted by aging itself, he says. The explanation “may be a psychosocial one,” he says.
Friday, May 1, 2009
salt 6.sal.004 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
When you look at your food, some ingredients are easy to see. For example, there is obviously milk in your cereal, cheese on your pizza and peanut butter on your toast.
But your meals are also filled with ingredients you can’t see. And you might be surprised to learn just how much those hidden items affect your health.
Salt is a perfect example of an ingredient that you might not notice, even when you eat a lot of it.
Sometimes, salt is obvious. You can see it on pretzels. You can taste it on french fries. And you can sprinkle it on green beans, straight from the shaker.
But it’s the salt we can’t see that concerns scientists most. For decades, doctors have warned patients that too much salt can be bad for their hearts. Still, most Americans continue to eat way too much salt, even when they try to avoid the salt shaker.
That’s because more than 75 percent of the salt we eat is hidden in restaurant meals, fast food and processed foods, such as spaghetti sauce from a jar, canned soup and frozen pizza. Often, you can’t even taste that the salt is there.
Heart trouble has long been considered a grown-up problem, and parents haven’t worried too much about the salt their kids eat. But new research suggests that salt is starting to affect kids — in their hearts, kidneys and waistlines.
Loading up on salt-filled potato chips, hot dogs and canned tuna today could also set young people up for even more health problems down the road.
“Most national heads of policy-making bodies in the United States and Canada and Great Britain are reaching the same conclusion,” says Lawrence Appel, professor of medicine at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore. “Reduce your salt intake.”
Straight to the heart
Salt is made up of two elements, or basic components: sodium and chlorine. When put in food or liquid, salt, also called sodium chloride, or NaCl, breaks into its two elements.
The chlorine part of salt isn’t that important. It’s the sodium that can stir up trouble.
We need a small amount of sodium to keep our muscles working and our nerves sending messages throughout the body. But the amount of sodium we actually need is really tiny: about 500 milligrams, or less than a quarter teaspoon of salt. A little bit goes a long way.
access
Enlargemagnify
Want salt with that?Some foods just cry out for extra salt, like these fries. That can make them a bad meal choice.Burke/Triolo
Dietary guidelines in the United States and elsewhere recommend that healthy adults consume no more than 2,300 milligrams of sodium a day. That’s about a teaspoonful of salt.
Kids ages 9 to 13 should eat no more than 1,500 to 2,200 mg of sodium a day. Younger kids should get even less.
But the average American eats about twice the recommended daily amount. This worries doctors because too much sodium can cause the body to produce more blood. To pump the extra blood, the heart has to work extra hard. This leads to a rise in blood pressure — a measurement of how stressed out the heart is. High blood pressure, also known as hypertension, often leads to heart disease. Heart disease is the leading cause of death in the United States and can lead to ailments like heart attacks.
“Ninety percent of adult Americans develop hypertension in their lifetimes,” Appel says. It’s a big problem.
You are what you eat
Salt isn’t the only cause of hypertension. Eating lots of junk food, weighing too much and exercising too little also contribute to high blood pressure. But a large number of studies suggest that salt is a major player.
Some of the most powerful strikes against salt come from a pair of studies that took place in the 1990s. The goal of the research was to figure out if what we eat affects blood pressure, and if so, how much.
As part of the studies, hundreds of adults ate exactly what researchers told them to. Called DASH, these studies lasted for months at a time.
The results showed a sizeable drop in blood pressure in people who ate extra fruits and vegetables, lots of whole grains, low-fat dairy products and only small amounts of red meat, sweet treats and fatty foods like fast food and donuts. Eating well, the researchers concluded, is good for your heart.
But blood pressure levels dropped even more when participants who followed the diet described above also lessened their salt intake. In the first DASH study, participants ate a relatively high level of salt — 3,300 mg a day. In the second DASH study, participants’ salt intake dropped to as low as 1,500 mg a day. The low-salt, healthy eating program became known as the DASH diet, and doctors now recommend it to both adults and kids.
“The DASH diet reduces blood pressure in the whole population,” says Eva Obarzanek, a registered dietician and research nutritionist with the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute in Bethesda, Md. Better yet, she says, the diet works “as much as any [blood-pressure] drug would.”
What’s more, studies from around the world show that hypertension and heart disease rates are lowest in places where people eat the least amount of salt. (In fact, the Yanomami Indians of South America eat very little sodium and have lower blood pressure readings than American 10-year-olds.)
And in a 2007 study, scientists turned up the first direct link between salt and heart disease. They found that cutting down on salt now can lower a person’s risk of heart disease 10 to 15 years in the future.
access
Enlargemagnify
Well dressed?Although most salad offerings, with the exception of olives and other pickled foods, tend to be low in salt, salad dressings can have plenty. Check out the sodium content on the label before splashing plenty on your veggies.Burke/Triolo
“The bottom line is that high sodium levels are definitely bad for you,” Obarzanek says. “It affects everybody. And it’s important even if you don’t have high blood pressure [now], because you’re likely to get it as you get older.”
Start thinking about salt now
Like most kids, you probably don’t spend much time worrying about heart disease. After all, hypertension tends to become more common as people reach middle age and older.
But doctors say it’s never too early to start thinking about your heart — or about salt.
Blood pressure has been going up over the past decade in children and teenagers in the United States and many European countries. And a kid with high blood pressure is more likely to become a grown-up with hypertension.
“It’s better to not have a lifelong exposure to high blood pressure,” Obarzanek says.
Cutting down on salt might help stop the cycle. In one recent study, researchers from the United Kingdom analyzed 10 trials involving nearly 1,000 kids. The trial results showed that lowering sodium intake by 40 to 50 percent led to a significant decrease in blood pressure, even in infants.
Reducing salt might also help combat childhood obesity, a growing public health problem. British researchers recently found that kids who eat less salt also drink fewer sugary soft drinks. Drinking less soda makes kids less likely to gain weight, become obese and develop high blood pressure.
And salt can affect more than just your heart and weight. A study published in October found that a growing number of kids in the U.S are suffering from an ailment called kidney stones. This painful condition used to mostly affect people in their 40s and older. Now, kids as young as 5 are getting it.
The kidneys are responsible for filtering salt out of the bloodstream. So researchers think that kids eating too much salt and not drinking enough water are partly to blame for the trend.
How to lick salt
If you’re like most people, cutting down on salt can be tough, says Gary Beauchamp, director of the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia.
His research shows that when given larger and larger amounts of sodium, people want more and more of it. Even babies drink more formula when it’s saltier. That preference starts as early as 4 months old.
Getting used to eating less salt, on the other hand, can take months. And low-sodium food might taste gross at first when you’re used to highly salted versions.
The good news is that you can retrain your taste buds to prefer less salty food. And now is a good time to do it: Research shows that what you eat as a kid strongly influences what you’ll like as an adult. So, the more salt (or sugar, or even spices, such as hot chili powder) you eat now, the more likely you are to crave those ingredients later. And later, your heart might be weaker and less able to handle a heavy salt load.
“It’s an easy change to make at virtually no cost,” says Darwin Labarthe, director of the Division for Heart Disease and Stroke Prevention at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta. “And it has an immense health impact.”
The best way to reduce the amount of sodium you consume, researchers say, is to make changes gradually. Start by sprinkling half as much salt on your dinner as you normally do. Switch to fresh foods instead of canned and bottled versions. And go easy on the condiments. Things like ketchup, soy sauce and salad dressing can carry far more sodium than you might expect.
You might also want to start reading nutrition labels. You may be surprised to find out that a serving of tomato sauce has more than 500 mg of sodium. And that there are 1,150 mg of sodium in a McDonald’s double cheeseburger, and more than 2,000 mg in many frozen meals.
“Kids today need to give salt the shake,” says David Grotto, a dietician and author in Chicago, “For overall health’s sake.”
When you look at your food, some ingredients are easy to see. For example, there is obviously milk in your cereal, cheese on your pizza and peanut butter on your toast.
But your meals are also filled with ingredients you can’t see. And you might be surprised to learn just how much those hidden items affect your health.
Salt is a perfect example of an ingredient that you might not notice, even when you eat a lot of it.
Sometimes, salt is obvious. You can see it on pretzels. You can taste it on french fries. And you can sprinkle it on green beans, straight from the shaker.
But it’s the salt we can’t see that concerns scientists most. For decades, doctors have warned patients that too much salt can be bad for their hearts. Still, most Americans continue to eat way too much salt, even when they try to avoid the salt shaker.
That’s because more than 75 percent of the salt we eat is hidden in restaurant meals, fast food and processed foods, such as spaghetti sauce from a jar, canned soup and frozen pizza. Often, you can’t even taste that the salt is there.
Heart trouble has long been considered a grown-up problem, and parents haven’t worried too much about the salt their kids eat. But new research suggests that salt is starting to affect kids — in their hearts, kidneys and waistlines.
Loading up on salt-filled potato chips, hot dogs and canned tuna today could also set young people up for even more health problems down the road.
“Most national heads of policy-making bodies in the United States and Canada and Great Britain are reaching the same conclusion,” says Lawrence Appel, professor of medicine at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore. “Reduce your salt intake.”
Straight to the heart
Salt is made up of two elements, or basic components: sodium and chlorine. When put in food or liquid, salt, also called sodium chloride, or NaCl, breaks into its two elements.
The chlorine part of salt isn’t that important. It’s the sodium that can stir up trouble.
We need a small amount of sodium to keep our muscles working and our nerves sending messages throughout the body. But the amount of sodium we actually need is really tiny: about 500 milligrams, or less than a quarter teaspoon of salt. A little bit goes a long way.
access
Enlargemagnify
Want salt with that?Some foods just cry out for extra salt, like these fries. That can make them a bad meal choice.Burke/Triolo
Dietary guidelines in the United States and elsewhere recommend that healthy adults consume no more than 2,300 milligrams of sodium a day. That’s about a teaspoonful of salt.
Kids ages 9 to 13 should eat no more than 1,500 to 2,200 mg of sodium a day. Younger kids should get even less.
But the average American eats about twice the recommended daily amount. This worries doctors because too much sodium can cause the body to produce more blood. To pump the extra blood, the heart has to work extra hard. This leads to a rise in blood pressure — a measurement of how stressed out the heart is. High blood pressure, also known as hypertension, often leads to heart disease. Heart disease is the leading cause of death in the United States and can lead to ailments like heart attacks.
“Ninety percent of adult Americans develop hypertension in their lifetimes,” Appel says. It’s a big problem.
You are what you eat
Salt isn’t the only cause of hypertension. Eating lots of junk food, weighing too much and exercising too little also contribute to high blood pressure. But a large number of studies suggest that salt is a major player.
Some of the most powerful strikes against salt come from a pair of studies that took place in the 1990s. The goal of the research was to figure out if what we eat affects blood pressure, and if so, how much.
As part of the studies, hundreds of adults ate exactly what researchers told them to. Called DASH, these studies lasted for months at a time.
The results showed a sizeable drop in blood pressure in people who ate extra fruits and vegetables, lots of whole grains, low-fat dairy products and only small amounts of red meat, sweet treats and fatty foods like fast food and donuts. Eating well, the researchers concluded, is good for your heart.
But blood pressure levels dropped even more when participants who followed the diet described above also lessened their salt intake. In the first DASH study, participants ate a relatively high level of salt — 3,300 mg a day. In the second DASH study, participants’ salt intake dropped to as low as 1,500 mg a day. The low-salt, healthy eating program became known as the DASH diet, and doctors now recommend it to both adults and kids.
“The DASH diet reduces blood pressure in the whole population,” says Eva Obarzanek, a registered dietician and research nutritionist with the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute in Bethesda, Md. Better yet, she says, the diet works “as much as any [blood-pressure] drug would.”
What’s more, studies from around the world show that hypertension and heart disease rates are lowest in places where people eat the least amount of salt. (In fact, the Yanomami Indians of South America eat very little sodium and have lower blood pressure readings than American 10-year-olds.)
And in a 2007 study, scientists turned up the first direct link between salt and heart disease. They found that cutting down on salt now can lower a person’s risk of heart disease 10 to 15 years in the future.
access
Enlargemagnify
Well dressed?Although most salad offerings, with the exception of olives and other pickled foods, tend to be low in salt, salad dressings can have plenty. Check out the sodium content on the label before splashing plenty on your veggies.Burke/Triolo
“The bottom line is that high sodium levels are definitely bad for you,” Obarzanek says. “It affects everybody. And it’s important even if you don’t have high blood pressure [now], because you’re likely to get it as you get older.”
Start thinking about salt now
Like most kids, you probably don’t spend much time worrying about heart disease. After all, hypertension tends to become more common as people reach middle age and older.
But doctors say it’s never too early to start thinking about your heart — or about salt.
Blood pressure has been going up over the past decade in children and teenagers in the United States and many European countries. And a kid with high blood pressure is more likely to become a grown-up with hypertension.
“It’s better to not have a lifelong exposure to high blood pressure,” Obarzanek says.
Cutting down on salt might help stop the cycle. In one recent study, researchers from the United Kingdom analyzed 10 trials involving nearly 1,000 kids. The trial results showed that lowering sodium intake by 40 to 50 percent led to a significant decrease in blood pressure, even in infants.
Reducing salt might also help combat childhood obesity, a growing public health problem. British researchers recently found that kids who eat less salt also drink fewer sugary soft drinks. Drinking less soda makes kids less likely to gain weight, become obese and develop high blood pressure.
And salt can affect more than just your heart and weight. A study published in October found that a growing number of kids in the U.S are suffering from an ailment called kidney stones. This painful condition used to mostly affect people in their 40s and older. Now, kids as young as 5 are getting it.
The kidneys are responsible for filtering salt out of the bloodstream. So researchers think that kids eating too much salt and not drinking enough water are partly to blame for the trend.
How to lick salt
If you’re like most people, cutting down on salt can be tough, says Gary Beauchamp, director of the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia.
His research shows that when given larger and larger amounts of sodium, people want more and more of it. Even babies drink more formula when it’s saltier. That preference starts as early as 4 months old.
Getting used to eating less salt, on the other hand, can take months. And low-sodium food might taste gross at first when you’re used to highly salted versions.
The good news is that you can retrain your taste buds to prefer less salty food. And now is a good time to do it: Research shows that what you eat as a kid strongly influences what you’ll like as an adult. So, the more salt (or sugar, or even spices, such as hot chili powder) you eat now, the more likely you are to crave those ingredients later. And later, your heart might be weaker and less able to handle a heavy salt load.
“It’s an easy change to make at virtually no cost,” says Darwin Labarthe, director of the Division for Heart Disease and Stroke Prevention at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta. “And it has an immense health impact.”
The best way to reduce the amount of sodium you consume, researchers say, is to make changes gradually. Start by sprinkling half as much salt on your dinner as you normally do. Switch to fresh foods instead of canned and bottled versions. And go easy on the condiments. Things like ketchup, soy sauce and salad dressing can carry far more sodium than you might expect.
You might also want to start reading nutrition labels. You may be surprised to find out that a serving of tomato sauce has more than 500 mg of sodium. And that there are 1,150 mg of sodium in a McDonald’s double cheeseburger, and more than 2,000 mg in many frozen meals.
“Kids today need to give salt the shake,” says David Grotto, a dietician and author in Chicago, “For overall health’s sake.”
Thursday, April 30, 2009
Oops! western 4.oop.223 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
It takes years for children to master the ins and outs of arithmetic. New research indicates that this learning process triggers a large-scale reorganization of brain processes involved in understanding written symbols for various quantities.
The findings support the idea that humans' ability to match specific quantities with number symbols, a skill required for doing arithmetic, builds on a brain system that is used for estimating approximate quantities. That brain system is seen in many nonhuman animals.
When performing operations with Arabic numerals, young adults, but not school-age children, show pronounced activity in a piece of brain tissue called the left superior temporal gyrus, says Daniel Ansari of the University of Western Ontario in London, Canada. Earlier studies have linked this region to the ability to associate speech sounds with written letters, and musical sounds with written notes. The left superior temporal gyrus is located near the brain’s midpoint, not far from areas linked to speech production and understanding.
In contrast, children solving a numerical task display heightened activity in a frontal-brain area that, in adults, primarily serves other functions.
Ansari presented his findings November 19 at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience.
“Left superior temporal regions may also be responsible for mapping numerical symbols onto quantities,” remarks Filip van Opstal of Ghent University in Belgium, who studies adults’ neural responses to number tasks.
In addition, Ansari and his colleagues find that nearby parts of the brain, in the parietal cortex, contribute far more to both number understanding and the ability to estimate quantities in adults than they do in children. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire At the same time, both types of numerical knowledge recruit the prefrontal cortex far more in youngsters than in adults, according to the scientists.
“Our results demonstrate that the brain basis of number processing changes as a function of development and experience,” Ansari says.
The new findings support the idea that symbolic number use unique to people builds on an evolutionarily ancient brain system many animals share for estimating approximate quantities. In the past five years, studies of adult people and monkeys have suggested that parts of both the parietal and prefrontal cortex foster quantity estimates and symbolic number knowledge, with a specific parietal region looming especially large in adult humans. But little is known about quantity-related neural activity in kids.
Ansari’s new study consisted of 19 children, ages 6 to 9, and 19 adults, ages 18 to 24. Participants first viewed pairs of Arabic numerals, ranging from 1 to 10, and indicated which number was larger. Volunteers then viewed pairs of images showing arrays of one to 10 squares and indicated which array contained more squares. During these tasks, a functional MRI scanner measured where blood flow changed in the volunteers’ brains, providing a glimpse of rises and falls in neural activity.
Young adults performed the tasks more accurately than children did. But like kids, these adults took increasingly longer to discriminate between two numbers or two arrays as quantities got closer. So, it took longer to tell 2 apart from 1 than 9 apart from 1.
Correspondingly, one part of the parietal cortex in young adults, but not in children, grew increasingly active as pairs of numerals or quantities got closer. This area aids in initial efforts to translate knowledge about approximate quantities into comprehension of symbolic numerals, Ansari hypothesizes. With increasing math experience, the left superior temporal gyrus assumes major responsibility for symbolic number knowledge, he suspects.
Disturbances in that region and in nearby parietal areas may lie at the root of a dyscalculia, a childhood disorder characterized by an inability to conceptualize numbers and understand arithmetic, Ansari adds.
In related research presented at the neuroscience meeting, Ilka Diester of Stanford University reported that monkeys trained to associate Arabic numerals with corresponding quantities in dot arrays show robust prefrontal cortex activity but little parietal activity. Monkeys, like children, may achieve a budding grasp of numerals with the help of the prefrontal cortex, Diester proposes.
* Print Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
* |
* Comment
Found in: Body & Brain and Psychology
Share & Save
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Comments 4
* The Origin of Consciousness.
================
Descartes said: "I think , therefore I am"
Buddhist monk says "I think not, therefore I am"
==========================
Consciousness is real but nonphyslcal.
Consciousness is connected to physical reality .
================
There are many theories explaining the origin of consciousness.
Here some of them.
1)
"God" "blowing" "consciousness" "into man"
"whom he created from clay"
2)
20 billions years ago all matter (all elementary particles,
all quarks and their girlfriend antiquarks, all kinds of waves:
electromagnetic, gravitational, muons….) –
all was assembled in “singular point”.
Then there was a Big Bang .
Question: when was there consciousness?
a) Before explosion,
b) At the moment of explosion,
c) After the explosion.
It is more probable, that it existed after the explosion.
Then there is a question: what particles (or waves)
were carriers of consciousness?
Mesons, muons, leptons, bosons (W+, W- , Z) ,
quarks, …gluons field ….. ets …?
On this question the Big Bang theory does not give an answer.
But can it be that consciousness was formed as a result
of the interaction of all elementary particles, all waves, all fields?
Then, on the one hand, the reason for the origin of the Big Bang is clear:
everything was mixed, including consciousness, and when it is mixed
then it is possible to construct all and everything.
But on the other hand, it is not clear:
why farmer John can think simply, clearly and logically.
3) Ancient Indian Veda approve, that origination of consciousness
is connected with the existence of spiritual, conscious particles – purusha .
4) Modern physics affirms that the Quantum of light
is a privileged particle as in one cases,
it behave as a particle, and in other case, acts in a way which causes a wave.
How is a particle capable of creating a wave?
The behaviour of Light quanta (dualism ) is explained simply.
A quantum of light has its own initial consciousness.
This consciousness is not rigid, but develops.
The development of consciousness goes
“from vague wish up to a clear thought”.
#
Consciousness is connected to physical reality.
It is fact that consciousness is itself already dualistic.
This dualism stays on the basis of Quantum Physics.
Therefore “Quantum Theory of Consciousness”
can be understand only with connection to the
“Theory of Light Quanta”.
#
Spirituality Spot Found in Brain.
http://www.livescience.com/health/081224-brain-spirit.html
========= . .
Neuroscience has found the EGO assuming group
of neurons in the Brain in the right parietal lobe!
It keeps track of self-centred notions as “my hand”,
“my cocktail”, “my witty intelligence” etc.
The greatest silencing of this ‘Me-Definer’ region
likely happens in deep states of meditation!
Meditation stills and stops the EGO! How wonderful indeed !
LiveScience Details here:
http://www.livescience.com/health/081224-brain-spirit.html
=================================== . .
Best wishes.
Israel Sadovnik. / Socratus.
israel socratus israel socratus
Dec. 26, 2008 at 12:35am http://Louis-J-Sheehan.biz
* Our computer-brain.
Consciousness and the Quantum Physics.
Dualism of consciousness.
The Problem of Knowledge .
Quantum Theory of Consciousness:
Our computer-brain works on a dualistic basis.
Some psychologists compare our consciousness with iceberg.
The small visible part of this iceberg is our consciousness.
And the unseen (underwater) greater part of the iceberg is
our subconsciousness. Therefore they say, the man uses
only 10% of possibility of his brain.
And if it so, why doesn’t anybody teach us how
to develop our subconsciousness.
I think it is because there are few people who understand
that the processes of subconsciousness are connected
with quantum processes. The subconsciousness theory
closely united with quantum theory.
These quantum processes which take place in lifeless
(inanimate) nature also take place in our brain.
Our brain can be the laboratory in which we can
test the truth of quantum theory.
The man acts:
1) usually under logic program,
2) sometimes on intuition (unconsciousnessly).
============================
Our computer-brain works on a dualistic basis.
1.
In a usual daily life all we do is done logically,
under an influence of our feelings.
2.
On the other hand, in intuition we act:
a) Without the participation of the sense organs.
b) Without the participation of the logic mental processes.
===== ========
"The conflict between right and wrong is the sickness of the mind"
- Chuang Tzu
The conflict between right and wrong can be explain
by the theory of “Quantum dualism of consciousness” .
===========.
Best wishes.
Israel Sadovnik. / Socratus.
http://www.socratus.com
http://www.wbabin.net
http://www.wbabin.net/comments/sadovnik.htm
http://www.wbabin.net/physics/sadovnik.pdf
israel socratus israel socratus
Dec. 12, 2008 at 11:30pm
* Disturbances in that region and in nearby parietal areas may lie at the root of a dyscalculia, a childhood disorder characterized by an inability to conceptualize numbers and understand arithmetic, Ansari adds.
Oops! Might want to amend this to add "developmental" disorders rather than limiting it to just kids. It is common for adults with pervasive development disorders to have dyscalculia.
Criticisms dispensed with, this is interesting! I have always had a great deal of trouble writing numbers or transcribing letters if the spelling of them is recited to me. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire Very frustrating and http://Louis-J-Sheehan.biz confusing because I should be good at this (I'm a writer) but then I have pronounced dyscalculia and diagnosed ASD and altho I suspected a connection, didn't understand where it might be.
Kathleen Fasanella Kathleen Fasanella
Nov. 23, 2008 at 9:26am
* It would be interesting to see whether people who acquire mathematical skills in other cultures, using, say, Chinese numerals, primarily using the abacus to calculate, rely on the same brain areas as Western adults.
It takes years for children to master the ins and outs of arithmetic. New research indicates that this learning process triggers a large-scale reorganization of brain processes involved in understanding written symbols for various quantities.
The findings support the idea that humans' ability to match specific quantities with number symbols, a skill required for doing arithmetic, builds on a brain system that is used for estimating approximate quantities. That brain system is seen in many nonhuman animals.
When performing operations with Arabic numerals, young adults, but not school-age children, show pronounced activity in a piece of brain tissue called the left superior temporal gyrus, says Daniel Ansari of the University of Western Ontario in London, Canada. Earlier studies have linked this region to the ability to associate speech sounds with written letters, and musical sounds with written notes. The left superior temporal gyrus is located near the brain’s midpoint, not far from areas linked to speech production and understanding.
In contrast, children solving a numerical task display heightened activity in a frontal-brain area that, in adults, primarily serves other functions.
Ansari presented his findings November 19 at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience.
“Left superior temporal regions may also be responsible for mapping numerical symbols onto quantities,” remarks Filip van Opstal of Ghent University in Belgium, who studies adults’ neural responses to number tasks.
In addition, Ansari and his colleagues find that nearby parts of the brain, in the parietal cortex, contribute far more to both number understanding and the ability to estimate quantities in adults than they do in children. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire At the same time, both types of numerical knowledge recruit the prefrontal cortex far more in youngsters than in adults, according to the scientists.
“Our results demonstrate that the brain basis of number processing changes as a function of development and experience,” Ansari says.
The new findings support the idea that symbolic number use unique to people builds on an evolutionarily ancient brain system many animals share for estimating approximate quantities. In the past five years, studies of adult people and monkeys have suggested that parts of both the parietal and prefrontal cortex foster quantity estimates and symbolic number knowledge, with a specific parietal region looming especially large in adult humans. But little is known about quantity-related neural activity in kids.
Ansari’s new study consisted of 19 children, ages 6 to 9, and 19 adults, ages 18 to 24. Participants first viewed pairs of Arabic numerals, ranging from 1 to 10, and indicated which number was larger. Volunteers then viewed pairs of images showing arrays of one to 10 squares and indicated which array contained more squares. During these tasks, a functional MRI scanner measured where blood flow changed in the volunteers’ brains, providing a glimpse of rises and falls in neural activity.
Young adults performed the tasks more accurately than children did. But like kids, these adults took increasingly longer to discriminate between two numbers or two arrays as quantities got closer. So, it took longer to tell 2 apart from 1 than 9 apart from 1.
Correspondingly, one part of the parietal cortex in young adults, but not in children, grew increasingly active as pairs of numerals or quantities got closer. This area aids in initial efforts to translate knowledge about approximate quantities into comprehension of symbolic numerals, Ansari hypothesizes. With increasing math experience, the left superior temporal gyrus assumes major responsibility for symbolic number knowledge, he suspects.
Disturbances in that region and in nearby parietal areas may lie at the root of a dyscalculia, a childhood disorder characterized by an inability to conceptualize numbers and understand arithmetic, Ansari adds.
In related research presented at the neuroscience meeting, Ilka Diester of Stanford University reported that monkeys trained to associate Arabic numerals with corresponding quantities in dot arrays show robust prefrontal cortex activity but little parietal activity. Monkeys, like children, may achieve a budding grasp of numerals with the help of the prefrontal cortex, Diester proposes.
* Print Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
* |
* Comment
Found in: Body & Brain and Psychology
Share & Save
* slashdot slashdot
* digg digg
* facebook facebook
* yahoo yahoo
* del.icio.us del.icio.us
* reddit reddit
* google google
* technorati technorati
Comments 4
* The Origin of Consciousness.
================
Descartes said: "I think , therefore I am"
Buddhist monk says "I think not, therefore I am"
==========================
Consciousness is real but nonphyslcal.
Consciousness is connected to physical reality .
================
There are many theories explaining the origin of consciousness.
Here some of them.
1)
"God" "blowing" "consciousness" "into man"
"whom he created from clay"
2)
20 billions years ago all matter (all elementary particles,
all quarks and their girlfriend antiquarks, all kinds of waves:
electromagnetic, gravitational, muons….) –
all was assembled in “singular point”.
Then there was a Big Bang .
Question: when was there consciousness?
a) Before explosion,
b) At the moment of explosion,
c) After the explosion.
It is more probable, that it existed after the explosion.
Then there is a question: what particles (or waves)
were carriers of consciousness?
Mesons, muons, leptons, bosons (W+, W- , Z) ,
quarks, …gluons field ….. ets …?
On this question the Big Bang theory does not give an answer.
But can it be that consciousness was formed as a result
of the interaction of all elementary particles, all waves, all fields?
Then, on the one hand, the reason for the origin of the Big Bang is clear:
everything was mixed, including consciousness, and when it is mixed
then it is possible to construct all and everything.
But on the other hand, it is not clear:
why farmer John can think simply, clearly and logically.
3) Ancient Indian Veda approve, that origination of consciousness
is connected with the existence of spiritual, conscious particles – purusha .
4) Modern physics affirms that the Quantum of light
is a privileged particle as in one cases,
it behave as a particle, and in other case, acts in a way which causes a wave.
How is a particle capable of creating a wave?
The behaviour of Light quanta (dualism ) is explained simply.
A quantum of light has its own initial consciousness.
This consciousness is not rigid, but develops.
The development of consciousness goes
“from vague wish up to a clear thought”.
#
Consciousness is connected to physical reality.
It is fact that consciousness is itself already dualistic.
This dualism stays on the basis of Quantum Physics.
Therefore “Quantum Theory of Consciousness”
can be understand only with connection to the
“Theory of Light Quanta”.
#
Spirituality Spot Found in Brain.
http://www.livescience.com/health/081224-brain-spirit.html
========= . .
Neuroscience has found the EGO assuming group
of neurons in the Brain in the right parietal lobe!
It keeps track of self-centred notions as “my hand”,
“my cocktail”, “my witty intelligence” etc.
The greatest silencing of this ‘Me-Definer’ region
likely happens in deep states of meditation!
Meditation stills and stops the EGO! How wonderful indeed !
LiveScience Details here:
http://www.livescience.com/health/081224-brain-spirit.html
=================================== . .
Best wishes.
Israel Sadovnik. / Socratus.
israel socratus israel socratus
Dec. 26, 2008 at 12:35am http://Louis-J-Sheehan.biz
* Our computer-brain.
Consciousness and the Quantum Physics.
Dualism of consciousness.
The Problem of Knowledge .
Quantum Theory of Consciousness:
Our computer-brain works on a dualistic basis.
Some psychologists compare our consciousness with iceberg.
The small visible part of this iceberg is our consciousness.
And the unseen (underwater) greater part of the iceberg is
our subconsciousness. Therefore they say, the man uses
only 10% of possibility of his brain.
And if it so, why doesn’t anybody teach us how
to develop our subconsciousness.
I think it is because there are few people who understand
that the processes of subconsciousness are connected
with quantum processes. The subconsciousness theory
closely united with quantum theory.
These quantum processes which take place in lifeless
(inanimate) nature also take place in our brain.
Our brain can be the laboratory in which we can
test the truth of quantum theory.
The man acts:
1) usually under logic program,
2) sometimes on intuition (unconsciousnessly).
============================
Our computer-brain works on a dualistic basis.
1.
In a usual daily life all we do is done logically,
under an influence of our feelings.
2.
On the other hand, in intuition we act:
a) Without the participation of the sense organs.
b) Without the participation of the logic mental processes.
===== ========
"The conflict between right and wrong is the sickness of the mind"
- Chuang Tzu
The conflict between right and wrong can be explain
by the theory of “Quantum dualism of consciousness” .
===========.
Best wishes.
Israel Sadovnik. / Socratus.
http://www.socratus.com
http://www.wbabin.net
http://www.wbabin.net/comments/sadovnik.htm
http://www.wbabin.net/physics/sadovnik.pdf
israel socratus israel socratus
Dec. 12, 2008 at 11:30pm
* Disturbances in that region and in nearby parietal areas may lie at the root of a dyscalculia, a childhood disorder characterized by an inability to conceptualize numbers and understand arithmetic, Ansari adds.
Oops! Might want to amend this to add "developmental" disorders rather than limiting it to just kids. It is common for adults with pervasive development disorders to have dyscalculia.
Criticisms dispensed with, this is interesting! I have always had a great deal of trouble writing numbers or transcribing letters if the spelling of them is recited to me. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire Very frustrating and http://Louis-J-Sheehan.biz confusing because I should be good at this (I'm a writer) but then I have pronounced dyscalculia and diagnosed ASD and altho I suspected a connection, didn't understand where it might be.
Kathleen Fasanella Kathleen Fasanella
Nov. 23, 2008 at 9:26am
* It would be interesting to see whether people who acquire mathematical skills in other cultures, using, say, Chinese numerals, primarily using the abacus to calculate, rely on the same brain areas as Western adults.
Tuesday, April 14, 2009
positive 5.pos.123 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
Combination therapy that adds radiation to a standard medication for localized but aggressive prostate cancer results in longer survival and fewer signs of relapse than treatment with the drugs alone, Scandinavian scientists report online December 16 in The Lancet.
There hasn’t been a clear consensus on how best to treat such malignancies, which comprise roughly 10 to 20 percent of prostate cancer cases. Doctors call these growths locally advanced prostate cancers — tumors that are marked by fast growth and can even be felt by a doctor during a routine prostate examination. And although the cancer hasn’t spread to lymph nodes or organs beyond the prostate, it has often expanded to the outside of the gland and can be lethal.
For such patients, doctors can use radiation treatments to kill cancer cells, or prescribe drug therapy to suppress the testosterone that fuels prostate cancer growth. The benefits of using both hadn’t been ascertained until now.
“These are exciting results,” says radiation oncologist Colleen Lawton of the Medical College of Wisconsin, in Milwaukee. “This confirms what we’ve all been thinking. It’s pretty clear that dual therapy should be used” for such patients, she says.
Researchers at 47 medical centers in Sweden, Denmark and Norway enrolled 875 men with this form of prostate cancer, average age 66, into a trial lasting from 1996 to 2002. Half were randomly assigned to get drugs only, while the others also received radiation treatments, says study coauthor Anders Widmark, a medical and radiation oncologist at Umeå University in Sweden.
After an average follow-up of 7 ½ years, 79 men in the drugs-only group had died of prostate cancer or related causes, compared with 37 in the group that received radiation and drugs. Deaths from other causes were roughly equal between the groups.
What’s more, 285 men assigned to the drugs-only group — but only 77 men getting the combined therapies — experienced warning signs of a return of their prostate cancer as evidenced by an increase in their prostate specific antigen (PSA) score. This measurement, obtained by a blood test, is a proxy for cancer and a jump in the score reveals “a very early relapse stage,” says Widmark.
“[This] is a pivotal trial, and is the first to show an overall survival advantage for radiotherapy in the primary treatment of prostate cancer,” according to Alex Tan of the Noe Valley Clinic in San Francisco and Chris Parker of the Institute of Cancer Research in Sutton, U.K., writing in the same issue of The Lancet. “The results should change current practice, making long-term hormonal therapy plus radical radiotherapy the standard of care for men with locally advanced prostate cancer.”
Lawton agrees. “This says that radiation is playing a very significant role in local control” of the cancer, she says. “It’s pretty clear that dual therapy should be used.”
Whether dual therapy would help prostate cancer patients who have slower-growing malignancies, the vast majority, remains unclear, these researchers say. A course called “watchful waiting” may be best for elderly, frail men in that situation, Lawton says, whereas young or middle-aged men with slow-growing cancer have other options such as surgery or implantation of highly localized radioactive capsules.
In the new study, some well-known side effects of prostate cancer treatment showed up, and men getting the combined treatment experienced more of them than those on drugs alone. For example, five years into the follow-up period, roughly twice as many men in the combined therapy group than in the drugs-only group —7 percent versus 3 percent — reported urinary incontinence. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire And roughly 9 in 10 men receiving the dual therapy reported erectile problems, compared with 8 in 10 men getting drugs alone. http://Louis1J1Sheehan.us
On a more positive note, Widmark says radiation therapy has advanced since these men were treated and can now deliver more specifically targeted doses that are 10 percent greater than those used in much of this trial. Research has shown an added clinical benefit from the higher doses, he says.Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
“Indeed, it is possible that the trial could underestimate the true benefit of radiotherapy,” Tan and Parker note.
Combination therapy that adds radiation to a standard medication for localized but aggressive prostate cancer results in longer survival and fewer signs of relapse than treatment with the drugs alone, Scandinavian scientists report online December 16 in The Lancet.
There hasn’t been a clear consensus on how best to treat such malignancies, which comprise roughly 10 to 20 percent of prostate cancer cases. Doctors call these growths locally advanced prostate cancers — tumors that are marked by fast growth and can even be felt by a doctor during a routine prostate examination. And although the cancer hasn’t spread to lymph nodes or organs beyond the prostate, it has often expanded to the outside of the gland and can be lethal.
For such patients, doctors can use radiation treatments to kill cancer cells, or prescribe drug therapy to suppress the testosterone that fuels prostate cancer growth. The benefits of using both hadn’t been ascertained until now.
“These are exciting results,” says radiation oncologist Colleen Lawton of the Medical College of Wisconsin, in Milwaukee. “This confirms what we’ve all been thinking. It’s pretty clear that dual therapy should be used” for such patients, she says.
Researchers at 47 medical centers in Sweden, Denmark and Norway enrolled 875 men with this form of prostate cancer, average age 66, into a trial lasting from 1996 to 2002. Half were randomly assigned to get drugs only, while the others also received radiation treatments, says study coauthor Anders Widmark, a medical and radiation oncologist at Umeå University in Sweden.
After an average follow-up of 7 ½ years, 79 men in the drugs-only group had died of prostate cancer or related causes, compared with 37 in the group that received radiation and drugs. Deaths from other causes were roughly equal between the groups.
What’s more, 285 men assigned to the drugs-only group — but only 77 men getting the combined therapies — experienced warning signs of a return of their prostate cancer as evidenced by an increase in their prostate specific antigen (PSA) score. This measurement, obtained by a blood test, is a proxy for cancer and a jump in the score reveals “a very early relapse stage,” says Widmark.
“[This] is a pivotal trial, and is the first to show an overall survival advantage for radiotherapy in the primary treatment of prostate cancer,” according to Alex Tan of the Noe Valley Clinic in San Francisco and Chris Parker of the Institute of Cancer Research in Sutton, U.K., writing in the same issue of The Lancet. “The results should change current practice, making long-term hormonal therapy plus radical radiotherapy the standard of care for men with locally advanced prostate cancer.”
Lawton agrees. “This says that radiation is playing a very significant role in local control” of the cancer, she says. “It’s pretty clear that dual therapy should be used.”
Whether dual therapy would help prostate cancer patients who have slower-growing malignancies, the vast majority, remains unclear, these researchers say. A course called “watchful waiting” may be best for elderly, frail men in that situation, Lawton says, whereas young or middle-aged men with slow-growing cancer have other options such as surgery or implantation of highly localized radioactive capsules.
In the new study, some well-known side effects of prostate cancer treatment showed up, and men getting the combined treatment experienced more of them than those on drugs alone. For example, five years into the follow-up period, roughly twice as many men in the combined therapy group than in the drugs-only group —7 percent versus 3 percent — reported urinary incontinence. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire And roughly 9 in 10 men receiving the dual therapy reported erectile problems, compared with 8 in 10 men getting drugs alone. http://Louis1J1Sheehan.us
On a more positive note, Widmark says radiation therapy has advanced since these men were treated and can now deliver more specifically targeted doses that are 10 percent greater than those used in much of this trial. Research has shown an added clinical benefit from the higher doses, he says.Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
“Indeed, it is possible that the trial could underestimate the true benefit of radiotherapy,” Tan and Parker note.
Friday, April 10, 2009
data 9.dat.0001 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
A provocative story on the front page of today’s Washington Post reports that consuming as little as a single alcoholic beverage a day could raise a woman’s risk of cancer. The size of that increase varies by cancer type. Overall, however, it appears to be about five percent over the seven years that women were followed.
What makes these findings provocative: A host of previous studies have shown that for heart disease — the leading killer of postmenopausal women — quaffing a little alcohol regularly is better than drinking none.
So what should women do? http://Louis-J-Sheehan.de
The answer, typical for science, is that it’s all relative.
For people worried about cancer — particularly those who have a genetic predisposition to breast malignancies — no alcohol is probably the best policy.Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire And earlier studies have argued that line already. In this study, each seven-drinks-per-week increase in alcohol consumption upped a woman’s risk of developing breast cancer by 12 percent.
For people at low risk for heart disease, such as nearly everyone under the age of 35, there’s no health justification for drinking. And a steady diet of three or more drinks — or binging on four or more at a sitting — never ever gets a green light from the medical establishment.
But study after study has offered quantitative evidence that middle-age and older adults who take a regular nip — like that proverbial glass of sherry after dinner or at bedtime — suffer less heart disease and diabetes than teetotalers or people who consume more than two drinks a day.
Ironically, even the study referred to in today’s Post doesn’t clearly contradict that apparent license to drink a bit, even daily. The reason: The new study didn’t assess daily alcohol intake among the 1.28 million ladies in Britain studied as part of the Million Women Study. Participants were asked about weekly consumption, and then the epidemiologists analyzing those data divided the findings by seven. Among women drinking 7 to 14 servings of alcohol each week, the new study shows, risk of developing cancers at several sites beyond the breast does increase.
However . . . if someone averages seven drinks a week, those beverages might have been downed on weekends only — leading to consumption of three or more drinks at a sitting. That would be bad even for the heart. Also, in the long haul, for anyone’s liver.
Unless the servings per day can be teased out, the new study — which appears in the March 4 Journal of the National Cancer Institute — only offers fodder for speculation. And questions to be addressed in follow-up studies that home in on daily intakes.
Another interesting caveat mentioned in the new study, but omitted from today’s Post story: “Nondrinkers had an increased risk for several cancer sites compared with women who drank fewer than or equal to two drinks per week.” Naomi Allen and her colleagues at the University of Oxford note that this apparent protective effect of alcohol was statistically significant for cancers of the oral cavity and pharynx, esophagus, stomach, liver, lung, cervix and endometrium, and for renal (kidney) cell carcinoma.
Finally, there’s the impact of smoking. The new study was meant to identify cancers — beyond those in the breast — that might be associated with alcohol. It found small risk increases of one to four percent for leukemia, melanoma, and cancers of the lung, brain and colon. Far bigger increased risks — of 10 to 44 percent— were seen for cancers in the rectum, breast and a few other sites. But among those alcohol-linked spikes in cancer risk exceeding 12 percent (esophagus, liver, oral cavity and pharynx, and larynx), risks for all but liver cancer increased SOLELY among women who smoked. http://Louis-J-Sheehan.de
Don’t get me wrong: I’m not trying to defend drinking. I’m close to a teetotaler myself. And as the mom of a teen who was injured when a drunk classmate totaled the car she was driving (at 5 p.m. on St. Patrick’s Day), I’m fairly intolerant of drinking irresponsibly.
But let’s not scare people with incomplete data. There will be plenty of time to hammer home a call for temperance if and when stronger data emerge.Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
A provocative story on the front page of today’s Washington Post reports that consuming as little as a single alcoholic beverage a day could raise a woman’s risk of cancer. The size of that increase varies by cancer type. Overall, however, it appears to be about five percent over the seven years that women were followed.
What makes these findings provocative: A host of previous studies have shown that for heart disease — the leading killer of postmenopausal women — quaffing a little alcohol regularly is better than drinking none.
So what should women do? http://Louis-J-Sheehan.de
The answer, typical for science, is that it’s all relative.
For people worried about cancer — particularly those who have a genetic predisposition to breast malignancies — no alcohol is probably the best policy.Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire And earlier studies have argued that line already. In this study, each seven-drinks-per-week increase in alcohol consumption upped a woman’s risk of developing breast cancer by 12 percent.
For people at low risk for heart disease, such as nearly everyone under the age of 35, there’s no health justification for drinking. And a steady diet of three or more drinks — or binging on four or more at a sitting — never ever gets a green light from the medical establishment.
But study after study has offered quantitative evidence that middle-age and older adults who take a regular nip — like that proverbial glass of sherry after dinner or at bedtime — suffer less heart disease and diabetes than teetotalers or people who consume more than two drinks a day.
Ironically, even the study referred to in today’s Post doesn’t clearly contradict that apparent license to drink a bit, even daily. The reason: The new study didn’t assess daily alcohol intake among the 1.28 million ladies in Britain studied as part of the Million Women Study. Participants were asked about weekly consumption, and then the epidemiologists analyzing those data divided the findings by seven. Among women drinking 7 to 14 servings of alcohol each week, the new study shows, risk of developing cancers at several sites beyond the breast does increase.
However . . . if someone averages seven drinks a week, those beverages might have been downed on weekends only — leading to consumption of three or more drinks at a sitting. That would be bad even for the heart. Also, in the long haul, for anyone’s liver.
Unless the servings per day can be teased out, the new study — which appears in the March 4 Journal of the National Cancer Institute — only offers fodder for speculation. And questions to be addressed in follow-up studies that home in on daily intakes.
Another interesting caveat mentioned in the new study, but omitted from today’s Post story: “Nondrinkers had an increased risk for several cancer sites compared with women who drank fewer than or equal to two drinks per week.” Naomi Allen and her colleagues at the University of Oxford note that this apparent protective effect of alcohol was statistically significant for cancers of the oral cavity and pharynx, esophagus, stomach, liver, lung, cervix and endometrium, and for renal (kidney) cell carcinoma.
Finally, there’s the impact of smoking. The new study was meant to identify cancers — beyond those in the breast — that might be associated with alcohol. It found small risk increases of one to four percent for leukemia, melanoma, and cancers of the lung, brain and colon. Far bigger increased risks — of 10 to 44 percent— were seen for cancers in the rectum, breast and a few other sites. But among those alcohol-linked spikes in cancer risk exceeding 12 percent (esophagus, liver, oral cavity and pharynx, and larynx), risks for all but liver cancer increased SOLELY among women who smoked. http://Louis-J-Sheehan.de
Don’t get me wrong: I’m not trying to defend drinking. I’m close to a teetotaler myself. And as the mom of a teen who was injured when a drunk classmate totaled the car she was driving (at 5 p.m. on St. Patrick’s Day), I’m fairly intolerant of drinking irresponsibly.
But let’s not scare people with incomplete data. There will be plenty of time to hammer home a call for temperance if and when stronger data emerge.Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
Saturday, January 10, 2009
tandem 7.tan.0002 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire . Diversity ruled among the first American settlers. Within a relatively short time span, at least two groups of people trekked across a land bridge from Asia to Alaska and then went their separate ways, one down the Pacific Coast and the other into the heart of North America, a new genetic study suggests.
A team led by geneticist Antonio Torroni of the University of Pavia in Italy estimates that these separate migrations into the New World occurred between 17,000 and 15,000 years ago. http://LOUIS2J2SHEEHAN.US
Even more populations with distinct genetic signatures and languages may have crossed a now-submerged strip of land, known as Beringia, that connected northeastern Asia to North America within that relatively narrow window of time, the scientists also contend in a paper published online January 8 and in the Jan. 13 Current Biology.
“Whereas some recent investigators had thought that a single major population expansion explained all mitochondrial DNA variation among Native Americans, this new report revives earlier ideas about multiple expansions into the New World,” comments molecular anthropologist Theodore Schurr of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.
Torroni’s team analyzed entire genomic sequences of mitochondrial DNA, the genetic material in cells’ energy-generating units that gets passed from mothers to children. Genetic data came from Native American groups in North, Central and South America that had already provided blood samples for study. The researchers focused on the disparate geographic distributions of two rare mitochondrial DNA haplogroups — which are characterized by a distinctive DNA sequence derived from a common maternal ancestor — that still appear in Native Americans.
“Our study presents a novel scenario of two almost concomitant paths of migration, both from Beringia about 15,000 to 17,000 years ago, that led to the dispersal of the first Americans,” Torroni says.
If that hypothesis holds up, he adds, it suggests that separate groups of New World migrants founded prehistoric Native American tool traditions independently in eastern and western North America. http://LOUIS2J2SHEEHAN.US The new findings also raise the possibility that the first Americans spoke languages from more than one language family, in Torroni’s view. Linguists have debated for decades whether late–Stone Age migrants to the Americas spoke tongues from a single language family that would have provided a foundation for many later Native American languages.
Despite the new evidence, scientific consensus on how and when the New World was settled remains elusive. http://LOUIS2J2SHEEHAN.US
“Peopling of the Americas is a hard problem,” remarks geneticist Jody Hey of Rutgers University in Piscataway, N.J. “My guess is that it will be a couple more years before we have a good picture of what happened.”
Hey takes a skeptical view of the new study. Different present-day Native American populations display signature mitochondrial DNA patterns, so it’s not surprising that rare haplogroups would be unique to separate regions, he says. But Torroni’s analysis doesn’t explicitly address whether their genetic data more closely reflect a single migration, a pair of simultaneous migrations or some other pattern of population movements, in Hey’s view.
Some climate reconstructions suggest that an ice-free corridor from Alaska into North America wasn’t passable until around 12,000 years ago, Schurr says. If so, that creates a major roadblock for Torroni’s scenario of an inland migration at least 15,000 years ago.
Investigators also differ on how best to study ancient population movements using genetic data.
Two approaches currently dominate DNA-based attempts to explain the population movements and evolution of people and other animals, Hey notes. Some researchers track today’s geographic distribution of different haplogroups and generate tree diagrams that portray patterns of ancestry, as Torroni’s group did. Other investigators, such as Hey, use statistical methods to test whether genetic data fit simple models of how populations might have been structured.
In 2005, Hey took the model-based approach to examine mitochondrial DNA from northeastern Asians and Native Americans. He concluded that a single group of New World settlers, consisting of perhaps 70 fertile adults, crossed Beringia no more than 14,000 years ago (SN: 5/28/05, p. 339).
In this study, Torroni and his colleagues got different results by searching a large genetic database for mitochondrial DNA. The team found 55 unrelated individuals who displayed either of two rare Native American haplogroups, called D4h3 and X2a, identifying 44 instances of haplogroup D4h3 and 11 instances of haplogroup X2a.
Further analyses indicated that the D4h3 haplogroup spread into the Americas along the Pacific Coast, rapidly reaching the southern tip of South America. Estimated ages of D4h3 sequences from ChiIe are nearly as old as the estimated time of the Beringia crossing.
In contrast, haplogroup X2a crossed Beringia and spread through an ice-free corridor in what’s now western Canada, eventually clustering in the Great Lakes area, the new study suggests.
Examination of an additional 276 mitochondrial DNA sequences, all from unrelated people, representing the six haplogroups common in Native Americans indicated that those genetic types entered the Americas at about the same time as the two rare haplogroups did.
“Within a rather short period of time, there may have been several entries into the Americas from a dynamically changing Beringian source,” Torroni says.
Extensive mitochondrial DNA data have yet to be obtained for many Native American populations, Schurr cautions. Hence, precise age estimates don’t exist yet for the major New World haplogroups and their sub-branches. Such estimates are needed to check the veracity of competing scenarios of ancient migration to the Americas, including Torroni’s.
Such scenarios also include recent mitochondrial DNA studies that argued for a single founding group of New World migrants. One research team concluded that northeastern Asians reached Beringia as early as 40,000 years ago but had to wait for ice sheets to melt before entering the Americas at least 20,000 years later (SN: 2/16/08, p. 102).
A separate investigation, published online September 17 in PLoS ONE, concluded that migrants from northeastern Asia stayed in Beringia only a few thousand years before crossing into the New World about 16,000 years ago.
“The more we learn about this story, the more we realize that there is much more to understand about this segment of human history and migration,” Schurr says. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire.
Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire . Diversity ruled among the first American settlers. Within a relatively short time span, at least two groups of people trekked across a land bridge from Asia to Alaska and then went their separate ways, one down the Pacific Coast and the other into the heart of North America, a new genetic study suggests.
A team led by geneticist Antonio Torroni of the University of Pavia in Italy estimates that these separate migrations into the New World occurred between 17,000 and 15,000 years ago. http://LOUIS2J2SHEEHAN.US
Even more populations with distinct genetic signatures and languages may have crossed a now-submerged strip of land, known as Beringia, that connected northeastern Asia to North America within that relatively narrow window of time, the scientists also contend in a paper published online January 8 and in the Jan. 13 Current Biology.
“Whereas some recent investigators had thought that a single major population expansion explained all mitochondrial DNA variation among Native Americans, this new report revives earlier ideas about multiple expansions into the New World,” comments molecular anthropologist Theodore Schurr of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.
Torroni’s team analyzed entire genomic sequences of mitochondrial DNA, the genetic material in cells’ energy-generating units that gets passed from mothers to children. Genetic data came from Native American groups in North, Central and South America that had already provided blood samples for study. The researchers focused on the disparate geographic distributions of two rare mitochondrial DNA haplogroups — which are characterized by a distinctive DNA sequence derived from a common maternal ancestor — that still appear in Native Americans.
“Our study presents a novel scenario of two almost concomitant paths of migration, both from Beringia about 15,000 to 17,000 years ago, that led to the dispersal of the first Americans,” Torroni says.
If that hypothesis holds up, he adds, it suggests that separate groups of New World migrants founded prehistoric Native American tool traditions independently in eastern and western North America. http://LOUIS2J2SHEEHAN.US The new findings also raise the possibility that the first Americans spoke languages from more than one language family, in Torroni’s view. Linguists have debated for decades whether late–Stone Age migrants to the Americas spoke tongues from a single language family that would have provided a foundation for many later Native American languages.
Despite the new evidence, scientific consensus on how and when the New World was settled remains elusive. http://LOUIS2J2SHEEHAN.US
“Peopling of the Americas is a hard problem,” remarks geneticist Jody Hey of Rutgers University in Piscataway, N.J. “My guess is that it will be a couple more years before we have a good picture of what happened.”
Hey takes a skeptical view of the new study. Different present-day Native American populations display signature mitochondrial DNA patterns, so it’s not surprising that rare haplogroups would be unique to separate regions, he says. But Torroni’s analysis doesn’t explicitly address whether their genetic data more closely reflect a single migration, a pair of simultaneous migrations or some other pattern of population movements, in Hey’s view.
Some climate reconstructions suggest that an ice-free corridor from Alaska into North America wasn’t passable until around 12,000 years ago, Schurr says. If so, that creates a major roadblock for Torroni’s scenario of an inland migration at least 15,000 years ago.
Investigators also differ on how best to study ancient population movements using genetic data.
Two approaches currently dominate DNA-based attempts to explain the population movements and evolution of people and other animals, Hey notes. Some researchers track today’s geographic distribution of different haplogroups and generate tree diagrams that portray patterns of ancestry, as Torroni’s group did. Other investigators, such as Hey, use statistical methods to test whether genetic data fit simple models of how populations might have been structured.
In 2005, Hey took the model-based approach to examine mitochondrial DNA from northeastern Asians and Native Americans. He concluded that a single group of New World settlers, consisting of perhaps 70 fertile adults, crossed Beringia no more than 14,000 years ago (SN: 5/28/05, p. 339).
In this study, Torroni and his colleagues got different results by searching a large genetic database for mitochondrial DNA. The team found 55 unrelated individuals who displayed either of two rare Native American haplogroups, called D4h3 and X2a, identifying 44 instances of haplogroup D4h3 and 11 instances of haplogroup X2a.
Further analyses indicated that the D4h3 haplogroup spread into the Americas along the Pacific Coast, rapidly reaching the southern tip of South America. Estimated ages of D4h3 sequences from ChiIe are nearly as old as the estimated time of the Beringia crossing.
In contrast, haplogroup X2a crossed Beringia and spread through an ice-free corridor in what’s now western Canada, eventually clustering in the Great Lakes area, the new study suggests.
Examination of an additional 276 mitochondrial DNA sequences, all from unrelated people, representing the six haplogroups common in Native Americans indicated that those genetic types entered the Americas at about the same time as the two rare haplogroups did.
“Within a rather short period of time, there may have been several entries into the Americas from a dynamically changing Beringian source,” Torroni says.
Extensive mitochondrial DNA data have yet to be obtained for many Native American populations, Schurr cautions. Hence, precise age estimates don’t exist yet for the major New World haplogroups and their sub-branches. Such estimates are needed to check the veracity of competing scenarios of ancient migration to the Americas, including Torroni’s.
Such scenarios also include recent mitochondrial DNA studies that argued for a single founding group of New World migrants. One research team concluded that northeastern Asians reached Beringia as early as 40,000 years ago but had to wait for ice sheets to melt before entering the Americas at least 20,000 years later (SN: 2/16/08, p. 102).
A separate investigation, published online September 17 in PLoS ONE, concluded that migrants from northeastern Asia stayed in Beringia only a few thousand years before crossing into the New World about 16,000 years ago.
“The more we learn about this story, the more we realize that there is much more to understand about this segment of human history and migration,” Schurr says. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire.
Monday, January 5, 2009
blass 4.bla.0 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire . IN early December 1999, the mood in the Bill Blass showroom at 550 Seventh Avenue was as gray as the film of dust on a potted plant that sat in the corner and always seemed to be dying. http://blog.360.yahoo.com/blog-jmbPCHg9dLPh1gHoZxLG.GpS
Blass, arguably the most famous of all the American designers, had shown his farewell collection that September and sold the company a few weeks later. He had been ill for some time, living with throat cancer for years — he was then 77 — and he didn’t seem much inclined to argue with the new owners about who would fill his oversize shoes. They wanted a name. So the future of Blass’s longtime assistants was far from certain. Laura Montalban, one of two top designers, left to work for Oscar de la Renta; Blass called the other, Craig Natiello, who had been with him for a decade, into his office.http://web.mac.com/lousheehan
“You’re not going to like the people who bought the company,” Blass said. He made a phone call, then told Mr. Natiello, who recalled the conversation in a recent interview, that there was a job waiting for him at Halston. “Here is your out. Do you want it?”
Mr. Natiello was reminded of this moment the other day when he bumped into Adolfo Sardina, the famous Adolfo, at a deli near his apartment on the Upper East Side. In 1962, Blass had given Adolfo the $10,000 he needed to start his own millinery collection, so they both remembered what he did for them and for fashion; and they, like the remnants of a generation of society women, couldn’t quite believe the Bill Blass legacy was ending in such an ignoble way. On Friday, the last sewers, patternmakers and assistants were laid off without severance as the company, after years of turmoil and a revolving door of designers, began to dismantle. NexCen Brands, its parent company, was discontinuing the collection, even as it was still trying to sell the brand.
“I want to go in there and throttle their necks!” Mr. Natiello said.
Much as Chanel and Dior and YSL carried on as luxury concerns well after the deaths of their namesakes, no American label seemed better poised to persevere in the absence of its founder than Bill Blass did. Blass, when he bought out his former partners in Maurice Rentner in 1970 to form Bill Blass Ltd., changed things for designers on Seventh Avenue, who used to toil in the relative obscurity of its backrooms. By the sheer force of his talent and wit — upon his death in 2002, he was remembered as the Noël Coward of fashion — he brought glamour to the job. He dressed and drank and dined with Nan Kempner, Pat Buckley and Brooke Astor, and, by the 1990s, he was so famous that his company had more than 40 licenses with annual sales of $500 million of Bill Blass products.
There is no shortage of explanations for the label’s demise. There was an aging clientele, a management that seemed to take a freewheeling approach to the brand and its failure to find a successor who could match the Blass persona. That the problems were endemic became evident last spring, when NexCen said it faced a severe cash shortage. Peter Som, the latest designer, left in October and was not replaced, while the company told retailers it would not be taking orders for a spring collection. Ultimately, NexCen blamed the economic climate.
“It is the passing of a brand that held a lot of meaning for not only me but for many people in the fashion industry,” Mr. Som said last week in an e-mail message. “We have truly lost a legacy.”
THE REAL TROUBLE at Bill Blass started the moment Blass himself walked out the door without an heir apparent.
“It was an enormous question mark that hung over all of us,” said John Lindsey, who was the director of sales at Bill Blass for 12 years.
That fall, Blass had retreated to his home near New Preston, Conn., but he kept a sly eye on what was happening at the company. The new owners, who acquired the business through a bond deal that placed a premium on the future value of the trademark, were Michael Groveman, who had been the chief financial officer at Bill Blass for 10 years, and Haresh T. Tharani, who ran its largest licensee.
They began to look for a successor, interviewing designers like Randolph Duke, James Purcell and Steven Slowik. There was huge interest in the position, and Mr. Groveman seemed to recognize the leverage he had when negotiating with designers.
“For three hours, he said, ‘I’m going to make you the designer here,’ ” Mr. Purcell recalled. “I said, ‘I’m not doing anything unless I have a contract.’ He said, ‘Do you want to be famous or don’t you?’ ”
In February 2000, Mr. Slowik, who had worked for Ferragamo and was living in Paris, took the job — without a contract.
Handsome, unassuming, tasteful, Midwestern (from Detroit), he had good credentials. Blass, a Hoosier, liked him right away.
“The first thing he asked me was my sign,” Mr. Slowik said. Like Blass (and his “dear friends” Nancy Reagan and Lynn Wyatt), he is a Cancer. That September, Mr. Slowik had his first big show. The pressure, he said, was tremendous. The clothes were less structured, more sparkly, less Blass. And the reviews were scathing. One critic called it the “My Little Pony” collection, a reference to a finale dress that had a cartoonish rainbow ribbon splashed across one side, as if it were magic.
“That was an absolute disaster,” Mr. Lindsey said. “All I remember was standing there, watching the whole front row — our clientele — with their hands over their ears as Madonna blasted on the speakers, and then they chose to go out a different door to avoid saying anything to me, because they couldn’t think of anything nice to say. That was the longest 11 minutes of my career.”
Sales were dismal, he said. In one season, the collection business, which had sold $25 million in a good year, dropped to about $5 million. Mr. Slowik carried on and designed a fall collection, but in January 2001, just weeks before he was to show it, he was dismissed. Lars Nilsson, his assistant, became the head designer.
“It certainly wasn’t fun,” Mr. Slowik said. “One of the things I learned from this situation: if people aren’t willing to give you a contract, there’s a problem.”
Mr. Groveman, who left the company in July, would not discuss hiring decisions. He said he never had a contract when he worked for Blass, either.
“I don’t have any regrets about what happened,” he said. “It’s never easy replacing the namesake designer.”
THE NIGHT OF FEB. 10, 2003, Mr. Nilsson, a designer from Sweden who had trained at Dior and Lacroix, was preparing the fall collection, his fifth at the house. Mr. Nilsson had the enthusiastic endorsement of the editors of Vogue, but his clothes weren’t selling. André Leon Talley, the magazine’s editor at large, was in the showroom to offer guidance. Tensions had been building between Mr. Nilsson and management, with reports of screaming matches over creative control. Mr. Nilsson knew his job was on the line.
What he did not know was that seven floors below, another collection was being designed simultaneously in the Blass executive offices by Yvonne Miller, who had been a fit model and the public relations director for Blass. She knew the Blass designs better than anyone and always thought she should have been asked to replace him.
Describing the events last week, Ms. Miller said Mr. Groveman had asked her to have a ghost collection ready for the stores in the event Mr. Nilsson’s line failed.
“I didn’t want to get fired,” she said. “And I’m the only one who can design Blass.”
Mr. Nilsson showed his collection on Feb. 11. Its Scandinavian influences were sometimes absolutely beautiful, like a white-on-white embroidered anorak that was breathtaking. But sometimes they were not. On Feb. 12, as the reviews came in, mostly negative, and he and his assistant were about to leave for Paris to buy fabrics for the next season, Mr. Groveman fired him.
It was a scandal that consumed the fashion industry and enraged the Vogue editors. Mr. Talley complained at the time that Mr. Nilsson “couldn’t even do an embroidery unless it was approved.” But Ms. Miller and other Blass executives said Mr. Nilsson had been unreasonable and had refused to rein in his spending on lavish fabrics, causing the company to lose money.
“Management took it on the chin, kind of unfairly,” Mr. Lindsey said. “It looked very heavy-handed, but they didn’t want to turn him loose again.”
The problem was how it was handled, said Michael Vollbracht, who replaced Mr. Nilsson the next month: “When they fired Lars Nilsson, they fired Anna Wintour. And that you do not do.”
MR. VOLLBRACHT, who worked with Blass on a retrospective book that was published in 2002, speaks in the same gravel tone tinged with grouchiness as the late designer. He had been on Seventh Avenue for decades before taking a 15-year hiatus to work as an artist. But no matter how much the critics begged him to design something modern, he was determined to revisit the Blass of old. He brought back Karen Bjornson, Halston’s house model in the 1980s, as his muse.
“Quite honestly, I got the formula of Bill Blass,” he said. “It wasn’t revolutionary design.”
Over the next four years, the press dried up, but the clients came back. Sales of the collection climbed to about $12 million, and new licenses were signed for shoes, fur and a home collection. But the collection was still losing money, about $2 million a year, because of the production costs and runway shows. In December 2006, Mr. Groveman and Mr. Tharani sold the Bill Blass corporation to NexCen, a conglomerate that also owned the Athlete’s Foot and mall stores like Great American Cookies, for $54.6 million, but Mr. Groveman retained the collection business.
Things seemed to calm down. There was even a sense of nostalgic elegance in the collections, with Pat Cleveland vamping on Mr. Vollbracht’s runway. Then, in May 2007, he quit. NexCen, he said, wanted him to serve as a mentor to the younger designers he had hired, which made him feel a bit like Margo Channing.
“I was going to be the coach of this young, effervescent design team that’s going to win back Vogue magazine,” Mr. Vollbracht said. “I had put in place a staff that was becoming more powerful than I was, and I learned long ago to leave before they ask you to leave.”
IN JULY 2007, Mr. Som became the fourth designer to take over the collection. As a design student, he had interned with Blass, and his signature collections were often remarked upon as Blass-like. He was Vogue-approved.
His first collection, shown in February of this year, looked, well, about the same. The big stores were encouraged.
But in a matter of months, everything fell apart. Without warning, NexCen announced in May that there was “substantial doubt” that it would remain in business and that its accounting was in question. At Blass, fabric bills went unpaid, and in July Mr. Groveman told NexCen he would rather shutter the line than sink any more money into it. NexCen, hoping to sell the label, bought the Groveman stake for about $425,000 in net liabilities and persuaded Mr. Som to stay on to entice a buyer. Now, five months later, with no deal in place, NexCen has pulled the plug.
“To see it go down so quickly, I’m saddened,” Mr. Groveman said. “It’s the end of a great American brand.”
For the Bill Blass collection to fail in such an ugly way strikes many of those involved in the company as an especially cruel fate for a designer who made the profession seem so dazzling. If Blass were around to see what has become of his house today, he might think it was the 1950s, when, as Charles Gandee, a onetime editor at Vogue and Talk, wrote, designers “were regarded as slightly tedious, slightly embarrassing necessities.”
When anyone asked Blass what he did, he’d simply say, “I’m in advertising.” Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire.
Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire . IN early December 1999, the mood in the Bill Blass showroom at 550 Seventh Avenue was as gray as the film of dust on a potted plant that sat in the corner and always seemed to be dying. http://blog.360.yahoo.com/blog-jmbPCHg9dLPh1gHoZxLG.GpS
Blass, arguably the most famous of all the American designers, had shown his farewell collection that September and sold the company a few weeks later. He had been ill for some time, living with throat cancer for years — he was then 77 — and he didn’t seem much inclined to argue with the new owners about who would fill his oversize shoes. They wanted a name. So the future of Blass’s longtime assistants was far from certain. Laura Montalban, one of two top designers, left to work for Oscar de la Renta; Blass called the other, Craig Natiello, who had been with him for a decade, into his office.http://web.mac.com/lousheehan
“You’re not going to like the people who bought the company,” Blass said. He made a phone call, then told Mr. Natiello, who recalled the conversation in a recent interview, that there was a job waiting for him at Halston. “Here is your out. Do you want it?”
Mr. Natiello was reminded of this moment the other day when he bumped into Adolfo Sardina, the famous Adolfo, at a deli near his apartment on the Upper East Side. In 1962, Blass had given Adolfo the $10,000 he needed to start his own millinery collection, so they both remembered what he did for them and for fashion; and they, like the remnants of a generation of society women, couldn’t quite believe the Bill Blass legacy was ending in such an ignoble way. On Friday, the last sewers, patternmakers and assistants were laid off without severance as the company, after years of turmoil and a revolving door of designers, began to dismantle. NexCen Brands, its parent company, was discontinuing the collection, even as it was still trying to sell the brand.
“I want to go in there and throttle their necks!” Mr. Natiello said.
Much as Chanel and Dior and YSL carried on as luxury concerns well after the deaths of their namesakes, no American label seemed better poised to persevere in the absence of its founder than Bill Blass did. Blass, when he bought out his former partners in Maurice Rentner in 1970 to form Bill Blass Ltd., changed things for designers on Seventh Avenue, who used to toil in the relative obscurity of its backrooms. By the sheer force of his talent and wit — upon his death in 2002, he was remembered as the Noël Coward of fashion — he brought glamour to the job. He dressed and drank and dined with Nan Kempner, Pat Buckley and Brooke Astor, and, by the 1990s, he was so famous that his company had more than 40 licenses with annual sales of $500 million of Bill Blass products.
There is no shortage of explanations for the label’s demise. There was an aging clientele, a management that seemed to take a freewheeling approach to the brand and its failure to find a successor who could match the Blass persona. That the problems were endemic became evident last spring, when NexCen said it faced a severe cash shortage. Peter Som, the latest designer, left in October and was not replaced, while the company told retailers it would not be taking orders for a spring collection. Ultimately, NexCen blamed the economic climate.
“It is the passing of a brand that held a lot of meaning for not only me but for many people in the fashion industry,” Mr. Som said last week in an e-mail message. “We have truly lost a legacy.”
THE REAL TROUBLE at Bill Blass started the moment Blass himself walked out the door without an heir apparent.
“It was an enormous question mark that hung over all of us,” said John Lindsey, who was the director of sales at Bill Blass for 12 years.
That fall, Blass had retreated to his home near New Preston, Conn., but he kept a sly eye on what was happening at the company. The new owners, who acquired the business through a bond deal that placed a premium on the future value of the trademark, were Michael Groveman, who had been the chief financial officer at Bill Blass for 10 years, and Haresh T. Tharani, who ran its largest licensee.
They began to look for a successor, interviewing designers like Randolph Duke, James Purcell and Steven Slowik. There was huge interest in the position, and Mr. Groveman seemed to recognize the leverage he had when negotiating with designers.
“For three hours, he said, ‘I’m going to make you the designer here,’ ” Mr. Purcell recalled. “I said, ‘I’m not doing anything unless I have a contract.’ He said, ‘Do you want to be famous or don’t you?’ ”
In February 2000, Mr. Slowik, who had worked for Ferragamo and was living in Paris, took the job — without a contract.
Handsome, unassuming, tasteful, Midwestern (from Detroit), he had good credentials. Blass, a Hoosier, liked him right away.
“The first thing he asked me was my sign,” Mr. Slowik said. Like Blass (and his “dear friends” Nancy Reagan and Lynn Wyatt), he is a Cancer. That September, Mr. Slowik had his first big show. The pressure, he said, was tremendous. The clothes were less structured, more sparkly, less Blass. And the reviews were scathing. One critic called it the “My Little Pony” collection, a reference to a finale dress that had a cartoonish rainbow ribbon splashed across one side, as if it were magic.
“That was an absolute disaster,” Mr. Lindsey said. “All I remember was standing there, watching the whole front row — our clientele — with their hands over their ears as Madonna blasted on the speakers, and then they chose to go out a different door to avoid saying anything to me, because they couldn’t think of anything nice to say. That was the longest 11 minutes of my career.”
Sales were dismal, he said. In one season, the collection business, which had sold $25 million in a good year, dropped to about $5 million. Mr. Slowik carried on and designed a fall collection, but in January 2001, just weeks before he was to show it, he was dismissed. Lars Nilsson, his assistant, became the head designer.
“It certainly wasn’t fun,” Mr. Slowik said. “One of the things I learned from this situation: if people aren’t willing to give you a contract, there’s a problem.”
Mr. Groveman, who left the company in July, would not discuss hiring decisions. He said he never had a contract when he worked for Blass, either.
“I don’t have any regrets about what happened,” he said. “It’s never easy replacing the namesake designer.”
THE NIGHT OF FEB. 10, 2003, Mr. Nilsson, a designer from Sweden who had trained at Dior and Lacroix, was preparing the fall collection, his fifth at the house. Mr. Nilsson had the enthusiastic endorsement of the editors of Vogue, but his clothes weren’t selling. André Leon Talley, the magazine’s editor at large, was in the showroom to offer guidance. Tensions had been building between Mr. Nilsson and management, with reports of screaming matches over creative control. Mr. Nilsson knew his job was on the line.
What he did not know was that seven floors below, another collection was being designed simultaneously in the Blass executive offices by Yvonne Miller, who had been a fit model and the public relations director for Blass. She knew the Blass designs better than anyone and always thought she should have been asked to replace him.
Describing the events last week, Ms. Miller said Mr. Groveman had asked her to have a ghost collection ready for the stores in the event Mr. Nilsson’s line failed.
“I didn’t want to get fired,” she said. “And I’m the only one who can design Blass.”
Mr. Nilsson showed his collection on Feb. 11. Its Scandinavian influences were sometimes absolutely beautiful, like a white-on-white embroidered anorak that was breathtaking. But sometimes they were not. On Feb. 12, as the reviews came in, mostly negative, and he and his assistant were about to leave for Paris to buy fabrics for the next season, Mr. Groveman fired him.
It was a scandal that consumed the fashion industry and enraged the Vogue editors. Mr. Talley complained at the time that Mr. Nilsson “couldn’t even do an embroidery unless it was approved.” But Ms. Miller and other Blass executives said Mr. Nilsson had been unreasonable and had refused to rein in his spending on lavish fabrics, causing the company to lose money.
“Management took it on the chin, kind of unfairly,” Mr. Lindsey said. “It looked very heavy-handed, but they didn’t want to turn him loose again.”
The problem was how it was handled, said Michael Vollbracht, who replaced Mr. Nilsson the next month: “When they fired Lars Nilsson, they fired Anna Wintour. And that you do not do.”
MR. VOLLBRACHT, who worked with Blass on a retrospective book that was published in 2002, speaks in the same gravel tone tinged with grouchiness as the late designer. He had been on Seventh Avenue for decades before taking a 15-year hiatus to work as an artist. But no matter how much the critics begged him to design something modern, he was determined to revisit the Blass of old. He brought back Karen Bjornson, Halston’s house model in the 1980s, as his muse.
“Quite honestly, I got the formula of Bill Blass,” he said. “It wasn’t revolutionary design.”
Over the next four years, the press dried up, but the clients came back. Sales of the collection climbed to about $12 million, and new licenses were signed for shoes, fur and a home collection. But the collection was still losing money, about $2 million a year, because of the production costs and runway shows. In December 2006, Mr. Groveman and Mr. Tharani sold the Bill Blass corporation to NexCen, a conglomerate that also owned the Athlete’s Foot and mall stores like Great American Cookies, for $54.6 million, but Mr. Groveman retained the collection business.
Things seemed to calm down. There was even a sense of nostalgic elegance in the collections, with Pat Cleveland vamping on Mr. Vollbracht’s runway. Then, in May 2007, he quit. NexCen, he said, wanted him to serve as a mentor to the younger designers he had hired, which made him feel a bit like Margo Channing.
“I was going to be the coach of this young, effervescent design team that’s going to win back Vogue magazine,” Mr. Vollbracht said. “I had put in place a staff that was becoming more powerful than I was, and I learned long ago to leave before they ask you to leave.”
IN JULY 2007, Mr. Som became the fourth designer to take over the collection. As a design student, he had interned with Blass, and his signature collections were often remarked upon as Blass-like. He was Vogue-approved.
His first collection, shown in February of this year, looked, well, about the same. The big stores were encouraged.
But in a matter of months, everything fell apart. Without warning, NexCen announced in May that there was “substantial doubt” that it would remain in business and that its accounting was in question. At Blass, fabric bills went unpaid, and in July Mr. Groveman told NexCen he would rather shutter the line than sink any more money into it. NexCen, hoping to sell the label, bought the Groveman stake for about $425,000 in net liabilities and persuaded Mr. Som to stay on to entice a buyer. Now, five months later, with no deal in place, NexCen has pulled the plug.
“To see it go down so quickly, I’m saddened,” Mr. Groveman said. “It’s the end of a great American brand.”
For the Bill Blass collection to fail in such an ugly way strikes many of those involved in the company as an especially cruel fate for a designer who made the profession seem so dazzling. If Blass were around to see what has become of his house today, he might think it was the 1950s, when, as Charles Gandee, a onetime editor at Vogue and Talk, wrote, designers “were regarded as slightly tedious, slightly embarrassing necessities.”
When anyone asked Blass what he did, he’d simply say, “I’m in advertising.” Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire.
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