Starbucks Management Strategy Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1500 words

Starbucks Management Strategy - Essay Example However, the global financial crisis slowed down the economy; many similar competitors entered the market and downplayed Starbucks by offering low priced, high quality coffee. Since Starbucks’s establishment this was the first time that its growth slowed down and in 2007, its stock value dropped down by almost 50 %. In 2008, its net revenue growth saw a decline of 11% compared to the previous years. Customer/ target audience of Starbucks: Starbucks targets a diverse audience. The fragments of target audience are different based on products that Starbucks provides. However, Starbuck’s overall target audience can be defined as men and women whose age is between 18 to 60 years and who consume coffee or enjoy special beverages that are offered by Starbucks. Starbucks appeals to these target age groups through contemporary and clean designs that are presented in a consistent way in its product and package designs, interior of the store and advertising. For young adults whose age is between18 and 24, Starbucks positions itself as a place where college students can study, write, read and hang out with others. This target market tends to grow by 4.6% every year. The targeted age group for Starbucks is 24- 60 years which includes people living in urban areas who have professional careers with relatively higher incomes and are socially responsive individuals who care about sustainability and environment. This target audience grows at a rate of 3 percent annually. Both these age groups consider customer service and experience at the retail store with the brand as important. The company’s offerings are targeted relatively to higher income individuals who are people who go to Tim Horton’s or McDonalds. The journey (The process and how... This essay stresses that Starbucks’ reward program operates by giving a customer a Starbucks gift card so that he can register it online and reload the money to continue using it after he finishes the amount of money that comes preloaded in the gift card. After he registers card, he gets a star on every transaction and after gaining 5 stars he gets to the green level. Reaching the green level gives certain advantages to the customer. When a customer collects 30 stars, a Starbucks gold card is made which has engraved on it the cardholder’s name. After obtaining the gold card, with every 15 stars the customers gets a free beverage coupon. This report makes a conclusion that this is a good idea to reward customers. Also, providing a personalized slick design of the Starbucks gold card made its customers feel more attached to the company. Starbucks also created iPhone apps called â€Å"My Starbucks†, which allows customers to register their card number on the phone and which can be used to make payments when customers forget to bring their card to the store. Social responsibility is being implemented both outside and inside the company’s stores. Starbucks started to use reusable cups and cup holders with environmental friendly materials as much as possible. Also, they pushed themselves hard to mark their role in supporting fair trade coffee and markets. The company’s clean packaging of coffee beans also gives a good impression to the customers.

Orthodox Christianity Essay Example for Free

Orthodox Christianity Essay For centuries, the two major Christian sects of Orthodox Christianity and Roman Catholicism have been a center of comparison because of the resemblance in both religions’ beliefs and practices. But in my recent visit to the Cathedral of Christ the Savior in Miami, I have discovered the stark contrasts to what popular notions hold. Particularly, what befell upon me was a revelation that Orthodox Catholicism differs from Roman Catholicism and other conventional Christian churches as far as relevant doctrines, laws, standards for morality, organizational leadership, church services, and religious ceremonies are concerned. While Orthodox Christianity is generally being compared as similar to Roman Catholicism, its basic and complex theologies both concur to and diverge from that of the Roman Catholic faith. Orthodox Christians generally regard their religious system as a direct continuance of Christ’s ministry; they believe that their very sect is part of a long continuing tradition, otherwise called the Holy Tradition, which started during the first century and remained pure and intact despite the drastic changes that occurred across the world over the centuries (Ware 7-8). Orthodox Christian belief likewise holds that the Bible is the life giving tome of the church because it contains and uncovers the will of God, reveals the relationship between God and the early Israelites, narrates the events that happened during the ministry of Jesus, as well as Christ’s foundation of the first church (Ware 194-196). Apart from the sacred readable contents of the Bible, Christian Orthodoxy also considers it as the sole living witness to the centuries old tradition the sect continues to practice. And with blessing from the early church leaders with guidance from the Holy Spirit, the books of the Bible were expressed as the apostles’ way of handing down the tradition from one generation to another. Christian Orthodoxy merits the Nicene Creed with the highest of regard and considers it as a basis of its beliefs (Ware 202). As such, in its belief in the nature of God, Orthodox Christianity employs a Trinitarian concept or one God with three different personas: The Father, The Son, and The Holy Spirit. The Orthodox doctrine furthers that God is an omnipotent being that constitutes no physical form, and is therefore a transcendent being (Ware 210-211). A Distinct Orthodox Catholic belief is in the concept that man is an image and likeness of God. This belief is stressed in extreme senses that Orthodox Christianity’s adherents consider humankind’s resemblance to God as a means of carrying the icon of God within the self (Benz 18). Because of the central idea that man is the image and likeness of God, Orthodox Catholicism’s notion of the original sin differs from most Christian traditions in such a way that the sin committed by Adam and Eve is not morally and spiritually inherited by humans. Instead, original sin is the separation from God’s grace and acquisition of physical and spiritual mortality (Benz 19). And humankind’s separation from God is an action out of free will, particularly when Adam and Eve chose to listen to the serpent’s word and their give in to their urge. Furthermore, Christian Orthodox belief suggests that the fall of man stained all of God’s creation with sin, and corruption while implying that Adam and Eve’s eviction from paradise is God’s way of avoiding man’s sin, wickedness, and corruption from lasting endlessly (Ware 218-219). The Orthodox Christians’ general concept of sin and corruption meanwhile is milder than any other Christian sect or any other religious system for that matter. Sin, as Orthodox Christian doctrine holds, encompasses a contamination, deformation, and infliction of damage on God’s image. However despite sin’s vile nature and humanity’s vulnerability to it, man remains as noble beings because of the simple fact that humans are created in the image of God (Benz 19). As much as the beliefs and practices have renewed my perspective of Orthodox Catholicism, the church service I became part of was a very overwhelming experience. I thought my religion was already rich in traditions and customs, but what I saw and experienced in the ceremony brought my knowledge of Orthodox Christianity to new heights as I have seen and distinguished the difference of the ceremony from conventional Christian sects. Before going to the church, I thought to myself that it is simply going to be a typical service in a Christian place of worship similar to the ones documented in Christian television networks. However, set my eyes on the church, the distinctive style of the structure surprised me as I have observed a slight difference in the church’s architecture. I expected the church to have a dome-shaped top which is a recognizable design of most Christian churches. Except for the cross on the tip of the church’s roof, the external appearance of the church resembles a mosque. The color scheme, the golden plates on the roof all appear to me as elements of Islamic design. As I entered the church, I have received a warm welcome from the church’s senior warden Gary Popovich. He mentioned that every part of the cathedral was a sanctuary for everyone, even to non-orthodox Christians. As Mr. Popovich gave me a mini tour of the church, the interiors further made me notice the distinction of Orthodox Church structures from that of most Roman Catholic structures. While both churches are known to have long, wide aisles leading to the altar, Cathedral of Christ the Savior’s hallway leading to the altar was a little compact despite the conventionality of its length. However, the lobby area of the church, or the narthex as it is properly called, was similar to lobbies of other churches in such a way that it has a board which posts announcements of the church’s activities for the week. Mr. Popovich however added that apart from the usual acknowledging of guests, the narthex is also significant in that tables are set up there during Easter to bless food that would be taken home by adherents after days of fasting and abstinence in the Lenten season. And in days of divine service and obligation, candles and offerings are sold in the narthex. As I was to be part of the Eastern Orthodox Communion for a day, Mr. Popovich toured me to the inner areas of the church. We then proceeded to the main area of the church, which, Mr. Popovich regarded as the nave. This area is where the people stay during divine services, and is thus considered sacred ground. Along the walls and the ceiling of the nave of the cathedral, I noticed numerous portraits of individuals considered holy by Orthodox Catholics including a large portrait of Christ in the ceiling. Mr. Popovich was about to give me a guided tour of what he calls an iconostasis or the room where all of the religious figures and paintings were placed, when he told me to be prepared because the service was about to start. So I proceeded to the nave to participate in the upcoming service. Although I did not clarify if there was any appropriate attire for adherents, I wore the conventional clothing reserved for church attendance. As the service started, everyone gathered in the nave of the cathedral. I first noticed that no one among the people in attendance was wearing casual clothing. The people around me had conservative clothing; the males wore formal attire with collared shirts and sleeves with cuffs. The females were all wearing mid-length and long skirts as well as blouses with sleeves. In addition, most of the women, though not all of them, sported head scarves during the service. Furthermore, apart from the clothing, I also noticed the cathedral’s segregation scheme. All the males were on the right hand side of the nave, while the females were on the right wing of the nave. While I was fascinated by the formality of the people in the church, I never asked them the relevance of wearing such clothing. I simply thought that the sanctity of their church together with the value they uphold for their tradition includes dressing well during services. Mr. Popovich informed me prior to the service that what I am going to be part of was the evening services otherwise the Vespers. I recall senior warden Popovich previously discussed that the Vespers begins at 9 in the evening, an hour which was actually based on the exact time of Christ’s death: 3:00 pm or the 9th hour in antiquated time. The service starts with the priest’s ceremonial blessing and continued with the usual beginnings, which, is basically a sequence of prayers that include the trisagion or the common hymn in almost every Orthodox liturgical service (Perry Melling 190). The service then proceeded with the recital of the Lord’s Prayer before the actual scripture reading of psalms took place. The reader read about three psalms before reciting another short hymn called the troparion (Perry Melling 37). Another hymn called the theotokion followed the troparion, the hymn was sung in honor of the mother of God. Particularly, the hymn honors the virgin mother of God for the incarnation of Christ through her. The singing of the hymn also coincided with the entrance of the clergy; the clergy coming from the Holy Doors signified that the creation of the world also marks man’s selection to live in paradise (Perry Melling 295). As the service was progressing, I took a small window of time to look around and observe what was happening around me. In doing so, I noticed that most people get distracted at what they do knowing that an unfamiliar person is present to witness what they do, but I felt their utmost dedication to their obligations to God because my very presence did not even cause them to be distracted at what they do. Similarly, as much as it was a rare occasion for me to be part of their usual service, they must have felt that it was also a rare occasion to have an outsider among them, yet their dedication remained pure and untainted. A series of readings soon followed, after the clergy’s entrance, another series of hymns, the Phos Hilaron and the Prokeimenon marked a transition of the service to epistle reading. During the epistle reading, the adherents hear the words of God for enlightenment. For the first part, the reader read a passage from the Bible’s Old Testament. At the time, the reading was taken from the book of Elijah which announced what message God’s promised messiah would bring. After the reading of the scriptures, the Vespers was concluded by the Litany of Fervent Supplication and the final blessing of the presiding clergy. During the Litany of Fervent Supplication, the adherents pray that God may grant all Christians mercy. The litany is a responsorial prayer wherein the reader asks for mercy in every aspect and the people respond with the words â€Å"Grant it, O Lord. † After the final blessing has been given, the crowds of people are dismissed accordingly. Based on what I have seen in the liturgical service I attended, Orthodox Catholicism is a religion filled with tradition, symbolisms and customary ceremonies. But true service to God is not really measured by the traditions, the customs, and other rituals of sacrifice and praise; the true essence of serving God lies in a person’s obedient and relentless faith. Ultimately, the sacrifices and the customs do not matter if a person has little or weak faith. Works Cited Benz, Ernst. â€Å"The Eastern Orthodox Church: Its Thought and Life† New Jersey: Aldine Transaction, 2008 Parry, Ken David Melling. â€Å"The Blackwell Dictionary of Eastern Christianity† Malden, MA. : Blackwell Publishing, 1999. Ware, Timothy. â€Å"The Orthodox Church: New Edition†. New York: Penguin Books, 1997

The Legalization of Drugs: Just Say No Essay -- Con-Legalization of Dr

  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  The idea of legalizing drugs is as bad as the drugs itself. Some drugs are though to have positive medical use, but that's a though to be untrue considering the contradicting facts. How could drugs that are so addicitve be in any way helpful, specially in a medical manner. Every part of the world that has tried it only brought corruption to their country and made addiction rates even worse.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Although rumors that some drugs can help treat certain diceases have been stated they are not true, the fact is that false beliefs don't accumulate to the real facts. The repeutic treatment of heroin is said to alleviate cancer pain, this drug can also create other problems increasing the risk of diversion. In other words, it would encourage patients to sell their heroin on the black market. Another example is Glaucoma, which is a fluid pressure dicease to the eye. The THC that is found in marijuana decreases intraocular pressure. However, while marijuana may decrease intraocular pressure, it also decreases blood pressure making blood flow to the eye. Marijuana is also thought to be useful with treating pain caused by AIDS. Unfortunately, marijuana actually exacerbates the health risks associated with AIDS. Drugs wouldn't only physically be negative, it can also give you mental problems regarding the control towards drugs.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Legalizing would only increase the addiction rates of the already high standards and statistics regardless. For example, cocaine locks all of th...

Ice Cream Essay

According to market research conductedin 1996, 80% of Filipino consumers bought on impulse (they bought only upon passing an ice cream shop or scooping station, but without an intention to buy first); 98% ate ice cream was an afternoon snack. Furthermore, studies showed that per capita consumption of ice cream was less than a forth of a gallon per person per year. In 1992, it stood at 0. 23 gallons per person and declined to 0. 20 in 1993. On average, domestic ice cream market was 13. 8 million gallons from 1991-1993, worth estimated p 2. 5-3 billion per annum. Bulk ice cream comprised 86% of the industry sales while the rest was accounted for by frozen novelties. Main competitors in this include San Miguel Corporation’s (SMC) Magnolia and RFM’s Selecta. Magnolia Other trailing competitors are Universal Robina Corporation’s (URC) Presto, Arce Dairy Ice Cream, and Pure food’s Coney Island, as well as foreign brands like Baskin-Robbins ,Dreyer’s and Haagen-Dazs. Magnolia – The pioneer ice cream brand in terms of flavour, quality control, variety, technology and distribution produced by the merger of SMC and Nestle. It introduced the Flavor of the Month series that provided a huge variety of ice cream flavours to the consumer, with projected volumes of FoM ice cream sold reaching over 28 million gallons. It pioneered the introduction of tropical fruit flavours. It was the first to achieve International Standards Organization quality standards, and is the only Filipino ice cream brand that has expanded overseas. Magnolia is poised as the main competitor, as it aims to be at the forefront of the dairy industry. With increasing competition, MNC intends to make its products available in neighborhood stores and major outlets; introduce a feedback mechanism that will help the corporation monitor the market; and employ new approaches to selling. Currently, magnolia is the preferred choice of many five star hotels, fine dining restaurants, sports and country clubs and food chains.Presto – this brand claims value for money, as part of the corporate philosophy of the Gokongweis, owners of JG summit corp. hich URC is part of, which is to make available value-for-money items for all its consumer-branded products, and as such has positioned its prices lower than Magnolia & Selecta. Presto excels in the frozen novelties market, as was demonstrated in their introduction of Tivoli bars, the first ice cream bar in the Philippines, a phenomenal success that had competitors challenge it with their own versions of ice cream bars. Presto currently holding the number three position, is determined to fur ther widen its market share and catch up with the giants. Thus, the company is eyeing the possibility of plant capacity expansion and wider distribution network. It is also determined to enhance its advertising campaigns and be very active in the communication field. Arce Dairy – This ice cream brand was started in January 1995 and immediately got hold of a 5% market share. Its trademark was the use of carabao milk as base, comfortably within the 5-16% fat content requirement to be called ice cream because carabao milk contains considerably more fat than cow milk (9. 65% as opposed to 4. 16%). Only the expensive ice cream (super deluxe and super special) of Arce contain carabao milk, and are priced at higher than the rates of the competition, showing that Arce’s main strength is its appeal to the AB market where its products cost P3-5 more than its competitors’ products, and as its regular ice cream products are priced lower than its competitors by P3-5 which indicates its attempt to appeal to the CD market’s tendency to want every peso to count. Coney Island – 1976 saw the entry of Coney Island in the local ice cream market. It introduced a new standard of creaminess thanks to its products’ high milk fat content, setting a standard for flavour richness back then. Purefoods acquired it in 1991 and increased its production capacity without having neglected the improvement of its quality. In line with Pure Food’s rule of following the highest international standards, Coney Island tried to implement the zero-vegetable fat and at least 10 percent milk fat standard of US ice cream. It used high quality ingredients like Callebaut chocolate from Belgium for its top-of-the-line products such as the Premium Bar, Pure and Simple and Bugs Bunny Bar. It repositioned itself in the market in 1995 to improve local competitiveness. It marketed its products as â€Å"Not Just Ordinary Ice Cream†, supported by new flavours and packaging. Coney Island revised its product classification, and began categorizing its bulk ice cream as simply creamy, fruit and nuts, and cakes and pastries instead of the traditional premium and super premium. This move was inspired by a study that showed that consumers buy ice cream on the basis of flavour concepts. Foreign Brands – Foreign include Haagen-Dazs, Dreyer’s Grand Ice Cream and Baskin-Robbins. Dreyers was the first to penetrate the local market.

Prognosis by Morris West Essay

1) Judeo-Christian Ethics:When people call America a â€Å"Christian nation,† they’re referring to the Judeo-Christian morals that shaped our country. Our strong sense of right and wrong kept corruption to a minimum, our Protestant work ethic caused Americans to be productive, and our belief in rights given by God, not government shaped our national philosophy. Respect for Christian values is a part of the fabric of our country that goes right back to our founding. Even if many people wouldn’t realize it until it is too late, an America where Christianity isn’t an important part of everyday life would no longer be America in any meaningful sense. 2) A Powerful Military: There’s a lot to be said for â€Å"soft power,† but it pales in comparison to raw military might. The United States was not always a great military power, but once the Civil War was over, we started to assert ourselves. Since WWII, we’ve had the finest military on Planet Earth. That one factor does more to insure our freedom and the safety of our allies than every other factor combined. As Reagan said, â€Å"History teaches that war begins when governments believe the price of aggression is cheap.† At least for now, no nation could be so foolish as to believe that a potential fight with the United States would be cheap. 3) Western Culture: If the entire population of Venezuela, Iran, or South Africa were here in the United States and all of us were gone, this country would quickly turn into a pesthole, just like all of those nations because they’re culturally inferior to us. On the other hand, Western culture has produced ancient Greece, the Roman Empire, Britain, the United States and a host of lesser nations that are still more successful than 90% of the planet. The emphasis in Western culture on individualism, innovation, Christianity, capitalism, science, technology, freedom and individual rights has given us an enormous advantage that we are sadly eroding with our foolish embrace of multi-culturalism. 4) Geography: We can’t underestimate the importance of being a large, resource-rich nation that’s isolated from powerful foes. Had Britain been considerably closer, it’s possible that we may have been unable to break away and take control of our own destiny. If we had powerful adversaries to our North and South, we may have had great difficulties when our nation was young and we were just finding our strength. If we had been closer to Europe, our homeland might have been decimated during WWI and WWII. If God had given us first choice of places to  found a nation, this is where we would have ended up. 5) Industrial Capacity: Economically, America managed to take full advantage of the Industrial Revolution and most people still don’t realize how important our ability to churn out material was to winning WWII. Just to give youone of many examples, â€Å"By 1944 America built 96,300 planes, more planes than were possessed by the Axis combined and this does not include British and Soviet production. The Germans built 40,000 war planes in 1944, but the arrival of P51 Mustangs in the skies over Germany resulted in the destruction of the Luftwaffe. And American production was 75 percent combat aircraft†¦..This was the peak of production, an incredible 11 planes an hour were rolling out of American aircraft plants.† We lack this capacity today and make up for our inability to mass produce weaponry by creating high quality war machines. This is a potentially dangerous strategy because if a large chunk of our superior weaponry were ever destroyed somehow, it would take us an inordinately long time to rebuild it. 6) A Merit-Based Society: America’s lack of an aristocracy, tribes, and castes helped allow the cream to rise to the top in our society. Although we certainly weren’t perfect in this regard as any slave or woman throughout most of our history could tell you, we were well ahead of much of the rest of the world. The fact that we’re still regarded by the rest of the world as a â€Å"land of opportunity† is one of our greatest strengths, although our antiquated immigration system does little to take advantage of this fact. The more we penalize success as a society, the more stratified, stagnant and sterile we’ll become as a country. 7) A Constitution That Limited Centralized Government: Nothing could be more fundamentally American than a deep and abiding distrust of government. That’s why the Constitution was specifically designed to keep our own government from oppressing the people. This contributed mightily to our success because the bigger and more powerful the government becomes, the smaller, weaker and poorer the people become. Our Founding Fathers understood this and were fanatical about small, decentralized government. The further we move from that principle, the more economic stagnation, frightening levels of debt, and potentially dangerous tyranny we’ll see from our own.

CHANGING WOMANS ROLE DURING COLD WAR AND NOW essays

CHANGING WOMAN'S ROLE DURING COLD WAR AND NOW essays Women are often defined by their ability to successfully juggle a career and family life. This fact is evidenced by the film Mildred Pierce. Though women's roles have changed significantly over the last several decades, certain facts related to women's roles remain the same. This includes society's vision of woman as a duplicitous creature; one that should be able to manage professional and personal aspirations with equal success and finesse. She is measured by society based on her ability to manage each of these roles successfully, despite trends in society that do not support a woman's role in neither the home nor the workplace to any great degree. Women have faced an upward battle defining their roles over the last several decades. These ideas and more related to the changing roles of women over the last 40 years are analyzed and described in greater In the movie Mildred Pierce Joan Crawford plays a woman who is divorced and ends up in a twisted tangle when her daughter becomes a miscreant Mildred's newfound success in the business world represents the beginning force in a long drive for women aspiring to become equal and even surpass the status of men in the working world, becoming creatures whose roles are defined by their success in business as well as their role as caretaker. Mildred fights against the stereotypical role woman has taken on in society, by establishing herself as an entrepreneur, taking a new lover, buying a car and creating a successful life for herself. This trend toward women aspiring to beat down traditional role stereotypes to become independent and successful yet still maintain a handle on their role as mother has continued for many years. Though women in many instances are still not represented entirely as equals in the business world, this movie portrayed the existing impetus and a lot of the momentum that lie behind much of the women's movements t...

Review of Godspell †The Musical †Summary Paper

Review of Godspell – The Musical – Summary Paper Free Online Research Papers Review of Godspell The Musical Summary Paper A more modern day rendition of the Gospels of Jesus, John the Baptist is depicted as a clown who gathers disciples from the city streets of New York by blowing on a horn. He comes to baptize them and in doing so, Jesus comes to him for his own baptism. Jesus and all his disciples (including women) become clowns and teach and learn the Gospels of Jesus through song and dance. In the end, Jesus and the other disciples are crucified on a chain link fence after Judas (formerly John the Baptist) reports the group to the police. In Lloyd Baugh’s lecture, he pointed out that the teachings of Jesus are omitted the parables are present. Also, unlike Andrew Lloyd Weber’s â€Å"Jesus Christ Superstar† musical which uses rock music, Godspell’s songs are more subdued and coherent thus causing the movie to not draw attention to itself as much as to the lessons being taught. There is a very clear representation of Jesus’ intimacy with God through his gentleness with his disciples. The repetition of an earlier song at the end signifies the resurrection of Jesus after his death. The isolation of the group as Jesus takes the disciples away from the real world and its issues and problems possibly suggests a space experience like a retreat where the disciples can be one with the lord. Rather than remain hidden with Jesus after isolation, he liberates them and grants them the strength to do all they desire. Personally I did not really like this film. The idea was good but I believe that the whole point of the movie could have been wrapped up within 2 of the songs or so and the ending crucifixion scene. Also, the idea of one actor as both John the Baptist and Judas was confusing but at the same time it was intriguing because the viewer builds a bond with John from the beginning and then is betrayed by the change in a way that Jesus himself is betrayed by Judas. I did like the concept of a very happy and contemporary view of the story of Jesus but I felt the songs ran somewhat long on film where they were probably much more effective on stage where Godspell is usually performed. In all I do believe that the film offered an adequate portrayal of the Jesus of the Gospels for he is kind, very knowledgeable, passes information and spreads his word just as the Jesus of old, the only difference being exceptionally large shoes. Research Papers on Review of Godspell - The Musical - Summary PaperWhere Wild and West MeetHip-Hop is ArtComparison: Letter from Birmingham and CritoCanaanite Influence on the Early Israelite ReligionThe Masque of the Red Death Room meaningsHonest Iagos Truth through DeceptionMind TravelAnalysis Of A Cosmetics AdvertisementTrailblazing by Eric AndersonRelationship between Media Coverage and Social and

The Typical Diet of a Polar Bear

The Typical Diet of a Polar Bear Polar bears are often common in the mainstream media and get a lot of attention due to their threatened populations. In addition to questions about their habitat, you may wonder what they eat? Polar bears are one of the largest bear species (many sources say they are the largest). They can grow anywhere from 8 feet to 11 feet in height and about 8 feet in length. Polar bears weigh about 500 to 1,700 pounds, and they live the cold Arctic- in parts of Alaska, Canada, Denmark/Greenland, Norway, and Russia. They are large  marine mammals  with a varied appetite. Diet   The preferred prey for polar bears are seals- the species they prey upon most often are ringed seals and bearded seals, two species that are members of the group of seals known as ice seals. They are known as ice seals because they need ice for giving birth, nursing, resting, and finding prey. Ringed seals are one of the most common seal species in the Arctic. They are a small seal that grows to about 5 feet in length and about 150 pounds in weight. They live on top of, and underneath the ice, and use claws on their front flippers to dig breathing holes in the ice. A polar bear will patiently wait for the seal to surface to breathe or climb onto the ice, and then it will swat it with its claws or pounce on it. The polar bear feeds primarily on the seals skin and blubber, leaving the meat and carcass for scavengers. According to the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, a polar bear may kill a ringed seal every two to six days. Bearded seals are larger, and grow from 7 feet to 8 feet in length. They weigh 575 to 800 pounds. Polar bears are their main predator. Unlike the more open breathing holes of ringed seals, the breathing holes of bearded seals are capped with ice, which may make them less easy to detect. If their preferred prey isnt available, polar bears will feed on walruses, whale carcasses, or even garbage if they live near humans. Polar bears have a strong sense of smell, which comes in handy for finding prey, even from long distances- and even in cold weather. Predators Do polar bears have predators? Polar bear predators include killer whales (orcas), possibly sharks  and humans. Polar bear cubs may be killed by smaller animals, such as wolves, and other polar bears. References: Alaska Department of Fish and Game. Ringed Seal Species Profile.National Marine Mammal Laboratory. Bearded Seal.Neuberger, A., et. al. Animal Diversity Web. Bearded Seal.

Instructor methods Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 750 words

Instructor methods - Essay Example I guess looking back, it sounds a macabre, but I was very interested in it at the time. I believe that the instructor was following a linear-rational model of instruction because we were given a very specific rubric to follow for our research and presentation. The rubric was a number of steps and criteria that needed to be met for each portion of the assignment. The research guide took us through a logical progression of sources of information. Very little was left to intuition or exploration. We were not given a question and then sent out to discover possible solution. We were not asked to use any sort of deductive reasoning in order to arrive at a conclusion either. What we were expected to do was to follow a scripted manner of gathering information and then we were to present the information to the class. It was obvious to me that this learning activity was very well planned. The rubrics created by the teacher were detailed and logical. The information was extremely up to date as well. Websites and reference materials were current, so you could tell that this wasn’t just some lesson that the teacher would present in the same manner year after year. What was even more impressive is the way the teacher could comment on each of the presentations in a knowledgeable way. The discussion after each one of the presentations was as valuable as the student presentation itself. This was especially true after one of the presentations was over. Being in high school, some giggles or inappropriate remarks were whispered after some of the presentations. This was especially true if any of the disease or defect had anything to do with sex or the ability to have sex. I remember the instructor being patient but never failing to correct students that would make comments that were out of line. After a presentation on a genetic disorder that altered the facial appearance of

The Failure Of Sega Genesis CD Gaming System Essay

The Failure Of Sega Genesis CD Gaming System - Essay Example Finally, it concludes with the idea that the marketing function and its objectives, strategic plans and implementation cannot be over-emphasized ni any organization. Sega was originally founded in 1951 by American David Rosen in who permanently moved to Japan after WWII. The name Sega is a contraction of "Service Games", which Rosen's company adopted when it began producing arcade games and software for early game consoles like Atari 2600 and ColecoVision. By the 1980s, Sega had an American division which sold console software. Later on the company was sold to Japanese investors and officially became Sega Enterprises Ltd. During the mid-80s, Sega produced a series of hit games which made a lot of money for funding future development of Sega's own game consoles (Planet Dreamcast 2008). Various industry reports say that Sega's game consoles were technically superior than those of the competitors. But stiff competition in the 1990s, which had better product launches, marketing campaigns and more funds made the company decide to concentrate on software development for multiple platforms (Kent 2004). Year 2002 was a major shift for Sega as it moved out of the console manufacturing business. ... Today, Sega's main offices, Sega Corporation Japan, are located Tokyo. The company also operates Sega Europe Ltd. in London, Sega of America Inc. in San Francisco, California and Sega Australia in Sydney (Wikipedia 2008). Body Sega's downfall in the game console manufacturing business was caused by a series of unfortunate management, production and marketing decisions Starting in 1984, when Sega's Mark III was competing with Nintendo's very successful Famicom, Sega decided to follow Nintendo's lead of bringing their product to America. Re-christened Sega Master System, the American launch was a failure due to "poor marketing, bad timing, lack of third-party software developers, and the absence of a 'killer app' and lead to the Master System's demise (Planet Dreamcast 2008). One of the elements of marketing mix is product positioning which refers to the place a product offering occupies in consumers' minds relative to competing offerings. Sega's launch campaign for the Master System failed to communicate its benefits and the characteristics of the product that the target market desires. Sega would have done well if the product attributes it announced were perceived by consumers as being close to their ideal and were more ideal than the competitor's. Instead of allowing customers to position competing products by themselves, Sega's marketers should have planned to influence and shape consumers concepts and perceptions (Chapter 11). Planet Dreamcast reports that the Sega Master System (SMS) was technically superior than Nintendo's product and this does not seem to have been properly communicated. Moreover, the product development process for the SMS as intended for the US market seems to not have a comprehensive market requirements

Prospectus Regulation is it a Misleading Tool for Investors Essay

Prospectus Regulation is it a Misleading Tool for Investors - Essay Example H) RECOMMENDATION BY ESME REPORT 2. I) FUTURE CHANGES 4. CONCLUSION 5. REFERENCES 1) INTRODUCTION 1) A. PROSPECTUS REGULATION -2005 Prospectus regulation1 came into effect from 1st July 2005 based on Section 2(2) of European Communities Act 1972 in relation to issuing of prospectus offering transferable securities to public through listing of securities / shares in the respective stock exchanges of the home country (Legislative.gov.uk, 2005). Only an approved prospectus can be offered to the public. The Prospectus Directive (PD) is required to be reviewed every 5 years by the European Commission (Lannoo, 2007). On 25th January 2011, the PD was reviewed and amendments were submitted which was approved. This is the first review that has taken place since the Prospectus Regulation came into effect since 2011. 1) B. EXEMPTIONS AND CRITERIA FOR APPROVAL Securities are exempted from offer to public if – The offer is made to Qualified Investors only The offer is made to less than 100 investors other that the qualified investors Minimum consideration per investor should be at least 50,000 Euros. The transferable securities are denominated in amounts of 50,000 Euros The total consideration should not exceed 100,000 Euros. The prospectus shall be approved only if the following criteria is strictly met by the companies which includes- UK will be the home state where the transferable securities are to be listed The prospectus contains all information related to assets and liabilities, financial statements, the rights of transferable securities. The prospectus needs to be submitted in comprehensible format, non-technical language and also includes a summary, and risk factors. 1) C. SUPPLEMENTORY PROSPECTUS Supplementary prospectus is one which includes significant new factors, corrections due to material mistakes or omissions relating to information included in the prospectus approved by the authority. 1) D. PASSPORTING A prospectus which is approved by another state outside UK where the company is going for issue of transferable securities after getting necessary approval from competent authority. Here the competent authority has to provide with the following documents for approval – certificate of approval, copy of prospectus and translation of summary of specified prospectus. 1. A prospectus can be published only with some types of securities that are either offered to the public or are requested for admission on a regulated market (Legislative.gov.uk, 2005) 1) E. SUSPENSION OF TRADING AND OFFER TO PUBLIC If the competent authority feels that a particular provision has been infringed then it has the power to suspend issue of securities / advertisement of offer for a period not exceeding 10 working days. The aforesaid authority also has the power to require the offeror to with draw the offer of issue to public in case of breach of regulations. Similarly, after listing of shares on respective bourses, if the competent authority finds in fringement of provision, then it can inform the market operator to suspend trading in the stock for 10 working days or even in that matter prohibit public from trading in the securities till further notice. 1) F. INVESTOR RIGHTS An investor who has agreed to subscribe for shares in circumstances where the final offer price is not mentioned in the prospectus, then the investor can withdraw his acceptance before the withdrawal period which begins at investors acceptance and ends the second day after the competent aut

The Global Financial Crisis Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 3750 words

The Global Financial Crisis - Essay Example As the discussion declares there are similarities in the regulatory responses that have been given by different nations to the current financial crisis. The responses mainly touch on improved liquidity, management of risks, and lowering leverages. Enhanced insurance on investment and banking sector are other key response. The effects were severe in the developed countries like United States. In this regard, different countries reacted to the crisis identifying the opportunities and the associated challenges. The countries in the OECD advocated for a joint effort to have international standardization of regulatory policies. The main concerns are stimulation of demand in a given economy, improving liquidity, preventing foreclosures of mortgages and improving access to financing by for the SMEs and giant investors. There is a focus in risk reduction through investment in insurance. From this paper it is clear that the current global crisis began in 2007, in some countries, and deepened in 2008.1 Some of the factors that may contribute to financial crisis include application of similar operational strategies by players in the market, changes in the banking business, excessive leverage, changes in regulations and corporate governance, and failure of government policies on the financial sector. Government policies regulate the financial sector within in a country and the operations with a global business partner. The failures in some of these policies could have contributed greatly to the current situation. To fix the situation and mitigate for future crises, various governments have enacted some monetary policies. The current global financial crisis had other related problems like food crisis especially to the developing countries as was, and continues to be, witnessed in the horn of Africa.3 The financial reforms to manage the crisis must then focus on the other financial instruments controlling the economy of the country.  

Sexuality in America comedy show Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1250 words

Sexuality in America comedy show - Essay Example It is obvious that comedy shows tend to replicate the environment which fits the society regardless of the degree of contamination of the environment. Last Holiday is a comedy movie directed by Wayne Wang and is a remake of a 1950 British comedy that involves a woman who decides to enjoy pleasure when she finds out that she is going to die. It is a generic and romantic comedy with Queen Latifah, the main character and the main reason to enjoy the movie. It is interesting to note that someone enjoys her life only when she realizes that she is going to die instead of what most people could have done of forgoing the fun and perhaps ask their doctors for any other alternative and pray hard (Wang Film). The Queen Latifah’s ailment, which the doctor describes as diabolical, leads to her instant transformation from being a boring spinster to life of pleasure. She decides to abandon her desire of becoming a great cook and the need for dieting when she is told that she has three to four weeks to live. Latifah who plays a sales clerk named Georgia cashes in her savings to enjoy life in Czech Republic where her hero Chef Didier works. She mingles with other major powerbrokers in the hotel, she treats herself to all the services of spa, and the ski slopes (Wang Film). Georgia attracts the attention of wealthy men seated in the hotel and could not help taking their eyes off because of her beauty. She brings romance in the air due to unmistakable chemistry with LL Cool J as well as being attractive to the staff and the chef. However the films starts to bore when the focus turns from being a romantic comedy to parts that are more concentrating on politics, healthcare issues and corruption. This movie shows the attitude of most men who view women as sex tools. Sexual appeal of a woman’s body is crucial since a woman is considered a

The Global Financial Crisis Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 3750 words

The Global Financial Crisis - Essay Example As the discussion declares there are similarities in the regulatory responses that have been given by different nations to the current financial crisis. The responses mainly touch on improved liquidity, management of risks, and lowering leverages. Enhanced insurance on investment and banking sector are other key response. The effects were severe in the developed countries like United States. In this regard, different countries reacted to the crisis identifying the opportunities and the associated challenges. The countries in the OECD advocated for a joint effort to have international standardization of regulatory policies. The main concerns are stimulation of demand in a given economy, improving liquidity, preventing foreclosures of mortgages and improving access to financing by for the SMEs and giant investors. There is a focus in risk reduction through investment in insurance. From this paper it is clear that the current global crisis began in 2007, in some countries, and deepened in 2008.1 Some of the factors that may contribute to financial crisis include application of similar operational strategies by players in the market, changes in the banking business, excessive leverage, changes in regulations and corporate governance, and failure of government policies on the financial sector. Government policies regulate the financial sector within in a country and the operations with a global business partner. The failures in some of these policies could have contributed greatly to the current situation. To fix the situation and mitigate for future crises, various governments have enacted some monetary policies. The current global financial crisis had other related problems like food crisis especially to the developing countries as was, and continues to be, witnessed in the horn of Africa.3 The financial reforms to manage the crisis must then focus on the other financial instruments controlling the economy of the country.  

Child Protection Task Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1250 words

Child Protection Task - Essay Example sores, serious nappy rash and urine scalds, significant dental decay. Compromised standards of hygiene i.e. child consistently unwashed. Poverty-stricken complexion and hair texture. No adequate supervision for their age. Searching or stealing food and focus on basic survival. Extensive stays at school, public places and other homes. Longs for or erratically seeks adult affection. Rocking, sucking, head-banging. Poor school attendance (Recognizing Child Abuse and Neglect). Signs in children due to physical abuse: Streak marks on face, head or neck, other staining marks depicting the shape of the object that caused it e.g. belt buckle, hand print etc. the child show drowsiness, vomiting, fits or pooling of blood in the eyes, suggesting that the physical abuse has resulted in head injury. Some may display adult bite marks and scratches and in severe conditions fractures of bones, dislocations, sprains, twisting, burns and scalds encompassing cigarette burns. In some conditions child may complain about the abdominal pain caused by broken internal organs, swallowing of poisonous substances, alcohol or other harmful drugs (Recognizing Child Abuse and Neglect). Possible signs of sexual abuse depicted by the child: bruising or hemorrhage in the genital area, suffering from STD (sexually transmitted disease). In female child, bruising to breasts, buttocks, lower abdomen or thighs may be depicted. Child telling about the sexual acts, sexual knowledge shown by the child not appropriate for her age. Fear of going to bed and if going then with full clothes. Signs of bed wetting or soiling, showing changed behavior pattern of self destruction, attempting suicide, anorexia or over-eating, adolescent pregnancy, child not able to explain about the accumulation of money and gifts, enduring running away from home (Recognizing Child Abuse and Neglect). Possible signs of psychological abuse: Any kind of abuse, gives a great impact on the psychology

Night of the Scorpion Essay Example for Free

Night of the Scorpion Essay Throughout Vultures there is also a dark mood, you are told about the ugly vultures and are given lots of gory imagery: Yesterday they picked the eyes of a swollen corpse in a water-logged trench and ate the things in its bowel. This violent imagery reinforces the sense of evil you get about the vultures. This imagery is also similar to the imagery in Night of the Scorpion mainly because this is about suffering, death and dying. In Vultures, however, the person is already dead, whereas in the other poem the mother is dying and suffering. At the end of Vultures, the perpetuity of evil is mentioned, this is quite pessimistic and shows that evil is never going to go away. At the end of Night of the Scorpion however, the mother is cured: After twenty hours it lost its sting. She survives and is now free of suffering and pain, without even any regrets that she was the one who was bitten.

Overview of Vagus Nerve Stimulation

Overview of Vagus Nerve Stimulation The vagus nerve is one of 12 cranial nerves that pass information to and from the brain. The vagus nerve is the longest of the cranial nerves, with connections to the brain and many of the organs of the body. Intermittent electrical stimulation of the vagus nerve seems to reduce or prevent seizures. Vagus nerve stimulation involves a surgical procedure to implant an electrical pulse generator in the chest and attach electrodes to the vagus nerve in the neck. A pulse generator is similar to a pacemaker. It isabout the size of a pocket watch and weighs about 25 grams (g). How does vagus nerve stimulation work? The pulse generatoris surgically implanted in the chest just under the skin. This generator is programmed to intermittently transmit small electrical signals via a wire to the vagus nerve in the neck. We do not understand why electrical stimulation of the vagus nerve is effective at preventing seizures. It may be related to changes in the brainstem and thalamus, or the electrical stimulation may intercept the abnormal brain activity associated with seizures. The generator functions automatically 24 hours a day. An external programming wand and software are used by the doctor, to read and alter the stimulation strength and frequency. After the generator is first implanted, the usual starting settings are 30 seconds of stimulation every 5 minutes. The strength of the electrical signal usually starts at 0.25 or 0.5 milliamperes (mA) and is then increased every few months by 0.25 mA. The frequency of the stimulation can also be adjusted, to come on and off more frequently. Patients are also given a magnet, which acts as a switch for the generator. When a patient senses the beginning of a seizure, she can pass the magnet over the pulse generator to deliver extra stimulation. For some people, this extra stimulation can stop a seizure from progressing, shorten a seizure, or reduce the intensity of the seizure. The magnet can also be used to turn the stimulator off temporarily. The battery life of the generator is about six years, after which the device can be replaced. This will require another surgical procedure, similar to the first2. What and who is vagus nerve stimulation best used for? Vagus nerve stimulation has been used to treat partial and generalized seizures in both adults and children. It is considered in the following cases: Anti-epileptic medication does not control seizures effectively. The child is not a good candidate for brain surgery, either because of high risk or because he has various epileptogenic (seizure-generating) areas in his brain. The child is large enough to support the implant. This is usually decided by the neurologist and surgeon. Vagus nerve stimulation should not be used in children with certain cardiac, respiratory, or gastrointestinal problems. The vagus nerve serves the heart, lungs, and stomach, and some existing problems in these areas may lead to complications with vagus nerve stimulation. Vagus nerve stimulation usually reduces seizures but does not often eliminate them completely. Usually it is used together with medication. Use in the Pediatric Population A large group of patients with intractable epilepsy are younger than 12 years, including children with Lennox-Gastaut syndrome, Dravet syndrome, and other difficult-to-treat epileptic conditions. Morris and colleagues[3]recently provided an evidence-based guideline for VNS in children that is based on a review of off-label use. In 13 class 3 studies involving 470 children with partial or generalized epilepsy, 55% had > 50% seizure reduction with VNS. Similarly, in 4 class III studies of 113 children with Lennox-Gastaut syndrome, 55% had > 50% seizure reduction. Mood studies were not available for children. (In 2 class 3 studies of 31 adults with epilepsy, significant improvements in standard mood scales were observed.) Children were 3.4 times more likely than adults to develop an infection at the VNS implantation site. What is the procedure? A medical evaluation is necessary to determine if this is a case that may be successfully treated with vagus nerve stimulation. Once it has been decided that your child may be helped by vagus nerve stimulation, the surgeon, anaesthetist, and others on the medical team will explain the procedure to you in detail. Its important that you understand the procedure, its risks, and your childs future care; feel free to ask them any questions you may have. With the help of the treatment team, you should then explain the procedure to your child and help him understand what to expect after the implantation. Your child will need to be admitted into the hospital to install the device. Your child will probably need to be put to sleep under general anaesthetic, and therefore will need to stop eating eight hours before. The operation can be done with a local anaesthetic, but because it is hard for children to stay still, most require a general anaesthetic. The procedure itself takes about one hour. One cut about 5 cm long is made on the left chest wall to implant the pulse generator. Another cut about 5 cm long is made in the neck, through which flexible platinum electrodes are attached to the vagus nerve. Because the vagus nerve also goes to the heart, the generator will be turned on in the operating room so that the surgeon can make sure the device does not interfere with the heart. For the same reason, the electrodes are almost always placed on the left vagus nerve, which has less critical influence on the heart. Your child may be sent home on the same day or kept overnight for observation. You and your child will be taught how to care for the incisions before discharge1. Using vagus nerve stimulation After the pulse generator is implanted, the doctor will start the stimulation, using a wand attached to a laptop computer. The doctor will begin with a low dose of current, given for 30 seconds every five minutes. The strength and duration of the stimulation will be slowly increased, at subsequent doctor visits, to achieve optimum seizure control. The stimulation is delivered automatically, 24 hours a day. Your child will also be given a special magnet for use with the pulse generator. Children who experience auras (a feeling that signals the onset of a seizure) can use the magnet to give an extra burst of stimulation, which may reduce or eliminate an imminent seizure. You can also use the magnet if you see that your child is about to have a seizure. The magnet can also be used to turn off the pulse generator temporarily and to check its operation. The doctor will make sure that you and your child understand how to use the magnet before you leave the hospital. Your child will need to continue taking his medications. The dosage will be kept constant for several months while the generators output current is slowly increased. Once the current has been increased to its optimal level, your childs doctor will consider reducing medication and will discuss a new schedule with you. The benefits of VNS seem to increase over time. In one study:1 After 3 months, the number of seizures decreased by about one-third. After 12 months, the number of seizures decreased by about half. And in 2 out of 10 people, the number of seizures decreased by about three-fourths. For people who can sense when they are about to have a seizure, turning on the VNS using their hand-held magnet can sometimes prevent the seizure. It may also shorten a seizure already in progress. Studies show that VNS may also be effective in children. VNS improved independence, mood, and learning in some children3. What to Expect After Surgery The generator may be turned on the day following the surgery or at the first post-surgical visit. Your child will be reassessed in seven to 10 days for a wound check, and the generator may be turned on or adjusted.Parents will be shown how to use a magnet to control a seizure. Waving the magnet over the generator may stop or shorten a seizure. Children who are implanted with a VNS usually return home the same day following their surgery. Sometimes a hospital stay of one night is necessary2. Regular monitoring Regular monitoring is required to check the generator and battery and to make sure the treatment is working well and is not uncomfortable. The battery life of the generator is about six years, after which the device may be replaced. This will require another surgical procedure, similar to the first Risks The vagus nerve stimulator is considered safe. Mild side effects occur in some people when the device stimulates the nerve. The most common side effects include: Coughing. Throat pain. Hoarseness or slight voice changes. Shortness of breath. In children, vagus nerve stimulation may cause increased hyperactivity2. Conclusion For more than 15 years, VNS has proven a useful adjunct to pharmaceutical therapy in adults and children with intractable epilepsy. In an evidence-based guideline, Morris and colleaguesconcluded that VNS may be considered for treatment of seizures in children with epilepsy, including those with Lennox-Gastaut syndrome (level C). Improvements in mood, as well as a sense of control over seizures provided by the magnet, may be added benefits. Adverse events, such as postimplant infection and lead fracture, may occur more often in children than in adults1. As with many pediatric therapies, VNS is not FDA-approved for children. Nonetheless, VNS represents a potentially effective and nonsedating treatment option and should be considered for children with intractable epilepsy. Referances Andrew N,Vagus nerve stimulation for children;Medscape neurology,November 2013.http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/813917_3 Buchhalter JR, Jarrar RG (2003). Therapeutics in pediatric epilepsy, part 2: Epilepsy surgery and vagus nerve stimulation.Mayo Clinic Proceedings, 78(3): 371–378 Schachter SC (2002). Vagus nerve stimulation therapy summary: Five years after FDA approval.Neurology, 59(6, Suppl 4): S15–S20.

Grapes of Wrath Essay: Prejudice Against Immigrants Exposed :: Grapes Wrath essays

The Grapes of Wrath: The Californians Prejudice Against Immigrants Prejudice is a strong word. It is the kind of word that leaves a bitter taste in the mouth. One of Steinbeck's themes in the novel, The Grapes of Wrath, is the prejudice against the migrant workers by the financially established Californians. Steinbeck provides four clear examples of prejudice; the man whose children died of starvation, the fishing story, the California police officer and the history of the Californians. On the way to California, the Joad's encountered other people that had already been to California and were now returning. One of these encounters, with the ragged man with the sunburned face, is described on page 242. The ragged man had children that died because wages were too low and work was too scarce to afford food for his children and wife. His story was one of pain and despair and was evidence of the cruel and inhumane treatment which resulted from the California farmers prejudice towards the migrant workers. Later, the Joads stop by a river where Tom and his Father find a spot to go swimming. Two men, a man and his son, who asked if they might also join them in swimming, promptly join them. The men start talking and it turns out that the other two men have just come from California. They tell a story describing the conditions as very unsafe and uncomfortable and mention the prejudice against the workers. Subsequently the Joads paid no head to this warning either. Hence, they traveled on, only to meet up with a very dispassionate police officer. The police officer gave the Joads a first hand experience of the prejudice that Californians had against the migrant workers. The policeman treated the migrants with no respect. This officer, who undoubtedly had taken an oath to uphold the law and promote the public good, would have been more happy see the Joads drop off the face of the earth than see them in California. The Corollary chapter Nineteen deals with the history of California. How it was settled by the feverish Americans. Through these descriptions we can start to understand the Californians prejudice against the migrant workers. The chapter describes the initial owners of the land, the Mexicans, as being "weak and fed". This description would suggest that the Mexican's were like well fed livestock. Grapes of Wrath Essay: Prejudice Against Immigrants Exposed :: Grapes Wrath essays The Grapes of Wrath: The Californians Prejudice Against Immigrants Prejudice is a strong word. It is the kind of word that leaves a bitter taste in the mouth. One of Steinbeck's themes in the novel, The Grapes of Wrath, is the prejudice against the migrant workers by the financially established Californians. Steinbeck provides four clear examples of prejudice; the man whose children died of starvation, the fishing story, the California police officer and the history of the Californians. On the way to California, the Joad's encountered other people that had already been to California and were now returning. One of these encounters, with the ragged man with the sunburned face, is described on page 242. The ragged man had children that died because wages were too low and work was too scarce to afford food for his children and wife. His story was one of pain and despair and was evidence of the cruel and inhumane treatment which resulted from the California farmers prejudice towards the migrant workers. Later, the Joads stop by a river where Tom and his Father find a spot to go swimming. Two men, a man and his son, who asked if they might also join them in swimming, promptly join them. The men start talking and it turns out that the other two men have just come from California. They tell a story describing the conditions as very unsafe and uncomfortable and mention the prejudice against the workers. Subsequently the Joads paid no head to this warning either. Hence, they traveled on, only to meet up with a very dispassionate police officer. The police officer gave the Joads a first hand experience of the prejudice that Californians had against the migrant workers. The policeman treated the migrants with no respect. This officer, who undoubtedly had taken an oath to uphold the law and promote the public good, would have been more happy see the Joads drop off the face of the earth than see them in California. The Corollary chapter Nineteen deals with the history of California. How it was settled by the feverish Americans. Through these descriptions we can start to understand the Californians prejudice against the migrant workers. The chapter describes the initial owners of the land, the Mexicans, as being "weak and fed". This description would suggest that the Mexican's were like well fed livestock.

The Vampire Diaries: The Awakening Chapter Thirteen

Elena stood within the circle of adults and police, waiting for a chance to escape. She knew that Matt had warned Stefan in time-his face told her that-but he hadn't been able to get close enough to speak with her. At last, with all attention turned toward the body, she detached herself from the group and edged toward Matt. â€Å"Stefan got out all right,† he said, his eyes on the group of adults. â€Å"But he told me to take care of you, and I want you to stay here.† â€Å"To take care of me?† Alarm and suspicion flashed through Elena. Then, almost in a whisper, she said, â€Å"I see.† She thought a moment and then spoke carefully. â€Å"Matt, I need to go wash my hands. Bonnie got blood on me. Wait here; I'll be back.† He started to say something in protest, but she was already moving away. She held up her stained hands in explanation as she reached the door of the girls' locker room, and the teacher who was now standing there let her through. Once in the locker room, however, she kept on going, right out the far door and into the darkened school. And from there, into the night. Zuccone! Stefan thought, grabbing a bookcase and flinging it over, sending its contents flying. Fool! Blind, hateful fool. How could he have been so stupid? Find a place with them here? Be accepted as one of them? He must have been mad to have thought it was possible. He picked up one of the great heavy trunks and threw it across the room, where it crashed against the far wall, splintering a window. Stupid,stupid . Who was after him? Everybody. Matt had said it. â€Å"There's been another attack†¦ They think you did it.† Well, for once it looked as if the barbari , the petty living humans with their fear of anything unknown, were right. How else did you explain what had happened? He had felt the weakness, the spinning, swirling confusion; and then darkness had taken him. When he'd awakened it was to hear Matt saying that another human had been pillaged, assaulted. Robbed this time not only of his blood, but of his life. How did you explainthat unless he, Stefan, were the killer? A killer was what he was. Evil. A creature born in the dark, destined to live and hunt and hide there forever. Well, why not kill, then? Why not fulfill his nature? Since he could not change it, he might as well revel in it. He would unleash his darkness upon this town that hated him, that hunted him even now. But first†¦ he was thirsty. His veins burned like a network of dry, hot wires. He needed to feed†¦ soon†¦ now. The boarding house was dark. Elena knocked at the door but received no answer. Thunder cracked overhead. There was still no rain. After the third barrage of knocking, she tried the door, and it opened. Inside, the house was silent and pitch black. She made her way to the staircase by feel and went up it. The second landing was just as dark, and she stumbled, trying to find the bedroom with the stairway to the third floor. A faint light showed at the top of the stairs, and she climbed toward it, feeling oppressed by the walls, which seemed to close in on her from either side. The light came from beneath the closed door. Elena tapped on it lightly and quickly. â€Å"Stefan,† she whispered, and then she called more loudly, â€Å"Stefan, it's me.† No answer. She grasped the knob and pushed the door open, peering around the side. â€Å"Stefan-† She was speaking to an empty room. And a room filled with chaos. It looked as if some great wind had torn through, leaving destruction in its path. The trunks that had stood in corners so sedately were lying at grotesque angles, their lids gaping open, their contents strewn about the floor. One window was shattered. All Stefan's possessions, all the things he had kept so carefully and seemed to prize, were scattered like rubbish. Terror swept through Elena. The fury, the violence in this scene of devastation were painfully clear, and they made her feel almost giddy. Somebody who has a history of violence, Tyler had said. I don't care, she thought, anger surging up to push back the fear. I don't care about anything, Stefan; I still want to see you. But where are you? The trapdoor in the ceiling was open, and cold air was blowing down. Oh, thought Elena, and she had a sudden chill of fear. That roof was so high†¦ She'd never climbed the ladder to the widow's walk before, and her long skirt made it difficult. She emerged through the trapdoor slowly, kneeling on the roof and then standing up. She saw a dark figure in the corner, and she moved toward it quickly. â€Å"Stefan, I had to come-† she began, and broke off short, because a flash of lightning lit the sky just as the figure in the corner whirled around. And then it was as if every foreboding and fear and nightmare she'd ever had were coming true all at once. It was beyond screaming at; it was beyond anything. Oh, God†¦ no. Her mind refused to make sense of what her eyes were seeing. No. No. She wouldn't look at this, she wouldn't believe it†¦ But she could not help seeing. Even if she could have shut her eyes, every detail of the scene was etched upon her memory. As if the flash of lightning had seared it onto her brain forever. Stefan. Stefan, so sleek and elegant in his ordinary clothes, in his black leather jacket with the collar turned up. Stefan, with his dark hair like one of the roiling storm clouds behind him. Stefan had been caught in that flash of light, half turned toward her, his body twisted into a bestial crouch, with a snarl of animal fury on his face. And blood. That arrogant, sensitive, sensual mouth was smeared with blood. It showed ghastly red against the pallor of his skin, against the sharp whiteness of his bared teeth. In his hands was the limp body of a mourning dove, white as those teeth, wings outspread. Another lay on the ground at his feet, like a crumpled and discarded handkerchief. â€Å"Oh, God, no,† Elena whispered. She went on whispering it, backing away, scarcely aware that she was doing either. Her mind simply could not cope with this horror; her thoughts were running wildly in panic, like mice trying to escape a cage. She wouldn't believe this, she wouldn'tbelieve . Her body was filled with unbearable tension, her heart was bursting, her head reeling. â€Å"Oh, God,no-† â€Å"Elena!† More terrible than anything else was this, to seeStefan looking at her out of that animal face, to see the snarl changing into a look of shock and desperation. â€Å"Elena, please. Please, don't†¦Ã¢â‚¬  â€Å"Oh, God,no !† The screams were trying to rip their way out of her throat. She backed farther away, stumbling, as he took a step toward her. â€Å"No!† â€Å"Elena, please-be careful-† That terrible thing, the thing with Stefan's face, was coming after her, green eyes burning. She flung herself backward as he took another step, his hand outstretched. That long, slender-fingered hand that had stroked her hair so gently- â€Å"Don't touch me!† she cried. And then she did scream, as her motion brought her back against the iron railing of the widow's walk. It was iron that had been there for nearly a century and a half, and in places it was nearly rusted through. Elena's panicked weight against it was too much, and she felt it give way. She heard the tearing sound of overstressed metal and wood mingling with her own shriek. And then there was nothing behind her, nothing to grab on to, and she was falling. In that instant, she saw the seething purple clouds, the dark bulk of the house beside her. It seemed that she had enough time to see them clearly, and to feel an infinity of terror as she screamed and fell, and fell. But the terrible, shattering impact never came. Suddenly there were arms around her, supporting her in the void. There was a dull thud and the arms tightened, weight giving against her, absorbing the crash. Then all was still. She held herself motionless within the circle of those arms, trying to get her bearings. Trying to believe yet another unbelievable thing. She had fallen from a three-story roof, and yet she was alive. She was standing in the garden behind the boarding house, in the utter silence between claps of thunder, with fallen leaves on the ground where her broken body should be. Slowly, she brought her gaze upward to the face of the one who held her. Stefan. There had been too much fear, too many blows tonight. She could react no longer. She could only stare up at him with a kind of wonder. There was such sadness in his eyes. Those eyes that had burned like green ice were now dark and empty, hopeless. The same look that she'd seen that first night in his room, only now it was worse. For now there was self-hatred mixed with the sorrow, and bitter condemnation. She couldn't bear it. â€Å"Stefan,† she whispered, feeling that sadness enter her own soul. She could still see the tinge of red on his lips, but now it awakened a thrill of pity along with the instinctive horror. To be so alone, so alien and so alone†¦ â€Å"Oh, Stefan,† she whispered. There was no answer in those bleak, lost eyes. â€Å"Come,† he said quietly, and led her back toward the house. Stefan felt a rush of shame as they reached the third story and the destruction that was his room. That Elena, of all people, should see this was insupportable. But then, perhaps it was also fitting that she should see what he truly was, what he could do. She moved slowly, dazedly to the bed and sat. Then she looked up at him, her shadowed eyes meeting his. â€Å"Tell me,† was all she said. He laughed shortly, without humor, and saw her flinch. It made him hate himself more. â€Å"What do you need to know?† he said. He put a foot on the lid of an overturned trunk and faced her almost defiantly, indicating the room with a gesture. â€Å"Who did this? I did.† â€Å"You're strong,† she said, her eyes on a capsized trunk. Her gaze lifted upward, as if she were remembering what had happened on the roof. â€Å"And quick.† â€Å"Stronger than a human,† he said, with deliberate emphasis on the last word. Why didn't she cringe from him now, why didn't she look at him with the loathing he had seen before? He didn't care what she thought any longer. â€Å"My reflexes are faster, and I'm more resilient. I have to be. I'm a hunter,† he said harshly. Something in her look made him remember how she had interrupted him. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, then went quickly to pick up a glass of water that stood unharmed on the nightstand. He could feel her eyes on him as he drank it and wiped his mouth again. Oh, he still cared what she thought, all right. â€Å"You can eat and drink†¦ other things,† she said. â€Å"I don't need to,† he said quietly, feeling weary and subdued. â€Å"I don't need anything else.† He whipped around suddenly and felt passionate intensity rise in him again. â€Å"You said I was quick-but that's just what I'm not. Have you ever heard the saying ‘the quick and the dead,' Elena? Quick means living; it means those who have life. I'm the other half.† He could see that she was trembling. But her voice was calm, and her eyes never left his. â€Å"Tell me,† she said again. â€Å"Stefan, I have a right to know.† He recognized those words. And they were as true as when she had first said them. â€Å"Yes, I suppose you do,† he said, and his voice was tired and hard. He stared at the broken window for a few heartbeats and then looked back at her and spoke flatly. â€Å"I was born in the late fifteenth century. Do you believe that?† She looked at the objects that lay where he'd scattered them from the bureau with one furious sweep of his arm. The florins, the agate cup, his dagger. â€Å"Yes,† she said softly. â€Å"Yes, I believe it.† â€Å"And you want to know more? How I came to be what I am?† When she nodded, he turned to the window again. How could he tell her? He, who had avoided questions for so long, who had become such an expert at hiding and deceiving. There was only one way, and that was to tell the absolute truth, concealing nothing. To lay it all before her, what he had never offered to any other soul. And he wanted to do it. Even though he knew it would make her turn away from him in the end, he needed to show Elena what he was. And so, staring into the darkness outside the window, where flashes of blue brilliance occasionally lit the sky, he began. He spoke dispassionately, without emotion, carefully choosing his words. He told her of his father, that solid Renaissance man, and of his world in Florence and at their country estate. He told her of his studies and his ambitions. Of his brother, who was so different than he, and of the ill feeling between them. â€Å"I don't know when Damon started hating me,† he said. â€Å"It was always that way, as long as I can remember. Maybe it was because my mother never really recovered from my birth. She died a few years later. Damon loved her very much, and I always had the feeling that he blamed me.† He paused and swallowed. â€Å"And then, later, there was a girl.† â€Å"The one I remind you of?† Elena said softly. He nodded. â€Å"The one,† she said, more hesitantly, â€Å"who gave you the ring?† He glanced down at the silver ring on his finger, then met her eyes. Then, slowly, he drew out the ring he wore on the chain beneath his shirt and looked at it. â€Å"Yes. This was her ring,† he said. â€Å"Without such a talisman, we die in sunlight as if in a fire.† â€Å"Then she was†¦ like you?† â€Å"She made me what I am.† Haltingly, he told her about Katherine. About Katherine's beauty and sweetness, and about his love for her. And about Damon's. â€Å"She was too gentle, filled with too much affection,† he said at last, painfully. â€Å"She gave it to everyone, including my brother. But finally, we told her she had to choose between us. And then†¦ she came to me.† The memory of that night, of that sweet, terrible night came sweeping back. She had come to him. And he had been so happy, so full of awe and joy. He tried to tell Elena about that, to find the words. All that night he had been so happy, and even the next morning, when he had awakened and she was gone, he had been throned on highest bliss†¦ It might almost have been a dream, but the two little wounds on his neck were real. He was surprised to find that they did not hurt and that they seemed to be partially healed already. They were hidden by the high neck of his shirt. Herblood burned in his veins now, he thought, and the very words made his heart race. She had given her strength to him; she had chosen him. He even had a smile for Damon when they met at the designated place that evening. Damon had been absent from the house all day, but he showed up in the meticulously landscaped garden precisely on time, and stood lounging against a tree, adjusting his cuff. Katherine was late. â€Å"Perhaps she is tired,† Stefan suggested, watching the melon-colored sky fade into deep midnight blue. He tried to keep the shy smugness from his voice. â€Å"Perhaps she needs more rest than usual.† Damon glanced at him sharply, his dark eyes piercing under the shock of black hair. â€Å"Perhaps,† he said on a rising note, as if he would have said more. But then they heard a light step on the path, and Katherine appeared between the box hedges. She was wearing her white gown, and she was as beautiful as an angel. She had a smile for both of them. Stefan returned the smile politely, speaking their secret only with his eyes. Then he waited. â€Å"You asked me to make my choice,† she said, looking first at him and then at his brother. â€Å"And now you have come at the hour I appointed, and I will tell you what I have chosen.† She held up her small hand, the one with the ring on it, and Stefan looked at the stone, realizing it was the same deep blue as the evening sky. It was as if Katherine carried a piece of the night with her, always. â€Å"You have both seen this ring,† she said quietly. â€Å"And you know that without it I would die. It is not easy to have such talismans made, but fortunately my woman Gudren is clever. And there are many silversmiths in Florence.† Stefan was listening without comprehension, but when she turned to him he smiled again, encouragingly. â€Å"And so,† she said, gazing into his eyes. â€Å"I have had a present made for you.† She took his hand and pressed something into it. When he looked he saw that it was a ring in the same fashion as her own, but larger and heavier, and wrought in silver instead of gold. â€Å"You do not need it yet to face the sun,† she said softly, smiling. â€Å"But very soon you will.† Pride and rapture made him mute. He reached for her hand to kiss it, wanting to take her into his arms right then, even in front of Damon. But Katherine was turning away. â€Å"And for you,† she said, and Stefan thought his ears must be betraying him, for surely the warmth, the fondness in Katherine's voice could not be for his brother, â€Å"for you, also. You will need ft very soon as well.† Stefan's eyes must be traitors, too. They were showing him what was impossible, what could not be. Into Damon's hand Katherine was putting a ring just like his own. The silence that followed was absolute, like the silence after the world's ending. â€Å"Katherine-† Stefan could barely force out the words. â€Å"How can you give that tohim ? After what we shared-† â€Å"What you shared?† Damon's voice was like the crack of a whip, and he turned on Stefan angrily. â€Å"Last night she came to me. The choice is already made.† And Damon jerked down his high collar to show two tiny wounds in his throat. Stefan stared at them, fighting down the bright sickness. They were identical to his own wounds. He shook his head in utter bewilderment. â€Å"But, Katherine†¦ it was not a dream. You came tome †¦Ã¢â‚¬  â€Å"I came to both of you.† Katherine's voice was tranquil, even pleased, and her eyes were serene. She smiled at Damon and then at Stefan in turn. â€Å"It has weakened me, but I am so glad I did. Don't you see?† she continued as they stared at her, too stunned to speak. â€Å"This is my choice! I love you both, and I will not give either of you up. Now we all three will be together, and be happy.† â€Å"Happy-† Stefan choked out. â€Å"Yes, happy! The three of us will be companions, joyous companions, forever.† Her voice rose with elation, and the light of a radiant child shone in her eyes. â€Å"We will be together always, never feeling sickness, never growing old, until the end of time! That is my choice.† â€Å"Happy†¦ with him ?† Damon's voice was shaking with fury, and Stefan saw that his normally self-contained brother was white with rage. â€Å"With thisboy standing between us, this prating, mouthing paragon of virtue? I can barely stand the sight of him now. I wish to God that I should never see him again, never hear his voice again!† â€Å"And I wish the same ofyou , brother,† snarled Stefan, his heart tearing in his breast. This was Damon's fault; Damon had poisoned Katherine's mind so that she no longer knew what she was doing. â€Å"And I have half a mind to make sure of it,† he added savagely. Damon did not mistake his meaning. â€Å"Then get your sword, if you can find it,† he hissed back, his eyes black with menace. â€Å"Damon, Stefan, please! Please, no!† Katherine cried, putting herself between them, catching Stefan's arm. She looked from one to the other, her blue eyes wide with shock and bright with unshed tears. â€Å"Think of what you are saying. You are brothers.† â€Å"By no fault of mine,† Damon grated, making the words a curse. â€Å"But can you not make peace? For me, Damon†¦ Stefan?Please .† Part of Stefan wanted to melt at Katherine's desperate look, at her tears. But wounded pride and jealousy were too strong, and he knew his face was as hard, as unyielding, as Damon's. â€Å"No,† he said. â€Å"We cannot. It must be one or the other, Katherine. I will never share you withhim .† Katherine's hand fell away from his arm, and the tears fell from her eyes, great droplets that splashed onto the white gown. She caught her breath in a wrenching sob. Then, still weeping, she picked up her skirts and ran. â€Å"And then Damon took the ring she had given him and put it on,† Stefan said, his voice hoarse with use and emotion. â€Å"And he said to me, ‘I'll have her yet,brother .' And then he walked away.† He turned, blinking as if he'd come into a bright light from the dark, and looked at Elena. She was sitting quite still on the bed, watching him with those eyes that were so much like Katherine's. Especially now, when they were filled with sorrow and dread. But Elena did not run. She spoke to him. â€Å"And†¦ what happened then?† Stefan's hands clenched violently, reflexively, and he jerked away from the window. Not that memory. He could not endure that memory himself, much less try tospeak it. How could he do that? How could he take Elena down into that darkness and show her the terrible things lurking there? â€Å"No,† he said. â€Å"I can't. Ican't .† â€Å"You have to tell me,† she said softly. â€Å"Stefan, it's the end of the story, isn't it? That's what's behind all your walls, that's what you're afraid to let me see. But you must let me see it. Oh, Stefan, you can't stop now.† He could feel the horror reaching for him, the yawning pit he had seen so clearly, felt so clearly that day long ago. The day when it had all ended-when it had all begun. He felt his hand taken, and when he looked he saw Elena's fingers closed about it, giving him warmth, giving him strength. Her eyes were on his. â€Å"Tell me.† â€Å"You want to know what happened next, what became of Katherine?† he whispered. She nodded, her eyes nearly blind but still steady. â€Å"I'll tell you, then. She died the next day. My brother Damon and I, we killed her.†

Is Democracy good for women? Essay

Democracy without women is no democracy! (Declaration †¦ of Independent Women’s Democratic Initiative 1991:127) Women have tried to change the contours of a male-defined concept of democracy and assert the struggles for democracy which have been present within women’s movements as integral to a democratic body politic. (Rowbotham 1986: 106-107) Democracy is not something which, as a matter of ill-fated fact, has failed to deliver on its promises to women. It exemplifies ideals which guarantee that it will never deliver unless it gets on upon wide critical examination of its own philosophical assumptions. In brief, the charge made against democracy is that, for women, it was never more than an article of faith, and while two hundred years of democratization have failed (and are still failing) to bring equality for women, even faith is giving out. The uncharitable might interpret these remarks as nothing more than proof of feminist paranoia and of women’s general incapability to distinguish when they are well off. It is therefore significant to stress that the charge is not simply that democratic states are, as a matter of fact, ones in which women are deprived (though they are), but rather that democratic theory is, as a matter of principle, devoted to ideals which guarantee that that will remain so. As a faith, democracy was always a false faith, and its prophets (including nearly all the main political philosophers of the past two hundred years) are now exposed as false prophets. These are staid, depressing, and even dangerous charges. The more so if we have no preferred substitute to democracy, and no revised interpretation of its central ideals. The tasks for modern feminism are therefore twofold: first, to justify the claim that traditional democratic theory leads to undemocratic practice; secondly, to recognize the ways in which that theory might be reinterpreted so as to come closer to democratic ideals. The previous is feminism’s critique of the faith; the latter is feminism’s revision of the faith. Feminist theory and practice occupies a revealing position in debates concerning the relationship between social movements and democracy. As both a social movement and an academic body of thinking. It also offers a distinguishing, if marginalized, theoretical contribution. Though feminists are not the only movement contributors to have been both objects of and subjects in academic debates, they are debatably unique in emphasizing issues of democratic barring and inclusion. This emphasis stems from the chronological experience of women’s marginalization in the polity, their subordination within fundamental movements, and the complexities that feminists have faced in their attempt to create an independent, comprehensive movement of women. From these experiences, two discrete trails of analysis have emerged. The first, feminist democratic theory focuses on the integration of women in the polity. The second, emerging from debates concerning feminist organizing, centers on the democratization of relationships within the movement itself. Both are entrenched in a critique of the masculinity limits of liberal, republican, and leftist democratic theory and practices and are entrusting to constructing liberal, inclusive, and participatory alternatives. Since Mary Wollstonecraft, generations of women and some men wove painstaking arguments to demonstrate that excluding women from modern public and political life contradicts the liberal democratic promise of universal emancipation and equality. They identified the liberation of women with expanding civil and political rights to include women on the same terms as men, and with the entrance of women into the public life dominated by men on an equal basis with them. After two centuries of faith that the ideal of equality and fraternity included women have still not brought emancipation for women, contemporary feminists have begun to question the faith itself. (Young 1987: 93) Women’s marginalization within liberal democratic institutions was simply obvious at the end of the nineteenth century and the start of the twentieth. The vote was regularly extended, at least supposedly, to all adult men decades before it was to women. Full female suffrage was not won in Great Britain, for instance, until 1928. In France it was not granted until after the Second World War and in Switzerland not until the seventies. Early feminists felt that the elimination of women from the vote and other rights and privileges liberals accorded to â€Å"mankind† was conflicting and ignorant, a hangover of pre-Enlightenment prejudice and tradition that needed only to be brought to public attention to be remedied. However, it â€Å"turned out to be the merest tip of the iceberg: a daunting hint at deeper structures that stay women politically unequal† (Phillips 1993: 103). This is not to say that women do not use their vote as often or as autonomously as men. This has been the conclusion of some non-feminist studies of female voting behavior, which have argued that women are apolitical and ready to delegate decision making to the male head of family. Consequent feminist studies have concluded that gender disparities in voting behavior are extremely context specific, stratified by social and geographic location, and expected to diminish as women gain access to education and formal employment (Randall 1987: 50-53; Conway et al. 1997: 77-80; Baxter and Lansing 1983: 17-39). though, once we move beyond the vote, the participation of women of all backgrounds in those institutions inner to the functioning of liberal democracies, from parties to lobbying groups, remains considerably less than that of comparable men, though the proportion still varies eventually and space (Randall 1987: 53-58; Conway et al. 1997: 80-128). At the utmost levels of government, the numbers of women shrink radically, with little difference between democratic and non-democratic regimes. A sweeping experiential survey of both reveals: A bleak picture of women’s contribution as national leaders, cabinet ministers, members of national legislatures and sittings in the high civil service. At the end of 1990, only 6 of the 159 countries represented in the United Nations had women as chief executives. In almost 100 countries men held all the senior and deputy ministerial positions in 1987-89. Worldwide, only 10 percent of national lawmaking seats were held by women in 1987. (Chowdhury et al. 1994:15) There are disparities in the degree of women’s participation, even at this level. Most notably, Nordic countries have long outpaced other liberal democracies in the percentage of women in their legislatures as of facilitating welfare reforms, an democratic culture, and the overture of political quotas. For instance, women made up 37. 5 percent of the legislature in Norway in 1994 (Nelson and Chowdhury 1994: 775) and 47. 4 percent of the cabinet in 1991 (Bowker-Sauer 1991: 277). Jane Jaquette has argued that there were obvious increases in indicators of women’s demonstration in many regions during the 1990s. Yet the figures she cites underline the devastating reality of continuing female marginalization: â€Å"In the United States, women now make up 11. 2 per cent of Congress†; more than double the figure of 1987, certainly, but the fact remains that men still constitute 88. 8 percent (1997: 26-27). To take another example, women gained around 20 percent of the seats in the British Parliament in the 1997 elections. This was a vivid rise, but one leaving around 80 percent of representatives male. What is more, these advances remain brittle. In the British case, they were the consequence of the victorious Labour Party having ensured that a percentage of its candidate shortlists were composed of women, a move that consequently was ruled illegal. Finally, any advances have been compensated by the sharp drop in female levels of contribution during the East Central European transitions to liberal democracy. The significant point to recognize is that Nordic uniqueness and recent incremental advances in some countries do not basically alter the stark and relatively static discrepancy between male and female levels of contribution in liberal democratic institutions wide-reaching. Women have also not been incorporated as equals into substitute visions of democracy. The previously Marxist-Leninist regimes in East Central Europe made an overt effort to establish a considerable women’s presence within their policy-making institutions, attaining an average proportion of between 25 and 35 percent. Though, this was again much lower than women’s presence in the general population and it was attainned through quotas. Though they are not essentially undemocratic in themselves, quotas meshed with male-dominated, authoritarian rule to inflict a female presence lacking in legitimacy, autonomy, and real power. Additionally, efforts to democratize relations of production continued circumscribed by the top-down imposition of decisions by the party and by ongoing gender hierarchies within the party, workplace, and home. Women were integrated in large numbers into the workers but in lower paid, lower status work. They remained burdened with domestic responsibilities, and their capability for autonomy at work and in the home was thus not efficiently increased (Jaquette 1997: 27; Janova and Sineau 1992: 119-123). Anti-colonial radical movements that arose elsewhere throughout the twentieth century, from Vietnam to Nicaragua, were apparently more popular-democratic in nature and often succeeded in mobilizing large numbers of women in a wide diversity of roles. Though, they have also shown a propensity to relapse to more traditional divisions of labor on attaining state power, excluding women from positions of authority. The record is not much better for fundamental movements that are not primarily tilting toward gaining state power. The New Left, for instance, mobilized many women and was distinguished by an egalitarian, participatory democratic ethic, but it generated mainly male spokespeople and privileged masculinist modes of behavior. It also failed to challenge the sexual objectification of women and channeled them into community-oriented activism and supportive, administrative tasks (Evans 1979: 108-155, 177-179). Similar stories of women’s subordination and the trivialization of their concerns have emerged from more recent fundamental nonstatist movements’ organizations, from the Israeli peace group â€Å"The 21st Year† (Rapoport and Sasson-Levy 1997: 8) to the ecological activists â€Å"Earth First! † (Sturgeon 1997: 49-57). A major approaching of early second-wave feminist thought was the classification of gender itself as a site and source of hierarchical power, functioning to benefit masculine traits, roles, and values over feminine comparables. This brought with it an prominence on the pervasiveness of power and a focus on its operations at the micro level of daily interactions, or what Nira Yuval-Davis calls â€Å"primary social relations† (1997a: 13). This contrasted with the focus of most modernist approaches on power in â€Å"more distant secondary social relations† (Yuval-Davis 1997a: 13), namely the state and/or economy. Early second-wave feminists explicated the causes and operations of gendered power under the rubric of patriarchy. The factual meaning of patriarchy as rule of the father, â€Å"the principle of the authority of senior males over juniors, male as well as female† (Uberoi 1995: 196), was stretched in very diverse directions. It was conceptualized by â€Å"radical† feminists as the primary and most essential form of power, exercised by all men over all women all through the world and originating in either male biological capacities and psychological disaffection or women’s susceptibility to physical attack and pregnancy. Patriarchy in this sense was understood to be retained through male aggression, the philosophy of heterosexuality, and the institutionalization of both in marriage and the family. on the contrary, feminists working within Marxist and socialist theoretical traditions concerted on the operations of patriarchy in capitalist modernity. Some argued that capitalism was essentially patriarchal, with varying stress given to the gendered division of labor, the reproductive role of women, or the purpose of the household within the economy. Others insisted that patriarchy and capitalism were distinct if inter-related systems of power, though they disagreed on the specific nature of that interrelationship. All established that neither patriarchy nor capitalism must be systematically or politically privileged, both being equally major forms of power. In addition, socialist feminists agreed that patriarchy was a property of structures that located both women and men in patterned roles within society. Most socialist and radical feminists held to the view that it was both potential and essential to abolish patriarchal and capitalist power relations and thus form a power-free world. A third strand in second-wave feminist thinking concerning gender and power drawing a division between power over as authority and control and power to as creative capacity, exercised in involvement with others rather than at their expense. The latter form of power also featured as an significant strand in republican thinking. Feminists have argued that it reflects especially feminine, relational modes of being and acting, of the kind typically exercised in close realms of life and in local communities. Such arguments have usually not been intended as a refusal of theories of patriarchal power over but do adapt them by insisting that women’s experiences are not completely negative and that their capacity for agency must be recognized alongside the constraints imposed upon it. This entails that patriarchal power has not completely prevented women from making an involvement to democracy although it has ensured that their involvement has not been fully valued. Second-wave feminist criticisms of the limited extent of most formulations of democracy focus predominantly on the dissimilarity between public and private life. Many feminists have accepted the force of Marx’s analysis of the liberal divide between public life and the private world of civil society. though, they have added that both liberalism and Marxism, and other approaches to democracy, rely on and reify a diverse public/private peculiarity, that between the domestic realm and the rest of social life (Pateman 1989: 118-140). The gendered nature of the domestic globe was openly recognized and defended in early moderate and republican work, and criticized in some Marxist and anarchist tracts, but it has since been included within the nebulous mass of civil society. Women’s continued involvement with the domestic, and the positioning of the domestic as especially private and outside of the public, has served to accept the relations of inequality between the genders that structure all dominions of life and to ensure that most women remain politically indiscernible. Whereas some second-wave feminists have formed historical and transcultural theories of this trend, others have stressed that it’s precise formulation and the consequences for women have diverse over time and place. Carole Pateman’s significant analysis of the recasting of this relationship in modernity (1989) describes a evolution from a monumental public patriarchal order, in which paternal control of the household was subordinated to a masculine hierarchy descending downwards from God and the King, to a system of private patriarchy whereby male heads of households were reconstituted as free and equal agents in the public globe through the continuation of hierarchical gender relations in the home. This meant that the state and the allegedly private civil sphere were constructed as fraternal associations of especially masculine equals. This argument is resistant by feminist critiques of the masculinist and Eurocentric character of public modes of behavior and language, such as balanced speech and impartial judgment. Feminists have argued that the supremacy of these modes is predicated on the relegation to the private sphere of bodily, affective, and illogical ways of being and those people, including women, who are considered to mark those (Young 1987). Perhaps most feminist investigations of the public/private divide in modernity, mainly those influenced by Marxism, have focused on the gendered division of labor under capitalism: the methodical allocation of accountability for â€Å"public,† paid work to men and â€Å"private,† unpaid labor to women. This is not an argument that women have been completely absent from the public economy. Total imprisonment to the home must be understood as a bourgeois ambition rather than a reality for most women. It was legitimately rejected in apparently socialist regimes and is increasingly being redundant by women of all classes in most locations. Though, women still take on the irresistible responsibility for family and domestic chores and this, joint with associated ideologies of domesticity, romance, and sexuality, channels them into marginalized, subordinated, and frequently sexualized roles in the formal economy. Precisely where the causal means in this process has been situated by feminists has depended on their precise analysis of the way patriarchy works and its relationship with capitalism. There has, conversely, been general agreement on the effects. In the West, women are intense in public welfare provision and service sectors, clerical and non-unionized manufacturing occupations, and part-time and lower paid rungs of the workforce. Women in emergent economies carry out the bulk of textile and electronics production, typically in non-unionized conditions that are often appalling. Those on the fringes of the world economy eke out a living from marginal agriculture, the informal economy, and sexual and domestic work. The dual burden of insecure and low-paid work in the formal economy and domestic chores in the private sphere operates as what feminist political scientists call a â€Å"situational constraint,† restrictive the participation of women, particularly those from certain classes, races, and locations, in public, political activities (Randall 1987: 127-129). All the above arguments focus on the gendered segregations arising from the restraints of politics to the public sphere. Feminist analysis also entails that the gendered hierarchies of the private sphere require to be recognized as political. This was the interpretation behind one of the most renowned second-wave slogans, â€Å"the personal is political. † The slogan insisted that in fact personal issues typically faced by isolated individuals behind closed doors such as whether to have sex, whether to have children, or how to systematize caring roles and responsibilities were analytically shaped by structures and relations of power that disadvantaged women relative to men. These power relations also limited women’s entree to partaking in those areas of life more characteristically understood as political and they requisite collective contestation (Randall 1987: 12-13). Effectively, this necessitated a refusal of restricted notions of politics as a characteristic activity separated out from social life, or as limited to a explicit realm or social struggle. Politics was extended to encompass the maintenance or contestation of coercive power relations wherever they were marked. This is a fundamentally agonistic formulation of politics as essentially confliction. It brought with it a liberal notion of democratic politics as the contestation of coercive power relations, and the disparities and marginalization they produce, in even the most intimate areas of life. It could be argued that this too is an agonistic formulation, one that anticipates the postmodern reconfiguration of democracy as a continuing process of conflict and contestation rather than an attainable end state. However, there is another element to the expansive feminist formulation of democracy, and that is the ambition to construct more cooperative, inclusive, and participatory relationships between individual women and the community. Certainly, second-wave feminists have had greatly different visions of possible â€Å"utopias† to which they desired and they have advocated very diverse routes to get there. Moreover, their arguments have hardly ever been articulated using the language of democracy per se. But the general point remains that much of untimely second-wave feminism sought to ease the self-determination and creative flowering of individual women and the development of more democratic and authentically consensual relationships between women and/or between women and men. This reverberates strongly with revolutionary arguments about democracy. One cause for the second-wave emphasis on participatory modes of democracy was a distress with women’s political agency and its chronological erasure. â€Å"Male stream† approaches to democracy were condemned for universalizing masculinist ideas concerning who can act in democracy and how they do and must act, in ways that function to eliminate women or marginalize their activities. One center of criticism was the liberal notion of the political subject as an asocial individual affianced in the rational pursuit of pregiven ends. Drawing on histories of the social and cultural collision of gender roles, psychoanalytic theories of gender establishment, and the experience of giving birth and living in families, feminists have argued that women hardly ever have the opportunity or the desire to live as entirely separate and discrete persons to the degree presumed by liberal ontology. Men can do so simply if they distance themselves from feminine traits and roles, relying on women to assume the major accountability for domestic labor and emotional interrelationships in the domestic spheres. The more social conceptualization of citizenship put onward by republicans, whereby individual autonomy is achieved through public consideration, has been seen as little better as it shares with liberalism the insistence that all corporal differences and particularist emotional attachments should be transcended in the public sphere. In early liberal and republican formulations, the gendered allegations of this move were made explicit. The bodily disparities of women from men and their involvement with sexuality, childbirth, and childrearing earned them a subsidiary service role in the private (Jones 1990: 790-792). Also, second-wave feminists have noted that the chronological connection between nationality and military service, predominantly evident in republican formulations, has resistant women’s internment to the private by positioning them as vulnerable and in require of protection. The fact that women finally won formal inclusion as citizens (and, somewhat, as soldiers) has not, many feminists have argued, altered the fundamental masculinist model. Women’s participation is probable to remain partial and driven with disagreements. This is supported by the findings of feminist political scientists with consider to the situational constraints faced by women with childcare responsibilities and the socialization of young girls into domestic roles and inert traits, both of which bound women’s capacity to become political actors as conservatively understood (Randall 1987: 123-126). A final area of second-wave feminist criticism has drawn consideration to the limits of strategies for change in â€Å"male stream† democratic frameworks. This is not to contradict that many feminists have established conventional strategies. Reformism has been and remains advocated by those working within laissez-faire and social democratic frameworks, who insist that women have to grab the opportunity to lobby for incremental change by exercising their vote and organizing cooperatively as an interest group to put more direct pressure on states, parties, and legislatures. The state is seen here as an unbiased arbiter of contradictory interests those women have an equal chance to shape to their purposes if they muster collectively. Their capability to do so, welfare liberal and social democratic feminists add, can be eased through economic redistribution. Such an approach has long been condemned by other feminists for its lack of radicalism, its search for compromise, and its emphasis on the activities of comparatively educated and economically privileged women. A conservatively Marxist model of revolutionary change through seizure of the state has often been pursued by more left wing feminists, often from within existing leftist organizations. The argument here is that gendered relations of power will collapse with capitalism and the liberal state, and a state proscribed in the interests of the working classes will facilitate a more substantive democracy for both women and men to expand. This view has been condemned by those who snub to subordinate feminist demands to anti-capitalist struggle. As the experience of so-called socialist states established, such subordination is probable to continue after the revolution. Gendered inequalities, though they may be considerably reconfigured, are unlikely to be determinedly overturned. Reference: †¢ Baxter, Sandra, and Marjorie Lansing. 1983. Women and Politics: The Visible Majority. Rev. ed. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. †¢ Bowker-Sauer. 1991. Who’s Who of Women in World Politics. London: Bowker? Sauer. †¢ Chowdhury, Najma, and Barbara J. Nelson, with Kathryn A. Carver, Nancy J. Johnson, and Paula L. O’Loughlin. 1994. â€Å"Redefining Politics: Patterns of Women’s Political Engagement from a Global Perspective. † In Barbara J. Nelson and Najma Chowdhury, eds. Women and Politics Worldwide. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. †¢ Conway, M. Margaret, Gertrude A Steuernagel, and David W. Ahern. 1997. Women and Political Participation: Cultural Change in the Political Arena. Washington, DC: Congressional Quarterly Press. †¢ Declaration from the Founder Members’ Meeting of the Independent Women’s Democratic Initiative. 1991. â€Å"Democracy Without Women Is No Democracy! † Feminist Review 39: 127-132. †¢ Evans, Sara. 1979. Personal Politics: The Roots of Women’s Liberation in the Civil Rights Movement and the New Left. New York: Vintage Books. †¢ Janova, Mira, and Mariette Sineau. 1992. â€Å"Women’s Participation in Political Power in Europe: An Essay in East-West Comparison. † Women’s Studies International Forum 11/1: 115-128. †¢ Jaquette, Jane S. 1997. â€Å"Women in Power: From Tokenism to Critical Mass. † Foreign Policy 108: 23-37. †¢ Nelson, Barbara J. , and Najma Chowdhury, eds. 1994. Women and Politics Worldwide. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. †¢ Pateman, Carole. 1989. The Disorder of Woman: Democracy, Feminism and Political Theory. Cambridge: Polity Press. †¢ Phillips, Anne. 1993. Democracy and Difference. Cambridge: Polity Press. †¢ Randall, Vicky. 1987. Women and Politics: An International Perspective. 2d ed. Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan. †¢ Rapoport, Tamar, and Orna Sasson-Levy. 1997. â€Å"Men’s Knowledge, Women’s Body: A Story of Two Protest Movements. † Paper presented at the First Regional Conference on Social Movements, 8-10 September, Tel Aviv, Israel. †¢ Rowbotham, Sheila. 1986. â€Å"Feminism and Democracy. † In David Held and Christopher Pollit, eds. New Forms of Democracy. London: SAGE in association with the Open University. †¢ Sturgeon, Noel. 1997. Ecofeminist Natures: Race, Gender, Feminist Theory and Political Action. London: Routledge. †¢ Uberoi, Patricia. 1995. â€Å"Problems with Patriarchy: Conceptual Issues in Anthropology and Feminism. † Sociological Bulletin 44/2: 195-221. †¢ Young, 1987. â€Å"Impartiality and the Civic Public: Some Implications of Feminist Critiques of Moral and Political Theory. † In Seyla Benhabib and Drucilla Cornell, eds. Feminism as Critique: Essays on the Politics of Gender in Late-Capitalist Societies. Cambridge: Polity Press. †¢ Yuval-Davis, Nira. 1997a. â€Å"Women, Citizenship and Difference. † Feminist Review 57: 4-27.