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Naïve art

Naïve art is usually defined as visual art that is created by a person who lacks the formal education and training that a professional artist undergoes (in anatomy, art history, technique, perspective, ways of seeing). When this aesthetic is emulated by a trained artist, the result is sometimes called primitivism, pseudo-naïve art, or faux naïve art.

Unlike folk art, naïve art does not necessarily derive from a distinct popular cultural context or tradition; indeed, at least in the advanced economies and since the Printing Revolution, awareness of the local fine art tradition has been inescapable, as it diffused through popular prints and other media. Naïve artists are aware of "fine art" conventions such as graphical perspective and compositional conventions, but are unable to fully use them, or choose not to. By contrast, outsider art (art brut) denotes works from a similar context but which have only minimal contact with the mainstream art world.

Naïve art is recognized, and often imitated, for its childlike simplicity and frankness. Paintings of this kind typically have a flat rendering style with a rudimentary expression of perspective. One particularly influential painter of "naïve art" was Henri Rousseau (1844–1910), a French Post-Impressionist who was discovered by Pablo Picasso.

The definition of the term, and its "borders" with neighbouring terms such as folk art and outsider art, has been a matter of some controversy. Naïve art is a term usually used for the forms of fine art, such as paintings and sculptures, made by a self-taught artist, while objects with a practical use come under folk art. But this distinction has been disputed. Another term that may be used, especially of paintings and architecture, is "provincial", essentially used for work by artists who had received some conventional training, but whose work unintentionally falls short of metropolitan or court standards.

Characteristics
Naïve art is often seen as outsider art that is by someone without formal (or little) training or degree. While this was true before the twentieth century, there are now academies for naïve art. Naïve art is now a fully recognized art genre, represented in art galleries worldwide.

The characteristics of naïve art have an awkward relationship to the formal qualities of painting, especially not respecting the three rules of the perspective (such as defined by the Progressive Painters of the Renaissance): The results are: Simplicity rather than subtlety are all supposed markers of naïve art. It has, however, become such a popular and recognizable style that many examples could be called pseudo-naïve.
 * 1) Decrease of the size of objects proportionally with distance,
 * 2) Muting of colors with distance,
 * 3) Decrease of the precision of details with distance,
 * 1) Effects of perspective geometrically erroneous (awkward aspect of the works, children's drawings look, or medieval painting look, but the comparison stops there)
 * 2)  Strong use of pattern, unrefined color on all the plans of the composition, without enfeeblement in the background,
 * 3) An equal accuracy brought to details, including those of the background which should be shaded off.

Whereas naïve art ideally describes the work of an artist who did not receive formal education in an art school or academy, for example Henri Rousseau or Alfred Wallis, 'pseudo naïve' or 'faux naïve' art describes the work of an artist working in a more imitative or self-conscious mode and whose work can be seen as more imitative than original.

Strict naïvety is unlikely to be found in contemporary artists, given the expansion of Autodidactism as a form of education in modern times. Naïve categorizations are not always welcome by living artists, but this is likely to change as dignifying signals are known. Museums devoted to naïve art now exist in Kecskemét, Hungary; Kovačica, Serbia; Riga, Latvia; Jaen, Spain; Rio de Janeiro, Brasil; Vicq France and Paris. Examples of English-speaking living artists who acknowledge their naïve style are: Gary Bunt, Lyle Carbajal, Gabe Langholtz, Gigi Mills, Barbara Olsen, Paine Proffitt, and Alain Thomas.

"Primitive art" is another term often applied to art by those without formal training, but is historically more often applied to work from certain cultures that have been judged socially or technologically "primitive" by Western academia, such as Native American, subsaharan African or Pacific Island art (see Tribal art). This is distinguished from the self-conscious, "primitive" inspired movement primitivism. Another term related to (but not completely synonymous with) naïve art is folk art.

The terms "naïvism" and "primitivism" also exist, and are usually applied to professional painters working in the style of naïve art (like Paul Gauguin, Mikhail Larionov, and Paul Klee).

Term
In 1870, in his poem Au Cabaret-Vert, 5 heures du soir, Arthur Rimbaud uses the word naïf to designate “clumsy” pictorial representations: “I contemplated the very naive subjects of the tapestry”, which is perhaps the case of the origin of the naïf employment by Guillaume Apollinaire some time later.

Movements
Nobody knows exactly when the first naive artists appeared on the scene, as from the first manifestations of art right up to the days of the "Modern Classic", naive artists quite unconsciously bequeathed us unmistakable signs of their creative activity. At all events, naive art can be regarded as having occupied an "official" position in the annals of twentieth-century art since – at the very latest – the publication of the Der Blaue Reiter, an almanac in 1912. Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc, who brought out the almanac, presented 6 reproductions of paintings by le Douanier' Rousseau (Henri Rousseau), comparing them with other pictorial examples. However, most experts agree that the year that naive art was "discovered" was 1885, when the painter Paul Signac became aware of the talents of Henri Rousseau and set about organizing exhibitions of his work in a number of prestigious galleries.

The Sacred Heart painters
German art collector and critic Wilhelm Uhde is known as the principal organiser of the first Naïve Art exhibition, which took place in Paris in 1928. The participants were Henri Rousseau, André Bauchant, Camille Bombois, Séraphine Louis and Louis Vivin, known collectively as the Sacred Heart painters.

Hlebine School
A term applied to Croatian naive painters working in or around the village of Hlebine, near the Hungarian border, from about 1930. At this time, according to the World Encyclopedia of Naive Art (1984), the village amounted to little more than 'a few muddy winding streets and one-storey houses', but it produced such a remarkable crop of artists that it became virtually synonymous with Yugoslav naive painting.

Hlebine is a small picturesque municipality in the north of Croatia that in 1920s became a setting against which a group of self-taught peasants began to develop a unique and somewhat revolutionary style of painting. This was instigated by leading intellectuals of the time such as the poet Antun Gustav Matoš and the biggest name in Croatian literature, Miroslav Krleža, who called for an individual national artistic style that would be independent from Western influences. These ideas were picked up by a celebrated artist from Hlebine – Krsto Hegedušić and he went on to found the Hlebine School of Art in 1930 in search of national “rural artistic expression”.

Ivan Generalić was the first master of the Hlebine School, and the first to develop a distinctive personal style, achieving a high standard in his art.

After the Second World War, the next generation of Hlebine painters tended to focus more on stylized depictions of country life taken from imagination. Generalić continued to be the dominant figure, and encouraged younger artists, including his son Josip Generalić.

The Hlebine school became a worldwide phenomenon with the 1952 Venice Biennale and exhibitions in Brazil and Brussels.

Some of the best known naive artists are  Dragan Gaži, Ivan Generalić, Maria Prymachenko, Josip Generalić, Krsto Hegedušić, Mijo Kovačić, Ivan Lacković-Croata, Franjo Mraz, Ivan Večenaj and Mirko Virius.

Museums and galleries

 * Croatian Museum of Naïve Art, Zagreb, Croatia
 * Musée international d'Art naïf Anatole Jakovsky, Nice, France
 * Musée d'Art Naïf – Max Fourny, Paris, France
 * International Museum of Naive Art, Vicq, France
 * Museum of Bad Art, Massachusetts
 * National Folk Decorative Art Museum, Kyiv, Ukraine

title: Naïve art


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Agram

Agram may refer to:

Places

 * Agram (Croatia), the historic German name for Zagreb, Croatia
 * Agram Township, Morrison County, Minnesota, U.S.
 * Agram, the Kanuri and Toubou name for the town of Fachi
 * Agram mountain range, in northeastern Niger; see Fachi

Other

 * Agram (card game)
 * Agram 2000, a submachine gun from Croatia

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: Agram


text:
James Carter

Jimmy Carter (born 1924) was president of the United States from 1977 to 1981.

James, Jim, or Jimmy Carter may also refer to:

Arts and entertainment

 * James Carter (engraver) (1798–1855), English engraver
 * James A. Carter (1902–?), British art director
 * James Carter (singer) (1925–2003), American singer for James Carter and the Prisoners
 * Jimmy Carter (singer) (born 1932), American singer for The Blind Boys of Alabama
 * Jim Carter (actor) (born 1948), English actor
 * James Carter (musician) (born 1969), American jazz saxophonist and flautist
 * James L. Carter, American film and television cinematographer
 * James Carter, a character in the Rush Hour film series, portrayed by Chris Tucker

Politics and law

 * James G. Carter (1795–1849), American state legislator and education reformer
 * James Carter (judge) (1805–1878), British jurist in Canada
 * James P. T. Carter (1822–1869), American military officer and politician in Arizona Territory
 * James C. Carter (1827–1905), American lawyer
 * James Garneth Carter (1877–1949), American diplomat
 * James Earl Carter Sr. (1894–1953), American businessman and politician; father of US president Jimmy Carter
 * James Earl Carter III (born 1949), American businessman and politician; son of US president Jimmy Carter
 * James Marshall Carter (1904–1979), United States federal judge
 * J. P. Carter (James Pratt Carter, 1915–2000), American military officer and mayor of Madison, North Carolina
 * James H. Carter (1935–2016), justice of the Iowa Supreme Court
 * James Y. Carter, Illinois politician

Sports

 * James Carter (footballer) (fl. 1900), English footballer
 * James Carter (coach) (1911–2012), American basketball coach
 * Jimmy Carter (boxer) (1923–1994), American boxer
 * Jim Carter (baseball) (1928–2000), American Negro league baseball player
 * Jim Carter (American football) (1948–2023), American football player
 * James Carter (swimmer) (born 1957), British swimmer
 * Jim Carter (golfer) (born 1961), American golfer
 * James Carter (basketball) (born 1964), Puerto Rican basketball player
 * Jimmy Carter (footballer) (born 1965), English footballer
 * James Carter (hurdler) (born 1978), American hurdler

Others

 * Jim Carter (pseudoscientist), amateur physicist whose theories have been controversial

Other uses

 * USS Jimmy Carter, a US Navy submarine

title: James Carter


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TACAMO

TACAMO (Take Charge And Move Out) is a United States military system of survivable communications links designed to be used in nuclear warfare to maintain communications between the decision-makers (the National Command Authority) and the triad of strategic nuclear weapon delivery systems. Its primary mission is serving as a signals relay, where it receives orders from a command plane such as Operation Looking Glass, and verifies and retransmits their Emergency Action Messages (EAMs) to US strategic forces. As it is a dedicated communications post, it features the ability to communicate on virtually every radio frequency band from very low frequency (VLF) up through super high frequency (SHF) using a variety of modulations, encryptions and networks, minimizing the likelihood an emergency message will be jammed by an enemy. This airborne communications capability largely replaced the land-based extremely low frequency (ELF) broadcast sites which became vulnerable to nuclear strike.

Components
The current TACAMO system comprises several components. The main part is the airborne portion, the U.S. Navy's Strategic Communications Wing One (STRATCOMWING 1), a U.S. Strategic Command (USSTRATCOM) organization based at Tinker Air Force Base, Oklahoma. STRATCOMWING 1 consists of three fleet air reconnaissance squadrons (VQ-3, VQ-4, and VQ-7) equipped with Boeing IDS E-6B Mercury TACAMO aircraft. As well as the main operating base at Tinker, there are a west coast alert base at Travis AFB, California, and an east coast alert base at NAS Patuxent River, Maryland.

History
The acronym was coined in 1961 and the first aircraft modified for TACAMO testing was a Lockheed KC-130 Hercules which in 1962 was fitted with a VLF transmitter and trailing wire antenna to test communications with the fleet ballistic missile submarines (see communication with submarines).

The Naval Air Development Center developed the required technique of "stalling" the trailing antenna to achieve the long vertical antenna needed. The VLF system is currently known as VERDIN (VERy low frequency Digital Information Network). The program was expanded in 1966 using modified C-130s designated Lockheed EC-130G/Q carrying a VLF system built by Collins Radio Company.

The first two squadrons were established in 1968: VQ-4 initially operated from Naval Air Station Patuxent River, Maryland and VQ-3 was initially formed at NAS Barbers Point, Hawaii before moving to Naval Air Station Agana, Guam, but later returned to NAS Barbers Point. The system known as TACAMO (from "take charge and move out") has been operationally deployed in 1969. TACAMO consisted of twelve Lockheed EC-130Q aircraft equipped with VLF transmitters using long trailing wire antennas. VLF system was repeatedly upgraded to improve signal strength.

By 1971, TACAMO IV incorporated a 200 kW transmitter and dual antenna. Actual transmission power and capabilities remain classified. Airborne ELF was tested but considered infeasible. The aircraft were upgraded to the E-6 Mercury beginning in 1990, and the E-6A was upgraded to the dual-role E-6B from 1998. With the introduction of the E-6, the Navy also stood up a Fleet Replacement Squadron (FRS), VQ-7, to provide initial training for new Naval Aviators, Naval Flight Officers and enlisted Naval Aircrewmen, and recurrent training for former TACAMO crewmembers returning to aircraft for second and third tours.

The E-6 aircraft is based on the Boeing 707. The wings were redesigned to meet new wing-loading characteristics; the tail was redesigned after a catastrophic failure of the vertical stabilizer during flight tests. The cockpit was copied from the Boeing 737NG commercial airliner, and the landing gear was modified to handle the added weight. Larger fuel tanks were installed and the fuselage was extensively modified to accommodate the 31 antennas, including the trailing wire antenna and reel assembly. After the upgrade to the E-6B, the TACAMO aircraft—with the addition of an Airborne Launch Control System (ALCS)—took over the EC-135 Looking Glass mission formerly conducted by the USAF 55th Wing at Offutt AFB, Nebraska.

In early 1991 TACAMO planes, which have been in the air nonstop for nearly three decades, were transferred to "interim ground alert" and their flights continued on a "random basis" off the US east and west coasts.

title: TACAMO


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Svetlana Savitskaya

Svetlana Yevgenyevna Savitskaya (Светла́на Евге́ньевна Сави́цкая; born 8 August 1948) is a Russian former aviator and Soviet cosmonaut who flew aboard Soyuz T-7 in 1982, becoming the second woman in space. On her 1984 Soyuz T-12 mission she became the first woman to fly to space twice, and the first woman to perform a spacewalk.

She set several FAI world records as a pilot.

Early life and early career
Svetlana Savitskaya was born in a privileged family. Her father, Yevgeny Savitsky, was a highly decorated fighter pilot during the Second World War, which later brought him to the position of Deputy Commander-in-Chief of Soviet Air Defense. Her mother was a Moscow Communist party leader.

Without the knowledge of her parents, Savitskaya began parachuting at the age of 16. Her father realized her unknown extracurricular activity upon the discovery of a parachute knife in his daughter's school bag. After his discovery, he further promoted this tendency. On her seventeenth birthday she already had 450 parachute jumps. Over the next year, she led record stratosphere jumps from 13,800 m and 14,250 m. Over the course of her flying experience, Savitskaya achieved three world record jumps from the stratosphere and 15 world record jumps from jet planes.

After graduating in 1966, she enrolled in the Moscow Aviation Institute (MAI), where she also took flight lessons. In 1971 she was licensed as a flight instructor. After graduating from the MAI in 1972, she trained as a test pilot at the Fedotov Test Pilot School, graduating in 1976. In May 1978 she went to work for the aircraft manufacturer Yakovlev, as a test pilot. In her flight experience, she became the first woman to reach 2,683 km/h in a MiG-25 aircraft. An experienced and highly educated female in the Soviet Space Program, Savitskaya was reportedly an extremely serious, unbending, and steely woman. While she and Valentina Tereshkova were both chosen for missions into space due to Soviet propaganda purposes, Savitskaya was much more trained and experienced in aeronautics whereas Tereshkova was chosen as a political stunt.

Between 1969 and 1977 she was a member of the Soviet national team for aerobatics. At the FAI World Aerobatic Championships in July 1970 at Hullavington, she flew a Yak-18 and won the world championship together with an all-female team. At this particular Championship in the United Kingdom, a journalist for the British Press nicknamed Savitskaya "Miss Sensation". At the 1972 World Championships in Salon-de-Provence she placed third; in 1976 in Kiev with a Yak-50, fifth.

Soviet space program
In 1979, Savitskaya participated in the selection process for the second group of female cosmonauts. On June 30, 1980, she was officially admitted to the cosmonaut group. Of the nine women selected, Savitskaya was the only test pilot. The groups' training was announced during French Air force officer and astronaut Jean-Loup Chretien's space mission. She passed her exams on February 24, 1982.

First flight: Soyuz T-7 / T-5
In December 1981, Savitskaya prepared for her first space flight, a short-term flight to the space station Salyut 7. She held the position of research cosmonaut on this mission. The mission of this second visiting expedition of the Salyut 7 was to prove the Soviet superiority to America by flying another woman into space and to replace the Soyuz T-5 spacecraft the crew would use for their return with a new vehicle.

The commander of this mission was Leonid Popov, with his third flight; it was flight engineer Alexander Serebrov's first flight.

The launch of Soyuz T-7 took place on August 19, 1982. This made Savitskaya the second woman in space, 19 years after Valentina Tereshkova. During the journey, Savitskaya claimed to have tied herself down to prevent from being carried into another compartment of the craft due to the loss of gravity. The three cosmonauts docked with the space station the following day, where they were welcomed by Anatoly Berezovoy and Valentin Lebedev. This was the first time a space station had a mixed gender crew. Savitskaya was assigned the orbital module of Soyuz T-7 as a private area, but slept as well as the men in the space station. On August 27, 1982, Popov, Savitskaya, and Serebrov returned to Earth in Soyuz T-5. The total duration of the mission was 7 days, 21 hours, and 52 minutes.

In 1995, Savitskaya gave an interview to Baltimore Sun journalist Clara Germani. She recalled encountering some sexism from her male crewmates and that upon entering Salyut 7 for the first time, Valentin Lebedev presented her with an apron and told her "to get to work". She stated that "I was quickly able to establish a working, professional relationship with them."

Second flight: Soyuz T-12
In December 1983 she was assigned to her second flight, including an extravehicular activity, or EVA, three weeks after American astronaut Kathy Sullivan's flight and EVA assignment were made public. The timing of her mission would become one of her last triumphs to further the Soviet propaganda agenda in performing the first woman's space walk before the Americans. Savitskaya was chosen above other female cosmonauts due to the extensive flight experience and physical ability to perform the necessary operations in a heavy, bulky space suit for multiple hours. Savitskaya participated in this mission under the title of flight engineer.

Again, it was to be a short-term mission to Salyut 7, this time bringing tools to the station so that the third resident crew, the Salyut 7 EO-3, could repair a fuel line.

On July 17, 1984, Savitskaya launched aboard Soyuz T-12, together with Commander Vladimir Dzhanibekov and research cosmonaut Igor Volk. On July 25, 1984, Savitskaya became the first woman to spacewalk, conducting EVA outside the Salyut 7 space station for 3 hours and 35 minutes, during which she cut and welded metals in space along with her colleague Vladimir Dzhanibekov. The importance of their mission was to test the Universal Hand Tool or Universalny Rabochy Instrument (URI). This tool created at the Paton Institute in Kiev, Ukraine could be used to cut, solder, weld, and braze in space. During the EVA, Savitskaya performed a total of 6 cuts of titanium and stainless steel, 2 coatings of anodized aluminum, 6 tests of tin and lead solder, and test cuts of a 0.5 mm titanium sample. Of the 57 Soviet/Russian spacewalkers through 2010, she is the only woman, and as of April 2020 is still the only Soviet/Russian woman to walk in space. The return to Earth took place on July 29, 1984.

Savitskaya recalled that, during her second mission, she expressed concern about the extravehicular welding exercises, as "I did not understand the point of it. We might burn our spacesuits or the exterior of the station." but her overall excellent performance on both flights silenced critics who questioned a woman's capability to perform space missions. Savitskaya's and Dzhanibekov's training and tests allowed for Dzhanibekov to direct two members of the Salyut 7 crew, Kizim and Solovyov, who had performed multiple EVA's to repair the ship, in the techniques to operate the URI in order to fully repair the fuel line. The total duration of their mission lasted 11 days, 19 hours, and 14 minutes.

Possible third spaceflight
Upon returning to Earth, Savitskaya was assigned as the commander of an all-female Soyuz crew to Salyut 7 in commemoration of International Women's Day. She was chosen for this duty because she was the only experienced female cosmonaut still on active duty at the time. She was set to command Yekaterina Ivanova and Yelena Dobrokvashina, two younger female cosmonauts. In February 1985, however, the radio contact with Salyut 7 was lost; the space station was rescued by the Soyuz T-13 mission in the summer of 1985. When the next mission had to be stopped in November 1985, due to an illness of the commander Vladimir Vasyutin, the women's flight was finally canceled. In addition, after two unsuccessful flights in 1983, Soyuz T-8 and Soyuz T-10-1, not enough Soyuz spacecraft were available. Later it would have been possible to fly with a Soyuz-TM to the space station Mir. However, this plan was not pursued due to Savitskaya's pregnancy and birth of her son in 1986.

Biography
Savitskaya is married, with one child, a son Konstantin born November 7,1986. In February 1986, she graduated from the Bauman Moscow Higher Technical School. From 1983 to 1994 Savitskaya held a position of Deputy Head of NPO Energia.

A committed communist, Savitskaya was elected as a people's deputy of the USSR from 1989 and a people's deputy of Russia in 1990, a position she held until 1992. She did not welcome the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, noting that everything her parents had worked hard to build was destroyed almost overnight and she was "glad they did not live to see it".

Savitskaya retired in 1993 from the Russian Air Force with the rank of Major. In 1994/95 she worked as an assistant professor in Economics and Investment at the Moscow State Aviation Institute. In 1996, she was elected a deputy of the State Duma representing the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, and has been re-elected four times since then. She presently serves as Deputy Chair of the Committee on Defence, and is also a member of the Coordination council presidium of the National Patriotic Union.

Honours and awards

 * Hero of the Soviet Union, twice (1982, 1984)
 * Orders of Lenin, twice (1982, 1984)
 * Order of the Badge of Honour (1976)
 * Medal "For Merit in Space Exploration" (12 April 2011) – for great achievements in the field of research, development and utilization of outer space, many years of honest work, public activities
 * Pilot-Cosmonaut of the USSR
 * Honoured Master of Sports
 * Gold Medal and 18 degrees FAI
 * 16 gold medals, sports of the USSR
 * Special medal for the women's world record stay in space
 * Honorary Citizen of Baikonur (1982)

Savitskaya was one of five cosmonauts selected to raise the Russian flag at the Sochi 2014 Winter Olympics opening ceremony.

The asteroid 4118 Sveta is named after her.

title: Svetlana Savitskaya


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Aure, Norway

Aure is a municipality in Møre og Romsdal county, Norway. It is part of the region of Nordmøre. The administrative centre is the village of Aure. Other villages in Aure include Gullstein, Stemshaug, Todalen, Tjeldbergodden, Arasvika, and Tømmervåg. Aure has one of the largest wooden churches in Norway, Aure Church.

The 641 km2 municipality is the 179th largest by area out of the 356 municipalities in Norway. Aure is the 218th most populous municipality in Norway with a population of 3,381. The municipality's population density is 5.4 PD/km2 and its population has decreased by 5.3% over the previous 10-year period.

General information
The municipality was established on 1 January 1838 (see formannskapsdistrikt law). On 1 January 1894, the southern district of Aure (population: 942) was separated to form the new municipality of Valsøyfjord. Then on 1 July 1914, the northeastern district of Aure (population: 851) was separated to form the new municipality of Stemshaug.

During the 1960s, there were many municipal mergers across Norway due to the work of the Schei Committee. On 1 January 1965, Stemshaug Municipality (population: 877), the part of Valsøyfjord Municipality on the island of Ertvågsøya (population: 141), and the part of Tustna Municipality on Ertvågsøya (population: 85) were all merged into Aure. On 1 January 1976, the district of Aure located south of the Vinjefjorden (population: 158) was merged into the neighboring Halsa Municipality. On 1 January 2006, Tustna Municipality was merged into Aure.

Name
The municipality (originally the parish) is named after the old Aure farm (Aurar) since the first Aure Church was built there. The name is the plural form of which means "gravel" or "mud".

Coat of arms
The original coat of arms was granted on 22 March 1991 and it was in use until 1 January 2006 when Aure was merged with Tustna municipality to form a new, larger Aure municipality. The official blazon is "Gules, two addorsed eagle heads erased Or" (I rødt to adosserte gull ørnehoder). This means the arms have a red field (background) and the charge is two heads of a sea eagle facing opposite directions. The charge has a tincture of Or which means it is commonly colored yellow, but if it is made out of metal, then gold is used. The design was chosen since there is a large population of these birds in the municipality. The arms were designed by Even Skoglund. The municipal flag has the same design as the coat of arms.

A new coat of arms was granted on 21 December 2005, just before the merger of the municipalities of Tustna and Aure so that it could be used starting on 1 January 2006 when the two municipalities were merged. It was decided to combine the arms of the two municipalities by using the charge from the old arms of Tustna and the colors from the old arms of Aure. The official blazon is "Azure, a klippfisk argent" (I blått en sølv klippfisk). This means the arms have a blue field (background) and the charge is a klippfisk which is a split and salted dried fish, usually cod. Traditionally, the fish was spread out on a rock to sun dry which gives the klippfisk its symmetrical shape (as opposed to the stockfish). The charge has a tincture of argent which means it is commonly colored white, but if it is made out of metal, then silver is used. The design was chosen since the klippfisk industry was pioneered in the Tustna area starting in the 1690s. The arms were designed by Jarle Skuseth. The municipal flag has the same design as the coat of arms.

Churches
The Church of Norway has three parishes (sokn) within the municipality of Aure. It is part of the Ytre Nordmøre prosti (deanery) in the Diocese of Møre.

Geography
The municipality includes many islands as well as some parts of the mainland. Islands of Aure include Ertvågsøya, Grisvågøya, Rottøya, Ruøya, Skardsøya, Solskjelsøya, Stabblandet, and Tustna. The Vinjefjorden, Arasvikfjord, and Edøyfjorden surround the municipality. Several bridges connect the islands including the Mjosund Bridge, Aursund Bridge, and Dromnessund Bridge.

Government
Aure Municipality is responsible for primary education (through 10th grade), outpatient health services, senior citizen services, welfare and other social services, zoning, economic development, and municipal roads and utilities. The municipality is governed by a municipal council of directly elected representatives. The mayor is indirectly elected by a vote of the municipal council. The municipality is under the jurisdiction of the Møre og Romsdal District Court and the Frostating Court of Appeal.

Municipal council
The municipal council (Kommunestyre) of Aure is made up of 19 representatives that are elected to four year terms. The tables below show the current and historical composition of the council by political party.

Mayors
The mayors (ordførar) of Aure:

 * 1838–1841: Caspar Karhs Lossius
 * 1842–1843: Johannes Ivarson Høgset
 * 1844–1845: Lars Ivarson Våg
 * 1846–1849: Caspar Karhs Lossius
 * 1850–1851: Johannes Ivarson Høgset
 * 1852–1853: Anders Arntson Todal
 * 1854–1855: Lars Ivarson Våg
 * 1856–1857: Johan Chr. H. Buschmann
 * 1858–1861: Marcus Hegge Lossius
 * 1862–1867: Lars Ivarson Våg
 * 1868–1869: Lars S. Vingsnes, Sr.
 * 1870–1871: Augustinius P. Todal
 * 1872–1873: Jon Danielsen Espvik
 * 1874–1875: Olaus Larsson Talgø
 * 1876–1883: Arnt Arntson Todal
 * 1883–1889: Ole Ulfsnes (V)
 * 1889–1895: Tølløv T. Todal (V)
 * 1895–1898: Ole Jonsson Ertvåg (V)
 * 1898–1904: Tølløv T. Todal (V)
 * 1904–1907: Ole Jonsson Ertvåg (V)
 * 1907–1916: Peder P. Todal (LL)
 * 1916–1922: Sivert Ødegaard (V)
 * 1922–1928: Anders L. Todal (LL)
 * 1929–1940: Jakob A. Todal (LL)
 * 1941–1942: Anders L. Todal (V)
 * 1942–1945: Lars Vingsnes, Jr. (NS)
 * 1946–1951: Arne Slætta (V)
 * 1951–1957: Sivert Todal (V)
 * 1957–1959: Øyvind Barlaup (Bp)
 * 1959–1964: Ola Eines (V)
 * 1965–1967: Sivert Haltbakk (Ap)
 * 1967–1971: Johannes J. Vaag (Sp)
 * 1971–1973: Bodolf Hareide (H)
 * 1973–1975: Johannes J. Vaag (Sp)
 * 1975–1979: Lars F. Berg (V)
 * 1979–1983: Hans Kiplesund (Sp)
 * 1983–1985: Lars F. Berg (V)
 * 1985–2005: Knut Baardset (H)
 * 2006–2007: Hans G. Lauritzen (Ap)
 * 2007–2019: Ingunn Oldervik Golmen (Sp)
 * 2019–present: Hanne Berit Brekken (Ap)

Economy
Agriculture and aquaculture employ 13.6% of the workforce, mostly within dairy farming, fishing, and fish farming. Manufacturing industry and construction employ 25.5%, where the most important industries are the shipyards in Mjosundet and the natural gas processing plant in Tjeldbergodden, as well as the Tjeldbergodden Reserve Power Station. A liquefied natural gas (LNG) pipeline from the Heidrun oil field terminates here. The remaining 60.5% work in the service industry.

Notable people

 * Paul Vighals (1886 in Aure – 1962) a Norwegian sport shooter; competed at the 1912 Summer Olympics
 * Sivert Todal (1904 in Aure – 1988) a politician, Mayor of Aure 1951–1955 & 1955–1957
 * Kristofer Leirdal (1915 in Aure – 2010) a Norwegian sculptor and art educator

title: Aure, Norway


text:
Talk:Mardi Gras

Change Entry Name From Mardi Gras To Pre-Lenten Celebrations?
Since Mardi Gras is just one of many pre-Lenten celebrations, perhaps the article name should be more general and then each type of pre-Lenten festival can be discussed. They can all still have their own pages but this articles seems to be the main one for all pre-Lenten celebrations.

It just seems that Mardi Gras is without much religous connotation in the United States. So it happens to be the day before the start of Lent, so what. Mardi Gras in the New Orleans sense has no reference point in our society with any church organization or is out of touch with it's religous roots.

The fact that Mardi Gras as celebrated in contemporary New Orleans, is not overtly religious does not negate the fact that it is a pre-Lenten celebration. This is an encyclopedia and an encyclopedias raison d'etre is to explain a thing including its history or background. The background of Mardi Gras and Carnival and Carnivale, etc. is that they are all celebrations in preparation for Lent. Even in modern day New Orleans the streets of the French Quarter are cleared at midnight because at midnight it is Ash Wednesday. I'm not saying the Mardi Gras article should be eliminated but perhaps it could be made a sub-page of a main article on pre-Lenten festivals.and also life is good

Also, the title of the article is "Mardi Gras" but it discusses celebrations that aren't Mardi Gras. Thus, the scope of the article is already general and yet the title refers only to one specific festival. If the article is about Mardi Gras then perhaps we should remove the discussion of Carnival, Carnivale, etc. Or, in the alternative, change the title to "Pre-Lenten Celebrations."

Shrove Tuesday, a common and beloved title in New England, has much import in getting ready for a Holy Lent. There is the inclination to have Dixie Land Music, or other types of social dances with the serving of traditional flapjack style pancake with Sausge, Maple Syrup and all sorts of fruit salads, deserts and other breakfast type foods. The Crepe style pancake is much more closely associated with the English or even German celebration of the day before Lent. In New England and other parts of the North East(OH,NY,PA,etc.) many churches and communities gather for celebrations, sometimes just the "Pot-Luck" or "Dish-to-Pass" Suppers, to get all the rich foods out of the house before Lent. Some churches and community groups in New England (often consiting of Northern European descendants) host a "Ham and Bean" Supper in the days before Lent. The contrast between the Shrove Tuesday festivities and the somber Ash Wednesday Services is striking and spiritual both for those who believe and those who are simply curious. This thought leads me to believe that the very term Mardi Gras may mean very different things to different people.

So merging Mardi Gras with all Pre-Lenten Celebrations seems inappropriate. The links within the body of the article on Mardi Gras or Shrove Tuesday is more than sufficient. Diggledafath,14:55,20 Feb. 2007

Cut sentences
I (Infrogmation)cut out the below two sentences, as they disagree with all the sources I am familiar with. Mobile Alabama is the birth of Mardi Gras not New Orleans let’s get the record straight

"in fact the first Mardi Gras owas celebrated there on February 27, 1827" "The first parade to have floats occured on February 24, 1868 at the New Orleans' Mardi Gras."

 * -- Infrogmation 17:07, 5 Mar 2003

Show me your...
wow, that's a long article without a single mention of boobies and beads. :O

 * They are mentioned in Mobile,Alabama is home of Mardi Gras,New Orleans is not home of Mardi Gras get your facts straight if you must know.

Pensacola, Mazatlán
Under Pensacola, the article states, "Pensacola, Florida is home to the third largest Mardi Gras Celebration in the United States." However, under St. Louis, it states, "The largest Mardi Gras celebration in the United States outside of New Orleans and Mobile is in the Soulard area of St. Louis, Missouri." I thought I'd raise this issue. I didn't change anything because I haven't found any resources that tell me which is true.

In "traditions", where it says: "Other cities famous for Mardi Gras celebrations include Rio de Janeiro; Barranquilla, Colombia; George Town, Cayman Islands; Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago; Quebec City, Quebec, Canada; Mazatlán, and Sinaloa, Mexico." 1) Mazatlán is the city, located in the state of Sinaloa, in Mexico so it should read "Mazatlán, Sinaloa, Mexico". 2) In Mazatlán, there is no celebration of Mardi Gras, and as far as I know, neither in Río de Janeiro nor Barranquilla. They celebrate Carnaval (or Carnival in english terms). Sure, they are on the same date... but if you ask anybody there about tthe Mardi Gras of [Barranquilla, Mazatlán, Río] they won't know what are you talking about. I strongly recommend the merge this article in "pre-Lenten celebrations" as others have suggested.

Copyright Violation
was copied from here www.mardigrasdigest.com/html/mardi_gras_history__timeline_mobile.htm

Mardi Gras is also celebrated in all of the towns in between New Orleans and Biloxi, such as Waveland, Bay St Louis, Pass Christian, Long Beach, and Gulfport, MS. Pass Christian has one of the largest and most popular day parades on the coast, always held the Sunday before Mardi Gras (although it hasn't returned to its pre-Katrina size yet).

title: Talk:Mardi Gras


text:
Distributed hash table

A distributed hash table (DHT) is a distributed system that provides a lookup service similar to a hash table. Key–value pairs are stored in a DHT, and any participating node can efficiently retrieve the value associated with a given key. The main advantage of a DHT is that nodes can be added or removed with minimum work around re-distributing keys. Keys are unique identifiers which map to particular values, which in turn can be anything from addresses, to documents, to arbitrary data. Responsibility for maintaining the mapping from keys to values is distributed among the nodes, in such a way that a change in the set of participants causes a minimal amount of disruption. This allows a DHT to scale to extremely large numbers of nodes and to handle continual node arrivals, departures, and failures.

DHTs form an infrastructure that can be used to build more complex services, such as anycast, cooperative web caching, distributed file systems, domain name services, instant messaging, multicast, and also peer-to-peer file sharing and content distribution systems. Notable distributed networks that use DHTs include BitTorrent's distributed tracker, the Kad network, the Storm botnet, the Tox instant messenger, Freenet, the YaCy search engine, and the InterPlanetary File System.

History
DHT research was originally motivated, in part, by peer-to-peer (P2P) systems such as Freenet, Gnutella, BitTorrent and Napster, which took advantage of resources distributed across the Internet to provide a single useful application. In particular, they took advantage of increased bandwidth and hard disk capacity to provide a file-sharing service.

These systems differed in how they located the data offered by their peers. Napster, the first large-scale P2P content delivery system, required a central index server: each node, upon joining, would send a list of locally held files to the server, which would perform searches and refer the queries to the nodes that held the results. This central component left the system vulnerable to attacks and lawsuits.

Gnutella and similar networks moved to a query flooding model – in essence, each search would result in a message being broadcast to every machine in the network. While avoiding a single point of failure, this method was significantly less efficient than Napster. Later versions of Gnutella clients moved to a dynamic querying model which vastly improved efficiency.

Freenet is fully distributed, but employs a heuristic key-based routing in which each file is associated with a key, and files with similar keys tend to cluster on a similar set of nodes. Queries are likely to be routed through the network to such a cluster without needing to visit many peers. However, Freenet does not guarantee that data will be found.

Distributed hash tables use a more structured key-based routing in order to attain both the decentralization of Freenet and Gnutella, and the efficiency and guaranteed results of Napster. One drawback is that, like Freenet, DHTs only directly support exact-match search, rather than keyword search, although Freenet's routing algorithm can be generalized to any key type where a closeness operation can be defined.

In 2001, four systems—CAN, Chord, Pastry, and Tapestry—ignited DHTs as a popular research topic. A project called the Infrastructure for Resilient Internet Systems (Iris) was funded by a $12 million grant from the United States National Science Foundation in 2002. Researchers included Sylvia Ratnasamy, Ion Stoica, Hari Balakrishnan and Scott Shenker. Outside academia, DHT technology has been adopted as a component of BitTorrent and in PlanetLab projects such as the Coral Content Distribution Network.

Properties
DHTs characteristically emphasize the following properties:

 * Autonomy and decentralization: The nodes collectively form the system without any central coordination.
 * Fault tolerance: The system should be reliable (in some sense) even with nodes continuously joining, leaving, and failing.
 * Scalability: The system should function efficiently even with thousands or millions of nodes.

A key technique used to achieve these goals is that any one node needs to coordinate with only a few other nodes in the system —most commonly, O(log n) of the n participants (see below) —so that only a limited amount of work needs to be done for each change in membership.

Some DHT designs seek to be secure against malicious participants and to allow participants to remain anonymous, though this is less common than in many other peer-to-peer (especially file sharing) systems; see anonymous P2P.

Structure
The structure of a DHT can be decomposed into several main components. The foundation is an abstract keyspace, such as the set of 160-bit strings. A keyspace partitioning scheme splits ownership of this keyspace among the participating nodes. An overlay network then connects the nodes, allowing them to find the owner of any given key in the keyspace.

Once these components are in place, a typical use of the DHT for storage and retrieval might proceed as follows. Suppose the keyspace is the set of 160-bit strings. To index a file with given filename and $data$ in the DHT, the SHA-1 hash of $filename$ is generated, producing a 160-bit key $k$, and a message $put(k, data)$ is sent to any node participating in the DHT. The message is forwarded from node to node through the overlay network until it reaches the single node responsible for key $k$ as specified by the keyspace partitioning. That node then stores the key and the data. Any other client can then retrieve the contents of the file by again hashing $filename$ to produce $k$ and asking any DHT node to find the data associated with $k$ with a message $get(k)$. The message will again be routed through the overlay to the node responsible for $k$, which will reply with the stored $data$.

The keyspace partitioning and overlay network components are described below with the goal of capturing the principal ideas common to most DHTs; many designs differ in the details.

Keyspace partitioning
Most DHTs use some variant of consistent hashing or rendezvous hashing to map keys to nodes. The two algorithms appear to have been devised independently and simultaneously to solve the distributed hash table problem.

Both consistent hashing and rendezvous hashing have the essential property that removal or addition of one node changes only the set of keys owned by the nodes with adjacent IDs, and leaves all other nodes unaffected. Contrast this with a traditional hash table in which addition or removal of one bucket causes nearly the entire keyspace to be remapped. Since any change in ownership typically corresponds to bandwidth-intensive movement of objects stored in the DHT from one node to another, minimizing such reorganization is required to efficiently support high rates of churn (node arrival and failure).

Consistent hashing
Consistent hashing employs a function $$\delta(k_1, k_2)$$ that defines an abstract notion of the distance between the keys $$k_1$$ and $$k_2$$, which is unrelated to geographical distance or network latency. Each node is assigned a single key called its identifier (ID). A node with ID $$i_x$$ owns all the keys $$k_m$$ for which $$i_x$$ is the closest ID, measured according to $$\delta(k_m, i_x)$$.

For example, the Chord DHT uses consistent hashing, which treats nodes as points on a circle, and $$\delta(k_1, k_2)$$ is the distance traveling clockwise around the circle from $$k_1$$ to $$k_2$$. Thus, the circular keyspace is split into contiguous segments whose endpoints are the node identifiers. If $$i_1$$ and $$i_2$$ are two adjacent IDs, with a shorter clockwise distance from $$i_1$$ to $$i_2$$, then the node with ID $$i_2$$ owns all the keys that fall between $$i_1$$ and $$i_2$$.

Rendezvous hashing
In rendezvous hashing, also called highest random weight (HRW) hashing, all clients use the same hash function $$h$$ (chosen ahead of time) to associate a key to one of the n available servers. Each client has the same list of identifiers $\{S_{1}, S_{2}, ..., S_{n} \}$, one for each server. Given some key k, a client computes n hash weights $w_{1} = h(S_{1}, k), w_{2} = h(S_{2}, k), ..., w_{n} = h(S_{n}, k)$. The client associates that key with the server corresponding to the highest hash weight for that key. A server with ID $$S_x$$ owns all the keys $$k_m$$ for which the hash weight $$h(S_x, k_m)$$ is higher than the hash weight of any other node for that key.

Locality-preserving hashing
Locality-preserving hashing ensures that similar keys are assigned to similar objects. This can enable a more efficient execution of range queries, however, in contrast to using consistent hashing, there is no more assurance that the keys (and thus the load) is uniformly randomly distributed over the key space and the participating peers. DHT protocols such as Self-Chord and Oscar address such issues. Self-Chord decouples object keys from peer IDs and sorts keys along the ring with a statistical approach based on the swarm intelligence paradigm. Sorting ensures that similar keys are stored by neighbour nodes and that discovery procedures, including range queries, can be performed in logarithmic time. Oscar constructs a navigable small-world network based on random walk sampling also assuring logarithmic search time.

Overlay network
Each node maintains a set of links to other nodes (its neighbors or routing table). Together, these links form the overlay network. A node picks its neighbors according to a certain structure, called the network's topology.

All DHT topologies share some variant of the most essential property: for any key $k$, each node either has a node ID that owns $k$ or has a link to a node whose node ID is closer to $k$, in terms of the keyspace distance defined above. It is then easy to route a message to the owner of any key $k$ using the following greedy algorithm (that is not necessarily globally optimal): at each step, forward the message to the neighbor whose ID is closest to $k$. When there is no such neighbor, then we must have arrived at the closest node, which is the owner of $k$ as defined above. This style of routing is sometimes called key-based routing.

Beyond basic routing correctness, two important constraints on the topology are to guarantee that the maximum number of hops in any route (route length) is low, so that requests complete quickly; and that the maximum number of neighbors of any node (maximum node degree) is low, so that maintenance overhead is not excessive. Of course, having shorter routes requires higher maximum degree. Some common choices for maximum degree and route length are as follows, where $n$ is the number of nodes in the DHT, using Big O notation:

The most common choice, $$O(\log n)$$ degree/route length, is not optimal in terms of degree/route length tradeoff, but such topologies typically allow more flexibility in choice of neighbors. Many DHTs use that flexibility to pick neighbors that are close in terms of latency in the physical underlying network. In general, all DHTs construct navigable small-world network topologies, which trade-off route length vs. network degree.

Maximum route length is closely related to diameter: the maximum number of hops in any shortest path between nodes. Clearly, the network's worst case route length is at least as large as its diameter, so DHTs are limited by the degree/diameter tradeoff that is fundamental in graph theory. Route length can be greater than diameter, since the greedy routing algorithm may not find shortest paths.

Algorithms for overlay networks
Aside from routing, there exist many algorithms that exploit the structure of the overlay network for sending a message to all nodes, or a subset of nodes, in a DHT. These algorithms are used by applications to do overlay multicast, range queries, or to collect statistics. Two systems that are based on this approach are Structella, which implements flooding and random walks on a Pastry overlay, and DQ-DHT, which implements a dynamic querying search algorithm over a Chord network.

Security
Because of the decentralization, fault tolerance, and scalability of DHTs, they are inherently more resilient against a hostile attacker than a centralized system.

Open systems for distributed data storage that are robust against massive hostile attackers are feasible.

A DHT system that is carefully designed to have Byzantine fault tolerance can defend against a security weakness, known as the Sybil attack, which affects most current DHT designs. Whanau is a DHT designed to be resistant to Sybil attacks.

Petar Maymounkov, one of the original authors of Kademlia, has proposed a way to circumvent the weakness to the Sybil attack by incorporating social trust relationships into the system design. The new system, codenamed Tonika or also known by its domain name as 5ttt, is based on an algorithm design known as "electric routing" and co-authored with the mathematician Jonathan Kelner. Maymounkov has now undertaken a comprehensive implementation effort of this new system. However, research into effective defences against Sybil attacks is generally considered an open question, and wide variety of potential defences are proposed every year in top security research conferences.

Implementations
Most notable differences encountered in practical instances of DHT implementations include at least the following:
 * The address space is a parameter of DHT. Several real-world DHTs use 128-bit or 160-bit key space.
 * Some real-world DHTs use hash functions other than SHA-1.
 * In the real world the key k could be a hash of a file's content rather than a hash of a file's name to provide content-addressable storage, so that renaming of the file does not prevent users from finding it.
 * Some DHTs may also publish objects of different types. For example, key k could be the node ID and associated data could describe how to contact this node. This allows publication-of-presence information and often used in IM applications, etc. In the simplest case, ID is just a random number that is directly used as key k (so in a 160-bit DHT ID will be a 160-bit number, usually randomly chosen). In some DHTs, publishing of nodes' IDs is also used to optimize DHT operations.
 * Redundancy can be added to improve reliability. The (k, data) key pair can be stored in more than one node corresponding to the key. Usually, rather than selecting just one node, real world DHT algorithms select i suitable nodes, with i being an implementation-specific parameter of the DHT. In some DHT designs, nodes agree to handle a certain keyspace range, the size of which may be chosen dynamically, rather than hard-coded.
 * Some advanced DHTs like Kademlia perform iterative lookups through the DHT first in order to select a set of suitable nodes and send put(k, data) messages only to those nodes, thus drastically reducing useless traffic, since published messages are only sent to nodes that seem suitable for storing the key k; and iterative lookups cover just a small set of nodes rather than the entire DHT, reducing useless forwarding. In such DHTs, forwarding of put(k, data) messages may only occur as part of a self-healing algorithm: if a target node receives a put(k, data) message, but believes that k is out of its handled range and a closer node (in terms of DHT keyspace) is known, the message is forwarded to that node. Otherwise, data are indexed locally. This leads to a somewhat self-balancing DHT behavior. Of course, such an algorithm requires nodes to publish their presence data in the DHT so the iterative lookups can be performed.
 * Since on most machines sending messages is much more expensive than local hash table accesses, it makes sense to bundle many messages concerning a particular node into a single batch. Assuming each node has a local batch consisting of at most b operations, the bundling procedure is as follows. Each node first sorts its local batch by the identifier of the node responsible for the operation. Using bucket sort, this can be done in O(b + n), where n is the number of nodes in the DHT. When there are multiple operations addressing the same key within one batch, the batch is condensed before being sent out. For example, multiple lookups of the same key can be reduced to one or multiple increments can be reduced to a single add operation. This reduction can be implemented with the help of a temporary local hash table. Finally, the operations are sent to the respective nodes.

DHT protocols and implementations

 * Apache Cassandra
 * BATON Overlay
 * Mainline DHT – standard DHT used by BitTorrent (based on Kademlia as provided by Khashmir)
 * Content addressable network (CAN)
 * Chord
 * Koorde
 * Kademlia
 * Pastry
 * P-Grid
 * Riak
 * ScyllaDB
 * Tapestry
 * TomP2P
 * Voldemort

Applications using DHTs

 * BTDigg: BitTorrent DHT search engine
 * Codeen: web caching
 * Freenet: a censorship-resistant anonymous network
 * GlusterFS: a distributed file system used for storage virtualization
 * GNUnet: Freenet-like distribution network including a DHT implementation
 * I2P: An open-source anonymous peer-to-peer network
 * I2P-Bote: serverless secure anonymous email
 * IPFS: A content-addressable, peer-to-peer hypermedia distribution protocol
 * JXTA: open-source P2P platform
 * LBRY: A blockchain-based content sharing protocol which uses a Kademlia-influenced DHT system for content distribution
 * Oracle Coherence: an in-memory data grid built on top of a Java DHT implementation
 * Perfect Dark: a peer-to-peer file-sharing application from Japan
 * Retroshare: a Friend-to-friend network
 * Jami: a privacy-preserving voice, video and chat communication platform, based on a Kademlia-like DHT
 * Tox: an instant messaging system intended to function as a Skype replacement
 * Twister: a microblogging peer-to-peer platform
 * YaCy: a distributed search engine

title: Distributed hash table


text:
User:Bluelion/test

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title: User:Bluelion/test


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Being and Nothingness

Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology (L'Être et le néant : Essai d'ontologie phénoménologique), sometimes published with the subtitle A Phenomenological Essay on Ontology, is a 1943 book by the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre. In the book, Sartre develops a philosophical account in support of his existentialism, dealing with topics such as consciousness, perception, social philosophy, self-deception, the existence of "nothingness", psychoanalysis, and the question of free will.

While a prisoner of war in 1940 and 1941, Sartre read Martin Heidegger's Being and Time (1927), which uses the method of Husserlian phenomenology as a lens for examining ontology. Sartre attributed the course of his own philosophical inquiries to his exposure to this work. Though influenced by Heidegger, Sartre was profoundly skeptical of any measure by which humanity could achieve a kind of personal state of fulfillment comparable to the hypothetical Heideggerian "re-encounter with Being". In Sartre's account, man is a creature haunted by a vision of "completion" (what Sartre calls the ens causa sui, meaning literally "a being that causes itself"), which many religions and philosophers identify as God. Born into the material reality of one's body, in a material universe, one finds oneself inserted into being. In accordance with Husserl's notion that consciousness can only exist as consciousness of something, Sartre develops the idea that there can be no form of self that is "hidden" inside consciousness. On these grounds, Sartre goes on to offer a philosophical critique of Sigmund Freud's theories, based on the claim that consciousness is essentially self-conscious.

Being and Nothingness is regarded as both the most important non-fiction expression of Sartre's existentialism and his most influential philosophical work, original despite its debt to Heidegger. Many have praised the book's central notion that "existence precedes essence", its introduction of the concept of bad faith, and its exploration of "nothingness", as well as its novel contributions to the philosophy of sex. However, the book has been criticized for its abstruseness and for its treatment of Freud.

Descartes
Sartre's existentialism shares its philosophical starting point with René Descartes: The first thing we can be aware of is our existence, even when doubting everything else (Cogito ergo sum). In Nausea, the main character's feeling of dizziness towards his own existence is induced by things, not thinking. This dizziness occurs "in the face of one's freedom and responsibility for giving a meaning to reality". As an important break with Descartes, Sartre rejects the primacy of knowledge (a rejection summed up in the phrase "Existence precedes essence") and offers a different conception of knowledge and consciousness.

Husserl
Important ideas in Being and Nothingness build on Edmund Husserl's phenomenology. To both philosophers, consciousness is intentional, meaning that there is only consciousness of something. For Sartre, intentionality implies that there is no form of self that is hidden inside consciousness (such as Husserl's transcendental ego). An ego must be a structure outside consciousness, so that there can be consciousness of the ego.

Summary
In the introduction, Sartre sketches his own theory of consciousness, being, and phenomena through criticism of both earlier phenomenologists (most notably Husserl and Heidegger) as well as idealists, rationalists, and empiricists. According to him, one of the major achievements of modern philosophy is phenomenology because it disproved the kinds of dualism that set the existent up as having a "hidden" nature (such as Immanuel Kant's noumenon); Phenomenology has removed "the illusion of worlds behind the scene".

Based on an examination of the nature of phenomena, he describes the nature of two types of being, being-in-itself (the being of things) and being-for-itself. While being-in-itself is something that can only be approximated by human beings, being-for-itself is the being of consciousness.

Part 1, Chapter 1: The origin of negation
From Sartre's phenomenological point of view, nothingness is an experienced reality and cannot be a merely subjective mistake. The absence of a friend and absence of money hint at a being of nothingness. It is part of reality. In the first chapter, Sartre develops a theory of nothingness which is central to the whole book, especially to his account for bad faith and freedom. For him, nothingness is not just a mental concept that sums up negative judgements such as "Pierre is not here" and "I have no money". Though "it is evident that non-being always appears within the limits of a human expectation", the concrete nothingness differs from mere abstract inexistence, such as the square circle. A concrete nothingness, e.g. not being able to see, is part of a totality: the life of the blind man in this world. This totality is modified by the nothingness which is part of it.

In the totality of consciousness and phenomenon (Heidegger's being-in-the-world), both can be considered separately, but exist only as a whole (intentionality of consciousness). The human attitude of inquiry, of asking questions, puts consciousness at distance from the world. Every question brings up the possibility of a negative answer, of non-being, e.g. "Who is entering? No one." For Sartre, this is how nothingness can exist at all. Non-being can neither be part of the being-in-itself nor can it be as a complement of it. Being-for-itself is the origin of negation. The relation between being-for-itself and being-in-itself is one of questioning the latter. By bringing nothingness into the world, consciousness does not annihilate the being of things, but changes its relation to it.

Part 1, Chapter 2: Bad faith
As bad faith, Sartre describes one's self-deception about the human reality. It can take two forms, the first one is making oneself falsely believe not to be what one actually is. The second one is conceiving oneself as an object (e.g. being identical to a job) and thereby denying freedom.

This essentially means that in being a waiter, grocer, etc., one must believe that their social role is equivalent to their human existence. Living a life defined by one's occupation, social, racial, or economic class, is the very essence of "bad faith", the condition in which people cannot transcend their situations in order to realize what they must be (human) and what they are not (waiter, grocer, etc.). It is also essential for an existent to understand that negation allows the self to enter what Sartre calls the "great human stream". The great human stream arises from a singular realization that nothingness is a state of mind in which we can become anything, in reference to our situation, that we desire.

The difference between existence and identity projection remains at the heart of human subjects who are swept up by their own condition, their "bad faith". An example of projection that Sartre uses is the café waiter who performs the duties, traditions, functions, and expectations of a café waiter:

"[W]hat are we then if we have the constant obligation to make ourselves what we are if our mode of being is having the obligation to be what we are? Let us consider this waiter in the café. His movement is quick and forward, a little too precise, a little too rapid. He bends forward a little too eagerly; his voice, his eyes express an interest a little too solicitous for the order of the customer. Finally there he returns, trying to imitate in his walk the inflexible stiffness of some kind of automaton while carrying his tray with the recklessness of a tight-rope-walker by putting it in a perpetually unstable, perpetually broken equilibrium which he perpetually re-establishes by a light movement of the arm and hand. All his behavior seems to us a game. He applies himself to changing his movements as if they were mechanisms, the one regulating the other; his gestures and even his voice seems to be mechanisms; he gives himself the quickness and pitiless rapidity of things. He is playing, he is amusing himself. But what is he playing? We need not watch long before we can explain it: he is playing at being a waiter in a café. There is nothing there to surprise us."

Sartre also gives, as an example of bad faith, the attitude of the homosexual who denies that he is a homosexual, feeling that "a homosexual is not a homosexual" in the same sense that a table is a table or a red-haired man is red-haired. Sartre argues that such an attitude is partially correct since it is based in the "irreducible character of human reality", but that it would be fully correct only if the homosexual accepted that he is a homosexual in the sense that he has adopted a pattern of conduct defined as that of a homosexual, although not one "to the extent that human reality can not be finally defined by patterns of conduct".

Sartre consistently mentions that in order to get out of bad faith, one must realize that one's existence and one's formal projection of a self are distinctly separate and within the means of human control. This separation is a form of nothingness. Nothingness, in terms of bad faith, is characterized by Sartre as the internal negation which separates pure existence and identity, and thus we are subject to playing our lives out in a similar manner. An example is something that is what it is (existence) and something that is what it is not (a waiter defined by his occupation).

However, Sartre takes a stance against characterizing bad faith in terms of "mere social positions". Says Sartre, "I am never any one of my attitudes, any one of my actions." The good speaker is the one who plays at speaking because he cannot be speaking. This literally means that, like the café waiter, the speaker is not his condition or social categorization, but is a speaker consumed by bad faith. Thus, we must realize what we are (beings who exist) and what we are not (a social/historical preoccupation) in order to step out of bad faith. Yet, existents (human beings) must maintain a balance between existence, their roles, and nothingness to become authentic beings.''

Additionally, an important tenet of bad faith is that we must enact a bit of "good faith" in order to take advantage of our role to reach an authentic existence. The authentic domain of bad faith is realizing that the role we are playing is the lie. To live and project into the future as a project of a self, while keeping out of bad faith and living by the will of the self is living life authentically.

One of the most important implications of bad faith is the abolition of traditional ethics. Being a "moral person" requires one to deny authentic impulses (everything that makes us human) and allow the will of another person to change one's actions. Being "a moral person" is one of the most severe forms of bad faith. Sartre essentially characterizes this as "the faith of bad faith" which is and should not be, in Sartre's opinion, at the heart of one's existence. Sartre has a very low opinion of conventional ethics, condemning it as a tool of the bourgeoisie to control the masses.

Bad faith also results when individuals begin to view their life as made up of distinct past events. By viewing one's ego as it once was rather than as it currently is, one ends up negating the current self and replacing it with a past self that no longer exists.

Part 3, Chapter 1: The look
The mere possible presence of another person causes one to look at oneself as an object and see one's world as it appears to the other. This is not done from a specific location outside oneself, but is non-positional. This is a recognition of the subjectivity in others.

This transformation is most clear when one sees a mannequin that one confuses for a real person for a moment.
 * While they believe it is a person, their world is transformed. Objects now partly escape them; they have aspects that belong to the other person, and that are thus unknowable to them. During this time one can no longer have a total subjectivity. The world is now the other person's world, a foreign world that no longer comes from the self, but from the other. The other person is a "threat to the order and arrangement of your whole world...Your world is suddenly haunted by the Other's values, over which you have no control".
 * When they realise it is a mannequin, and is not subjective, the world seems to transfer back, and they are again in the center of a universe. This is back to the pre-reflective mode of being, it is "the eye of the camera that is always present but is never seen". The person is occupied and too busy for self-reflection. This process is continual, unavoidable, and ineluctable.

Being for Others
Sartre states that many relationships are created by people's attraction not to another person, but rather how that person makes them feel about themselves by how they look at them. This is a state of emotional alienation whereby a person avoids experiencing their subjectivity by identifying themselves with "the look" of the other. The consequence is conflict. In order to maintain the person's own being, the person must control the other, but must also control the freedom of the other "as freedom". These relationships are a profound manifestation of "bad faith" as the for-itself is replaced with the other's freedom. The purpose of either participant is not to exist, but to maintain the other participant's looking at them. This system is often mistakenly called "love", but it is, in fact, nothing more than emotional alienation and denial of freedom through conflict with the other. Sartre believes that it is often created as a means of making the unbearable anguish of a person's relationship to their "facticity" (all of the concrete details against the background of which human freedom exists and is limited, such as birthplace and time) bearable. At its extreme, the alienation can become so intense that due to the guilt of being so radically enslaved by "the look" and therefore radically missing their own freedoms, the participants can experience masochistic and sadistic attitudes. This happens when the participants cause pain to each other, in attempting to prove their control over the other's look, which they cannot escape because they believe themselves to be so enslaved to the look that experiencing their own subjectivity would be equally unbearable.

Sex
Sartre explains that "the look" is the basis for sexual desire, declaring that a biological motivation for sex does not exist. Instead, "double reciprocal incarnation" is a form of mutual awareness which Sartre takes to be at the heart of the sexual experience. This involves the mutual recognition of subjectivity of some sort, as Sartre describes: "I make myself flesh in order to impel the Other to realize for herself and for me her own flesh. My caress causes my flesh to be born for me insofar as it is for the Other flesh causing her to be born as flesh."

Even in sex (perhaps especially in sex), men and women are haunted by a state in which consciousness and bodily being would be in perfect harmony, with desire satisfied. Such a state, however, can never be. We try to bring the beloved's consciousness to the surface of their body by use of magical acts performed, gestures (kisses, desires, etc.), but at the moment of orgasm the illusion is ended and we return to ourselves, just as it is ended when the skier comes to the foot of the mountain or when the commodity that once we desired loses its glow upon our purchase of it. There will be, for Sartre, no such moment of completion because "man is a useless passion" to be the ens causa sui, the God of the ontological proof.

Nothingness
Sartre contends that human existence is a conundrum whereby each of us exists, for as long as we live, within an overall condition of nothingness (no thing-ness)—that ultimately allows for free consciousness. Yet simultaneously, within our being (in the physical world), we are constrained to make continuous, conscious choices.

It is this dichotomy that causes anguish, because choice (subjectivity) represents a limit on freedom within an otherwise unbridled range of thoughts. Subsequently, humans seek to flee our anguish through action-oriented constructs such as escapes, visualizations, or visions (such as dreams) designed to lead us toward some meaningful end, such as necessity, destiny, determinism (God), etc. Thus, in living our lives, we often become unconscious actors—Bourgeois, Feminist, Worker, Party Member, Frenchman, Canadian or American—each doing as we must to fulfill our chosen characters' destinies.

However, Sartre contends our conscious choices (leading to often unconscious actions) run counter to our intellectual freedom. Yet we are bound to the conditioned and physical world—in which some form of action is always required. This leads to failed dreams of completion, as Sartre described them, because inevitably we are unable to bridge the void between the purity and spontaneity of thought and all-too constraining action; between the being and the nothingness that inherently coincide in our self.

Sartre's recipe for fulfillment is to escape all quests by completing them. This is accomplished by rigorously forcing order onto nothingness, employing the "spirit (or consciousness of mind) of seriousness" and describing the failure to do so in terms such as "bad faith" and "false consciousness". Though Sartre's conclusion seems to be that being diminishes before nothingness since consciousness is probably based more on spontaneity than on stable seriousness, he contends that any person of a serious nature is obliged to continuous struggle between two things:

 * a) The conscious desire for peaceful self-fulfillment through physical actions and social roles—as if living within a portrait that one actively paints of oneself

 * b) The more pure and raging spontaneity of no thing consciousness, of being instantaneously free to overturn one's roles, pull up stakes, and strike out on new paths

Phenomenological ontology
In Sartre's opinion, consciousness does not make sense by itself: it arises only as an awareness of objects. Consciousness is therefore always and essentially consciousness of something, whether this "something" is a thing, a person, an imaginary object, etc. Phenomenologists often refer to this quality of consciousness as "intentionality". Sartre's contribution, then, is that in addition to always being consciousness of something, consciousness is always consciousness of itself. In other words, all consciousness is, by definition, self-consciousness. By "self-consciousness", Sartre does not mean being aware of oneself thought of as an object (e.g., one's "ego"), but rather that, as a phenomenon in the world, consciousness both appears and appears to itself at the same time. By appearing to itself, Sartre argues that consciousness is fully transparent; unlike an ordinary "object" (a house, for instance, of which it is impossible to perceive all of the sides at the same time), consciousness "sees" all aspects of itself at once. This non-positional quality of consciousness is what makes it a unique type of being, a being that exists for itself.

Critique of Freud
Sartre offers a critique of the psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud's theory of the unconscious, based on the claim that consciousness is essentially self-conscious. Sartre also argues that Freud's theory of repression is internally flawed. According to Sartre, in his clinical work, Freud encountered patients who seemed to embody a particular kind of paradox—they appeared to both know and not know the same thing. In response, Freud postulated the existence of the unconscious, which contains the "truth" of the traumas underlying the patients' behavior. This "truth" is actively repressed, which is made evident by the patients' resistance to its revelation during analysis. Yet what does the resisting if the patients are unaware of what they are repressing? Sartre finds the answer in what Freud calls the "censor". "The only level on which we can locate the refusal of the subject", Sartre writes, "is that of the censor." Further:

"[T]he resistance of the patient implies on the level of the censor an awareness of the thing repressed as such, a comprehension of the end toward which the questions of the psychoanalyst are leading . . . These various operations in their turn imply that the censor is conscious itself. But what type of self-consciousness can the censor have? It must be the consciousness being conscious of the drive to be repressed, but precisely in order not to be conscious of it. What does this mean if not that the censor is in bad faith?"

In other words, Sartre views Freud's unconscious to be a scapegoat for the paradox of simultaneously knowing and not knowing the same information. Instead of alleviating the paradox, Freud simply moves it to the censor, establishing "between the unconscious and consciousness an autonomous consciousness in bad faith". Sartre thinks that the postulation of a censor within the psychic economy is therefore redundant: at the level of the censor, we still encounter the same problem of a consciousness that hides something from itself. For Sartre, what Freud identifies as repression is rather indicative of the larger structure of bad faith. Psychoanalysis thus does not yield any special insight, since hiding something from oneself occurs at the level of consciousness as a unified phenomenon, not as part of some intra-psychic mechanism.

Special terminology used by Sartre
Explanation of terms based on appendix to the English edition of Being and Nothingness by translator Hazel Barnes

 * Being (être): Including both Being-in-itself and Being-for-itself (both as defined below), but the latter is the nihilation of the former. Being is objective, not subjective or individual.
 * Being-in-itself (être-en-soi): Non-conscious Being. The sort of phenomenon that is greater than the knowledge that we have of it.
 * Being-for-itself (être-pour-soi): The nihilation of Being-in-itself; consciousness conceived as a lack of Being, a desire for Being, a relation of Being. The For-itself brings Nothingness into the world and therefore can stand out from Being and form attitudes towards other beings by seeing what it is not.
 * Being-for-others (être-pour-autrui): Here a new dimension arises in which the self exists as an object for others. Each For-itself seeks to recover its own Being by making an object out of the other.
 * Consciousness: The transcending For-itself. Sartre states that "Consciousness is a being such that in its being, its being is in question insofar as this being implies a being other than itself."
 * Existence: Concrete, individual being-for-itself here and now.
 * Existence precedes essence. The subjective existence of reality precedes and defines its nature. Who you are (your essence) is defined by what you do (your existence).
 * Facticity (facticité): Broadly, facts about the world. More precisely, the For-itself's necessary connection with the In-itself, with the world and its own past.
 * Freedom: The very being of the For-itself which is "condemned to be free". It must forever choose for itself and therefore make itself.
 * Nothingness (néant): Although not having being, it is supported by being. It comes into the world by the For-itself.
 * Reflection (reflet): The form in which the For-itself founds its own nothingness through the dyad of "the-reflection-reflecting"
 * Reflection (réflexion):The consciousness attempting to become its own object.

Reception
Being and Nothingness is considered Sartre's most important philosophical work, and the most important non-fiction expression of his existentialism. Christian existentialist Gabriel Marcel wrote that it was of "incontestable" importance and ranked among the most important contributions made to general philosophy. While Marcel noted the influence of Heidegger on "the form at least" of Being and Nothingness, he also observed that Sartre diverged from the views expressed by Heidegger in Being and Time (1927) in important ways, and that Sartre's contributions were original. Marcel considered Sartre's analysis of bad faith "one of the most outstanding and solid" parts of Being and Nothingness, writing that it prevented Sartre's arguments from being purely abstract. Marcel saw one of the most important merits of the work to be to show "that a form of metaphysics which denies or refuses grace inevitably ends by setting up in front of us the image of an atrophied and contradictory world where the better part of ourselves is finally unable to recognise itself".

The philosopher Jean Wahl criticized Sartre's arguments about the topic of "nothing". The philosopher Frederick Copleston described Sartre's view that all human actions are the result of free choice as "highly implausible", though he noted that Sartre had ways of defending his position. He also expressed sympathy for Marcel's criticism of Sartre, and described Sartre's view of freedom as both "nihilistic" and possibly inconsistent with some of Sartre's other views. The philosopher A. J. Ayer wrote that, apart from some psychological insights, the book was "a pretentious metaphysical thesis" and "principally an exercise in misusing the verb 'to be'".

The author Susan Sontag praised Sartre's discussions of the body and concrete relations with others. She identified them as part of a French tradition of serious thought about problems of fundamental importance. The literary scholar John B. Vickery wrote that Being and Nothingness resembles Sir James George Frazer's The Golden Bough (1890) in the way its author "merges psychology and the concrete sense of fiction", although he considered it less readable than Frazer's work. The philosopher Iris Murdoch compared Being and Nothingness to Gilbert Ryle's The Concept of Mind (1949). She maintained that continental philosophy shares the same general orientation as English analytic philosophy. According to the philosopher Steven Crowell, Being and Nothingness had come to be seen as outdated by Sartre's death in 1980, since its emphasis on consciousness associated with "the subjectivism and psychologism that structuralism and analytic philosophy had finally laid to rest".

The philosopher David Pears criticized Sartre's critique of Freud, describing it as complex but imprecisely formulated and open to potential objections. The philosopher Thomas Baldwin described Being and Nothingness as a work of pessimism. He wrote that Sartre's argument that Freud's theory of repression is internally flawed is based on a misunderstanding of Freud, and that Sartre's attempts to adapt Freud's ideas are of greater interest. The director Richard Eyre recalled that Being and Nothingness was popular among British students in the 1960s, but suggests that among them the work usually went unread.

Several authors, including the sociologist Murray S, Davis, the philosophers Roger Scruton and Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, and the physician Frank Gonzalez-Crussi, have praised Sartre for his contributions to the philosophy of sex. Davis credited Sartre with being the first author to present a phenomenological analysis of sex. Scruton credited Sartre with providing "perhaps the most acute philosophical analysis" of sexual desire and correctly arguing that treating sexual desire as equivalent to appetite ignores "the interpersonal component of human sexual responses." He described Sartre's reflections on le visqueux as "celebrated". He has also credited Sartre with providing a "stunning apology for sado-masochism", and characterized Being and Nothingness as a "great work of post-Christian theology". Gonzalez-Crussi credited Sartre with recognizing that it is incorrect to equate sexual desire with desire for sexual acts. Sheets-Johnstone believed Sartre presented a subtle analysis of human sexuality. She praised his understanding of desire in general and suggested that his views about the subject anticipated those of the philosopher Michel Foucault. She believed that his views contained both significant truth and internal contradictions. She suggested that despite his criticism of Freud, his views about women and female sexuality were in some ways similar to Freud's. Naomi Greene, arguing that there is a "distaste for sexuality" in Sartre's work, identifies a clear "anti-sexual bias" present in Being and Nothingness.

title: Being and Nothingness


text:
Mistick Krewe of Comus

The Mistick Krewe of Comus (MKC), founded in 1856, is the oldest extant New Orleans, Louisiana Carnival Krewe, the longest to continually parade with few interruptions from 1856 to 1991, and continues to hold a tableau ball for its members and guests, to date. Initially its public facade was The Pickwick Club.

Before Comus was organized Carnival celebrations in New Orleans were mostly confined to the Catholic Creole community, parades were irregular and often very informal. Bernard de Marigny changed that in 1833 with the first formally organized New Orleans Carnival parade and tableau ball. It was Comus who in 1856, organized by 6 Protestant Anglo-Americans from the corresponding Uptown Neighborhoods (versus French Creole Vieux Carré), formalized the first continued observance of what we know today as New Orleans Mardi Gras or technically "Carnival" in New Orleans. French Catholics may have been invited thereafter, but sharp racial, ethnic, and class divides of New Orleans make it unlikely until later.

In 1991, the New Orleans City Council passed an ordinance that required social organizations to certify publicly that they did not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, gender, disability, or sexual orientation, in order to obtain parade permits and other public licensure. The Comus organization (along with Momus and Proteus, other 19th-century Krewes) withdrew from parading rather than racially integrating.

History and formation
Building on the initial work of what French Creole American nobleman, and playboy, Bernard de Marigny had done in 1833, funding and organizing the first official Mardi Gras- a "parade" followed by a tableau ball celebration;  in December 1856, six Anglo-American men of New Orleans gathered at Dr. John Pope's Drug Store on the Corner of Jackson and Prytania, a favorite rendezvous for the young men of the Fourth District, to begin to organize a secret society to observe Mardi Gras in a  more formal and organized fashion than their Creole predecessors. These men invited their businessmen friends, a group of some thirty to forty people, to meet at a club room above the now-defunct Gem Restaurant/Saloon in New Orleans' Vieux Carré on Jan 4, 1857, to organize the Carnival society. The inspiration for the name came from John Milton's Lord of Misrule in his masque Comus. Part of the inspiration for the parade was a Mobile, Alabama, Carnival mystic society, with annual parades, called the Cowbellion de Rakin Society (from 1830),.

Founding members: Samuel Manning Todd, a drygoods merchant from Utica, New York, who arrived in New Orleans by way of Mobile, Alabama, like a few others. Frank Shaw, Jr., commission merchant from New York State; Lloyd Dulany Addison (son of Walter Dulany Addison, of the Oxon Hill Manor Addisons, members of the Tidewater gentry) born in Kentucky, partner Bullitt, Miller & Co. merchants and cotton factors; Dr. John H. Pope, credited with naming the group, from New York State originally, and Joseph Ellison, owned Pope, Ellison & Co., commission merchants-Pope was also a pharmacist owning Pope's Drugstore at the corner of Jackson and Prytania where this small coterie initially organized, he was born in Louisville, Kentucky; brother William Ellison, partner of firm Starke & Ellison, Cotton Brokers was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

The new group acquired the costumes, floats, flambeaux, and even theme — their very name, Comus — from the 1856 Cowbellion parade (Milton's "Paradise Lost"). There are also indications that Striker's Independent Society from Mobile, Alabama, were involved, and they went en masse to the first Comus event.

One Mardi Gras historian describes The Mistick Krewe's creation in New Orleans thus:

 * It was Comus, who, in 1857, saved and transformed the dying flame of the old Creole Carnival with his enchanter's cup; it was Comus who introduced torch-lit processions and thematic floats to Mardi Gras; and it was Comus who ritually closed, and still closes, the most cherished festivities of New Orleans with splendor and pomp.

Comus' first night parade – replete with torches (which later came to be known as "flambeaux"), marching bands, and rolling floats – was wildly popular with Carnival revelers. So popular was the first Comus parade that the prospect of its second one attracted, for the first time, thousands of out-of-town visitors to New Orleans for the Carnival celebration.

Like that of other old established krewes, including Rex and Momus, Comus's history includes ties to white supremacy, particularly New Orleans's White League. Opposition to Reconstruction-era reforms prompted parade themes such as 1873's "The Missing Links to Darwin's Origin of Species" and 1877's "The Aryan Race".

Parade
The Mistick Krewe presented a parade annually on the evening of Shrove Tuesday from 1857 to 1991 with some exceptions including during war. From 1885 to 1890 while the Mistick Krewe of Comus did not parade, the evening parade on Shrove Tuesday was the Krewe of Proteus. In 1890 Comus began parading again as the final parade on Mardi Gras with Proteus reverting to the evening of Lundi Gras.

Parade themes
• 1992 No Parade Planned theme: Enchantments and Metamorphoses

• 1991 Entomological Empire

• 1981 Idolatry

• 1979 No parade - New Orleans Police Department strike

• 1975 Comus' Constellations

• 1974 Visions of Valhalla

• 1973 Adventures of Perseus

• 1972 Fabled Isles (last parade to roll through the French Quarter)

• 1971 Feasts and Festivals

• 1970 Cities of Destiny

• 1969 Famous Gardens of the World

• 1968 History of New Orleans

• 1966 Monsters and Metamorphoses

• 1965 The Lure and Lore of Gold

• 1964 Journeys

• 1963 Mark Twain

• 1962 Nature: The Master Artist

• 1959 Poetry of the American Scene

• 1957 Famous Gardens of the World

• 1956 Early Contemporaries

• 1952 Bible Stories We All Know

• 1949 Familiar Facts and Fantasies

• 1941 No Parade - World War II

• 1940 Picturesque Passages from the Poets

• 1931 Jewels of Byron

• 1930 The Legend of Faust

• 1929 Gleanings of the Past

• 1928 The Travels of Marco Polo

• 1927 Arabesques

• 1926 The Gardens of Cashmere

• 1925 The Realms of Phantasy

• 1924 The Mirthful Monarch Greets Ye Once Again

• 1923 No Parade

• 1922 No Parade

• 1921 No Parade

• 1920 No Parade

• 1919 No Parade

• 1918 No Parade - World War I

• 1917 Romantic Legends

• 1916 Glimpses of the Modern World

• 1915 Lore and Legends of Childhood

• 1914 Tales from Chaucer

• 1913 Time's Mysteries

• 1912 Cathay

• 1911 Familiar Quotations

• 1910 Mahomet

• 1909 Flights of Fancy

• 1908 Gods and Goddesses

• 1907 Tennyson

• 1906 The Masque of Comus

• 1905 The Lost Pleiad

• 1904 Izdubar

• 1903 A Leaf from the Mahabarata

• 1902 The Fairy Kingdom

• 1901 Sections from the Operas

• 1900 Stories of the Golden Age

• 1899 Josephus

• 1898 Scenes from Shakespeare

• 1897 Homer's Odyssey

• 1896 The Months and Seasons

• 1895 The Songs of Long Ago

• 1894 Once Upon a Time

• 1893 Salambo

• 1892 Nippon, the Land of the Rising Sun

• 1891 Demonology

• 1890 The Plangenesis of the Mistick Krewe

• 1889 No Parade

• 1888 No Parade

• 1887 No Parade

• 1886 No Parade

• 1885 No Parade

• 1884 Illustrated Ireland

• 1883 No Parade

• 1882 The Worships of the World

• 1881 The Myths of Northland

• 1880 The Aztec People

• 1879 No Parade

• 1878 Scenes from the Metamorphoses of Ovid

• 1877 The Aryan Race

• 1876 Four Thousand Years of Sacred History

• 1875 No Parade

• 1874 The Visit of Envoys from the Old World and New to the Court of Comus

• 1873 The Missing Links to Darwin's Origin of Species

• 1872 Dreams of Homer

• 1871 Spenser's Faerie Queen

• 1870 The History of Louisiana from 1539 to 1815

• 1869 The Fives Senses

• 1868 The Departure of Lalla Rookh from Dehli

• 1867 The Triumph of Epicurus

• 1866 The Past, Present, and Future

• 1865 No Parade - American Civil War

• 1864 No Parade - American Civil War

• 1863 No Parade - American Civil War

• 1862 No Parade - American Civil War

• 1861 The Four Ages of Life

• 1860 Statues of the Great Men of Our Country

• 1859 The English Holidays

• 1858 The Classic Pantheon

• 1857 The Demon Actors in Milton's Paradise Lost

Respites from revelry
From the first Comus parade until a police strike in 1979, nothing suspended New Orleans' lavish Mardi Gras celebrations except war. On March 1, 1862, Comus issued his first proclamation suspending Carnival revelry on account of war. On that day, the New Orleans Daily Picayune published this notice:

Comus issued an identical proclamation in 1917 (for World War I), another in 1942 (for World War II), and again in 1951 (for the Korean War). On each occasion, the Captain of Comus persuaded the Captains of other Krewes to refrain from organized revelry during international hostilities.

From 1885–1889, the Mistick Krewe chose not to parade, although other observances continued. During this period, the Krewe of Proteus moved its parade to Carnival night. When Comus resumed parading in 1890, Proteus refused a request to withdraw from parading on Mardi Gras night. The same year, the two parades collided on Canal Street, nearly reaching an impasse. As the Captains of the two groups exchanged defiant expressions, a Comus masker diverted the horse bearing the Captain of Proteus, and Comus was able to complete its procession.

Withdrawal from parading
In 1991 the New Orleans City Council, led by Democrat Dorothy Mae Taylor, passed an ordinance that required social organizations, including Mardi Gras Krewes, to certify publicly that they did not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, gender, disability, or sexual orientation, in order to obtain parade permits and other public licensure. The Comus organization (along with Momus and Proteus, other 19th-century Krewes) withdrew from parading, rather than racially integrating (Proteus returned to parading in 2000). Two federal courts later decided that the ordinance was an unconstitutional infringement on First Amendment rights of free association and an unwarranted intrusion into the privacy of the groups subject to the ordinance. The Krewe of Comus never resumed its parading.

Early affiliation with The Pickwick Club
It is generally known by now that the Pickwick Club, in its beginnings, was the public shield behind which the revelries of the Mistick Krewe were planned and executed. The two were one, but only the Club was known to the public, and the allegiance of the early Pickwickian to the Misktick Krewe was a sacred secret. The fame of each grew independently until distinction became necessary in 1884. The Krewe came first into being, but soon resolved itself into the Club, in the same tradition as The Louisiana Club and the Knights of Momus along with The Stratford Club and the High Priests of Mithras carry one today.

In the 20th and early 21st centuries, their membership is not identical; but it is believed that there are members common to both groups.

Carnival secrecy and exclusivity
The Mistick Krewe has jealously guarded the identities of its membership and the privacy of its activities (other than its parade), perhaps even more than the other Carnival organizations subscribing to the traditional code of secrecy.

Legend has it that admittance to the Mistick Krewe's ball was so highly sought-after that a group of uninvited ladies formed a flying wedge and attempted to force their way into the Comus ball. In other years, uninvited persons have tried to beg, buy, or steal invitations to the ball.

Even after the Mystic Krewe of Comus ball is over, its invitations are prized by collectors. They are both rare and uncommonly beautiful.

Meeting of the courts
The Mistick Krewe of Comus also originated another Carnival tradition: the "Meeting of the Courts". The practice originated in 1882, when Rex (the King of Carnival) and his Queen paid a formal visit to the throne of Comus. This ritualized meeting eventually evolved into the symbolic conclusion of the Mardi Gras season, a practice which continues to this day.

Although Rex is the titular King, some observers believe that the Meeting of the Courts – in which Rex leaves his own festivities and is received by a seated Comus at the Mistick Krewe's bal masque – establishes Comus as the more prestigious of the two organizations in the Carnival hierarchy.

Mardi Gras parades
The first Comus parade was held on Mardi Gras 1857, and this became an annual event. Other organizations sprang up in New Orleans in the 19th century, inspired by the Comus model, and also came to be known as Krewes.

Parading on Mardi Gras night, Comus was the final parade of the carnival season for over 100 years. It was much smaller and more sedate than the other parades of the day put on by Rex and the Zulu Social Aid & Pleasure Club.

The Comus parades became known for their sometimes obscure themes relating to ancient history and mythology. While other New Orleans parades, especially the newer super krewes of Endymion and Bacchus, might have a theme such as "Foods of the World" or "Broadway Show Tunes", Comus would present themes on the order of "Serpent Deities of the Ancient Near East".

title: Mistick Krewe of Comus