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This title is part of the Python Mini-Degree – 13 Courses to Learn and Master Python
In this course we’ll be building an image classification Artificial Intelligence (AI) that can detect transportation vehicles, animals and other objects. We’ll train our AI with a dataset of images, and then give it new images which it will be able to classify.
We’ll begin by introducing the concept of image classification and Machine Learning. We’ll the cover the Nearest Neighbor Classifier technique and write a script to implement it. Then, we’ll move on to covering the k-Nearest Neighbor technique which provides a more generic approach to solving this problem. Parameters of our AI will be discussed and we’ll use Hyperparameter Tuning for that. To train our image we’ll use the CIFAR-10 Image Classification Dataset, which is broadly used in academia and the industry.
About the Python Mini-Degree
The Python Mini-Degree is a bundle of 13 online video courses, that go all the way from teaching you how to code in Python while making a game, to building your own Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Internet of Things (IoT) applications using Computer Vision, Machine Learning and Deep Learning.
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Zhou Youguang, Architect Of A Bridge Between Languages, Dies At 111
Enlarge this image toggle caption Wang Zhao/AFP/Getty Images Wang Zhao/AFP/Getty Images
Zhou Youguang, the inventor of a system to convert Chinese characters into words with the Roman alphabet, died Saturday at the age of 111. Since his system was introduced nearly six decades ago, few innovations have done more to boost literacy rates in China and bridge the divide between the country and the West.
Pinyin, which was adopted by China in 1958, gave readers unfamiliar with Chinese characters a crucial tool to understand how to pronounce them. These characters do not readily disclose information on how to say them aloud — but with such a system as Pinyin, those characters more easily and clearly yield their meaning when converted into languages like English and Spanish, which use the Roman alphabet.
While it was not the first system to Romanize Chinese, Pinyin has become the most widely accepted. For Chinese speakers, many of whom speak disparate dialects, its broad acceptance made education easier, giving instructors a single, relatively simple instrument to teach people how to read.
Beyond China's borders, Pinyin allowed the standardization of Chinese names. For instance, it's a big reason why the name Westerners commonly use for the Chinese capital shifted from "Peking" to "Beijing." And it's why many other such names changed dramatically along with it.
And yet Zhou, the man behind one of the most important linguistic innovations in the 20th century, said he was reluctant when asked by the Chinese government to take on the task in the mid-1950s.
At the time, he was an economic scholar, only recently returned to China after a stint working on Wall Street in the U.S. He had come back to the country after its 1949 Communist revolution.
"I said I was an amateur, a layman, I couldn't do the job," he told NPR in 2011, laughing. "But they said, it's a new job, everybody is an amateur. Everybody urged me to change professions, so I did. So from 1955, I abandoned economics and started studying writing systems."
toggle caption Courtesy Zhou Youguang
The committee Zhou led spent three years working on its alphabetic system.
"People made fun of us, joking that it had taken us a long time to deal with just 26 letters," he told the BBC in 2012.
Others took the committee's invention very seriously, however. The Communist government of China introduced Pinyin in schools in 1958. The international community eventually adopted it as the standard romanization for Chinese writing, as well, with the U.N. doing so in 1986.
Before Pinyin, 85 percent of Chinese people could not read, according to the BBC. Now, UNICEF says the literacy rate in China hovers at about 95 percent.
Lately, Pinyin has also been integral in determining the ways mobile phones and computers transmit Chinese characters.
Still, despite the broad acceptance of his system, Zhou went on to become something of a thorn in the side of the country's Communist government. During the Cultural Revolution, in the '60s and '70s, Zhou drew the scrutiny of the Communist Party. In 1969, he was even labeled a "reactionary academic authority" and exiled to a labor camp for more than two years, reports The New York Times.
But he was not dissuaded from speaking his mind for long. As he aged, he became more vocal about his dissatisfaction with the powers that be.
And, as Louisa Lim noted for NPR, Zhou was not afraid to use his stature to point out discrepancies he found in Communist Party doctrine.
"In 1985, he translated the Encyclopaedia Britannica into Chinese and then worked on the second edition — placing him in a position to notice the U-turns in China's official line. At the time of the original translation, China's position was that the U.S. started the Korean War — but the encyclopedia said North Korea was to blame, Zhou recalls. " 'That was troublesome, so we didn't include that bit. Later, the Chinese view changed. So we got permission from above to include it. That shows there's progress in China,' he says, adding, 'But it's too slow.' "
For a man born in 1906, under China's final dynasty, Zhou did more than most to help encourage the change he wished to see in his country. Though he died Saturday after more than a century of life, he is survived by the system he helped father, which continues to live on around the world.
Clarification: This post has been updated to make clearer the fact that Pinyin was not the first system of Romanization. |
Questions are prearranged; ‘It was awful,’ one US delegate says
HONG KONG — Former US vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin said the US government was wasting taxpayers’ money and could aggravate poverty, said delegates at her first speech outside North America on Wednesday.
Palin, the former governor of Alaska, gave hundreds of financial big-hitters at the CLSA Investors’ Forum in Hong Kong a wide-ranging speech that covered Alaska, international terrorism, US economic policy and trade with China.
Her performance, which was closed to the media, divided opinion.
Some of those who attended praised her forthright views on government social and economic intervention and others walked out early in disgust.
“She was brilliant,” said a European delegate, on condition of anonymity.
“She said America was spending a lot of money and it was a temporary solution. Normal people are having to pay more and more but things don’t get better. The rich will leave the country and the poor will get poorer.”
Two US delegates left early, with one saying “it was awful, we couldn’t stand it any longer”. He declined to be identified.
Palin, who shot to national and international prominence after Senator John McCain picked her as his running mate last year, stepped down as Alaska governor in July but has provided little insight into her future plans.
She is expected to write a book and has said she will travel the country campaigning for candidates who share her political ideology.
In the CLSA speech, which lasted about 75 minutes, Palin also tackled the recent US trade spat with China, a country she said the United States should have the best possible relationship with.
According to delegates, she said US President Barack Obama’s administration worsened an already difficult situation when earlier this month he slapped duties on Chinese tire imports blamed for costing American jobs.
They said she praised the economic policies of former US President Ronald Reagan and criticised the current administration for intervening too much during the recent financial crisis.
Although she touched on the threat posed to the United States by terrorism and talked about links with traditional US allies in Asia such as Japan, Australia and South Korea, one Asian delegate complained she devoted too much time to her home state of Alaska.
“It was almost more of a speech promoting investment in Alaska,” he said, declining to be named.
“As fund managers we want to hear about the United States as a whole, not just about Alaska. And she criticised Obama a lot but offered no solutions.”
Another said he was disappointed that she took only pre-arranged questions.
There were no apparent gaffes though from Palin, who was mocked during last year’s presidential campaign for her lack of experience in foreign affairs and for her verbal blunders.
Several delegates saw the speech as a sign of her ambitions to run as a presidential candidate in 2012 and a useful indication of the potential direction of US politics in the future.
“It was fairly right-wing populist stuff,’ one US delegate said.
Palin blasted Obama’s proposals on healthcare, reiterating a previous statement made to the press that the plan would include a bureaucratic “death panel” that would decide who gets assistance, he said.
Another from the United States said: “She frightens me because she strikes a chord with a certain segment of the population and I don’t like it.”
CLSA, an arm of French bank Credit Agricole, said it closed Palin’s session to the media after she indicated that she would have to adjust her speech if reporters were present. |
Even more striking to a civilian, though, is the other-planetary toxicity of SAC Capital’s culture. The competition was ruthless. Everyone was expendable, including partners and mentors. Cohen couldn’t tolerate anyone’s making money before he did — he’d fly into a rage if he heard that a portfolio manager had done a trade without giving him first dibs. “Employees often felt like they were part of an experiment looking at the effects of prolonged stress and uncertainty,” Kolhatkar writes.
But my hunch is that readers will most remember “Black Edge” for showing them just how alarmingly pervasive insider trading was in the years surrounding the 2008 collapse. It became commonplace, domesticated — dare I say it? — normalized. Big banks, Kolhatkar writes, often shared what they knew about the status of a stock with SAC Capital first, because they did so much business with it. Whole research firms existed for the sole purpose of connecting shops like SAC Capital to “expert networks,” or to individuals who worked in publicly traded companies, with the expectation that these people would share valuable insights to help those on Wall Street make better trades.
The industry called it “earnings intelligence.” But the line between earnings intelligence and inside information could be very hard to discern.
Kolhatkar makes a convincing case that Cohen leaned very hard on his employees to get vital information — to find an edge. Hence the book’s title: A “black edge” is early, private, proprietary information about a company. Cohen was too smart to declare explicitly that he wanted it. Instead, he’d ask his employees to give their assessments a “conviction rating,” from one to 10. And why would someone rate a conviction as nine without a black edge?
Perhaps the most despicable episode in Kolhatkar’s book involves Mathew Martoma, a portfolio manager for SAC. He struck up a mercenary friendship with an older, lonely neurologist, hoping to wrangle information from him about the status of an experimental drug to treat Alzheimer’s disease. The way Martoma went about seducing him is both sickening and extremely impressive.
It worked. Martoma contacted Cohen, who then arranged to unload millions of shares in two companies that were testing the drug. He shorted some of their stock for good measure.
Yet, when later pressed for specifics about it by the government, Cohen, “the greatest trader of his generation, who could track the price movements of 80 different securities at a time, claimed not to remember,” Kolhatkar writes. “He said ‘I don’t recall’ 65 times.” It worked. Martoma, as many people know, had a different fate.
So how do you end a book like this? In James B. Stewart’s “Den of Thieves,” it was easy: Michael Milken was sent to jail. Here, Kolhatkar doesn’t have so gratifying an option, but her ending is no less chilling for it. She notes that in 2014, Cohen made $2.5 billion by trading his personal fortune alone. “He is making plans to reopen his hedge fund,” she writes, “as soon as possible.” |
CTV Saskatoon
A man who pleaded guilty to the attempted murder of Marlene Bird now says he doesn’t believe he committed the crime.
Leslie Black, who pleaded guilty to attempted murder in April of last year, was in a Prince Albert court Wednesday attempting to change his plea.
He testified he doesn’t believe he’s guilty. He said he failed to tell his lawyer he believes he’s innocent of the charges laid against him following the attack on Bird.
Black was charged with aggravated sexual assault and attempted murder after Bird was found in a downtown Prince Albert parking lot on June 1, 2014. She had been viciously beaten and set on fire, and was barely conscious when she was found.
She suffered third-degree burns and was so badly wounded that both her legs required amputation. Half of her forehead down to her chin was lacerated.
Black told court he pleaded guilty to attempted murder in exchange for a dropped aggravated sexual assault charge. He said he signed the statement of facts to “get it over with.”
He would have never pleaded guilty if he knew the Crown might apply for dangerous offender status, he said.
His former lawyer, Thomas Adam Masiowski, testified Black was receiving death threats in Prince Albert. He was worried a sexual assault charge could be a problem for Black if he ended up in the penitentiary.
He also said he didn’t believe prosecutors would win dangerous offender status.
Defence lawyer Brent Little challenged Masiowski’s reasoning regarding dangerous offender status and questioned whether Masiowski properly explained the possible legal outcomes of the case to Black.
Black had a childlike quality, Masiowski said. He struggled to understand complicated legal concepts.
A decision on the hearing — referred to as an expungement hearing — is not expected until May 12 when both the Crown and defence are scheduled back in court.
--- CTV’s Jules Knox was in court for Black’s expungement hearing. Read her live coverage below: |
German Chancellor Angela Merkel was named the world's most powerful woman by Forbes for the sixth consecutive year. (Michael Sohn/AP)
For the sixth consecutive year, German Chancellor Angela Merkel was named the world's most powerful woman by Forbes. Merkel is also the reigning Time Person of the Year.
Merkel beat out Hillary Clinton, who the Associated Press declared the presumptive Democratic nominee for U.S. president on Monday. The former secretary of state finished second on the Forbes list.
"If there is a single leader able to defy existential economic and political challenges to the European Union, from edges and core, it has been German Chancellor Angela Merkel," Forbes explained. "But her latest act may be the boldest. By opening Germany's borders to over 1 million immigrants from Syria and other Muslim countries in the last several years, Merkel has decided to wield her power with the most curious of geopolitical strategies: sheer humanism.
Forbes said of Clinton, should she win the American presidency in November, she could likely move to the top spot.
"She remains the presumptive Democratic contender in the elections this fall, and her unflappable and tenacious pursuit of the country's highest office keeps her at spot No. 2 on this year's list, with a clear shot at number one if she wins the nation's vote." Forbes said of Clinton.
Clinton finished second in 2011 as well.
The Forbes list came out before the AP reported Clinton had secured the Democratic nomination Monday night. Rival Bernie Sanders contested that assessment. Clinton's campaign argued Tuesday's contests should conclude before making any calls on the race. Clinton believes she will be the eventual nominee, however, and AP's finding makes Clinton likely the first female major party presidential nominee in history .
Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen was named the third most powerful woman in the world. Yellen is the first female Fed chair in history.
Businesswoman and philanthropist Melinda Gates -- wife of world's richest man Bill Gates – is fourth on the list. Rounding out the top five is Mary Barra, CEO of General Motors. Barra is the first female GM CEO in history.
Time credited Merkel's 2015 leadership in managing the European-Middle East refugee crisis and for her leadership in the Greek debt negotiations.
"Germany has spent the past 70 years testing antidotes to its toxically nationalist, militarist, genocidal past. Merkel brandished a different set of values—humanity, generosity, tolerance—to demonstrate how Germany's great strength could be used to save, rather than destroy. It is rare to see a leader in the process of shedding an old and haunting national identity," the magazine wrote. .
Also ranked on the Forbes list are the IMF's Christine Legarde (sixth), Facebook's Sheryl Sandberg (seventh), and U.S. first lady Michelle Obama (13th). U.S. Supreme Court Justices Elena Kagan, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and Sonia Sotomayor are tied for 23rd, and Queen Elizabeth II, now England's longest-reigning monarch, comes in at 30th. |
'Stay Away From Re-Tweets': Melania Trump on Advice She Gives Her Husband
Cruz: Forget Trump, I Want an Apology From Obama & Hillary
Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump has repeatedly said that not only will he build a wall between the U.S. and Mexico, he will make Mexico pay for it.
So how would Trump compel Mexico to pay?
According to a two-page memorandum his campaign sent to The Washington Post, he will threaten to cut off the flow of billions of dollars in payments that immigrants send home to the country.
On "America's Newsroom," Trump campaign Arizona chairman Jeff DeWit explained that Trump would limit money transfers from the U.S. to Mexico by enforcing the "know your customer" provision of the Patriot Act.
If someone can't provide documentation proving lawful presence in the United States, they can't send money out, DeWit said, noting that would stop the flow of billions of dollars per year from the U.S. to Mexico.
"This can happen, so the argument's going to shift very quickly to 'should this happen?'" DeWit said, adding that other proposals outlined in the memo include increased trade tariffs, cancelation of visas and higher fees for border crossing cards.
"Basically, American workers are looking for a president that's going to put America first. And Donald Trump is the only presidential candidate that's saying he's going to do that."
Watch the segment above.
UPDATE, 12:55pm ET: President Obama just responded to a question about Trump's plan after making remarks on corporate inversion.
“Good luck with that…” President #Obama addressed #DonaldTrump's plans to build a wall & get Mexico to pay for it.https://t.co/QQktwjRGro — Fox News (@FoxNews) April 5, 2016
Kasich: Trump & Cruz Say I Should Drop Out Because I'm Winning Their Votes
Hillary: 'I Feel Sorry' for Sanders' Voters Who Believe Lies About Me
Kasich Consoles Man While Answering Question About Caring for Vets |
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: On Tuesday, the group Privacy International sued Britain’s intelligence agency for illegally developing spy programs that remotely hijack computers and mobile devices. According to the legal complaint, the British GCHQ and the National Security Agency can now take over a device’s microphone and record conversations occurring near the device, take over a device’s webcam and snap photographs, retrieve any content from a phone, log keystrokes entered into a device, and identify the geographic whereabouts of the user. Eric King of Privacy International, said, quote, “The hacking programs being undertaken by GCHQ are the modern equivalent of the government entering your house, rummaging through your filing cabinets, diaries, journals and correspondence, before planting bugs in every room you enter,” he said. Privacy International’s legal complaint is based on documents leaked by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden and first reported on by Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Glenn Greenwald and The Intercept.
Well, today we’ll spend the rest of the hour with part two of our interview with Glenn Greenwald, author of the new book, No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State. Glenn Greenwald and filmmaker Laura Poitras were the journalists who first met Snowden in Hong Kong last June. Glenn Greenwald came by Democracy Now!’s studios on Monday. I asked him to talk about how Edward Snowden first reached out to him.
GLENN GREENWALD: He first tried to contact me—or did contact me back in December of 2012, when he sent me an anonymous email using the name Cincinnatus, which is the name of a 5th BC Roman emperor who had famously been recruited to become essentially the emperor of Rome to vanquish a foreign enemy and then voluntarily gave up power after he succeeded and was at the height of his power and said, “I’m going back to my farm,” and became sort of the symbol of civic virtue, somebody who uses power for the collective good and not for their own personal aggrandizement. And that was the name Snowden chose when he first contacted me. The problem was that he was afraid, for obvious reasons—the reasons that are now obvious—to tell me much about who he was or what he had. All he would say, essentially, was “I have a story for you.” But as you know, we get contacted every day by people claiming to have stories, often which turn out to be—most of the time which turn out to be nothing. And so I didn’t prioritize it. He wanted me to install encryption so that we could talk securely, and I never did. And he tried, essentially, for seven weeks and finally gave up and then went to Laura Poitras, my friend, the award-winning documentarian. She did have encryption, and we were able to start speaking that way about the story that he had.
AMY GOODMAN: And talk about what eventually brought you and Snowden to Hong Kong.
GLENN GREENWALD: Well, when I first talked to Snowden, which was in early—the early part of May, he was a huge mystery, both to myself and Laura. All we knew was that he was claiming that he had access to incredibly incriminating documents at the highest level of the national security state. But we didn’t know who he was or how he got those documents or even what those documents were. And from the beginning, he was insistent that we travel to Hong Kong in order to meet him. And the idea that he was in Hong Kong was quite mystifying both to myself and Laura, and raised a lot of flags of suspicion, because we obviously assumed, when it was time to meet him, that we were going to be traveling to northern Virginia or southern Maryland, which is where most of the people who work at these agencies reside. And it was very difficult to understand why somebody with access to these kind of documents would be in Hong Kong of all places. And he was a little bit reluctant to talk about that.
I didn’t push much to get information, because I didn’t want to make him feel like he was being interrogated, especially early on before a bond of trust had been created. And the only thing I said was, “Of course I’m willing to come to Hong Kong, given the magnitude of what you’re saying you’re able to give me. But before I get on a plane and travel all the way across the world, I just would like to see some sample of the material that you’re prepared to turn over.” And he said, “That’s completely understandable.” He sent to me, through encryption programs that he helped me walk me through step by step to install, roughly two dozen top-secret NSA documents that I received sitting at my home in Rio de Janeiro. It was the first time any documents had leaked from this most secretive agency inside the U.S. government ever.
The documents themselves were explosive. Among them was the documents detailing the PRISM program, in which the NSA had obtained access directly to the servers of the largest Internet company so that they could get the emails and chats that they wanted directly. And so, when I got that first set of documents, I knew that this story was very serious, the source was at least somewhat reliable, that it wasn’t just a crank or crazy person. And the very next day, I got on the plane. I flew to New York to meet with my editors at The Guardian. I met Laura there. And the day after that, on the first available plane, we flew the 16 hours to Hong Kong to meet Edward Snowden.
AMY GOODMAN: But even that, it wasn’t as simple as that, because though you were a columnist for The Guardian newspaper, they were concerned. They wanted one of their trusty, older-generation reporters to be there, too.
GLENN GREENWALD: You know, I think that that—one of the reasons why I wrote the book is because there’s a perception of what has happened that’s informed by hindsight, and hindsight often distorts the situation more than it clarifies. And, you know, the challenges that we faced very early on in that story, journalistically and legally and politically, were quite profound. And, you know, we had no idea who it was that we were going to meet. We had no idea what he had done to get these documents or what the legal ramifications were or what the risks were of going to Hong Kong. In fact, The Washington Post, whom he had thought about involving, actually said that they were unwilling to send any of their journalists to Hong Kong because they were so worried about the risks.
And so, you know, The Guardian understandably was worried about all of that. And as you say, I had only worked with them for eight months. My deal with The Guardian was I write whatever I want, and I post it directly to the Internet, and you don’t interfere in any way in what I’m writing. So I had barely worked with any Guardian editors at all, let alone on a story of this size. And so, there was a lot of trust issues. I didn’t fully trust them in terms of how they were going to handle a story like this, and they didn’t fully trust me that they could, you know, essentially stake the 190-year history of their newspaper on a story based on what I was telling them, given that we had no relationship. And so, at the last minute, they did insist that this very trusted reporter, Ewen MacAskill, traveled along with us. It was a last-minute sort of request. And it bothered Laura, and it bothered me, and we were worried about what it would mean for the source. But we ultimately accepted it.
AMY GOODMAN: You write that Laura was particularly concerned that if this source, who you were going to meet in Hong Kong, were at the airport secretly sort of, well, checking you guys out as you came in, and saw someone else with you, he might just disappear. He might just back out.
GLENN GREENWALD: That was a big concern. I mean, we knew that this person was extremely well prepared. I mean, everything that he proposed to us had been thought through in a very detailed and systematic way. It was all incredibly planned. And so, the fact that there was this major last-minute change, which was it wasn’t just me and Laura, whom he trusted by that point, enough to meet, we’re coming, but also this completely unknown person from The Guardian, who just got thrown onto the end, was a major concern. And The Guardian said, “You don’t have to let him meet the source until you’re ready. We just want him to go to be around and just sort of help and to be our eyes and ears.” And we essentially agreed, because I thought it was a reasonable request, and I felt we could manage it. But it was illustrative of the kind of challenge that we faced right from the beginning in doing this story, with so many unknowns.
AMY GOODMAN: So, tell us about the moment, Glenn Greenwald, that you laid eyes on Edward Snowden. How did you agree to meet and then do the interview?
GLENN GREENWALD: Well, the meeting itself was incredibly intricate, and it was, you know, right out of a spy movie, essentially. I mean, he had—he was staying at a large hotel in Hong Kong, which itself was a little bit confusing. I mean, why would somebody who makes off with this amount of documents—you know, you picture them in sort of a hovel of an apartment and that’s very obscure, so they can’t be found, and he was staying at this sort of highrise, luxury apartment hotel in the middle of the most commercial district in Hong Kong, which was itself very surprising.
And so, he had selected a place in the hotel—and this is very illustrative of how Edward Snowden thinks—that was, in his words, not so trafficked that we will cause a scene by meeting there and be noticed, but not so obscure that it would be conspicuous if suddenly people were there. He found this, what he thought was this perfectly calibrated place, which was in this kind of bizarre room that had an enormous green alligator on the floor. And our instructions were to go to this room at two different times, 10:00 and 10:20, and to sit on the sofa in front of the green alligator and wait for him. And if he didn’t show up on the first occasion, we were to leave the room and come back in 20 minutes and wait for him. And the second time, he asked us to speak code questions to hotel employees, to ask, “How is the food here? When does the restaurant open?” so that we could signal to him that things had gone well on the trip over, that we hadn’t been followed. It was sort of a code question that he would hear as he hovered.
And so, we sat down as instructed at 10:00. He didn’t show up. We left. We came back at 10:20. A minute later, he walked in. And the big question was: How are we going to know that it’s you? We know nothing about you. We don’t know how old you are, what you look like or what your race is or even your gender. And he said, “You’ll know me because I’ll be holding in my left hand a Rubik’s cube. And so, he walked in, was holding a Rubik’s cube, came over to us, introduced himself, and that was how we met him.
AMY GOODMAN: I want to go to a part of that first video that appeared a few days later, the video when the world first saw Edward Snowden, filmed by Laura Poitras in Hong Kong. EDWARD SNOWDEN: The greatest fear that I have regarding the outcome for America of these disclosures is that nothing will change. People will see in the media all of these disclosures. They’ll know the length that the government is going to grant themselves powers, unilaterally, to create greater control over American society and global society, but they won’t be willing to take the risks necessary to stand up and fight to change things, to force their representatives to actually take a stand in their interests.
AMY GOODMAN: Talk about, Glenn Greenwald—that, again, Edward Snowden—that first video that the world came to know so well, how long that interview was, what shocked you most by it, how long it took you to put online, how The Guardian responded to this video.
GLENN GREENWALD: Well, the most extraordinary thing about this story, the most unusual and the most difficult, from the very beginning, was that Edward Snowden, from the very first time that I ever spoke with him, told me that he was absolutely determined to identify himself as the source of these disclosures, that he didn’t want to hide, he didn’t want to remain anonymous. He felt a moral responsibility to come out and explain why he did what he did to the world. And, you know, that’s extremely unusual. I mean, if a source comes to you with information that can send them to prison for the rest of their lives, they typically want you to even go to jail if it means that you have to to protect their identity. He wanted the opposite: He wanted to come forward and explain to the world why he did what he did. And—
AMY GOODMAN: He didn’t want to be Deep Throat.
GLENN GREENWALD: He did not want to be Deep Throat. He wanted to be Edward Snowden saying, “I stand up and take responsibility for the choice that I made, and I want to explain to you why I made it.” And so, from the beginning, I felt this very deep responsibility to make certain that he would have the ability to send the message that he wanted to send, to speak to the world and be heard in the right light, in the right way, so that the perception of him would come directly from him. And the way that Laura decided that this would be best done would be to make a video so that he could literally speak in his own words, not speak through me, not speak through any newspaper or other media institution. And so, the first thing that Laura did was, on the very first day that I met Edward Snowden, I interrogated him for literally six straight hours, so that I could convince myself that he was an authentic and reliable person, that what he was telling us was true. And she said it was so fragmented and so detailed and so lengthy that she didn’t feel like she could really put together a video that would really convey who he was.
AMY GOODMAN: Now, wait. Let’s just talk about who you are, Glenn Greenwald, what it means to be questioned by you.
GLENN GREENWALD: Right.
AMY GOODMAN: You’re a constitutional lawyer by training.
GLENN GREENWALD: Right. And, you know, I had spent, you know, many years, before being a journalist, not just as a lawyer, but as a litigator, which means that I so many times would sit down at a table just like this with witnesses, probably a little closer to me than you’re sitting, and for days at a time bombard them with questions. And almost nobody can withstand that level of scrutiny if they’re lying. The lies will always come out. And I felt very confident that if he were lying, that that would come out. It’d be apparent in the questioning.
And after six hours, I felt extremely confident that he was telling the truth about everything. There was no—there were no inconsistencies. There was no hesitation. He withstood all of it. I mean, we didn’t let him go to the bathroom. We didn’t let him eat anything or even have a drink of water. It was literally two feet away from me and asking questions. But Laura felt like that wouldn’t make a very effective video because it was too fragmented and too detailed. And so Laura wrote up, I think, 20 questions, and I added maybe five other ones. And it was on the third or fourth day that we were in Hong Kong, and we said, “Let’s really do this video the right way, in a focused way, so that he’s answering the questions that the world is going to want to know.”
AMY GOODMAN: At any point, Glenn, were you afraid that Edward Snowden would disappear?
GLENN GREENWALD: We were constantly afraid that he would disappear, not on his own volition, but because there was going to be a knock at the door, and American agents or Chinese agents or Hong Kong local authorities were going to find out what he was doing and come and take him away. That was—that threat, that fear, was constantly hovering over everything that we did. And, you know, part of why he chose Hong Kong, ultimately I found out, was because he felt like that would afford him the protection he needed from the U.S. government to be able to do the work that he wanted to do with the journalists whom he had selected. But yeah, that was always a serious concern.
AMY GOODMAN: Talk about what happened on the fifth day, what Edward Snowden said about some security having been breached—
GLENN GREENWALD: Right.
AMY GOODMAN: —having to do with his home in Hawaii.
GLENN GREENWALD: Yeah, I mean, you know, we—we had—none of us had any idea what the U.S. government knew about what he had done. And so, we were operating completely in the dark. And I got there on the fifth day that we were in Hong Kong, and he said, “I found out some alarming news.” And it was the news I had been waiting for, I thought, which was he said that he had discovered that NSA officials, a human resources person and an internal NSA police officer—which I didn’t even know exists, but the NSA has its own police force, and an officer from that police force had been dispatched to his home in Hawaii, which he shared with his longtime girlfriend, to essentially say, “Where is Edward Snowden? And why hasn’t he been at work? And do you know what it is that he’s doing? And do you mind if we search?” And Snowden was certain that this meant that the government had detected that he was the source of these disclosures. And I had argued the opposite, that I didn’t think that they would send just a human resources person and a police officer to his home, if they really thought he was the source of this massive leak. They would probably send FBI and SWAT teams and who knows what else. But neither of us was certain. And so, the possibility that he had been detected in some way or was about to be was very real, and it accelerated the need to get this video ready, so that we could have him appear before the world on his own volition.
AMY GOODMAN: Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Glenn Greenwald. His new book, released Tuesday, is No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State. When we come back, we’ll talk with Glenn about how Edward Snowden managed to go underground in Hong Kong after meeting with Glenn and Laura Poitras. This is Democracy Now! We’ll be back in a minute.
[break]
AMY GOODMAN: On our website, we have a new video timeline of Democracy Now! reports on Edward Snowden and the surveillance state. It features all of our interviews with Glenn Greenwald since he filed the first report last June based on Snowden’s leaked NSA documents. You can see the timeline at democracynow.org.
This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, as we continue with Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Glenn Greenwald, author of the new book, out this week, No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State. I asked Glenn Greenwald to talk about how Edward Snowden managed to secretly leave his hotel room in Hong Kong once it became known he was the source of the NSA leaks.
GLENN GREENWALD: Well, you know, the spycraft that permeated everything we did in Hong Kong extended right up until the time that he had to escape, because what had happened was, once we—it was really amazing. We spent the whole week reporting from Hong Kong on these stories, and not a single media outlet ever wondered, “Why are they in Hong Kong breaking all these NSA stories?” But the minute we revealed his identity, they put it all together and realized that Edward Snowden must be in Hong Kong, because we had interviewed him live from there. And so, they all descended on the city, and they were all desperately searching for where he was. They had found my hotel room by bribing a variety of hotel employees. But they were looking everywhere for him. And we knew that if they found him before he was able to leave, that he would never be able to leave, because they would follow him incessantly. And so, we arranged for some lawyers, who we were able to find in Hong Kong, who were well connected, to rush over to the hotel and literally take him out of his hotel room and put him into hiding 15 or 20 minutes before the media found him. And on that day, we were really worried that he wasn’t going to be able to get out of his hotel, that the media swarm would have found him. And he talked about how he could change his appearance—he could shave his head, he could do things to his face—to essentially make himself unrecognizable and be able to leave the hotel. I mean, it was at that level of spycraft that all of these events took place.
AMY GOODMAN: So where did he go?
GLENN GREENWALD: Well, he—we put him into the hands of these lawyers, who specialize in human rights law and in asylum claims. And they put him in various safe houses throughout Hong Kong, people who essentially were willing to shield him, on the premise that he was going to ask the world for asylum protection from the United States government.
AMY GOODMAN: So, then explain what his thinking was, and your thinking, about Hong Kong, about China, about what his chances were of one of these governments cooperating with the U.S. government in arresting him and then extraditing him.
GLENN GREENWALD: You know, people second-guess all these things that happened. You know, why did he end up in Hong Kong? Why didn’t he go to Iceland? Why didn’t he go, you know, to Ecuador, to begin with? And there are really good answers to all of that. But the best answer is—and he himself said this all the time, whenever I would ask him about alternatives—was, you know, he would say, “Look, all my options are bad options.” If you’re going to be a whistleblower who leaks more sensitive material about the U.S. government than anyone in history, you know, you’re not going to have very good options. They’re going to know you, who you are and where you are, and they’re going to want to find you, and it doesn’t matter where you go. And as it turns out, I think he planned really well. I mean, I think Hong Kong ended up being a great choice. They didn’t get him in Hong Kong. He tried to get to Latin America and was forced by the U.S. government to stay in Russia. But that, too, turned out to be fortuitous, because he’s further outside of the grasp of the United States, a year later, than he has ever been.
AMY GOODMAN: Explain what happened there, because a lot of people forget why he ended up in Russia, that he traveled to Russia because he wanted to sell the Russians secrets, or that he sold the Chinese secrets. Explain how he ends up being stuck in Russia.
GLENN GREENWALD: Well, first of all, it’s just such a potent sign of how disingenuous our political discourse can be, because when he was in Hong Kong for those first two-and-a-half weeks, all sorts of people were asserting—obviously without evidence—that he must be a Chinese spy. This was clear, clearly a Chinese espionage operation. And the minute he moved from Hong Kong to Moscow, those same people just switched seamlessly from he’s a Chinese spy to a Russian spy and forgot or ignored the fact that they were claiming something quite different just a moment ago.
Any whistleblower in the United States who’s effective is going to be aggressively demonized. But what people have blocked out and what the media has successfully obscured, because it’s the media that typically tries to attack Snowden by saying, “Oh, look he’s in this oppressive tyranny, and it’s hypocritical that he would be in Russia while criticizing the United States,” is that he did not choose to be in Russia. He went to Moscow with the intention of flying on to Havana, which had promised him safe passage so that he could then fly to the northern part of Latin America, where he would request asylum. And it was only because on the flight from Hong Kong to Moscow, when the U.S. government, with no due process, unilaterally just revoked his passport, declared it invalid, and then bullied and threatened the Cubans out of rescinding their offer of safe passage, and he landed and realized he no longer had safe passage, did they force him to remain in Russia. And he stayed there for five weeks. I mean, as he always says, “If I were a Russian spy, do you think I would have been given that welcome of being forced to remain in the airport for five weeks while the Russian government thought about what they wanted to do with me?”
And he only then, once he realized that he would be physically incapable of leaving Russia—remember, during this time, the U.S. government showed how radical it would be. There was a plane that they thought that he was on, that was actually the plane of Bolivian President Evo Morales. And despite no evidence that he was on the plane, they literally forced the plane down by preventing overflight rights from several of their allies in Europe, and he was forced to land in Austria. The fact that they were willing to force down the plane of a president of a sovereign country, based on a whim, showed that they were physically going to force him to stay in Russia, not let him leave. And it was only then that he sought asylum. So then to try and use that against him and say, “Well, he’s in Russia, and that undermines his credibility as a messenger,” is the ultimate in irony.
AMY GOODMAN: But talk about Julian Assange, then, another person who is the target of the U.S., not clear if he’s been secretly indicted by the U.S. I mean, here he is holed up in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London. The role he played in Edward Snowden’s escape from Hong Kong?
GLENN GREENWALD: WikiLeaks, as an organization, deserves immense credit for what they did to protect Edward Snowden. It was daring and innovative and heroic. Obviously, Julian himself was physically incapable of leaving the embassy in London. But what they did was they dispatched somebody who has been working with WikiLeaks for many years, who’s very closely associated with Julian Assange, a British woman named Sarah Harrison, who went to Hong Kong and met Edward Snowden and arranged his passage out of Hong Kong and to Russia and then stayed with him for five weeks in the airport and then three more months once he got asylum, just to be a witness to the world that he was being treated fairly. And WikiLeaks provided support for him and an infrastructure, legal advice. Essentially, the reason why Edward Snowden is a free man today and able to participate in the debate that he galvanized is because of the bravery of WikiLeaks and Sarah Harrison.
AMY GOODMAN: And Sarah Harrison then goes on to—well, she can’t go home to London.
GLENN GREENWALD: Right. I mean, she is concerned—almost certainly with very good reason—that if she went to London, at the very least she would be detained under the same terrorism law that they used to detain and interrogate my partner, David Miranda, which would entitle them to take all of her things and to question her. And if she didn’t answer every single question truthfully and honestly, in their eyes, they would then have the right to arrest her and prosecute her just for that. So she’s essentially exiled from her own country as a result of helping Edward Snowden be protected against persecution from his own government.
AMY GOODMAN: So, Sarah Harrison now lives in Germany.
GLENN GREENWALD: Right.
AMY GOODMAN: Glenn Greenwald, talk about how Edward Snowden got asylum in Russia.
GLENN GREENWALD: I mean, it’s really a fascinating and, I think, still, kind of obscured series of events. You know, the context for it is that even though the Cold War is over, the American political class still regards Russia as this enemy. I think it’s just baked into the DNA of Americans at this point to hear the word “Russia” and just sort of react with hysteria. And so the Russian and American political classes really hate each other. And for years, there have been numerous Russian criminals that have sought refuge in the U.S., whom Putin has been demanding be returned. And the position of the U.S. government is: “Sorry, but we have no extradition treaty with you, and therefore we just—there’s no way to turn them over, even though we would love to be able to do that.” And so, once Snowden ended up in Russia and the U.S. government started demanding that he be extradited and turned over, there was a lot of secret negotiations between the Russians and the Americans. And I was quite concerned at that point that that was going to end in an agreement where Snowden would be turned over. But the animosity between the two political classes is so intense—
AMY GOODMAN: And this is even before Ukraine.
GLENN GREENWALD: Yeah, this is before Ukraine, precisely. That even though it probably would have been in both of their interests, where they could have each gotten very valuable things, they just weren’t able to come to an agreement. And then Putin saw it as a way to sort of highlight the human rights abuses of the U.S. government, the way they love to highlight the human rights abuses of Russia and other countries, by giving Putin—by giving Snowden asylum.
AMY GOODMAN: So, Glenn Greenwald, you leave Hong Kong. Edward Snowden ends up with asylum, at least for now, in Russia. And you begin this series of articles—Laura Poitras, as well—revealing these documents that you have. Now, who has these documents? That’s a critical question. Does Edward Snowden have them, for example, in Russia?
GLENN GREENWALD: Right, so there is a certain universe of documents that Edward Snowden gave to journalists. And of the journalists to whom he gave documents, directly or indirectly, only Laura and I have the full set. There are other news organizations that have enormous numbers of documents, just not the full set, including The Washington Post, including The Guardian, ProPublica and then The New York Times. ProPublica and New York Times got theirs from The Guardian, when The Guardian was concerned that the British government would order them to destroy their entire set. So there are multiple organizations that have numerous documents. Der Spiegel has gotten numerous documents, because Laura has worked with them in Berlin. I’ve worked with other organizations around the world. They have lots of documents, as well. So they’re very dispersed at this point. Edward Snowden insists that when he went to Russia, on purpose, he took no documents with him of any kind, that he gave them all to the journalists he wanted to have them in Hong Kong and then took nothing with him.
AMY GOODMAN: So, how you broke through, here—you’re at a point now where it is known that you and Laura Poitras had interviewed Edward Snowden. This is posted online, the video, at The Guardian, and you’ve written your article. We’re talking about the danger Edward Snowden was in. And what about the two of you, and then what happened to Edward Snowden?
GLENN GREENWALD: We were pretty aware from the beginning—I mean, I think one of the—one of the important parts of this story is that we knew early on that what we were going to do was going to be at least as much about media and journalism issues as it was about surveillance. And the reason is that there’s a set of unspoken rules that usually govern how media outlets handle stories like this, which is, if you get a lot of documents, what you do at most is you publish one or two stories. You don’t publish many of the raw materials. You go to the government and extensively negotiate with them about what you can publish and what you can’t. You take all sorts of guidance from them about what you should and shouldn’t disclose. You do one or two stories, and then you kind of walk away, before you do any real damage or disrupt anything for real. You collect some awards. You get a lot of accolades. You know, you sort of just leave the status quo be but show the country that you’ve done some real journalism.
And once we got the sense of how vast and sprawling this archive was, we knew we were going to do everything differently, that we were going to ignore all those rules, because we don’t believe in those rules because they’re corrupting. And so, we knew that once we started publishing not one or two stories, but dozens of stories, and we were going to continue to publish until we were done, which is still our plan and still what we intend to do, that not just the government, but even fellow journalists were going to start to look at what we were doing with increasing levels of hostility and to start to say, “This doesn’t actually seem like journalism anymore,” because it’s not the kind of journalism that they do. It doesn’t abide by these unspoken rules that are designed to protect the government. And so we knew there were going to be all kinds of risks to us about threats, accusations that we were engaged in criminality, in treason, the possibility that we were going to be arrested or have legal process against us. Obviously, my partner was detained for 11 hours under a terrorism law and still is the target of an ongoing criminal investigation. The Guardian’s newsroom—
AMY GOODMAN: And this was David Miranda in—
GLENN GREENWALD: David Miranda in London.
AMY GOODMAN: —Heathrow Airport.
GLENN GREENWALD: And so, yeah, and over even the past three months, before we came back to the U.S., Laura and I for the first time three weeks ago, there was this escalating series of public threats, from James Clapper, who called us accomplices, to Mike Rogers, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, who called us thieves and said that we ought to be arrested. And so there was this deliberate climate created that was supposed to make us uncertain about what our fate would be, hoping that we would then curb the reporting or otherwise be a little bit less aggressive.
AMY GOODMAN: Wait, I want to just show, so it’s not just you saying or characterizing, since we are very concerned about people speaking in their own words, that exchange from February between House Intelligence Committee Chair Mike Rogers and FBI Director James Comey. REP. MIKE ROGERS: There have been discussions about selling of access to this material to both newspaper outlets and other places. Mr. Comey, to the best of your knowledge, is fencing stolen material—is that a crime? JAMES COMEY: Yes, it is. REP. MIKE ROGERS: And would be selling the access of classified material that is stolen from the United States government—would that be a crime? JAMES COMEY: It would be. It’s an issue that can be complicated if it involves a newsgathering, a news promulgation function, but in general, fencing or selling stolen property is a crime. REP. MIKE ROGERS: So if I’m a newspaper reporter for fill-in-the-blank and I sell stolen material, is that legal because I’m a newspaper reporter? JAMES COMEY: Right, if you’re a newspaper reporter and you’re hawking stolen jewelry, it’s still a crime. REP. MIKE ROGERS: And if I’m hawking stolen classified material that I’m not legally in the possession of for personal gain and profit, is that not a crime? JAMES COMEY: I think that’s a harder question, because it involves a newsgathering function, could have First Amendment implications. That’s something that probably would be better answered by the Department of Justice.
AMY GOODMAN: FBI Director James Comey being questioned by House Intelligence Committee Chair Mike Rogers, who, by the way, says he will leave Congress and become a radio talk show host. Glenn Greenwald?
GLENN GREENWALD: Well, right immediately after that hearing, Politico asked Mike Rogers, not that there was any doubt anyway, but “Who is it specifically who you were thinking about when you were engaged in that colloquy?” And he said, “Glenn Greenwald.” And the headlines in Politico were then, and in The Huffington Post and a bunch of other places was: “House Intelligence Committee chairman accuses Glenn Greenwald of being a thief and a fence and engaging in felonies.” And so, you know, when you have those kind of accusations being made by people who are powerful within Washington, you take them seriously. And the thing about it is, even if the threats don’t end up manifesting in terms of arrests, it creates this climate, that’s intended to be created, where journalists have to be afraid that the journalism that they’re doing, that’s supposed to be protected by the First Amendment, can now be subject to arresting you and charging you with crimes in a federal court system that has been extremely deferential to the U.S. government in the post-9/11 era. And that was definitely part of the climate that got created on purpose.
AMY GOODMAN: Reporter Glenn Greenwald. His new book, released Tuesday, is No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State. When we come back, Glenn Greenwald talks about the Pulitzer Prize and the corporate media’s response to his reporting. |
Carville said Bachmann's retirement was disappointing to Democrats. | AP Photos Carville on Bachmann: 'Sad day'
Veteran Democratic strategist James Carville predicted on Wednesday that Republicans throughout the country would be “relieved” Rep. Michele Bachmann has decided to retire.
“Sad day,” Carville quipped on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” when host Joe Scarborough mentioned Bachmann’s retirement.
Story Continued Below
( Also on POLITICO: Michele Bachmann retiring under fire)
“It makes me so sad and you so happy, Joe,” Carville said later. “God closes one door for Michelle Bachmann and opens three to Louie Gohmert. Everybody in a political party feels some sense of: ‘God, why can’t these people just shut up?’ We have many of them in the Democratic party that I’m not going to name right now, but I do think there are a lot of Republicans that are going to be relieved that some of these fringe people decide to pursue a speaking career.”
( PHOTOS: Michele Bachmann’s most controversial quotes)
Bachmann, a tea party star who delivered a response to the State of the Union and won the Ames Straw Poll in 2011, was a prolific fundraiser — both for her own campaigns and for Democrats, who made her inflammatory comments the star of fundraising pitches. The Minnesota Republican announced her retirement early Wednesday, saying that this term in Congress, her fourth, would be her last.
( PHOTOS: Michele Bachmann’s career)
Bachmann had become the target of several investigations into her campaign finances. |
Note: For various reasons, I waited a while to post this review. But here it is, raw and uncut. Also, shout out to whoever managed to time-travel back to 1994 and have Sega and Capri Sun team up to design this flyer.
I need to write about this festival, because I’ve seen many praise the event on various social media and I’m compelled to offer a different perspective – the perspective of a customer, rather than someone who organized, performed at, or otherwise had their hands on this beast they call Zebra. This is what happens when music festivals lack organization by competent people who love good music and then brands fill the void. I’m not writing this to attack anyone except for the brands and consumerism that ruined what could have been a really rock-and-roll experience by the ocean.
Zebra Music Festival could have been amazing. I mean, how hard is it to fuck up a music festival on the beach? Not that hard, apparently, once brands get involved without any oversight. The only beautiful moment was when rain suddenly poured down in the middle of some terrible electro house and only the crazy ones stayed dancing in the sand while others scattered for awnings and umbrellas. But even then the lights were too hot and bright.
Imagine for a moment that KTV* put on a music festival. That’s what Jinshan Zebra resembled – loud, repetitive 128 beats per minute electronic music pared with blinding lights, fake renao* (热闹), and heaps of branding and corporate presence poured on like oil in a Shanghai restaurant. Having participated in half-ass music festivals here, and given the desperate, midnight-hour promotion that promised “the biggest, best musical festival in Shanghai,” I feared Zebra would disappoint, but I had no idea just how bad it could get.
KTV = Karaoke TV; the whole spectrum of Asian karaoke halls, which ranges from places for family fun to deafeningly loud dens filled with flashing lights, sensory overload, hookers, dice, dissociatives, whiskey-and-green-tea, and people making business decisions. I’m referring to the latter end of this spectrum.
renao** = exciting, happening; something entertaining to watch. Could be used to describe the atmosphere at a bar, especially one like M2 in Shanghai. In this context *renao* also carries the meaning of loud, bright, and “high.”
Note: Through [questionable] luck and circumstance, I didn’t pay for transportation or tickets to this festival. Had I paid I may have caused a bigger scene.
We spent the 1.5 hour drive to Jinshan drinking Russian vodka in an American mini-van and watching the sun set. The night seemed promising and it felt good to leave the city. We got closer and closer to the beach and passed street hawkers selling inflatable ducks and swimsuits, then we arrived.
If bad house music got into a car accident with an advertising company it would look like the sprawling, confused beach scene that lay below.. Products, sounds, brands, and ads collided in total chaos down on the beach. Jinshan Beach is by the ocean but this wasn’t Venice Beach or even Hainan. Rumor is the sand gets imported from the latter though.
It was loud. And not in a good way, with at least ten soundsystems booming simultaneously, arranged for maximum interference and annoyance. The omnipresent speakers belted generic 128 beats-per-minute house music from tents/booths repping companies like Coke, Bacardi, and some shit you’ve never heard of. I heard “Gangnam Style” twice, and that song would only be appropriate here if sung by a Mao hologram. This was Guantanamo. To a DJ it all sounded like one colossal trainwreck, but occasionally when we passed between two systems, two songs lined up perfectly for like ten seconds. Brilliant.
Beyond the brand tents, there were KTV booths and even a place to soak your feet in a tub of bacteria-eating fish. Seriously. This was like a car show with Chinese characteristics. And yes, there were cars on display. On the beach I counted at least three under a tent with price tags. Never heard of that brand either.
We walked away from this mess and through the sand toward the main stage, where we found some kind of wacky salsa competition where the MCs called up people from different countries and had them compete in a dance-off. One Chinese guy was dressed up like an Arab and the host said, in Chinese, “oh you know those Arab people – they’re conservative and like to wear a towel on their head!” This was at 6:30PM on the main stage of a music festival with a few thousand people. This was a show to watch, not a music experience, and I fucking hate seeing shows when I’m trying to listen to some music.
Around 7:30, one of the weakest bands I’ve ever, ever seen took stage and stumbled through a few songs before I left; some local university students barely fit for an open-mic night slot. Don’t know how they got that slot. We had to heckle, and they were visibly shook but didn’t respond. People deserve more at a music festival.
Tragically, the biggest musical act of this festival was DJ iTunes, who often showed up at seven places at the same damn time, like the Bacardi tent, which stood right next to the main DJ stage at a 90 degree angle and had equally loud speakers. Or at the knockoff Gatorade tent, or the Coca-Cola booth that was actually SELLING Coke to people while blatantly attacking them with advertising and sensory confusion, or the Skull Candy Booth, that whore of headphones. What can I say about Skull Candy besides the fact that they’re shit, look tacky, and the company will sponsor anyone but no real sound pro would rock their shit? But they so #fashion! 怎么办??
We tried to find refuge from the bad music and hot, blinding lights by hanging out by the beach. I mean, it’s the ocean right? The inflatable slides looked cool but the water’s hue wasn’t exactly inviting, so we sat in white plastic chairs and stared at the sky until a countryside goon donning heart-shaped red neon glasses (frames) and a t-shirt rolled halfway up his stomach stumbled over and demanded 100RMB (about $15) each for the chairs. He looked like a villain from a B-movie about a haunted roller rink. There were hundreds of empty chairs. The wooden beach chairs, all unoccupied in these dark hours, were double that price. Who does that money go to? Is there a chair mafia? I bet many, many crayfish are eaten with that chair money.
So we went back to the show. The excitement. The renao. I’m not judging, but most of the crowd, probably 85% local, was there to watch a show, not dance or a have summer of love sesh. Fair enough. Music festivals are new phenomena in China and there’s no cultural background of e.g. Woodstock or Acid House. But unfortunately this festival was not organized by people who understand the magic of music festivals either. Instead of showing patrons something new and crazy, this festival became nothing but a vehicle for pushing products on consumers, with comfortable, accessible, and “high” music as a mere aid to the transaction.
Honestly, music played by actual DJs or musicians represented maybe 5% of the music audible at this festival. On the one stage with two or three decent DJs over the whole weekend, even tried-and-true songs like Beenie Man’s “Who Am I” and hip hop classics didn’t do much because the sound didn’t really bump. They should have called Pat. The MCs had heart and hyped up the crowd of camera statues by screaming “Jinshan put ur hands up” et al and pouring vodka straight out of Stoli bottles. This got bursts of excitement and ‘FLASH!’ ‘SNAP!’ from eager cell phone cameras. Chinese people love white people actin crazy in these settings, and people went mad for the free “Perfecto Playboys” sunglasses like a god damn food riot. One kid dove over my feet and hit the sand to secure a pair.
This was the Collective Concepts stage. These are the people behind successful commercial clubs The Geisha, Flamingo, and The Apartment. Look, I don’t hate these places. I’ve had good times there, but they’re not an acceptable choice for managing one of two real stages at a music festival. Ironically, they probably cared more about the music than anyone else working at the festival. I mean, at least they had human DJs. Much of this festival’s fucked-up-ness was way beyond their control. Furthermore, I give them props for letting us play what we wanted on the third floor of Geisha last Saturday, and for letting us bring our own subwoofers into the club, and for allowing hip hop on the main floor on Fridays. These are all positive signs. My problem is that these clubs make a lot of money but somehow can’t cough up enough cash to sound as good as an underground spot like Dada or loosen up their music policy a bit instead of catering to the lowest common denominator. I believe a lot of people want something more, and unfortunately most of the bookings on their stage reflected the music policy at their clubs – commercial, comfortable, and easily digestible. McMusic. Why should people travel 90 minutes to a festival to see this when they can hear it at dozens of clubs any night of the week?
Somehow these clubs are tied into an mysterious enigma called Perfecto Playboys. I don’t exactly understand what Perfecto Playboys is. A brand? A lifestyle? A meme? Bad electrohouse and wack pop trance shit? These guys played lowest common-denominator electro KTV fistpump jams with some 3-D screen-saver font spinning in the background advertising the mysterious Perfecto Playboys name. This is difficult to respect. One can push a crowd while being creative and maintaining some dignity, even while working in the frame of something familiar, e.g. Conrank’s bass-heavy remixes of Chinese songs.
Does “Party Rock Anthem” signify The End of Music? Is this mankind’s natural conclusion for music – derived, four-minute dance songs that are high, fun, and easily digestible? It doesn’t have to be like this. Challenge the audience a little.
If you’re a DJ playing at a music festival, you have to push the music you believe in. It’s not like earning scrill at some shit club in a third-tier city and playing music to keep the dice-playing customers happy on some baby-needs-shoes-and-I-gotta-eat hustle. And unfortunately whoever booked this festival on Saturday got a bunch of people who either don’t believe in anything or believe in total shit, with the exception of Hip Hop Hijack. I wasn’t there on Friday or Sunday so maybe James Blake or Cam’ron played, I dunno.
Admittedly, challenging the audience was hard at this festival, because people could wander to any booth selling some product and hear something they knew. I heard fucking Celiene Dion “Because You Loved Me” at one booth. That song should never be played at a music festival anywhere.
In the dark last hour of the festival, the last human DJ at the Perfecto Playboys stage, DJ Leo Chiodaroli, a resident at a wretched club called M2, requested no MCs during his set. How does this guy have such a long DJ name. His name alone is like half of a fucking Twitter/Weibo message. Why not just DJ Leo? Anyway, after a few songs in his set, the crowd dwindled down to about five people, for there was no more show. Everyone migrated to the Bacardi tent to hear all of 2011’s biggest hits. A song would start, play all the way through, end, and move on to the next in the library. Either no one cared or no one noticed. And who can really blame them? Dude played garden variety house that may make worked with MCs getting hype but otherwise it’s just one foreign bro playing some indistinguishable house music.
It could have been so much better. Black Rabbit is still the best music festival I’ve been to in Shanghai, and JZ Festival and Strawberry Festival are affairs worth attending. The latter two are organized by locals and come recommended by this blog, so I’m not saying “they just don’t know how to do music festivals here,” but rather complaining about a festival ruined by consumerism and poor planning. Zebra was the music festival that wasn’t. Instead, we just got a trainwreck of brands, advertisements, bad sound, and tackiness at 128 beats per minute. |
Now that 2013 Ladder Season 4 is officially locked, let’s talk about maps.
We’ve previously mentioned our goal of bringing the StarCraft II 1v1 ladder map pool into alignment with the maps being used in the World Championship Series. With 2013 Ladder Season 5, we’re taking this goal to a whole new level by mirroring the WCS and Ladder map pools exactly. This season, you’ll be able to ladder with the exact same collection of maps your favorite pro players are using in the WCS. Further, we think this may help matchmaking become a more effective practice tool for both aspiring and pro WCS competitors.
The 1v1 Map Pool
We're adding three maps to the 1v1 pool in Season 5, and as always, making additions to the ladder pool means we’ll be removing a few of last season’s maps. Since we’re making an effort to mirror the WCS pool, Ladder Season 5 will feature seven 1v1 maps in total. Here are the maps we’ll be removing, followed by the new additions:
1v1 Removals
Neo Planet S LE
Newkirk Precinct TE
Red City LE
Star Station
Korhal Sky Island LE
1v1 Additions
Polar Night LE
This is a new map created by EastWindy for WCS Korea GSL. We believe Polar Night LE will create some interesting choices for players when deciding how to best take advantage of Destructible Rock and Line of Sight Blocker positioning. We think these map features will help make for some exciting games.
Yeonsu LE
Yeonsu placed second in the Team Liquid Map Contest public vote, and third in the pro player vote.
Although the base and expansion layouts on Yeonsu LE are quite standard, we believe this map’s cool factor lies within the flow of its ground paths. The ways in which the various ramps by the natural and third bases interact feel unique, and seem to be a standout feature on this map.
Frost LE
Frost placed first in the Team Liquid Map Contest for both the pro player and public votes.
We were looking for a four player map to add this season that was not only solid overall, but different as well. We wanted to try Frost LE because of the variety in play styles it will provide depending on each player’s start location.
Now that we’ve unveiled the new maps you’ll be playing on this season, we’re pleased to show you the complete 1v1 map pool for 2013 Ladder Season 5 and WCS Season 3:
Complete WCS Season 3 Map Pool
Akilon Wastes
Bel’Shir Vestige LE
Derelict Watcher TE
Frost LE
Polar Night LE
Whirlwind LE
Yeonsu LE
In addition to the changes being made to the 1v1 map pool, we are also making changes to the 2v2 map pool. Below are the maps that we’ll be removing, along with descriptions of two new 2v2 maps that we’re adding.
2v2 Removals
Molten Crater
Overwatch
2v2 Additions
Isle of Slaughter
This fortress map is easy to macro on and has a very long rush distance. However, once the Destructible Rocks toward the center of the map are destroyed, the attack path between teams will become much shorter. The goal on Isle of Slaughter should be to macro up while keeping a close watch on when the combat starts, since reaction times will need to be much quicker during the mid to late game.
Resupply Tanker
Resupply Tanker has an easy to take fast expansion, but allies can’t easily assist each other on this map, so be careful not to grab this expansion too soon. The two attack paths along the sides of the map are good for focusing attacks on one opponent, but taking some time to clear out the center Xel’Naga Watchtower area before initiating an attack will often be a much safer way to engage on this map.
All five of these maps are already published to the custom games list in order to give you a chance to check them out before the season roll. Feel free to fire up a few games on the new maps and let us know what you think in the comment section below. Once Ladder Season 5 begins at 12:01 a.m. PDT on Monday, August 26, they will then appear in matchmaking queues for competitive play.
Good luck and have fun in the 2013 Season 5 ladder! |
No one likes to be last. The LG G2 was originally slated to become available online from T-Mobile on September 18th, nearly a week after competitors Verizon Wireless and AT&T were to start offering the handset. AT&T already jumped the gun when they started offering sales online a week ago, and now T-Mobile is offering the G2 at the same time as everyone else, at least online.
Unlike AT&T and Verizon Wireless, T-Mobile offers the G2 for $99.99 upfront. Of course, this comes with a commitment to pay $21 a month for two years to pay off the remainder of the device. You can skip the obligation all together and buy the entire device upfront for $603.99.
Customers can pick between black and white versions of LG's flagship. Regardless of the coat of paint, buyers will get the same great innards. With Android 4.2.2., a gorgeous 5.2-inch Full HD display, 2.26 GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 quad-core processor, 13MP camera, and 3,000mAh battery, this phone is powerful enough to make all but a few of the neighborhood kids jealous.
Unlike Verizon Wireless shoppers, who can now purchase the G2 both online and in-stores today, T-Mobile customers will still have to wait until September 25th before they can pick up the phone in person.
LG G2 on T-Mobile
Via: TmoNews |
Mount Wingen has been smoldering for 6000 years without stop. Just below the surface of the earth in New South Wales, a coal seam has been burning and slowly moving south along the mountain at a rate of one meter per year. In its history, the seam has covered a total area of 6.5 km, making it the oldest continuous coal fire in the world.
Coal seams are extremely common across the world, and at any time there are more than 1000 burning. They happen frequently in lesser-developed mineral rich countries, but are often put out within a few days or at most a month. Considering the average duration of a coal seam fire, Mount Wingen’s fiery longevity has become something of a wonder across the globe and tourists have flocked to see the sulfur-tinged smoke emanating from the mountain.
Although Mount Wingen has attracted tourists in droves, it has also caused massive ecological damage to the area’s vegetation. The path of the fire has left a barren and rocky trail, with no traces of life. Most assumed the fire was caused by volcanic activity, but it is now clear coal was ignited by a lightning strike or brush fire thousands of years earlier. The area is administered by NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service and is a natural reserve. |
Talmage Charles Robert "Tal" Bachman (born August 13, 1968) is a Canadian singer-songwriter and musician. He is best known for his late 1999 hit, " She's So High ", a pop rock tune from his self-titled 1999 album that led to a BMI award. [2]
Bachman's second album, Staring Down the Sun , was released in Canada on Sextant Records in August 2004 and was released in the United States by Artemis Records in 2006. The single "Aeroplane" reached No. 20 on the Canadian charts and was used in the 2005 film, American Pie Presents: Band Camp . It was played as an instrumental and during the credits.
Bachman lives in Victoria, British Columbia, and is the son of Canadian rocker Randy Bachman of the classic rock bands The Guess Who and Bachman–Turner Overdrive. His sister Lorelei Bachman is also a writer/musician.
He is a former member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and went on a two-year mission to Argentina, but after two years of research into that church's origins, Bachman concluded that the church's founder Joseph Smith had invented his stories, and severed his ties to that church.
As the holder of a bachelor's degree in political science, Bachman has moonlighted as a political commentator.[citation needed]
He plays right-wing and outside-centre for the Victoria, BC rugby club Castaway Wanderers RFC.[4]
In 2006, Bachman was interviewed for the 2007 PBS documentary called The Mormons. In it, he discussed his departure from the LDS church.[5] In 2008, Bachman also discussed his departure from the LDS church when interviewed for the Bill Maher documentary Religulous.[6] |
February's issue of Christianity Today contained a cover story in which secular and Christian media should take increased interest. During this time of great need around the world, we must ask ourselves if our work to combat poverty is making an impact. The cover story examines that question: "Cost-Effective Compassion: The 10 Most Popular Strategies to Help the Poor."
University of San Francisco professor Bruce Wydick asked development economists to rank the impact of the ten most popular strategies to fight poverty. Clean water was clearly the top rated strategy followed by deworming treatments and mosquito nets. "Sponsor A Child" rated fourth in terms of impact, but was the top rated long-term strategy.
Wydick asserts that Compassion International's sponsorship program, in particular, showed "substantial impact on adult life outcomes" when studying the children who participated in the program during the 80's and 90's. From increased educational attainment and higher probability of white-collar employment to delayed marriage and community leadership, the empirical benefits of Compassion whole-life sponsorship were clearly seen. There are discernable outcomes when a child is known, loved and protected out of the cycle of poverty.
The findings reflect the individual and unique interventions Compassion provides through just one of our four core programs: Child Development through Sponsorship. The other three programs, Child Survival, Leadership Development, and critical life intervention initiatives are offered to provide for additional critical needs during a child's life. Therefore, the totality of Compassion's interventions can include any, some or all of the nine other popular strategies that were studied.
For example, clean water is critically needed in most impoverished areas. Compassion's Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH) strategy supplied 56,000 Compassion children in Haiti with water filters that will provide one million gallons of clean water per household. For those areas without any nearby water source, like a desert area of Tanzania, we partner with water organizations to build wells, funded by Compassion sponsors like Darcy Creech, a Nantucket native who has designed watches to raise funds, and awareness, regarding the world's water crisis.
At a Compassion child development center in Burkina Faso, Florentin is one of the registered children who line up to receive a dose of deworming medication. Florentin never took deworming medicine prior to being registered in the Compassion program. According to the nurse at the center, the children have very few cases of parasite-based diseases because of frequent preventive treatment.
In East India, losing two adolescent daughters to malaria in quick succession was devastating. But then, Joseph and Adila's only remaining daughter, Mary, contracted malaria. Although the symptoms were acute, the timely medical intervention from the Compassion child development center helped save Mary's life.
Children at Compassion centers in East India are given Chloroquine tablets to protect against malaria. When children are diagnosed with malaria they are taken to the nearby hospital and administered Primaquine tablets to ensure that it doesn't turn into cerebral malaria. This outreach is just one component of Compassion East India's Malaria Intervention Program.
Many Compassion beneficiaries receive income generation training taught at child development centers. Dorcus, an HIV positive teenager in Rwanda lost her parents to AIDS at the age of nine. After finding a foster family for Dorcus, the Compassion center provided $600 to Dorcus's new family through our Highly Vulnerable Children program. The family started a hair salon for income. They now earn USD$15 per two days a week as a profit, which they put in Dorcus's bank account.
And, this week, Compassion flew a six-year-old boy, Fatao, from Burkina Faso to India for heart surgery for a ventricular septal defect. This intervention, "Fund Reparative Surgeries" is number seven on Wydick's list of strategies.
All of these interventions are provided because of Compassion's Child Sponsorship and Development program. Sponsors in 13 countries around the world care deeply for each child they sponsor. Many of them not only maintain correspondence with their sponsored child but take trips to personally meet them. The dedication of these sponsors and their commitment to care for each child as a member of their own family enables the compelling stories you read throughout this post.
By working with over 5,600 local churches in 26 countries, the Child Sponsorship Program offers educational opportunities, health care and health-related instruction, nutrition, life-skills training and because we believe poverty is also a spiritual matter, opportunities to hear about and respond to the gospel if children choose. Each of these children are known, loved and protected by staff, church workers and yes, their sponsors. |
With every Stanley Cup Playoff series conclusion, there comes an annual tradition: the revealing injuries. Usually, this sacred piece of hockey lore happens during the team's breakup day, a day or two after the postseason series ends. For the Los Angeles Kings, it began right after Game 5 of the Western Conference Final, when Patrick Kane's hat trick goal in double overtime ended their season.
Kings captain and forward Dustin Brown admitted that he played through the entire Western Final with a torn PCL in his knee. He told reporters that he suffered it during Game 6 of the Kings' Western Conference Semifinal series with the San Jose Sharks. That means he played through six more games with the injury. Justin Williams, who scored the Kings' game-winning goal of Game 7 in that series, was playing through a "slight shoulder separation." Which means it sounds only slightly horrifying to this non-athlete.
Meanwhile, here were Daryl Sutter's words after Game 5 on his team's health:
Three, four guys that were game time after Game 6 in San Jose, literally. I think most teams are going to say that the farther you go. Also tells you how tough it is to win, how you need that. I know it's something that gets talked lots about. You have to stay healthy. Have you to be close to 100 percent, especially with your top guys. I know we weren't.
The Los Angeles Kings were a tough, elite champion in this league, and if they stay healthy enough in the next couple of postseasons, there's no reason to think they can't be again. But they can't do it again with guys like Brown looking less mobile and useful than they normally are.
More in the NHL:
Follow @SBNationNHL
• Complete Stanley Cup Playoffs coverage
• Celebrating hockey’s ‘anti-heroes’
• Our playoff predictions
• The best of our hockey network |
Hardworking doesn’t go far enough to describe Daughter’s slog at Glastonbury this weekend, as Elena Tonra and co put in not one, two, but three performances at the Worthy Farm fest.
Kicking things off with a live session of ‘Youth’, a standout track from their debut If You Leave, on Friday night for BBC Three, the trio followed it with a pair of appearances yesterday; the first at the John Peel Stage, before they headlined the BBC Introducing tent later in the eve.
You can watch their full John Peel Stage set, clips from the BBC Introducing outing, as well as the live acoustic session) below.
Full John Peel Stage set:
‘Youth’ from BBC Introducing set:
‘Home’ from BBC Introducing set:
BBC Three live session:
Photo by Jason Williamson. |
He'll teach you everything he knows.
Earlier this week, we learned that Trump University encouraged prospective students to pay for its classes by maxing out their credit cards. Now, a seminar script obtained by ABC News has revealed one of the insights those students risked their financial security to access: If you pretend to make more money that you actually do, credit card companies may give you a higher spending limit.
“When asked about your income, take your current income and add $75,000 from your real estate enterprise,” reads the instructor’s script for the seminar Fast Track to Foreclosure Investing. In other words, the presentation advises students to commit fraud by pretending they already possess the wealth they plan to gain through real-estate investments. This was likely an important first step for the many Trump University student-investors who had already taken on massive credit card debt to pay for the seminar.
#TrumpU script tells students to inflate income, could be lesson in fraud, experts say - https://t.co/EmBwGEfrfo pic.twitter.com/xxqwNP7KMs — Brian Ross (@BrianRoss) June 3, 2016
“If someone is encouraging people to make a false representation about their current income — that might be an appropriate target for prosecution,” John W. Moscow, former head of the Frauds Bureau of the New York County District Attorney’s office, told ABC.
To be fair to Trump University, the school did promise to teach the secrets of its namesake’s success — and drastically inflating one’s income appears to be one of them. |
By Michael Aydinian
Whatsupic -- While war criminal, mass-murderer Benjamin Netanyau is offered an unchallenged platform by the Zionist controlled media, effectively donating him the opportunity to steer the world into a conflict that could quite conceivably bring about World War III, how many folk are aware of the true facts? This is media control in a nutshell:
Photo: Jack Guez / AFP/Getty Images
Iran is threatening no one - ISRAEL IS THE BIG BULLY!
Iran does not steal land - ISRAEL DOES, ALL THE TIME!
Iran does not slaughter innocent civilians - ISRAEL DOES!
Iran has no UN resolutions tabled against it - ISRAEL HAS 66!
Iran last invasion was in 1798 - ISRAEL DOES IT FOR FUN!
Iran has no nuclear weapons - ISRAEL HAS OVER 300!
Iran does not indulge in targeted assassinations - ISRAEL DOES!
Iran respects international law - ISRAEL IS A LAW UNTO ITSELF!
Iran is a peaceful nation - ISRAEL IS THE VERY ANTITHESIS!
How it works: You can tell all the lies you want; whether people believe them is another story. The only way a complete fabrication can make its way into the history books is by ensuring no other view ever hits the airwaves. Any evidence countering your story has to remain hidden from public gaze. Every eye witness account published has to confirm and so perpetuate the lie, while witnesses who simply tell the truth are ignored. The only story is your story!
If all goes well, one then puts into motion the second phase, every bit as crucial - operation bozo brainwash! In order for myth to become fact, a process occurs where the unsuspecting public is forever reminded of a terrible plight. The same lies are repeated over and over again. TV and radio programs reinforce this view while movie moguls, masters in extracting maximum sympathy, always portray the enemy in the worst possible light! Bombardment complete - now try telling Mr. Dumbo it's all a pack of lies? Humans are programmable!
All you Zionists out there can scream all you like. Blow a gasket for all I care! This is how it is whether you like it or not! Often I merely offer an opinion; here, no! If you disagree with my synopsis, it's no big deal - that's your prerogative, though, I'll say this to waverers - history is littered with massacres and genocide, many surpassing 6 million (which incidentally has been officially revised down to under 2 million for the holocaust ......but let's keep that schtum). Massacres in China and Russia were at least 10 times worse - up to 60 million dead in both countries. One can go on and on listing such atrocities! Why is the Holocaust the only one highlighted? No one has the right to claim their persecution is the only one that matters. Yet the Iraqis, who've never done anything to anyone, are currently going though a nightmare every bit as bad as the Holocaust, 1.5 million dead and counting and nobody seems to give a damn!
Finally a classic example of how media manipulation and programming not only shapes public opinion but as Malcolm X so rightly suggested, the masses end up believing something so far from the truth, if I was to think about it too much, my canister would rupture! I chose this one because currently the entire corporate media is in a mode of Russian villification that's off the charts. Only today the EU stated Russia was actually at war with civilization itself. Considering how many countries the West has destroyed this century alone, listening to some of the nonsense coming out of Washington DC truly beggars belief.
Q - who suffered the most in WW II? Well if everyone was asked, with the 6 million figure and the holocaust embedded in the thought process, most people will say - it's got to be the Jews! Yet, the integral reason the Nazis were defeated, the very people responsible for the alleged Holocaust, was down to the incredible sacrifice of the Russian people - 20 million dead! At the height of the siege of Stalingrad the average life expectancy of a Russian soldier was 24 hours! The Allies may have been victorious but WWII was won on the Russian front. I feel we owe a huge debt to the Russian people yet what makes my blood boil is even though both events occurred at the same time and both involved the Nazis, how can it be that more people know of the suffering of 6 million, while for the best part remain oblivious to the loss of 20? |
Mastercard International just clinched a deal to open a new, 60,000-square-foot technology lab at 114 Fifth Ave.
The 10-year lease brings the century-old, 330,000-square-foot address to 60 percent occupancy since David W. Levinson-led L&L Holding Co. bought the near-vacant property’s leasehold with private-equity firm Lubert-Adler last year, and created new infrastructure, lobby and “green” features.
The midsize lease is the latest illustration of a mega-trend largely overlooked. Everyone knows companies are now willing to set up shop in locations once thought unsuited to a particular industry.
Less recognized is the extent to which marquee-name firms of all kinds are increasingly unwilling to go to, or remain in, East Midtown — the 73-block district that the city last year tried but failed to rezone to allow for modern new buildings to be constructed.
The drumroll is deafening to those willing to listen:
Citigroup plans to move its headquarters to Greenwich Street from its longtime home at 399 Park Ave.
The ongoing and recent exodus includes three law firms that all gave up or will soon quit their Park Avenue homes — Kaye Scholer, Reed Smith and Jones Day — as well as social-media firm Twitter.
Sony’s leaving Madison Avenue for Madison Square Park.
Meanwhile, among those leaving other neighborhoods but passing up East Midtown are Time Inc., which intends to exit its own longtime home at 1271 Sixth Ave. for a 600,000-square-foot space it’s searching for downtown.
Also staking out new homes anywhere but in East Midtown are Microsoft, L’Oréal, Coach Inc., Facebook, Condé Nast, Group M and IBM’s Watson Group — all taking between 150,000 and 1 million square feet each in Hudson Yards, the World Trade Center, Brookfield Place and Midtown South.
Cable news network Al-Jazeera is reportedly in advanced talks to launch its US base at Boston Properties’ new 250 W. 55th St.
Within the past 10 years, Bank of America, Reuters, Ernst & Young, the New York Times Co., Grey Group and Tiffany & Co. all pitched tents in West Midtown, Times Square or Midtown South.
Hasn’t East Midtown — with around 170 million square feet and unparalleled transit access and dining and shopping amenities — attracted some prime tenants of late? We found only one: French bank Société Générale, which left 1221 Sixth Ave. for 440,000 square feet at Brookfield’s 245 Park Ave.
To be sure, East Midtown won’t turn into a ghost town. It’s still home to Fortune 500 companies. Jones Lang LaSalle reports that in the last quarter, availability was a reasonable 12.7 percent and 11.8 percent, respectively, in the Grand Central and Plaza districts, the submarkets mostly, but not precisely, comprised of East Midtown’s rezoning territory.
But glamorous companies that define “Manhattan” in the world’s eyes are shunning East Midtown en masse when leases are up there or when circumstances require them to move from somewhere else. The outward momentum carries profound long-term implications for the city’s entire office market.
Certain companies want only state-of-the-art, brand-new buildings, and they’ll chase them wherever they go up.
In a seeming paradox, other firms prefer buildings that are much older than East Midtown’s, like 111 Eighth Ave., because their high ceilings and thick floor plates lend them to digital upgrading more easily than do East Midtown’s “Mad Men”-era dinosaurs.
Firms choose new homes for many reasons, including lower rent, mass-transit access and proximity to the CEO’s home.
But East Midtown’s plummeting appeal has a lot to do with the fact that most of its buildings aren’t suited to today’s needs.
Zoning rules written in 1961 make it near-impossible to replace them with new ones even of the same size.
In an area where buildings are an average 73 years old, few will see the kind of $125 million modernization that SL Green and Vornado are bringing to 280 Park Ave., a 1968 tower with 1.28 million square feet.
New systems, emergency generators and a new lobby and plaza will make the tower more competitive — but it’s an exception amidst scores of properties receiving cosmetic upgrades.
Rarer still is 425 Park Ave., where L&L is re-inventing the obsolescent tower into an entirely new one of about the same size designed by Sir Norman Foster — requiring years of legal needle-threading and infinite patience to conform to the fine print of archaic zoning rules.
Back when the Park Avenue corridor was companies’ first choice, its physical stagnation didn’t matter. But new priorities changed everything. CBRE regional CEO Mary Ann Tighe noted, “There are no boundaries any more. No longer must a specific industry be in a specific neighborhood.”
Tighe said that unlike in the past, “There’s a willingness to at least explore, and often times it leads to a commitment. When Harper Collins was leaving East 53rd Street, it originally had no intention of moving downtown [to 195 Broadway], but the act of exploration led to it.”
Decisions about where to locate employees today is driven “by a profound change in the way people in every industry, even conservative ones, now want to be working,” Tighe said.
“They desire to accommodate a more open, collaborative, tech-fueled environment.”
Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes said of his company’s planned move to Related Cos.’ Hudson Yards, “A dynamic new complex will foster even more collaboration, creativity and efficiency across our businesses.”
Until the environment for “collaboration, creativity and efficiency” is established in East Midtown, its commercial energy will continue to ebb elsewhere, from the Battery to the foot of Central Park. |
Profiles in History is an auction house that has offered some one-of-a-kind pieces for the well-heeled fan, including the original R2-D2 from Star Wars and Rick Deckard’s gun from Blade Runner. Its next auction is going to be a favorite for those fans of DC Comics’ super-suited hero Superman: The entire catalog will be dedicated to the man of steel.
Profiles in History will be offering seventy-two items all based on Superman’s various incarnations. They include:
Action Comics #1 in Grade 7 condition.
A shooting script from 1953 episode “The Man in the Lead Mask” from 1952-1958 series The Adventures of Superman starring George Reeves.
Christopher Reeve’s cape from Superman 3.
Storyboard art from the 1984 movie Supergirl.
Dean Cain’s suit and test boots from Lois and Clark: The New Adventures of Superman.
But then there’s also some epic film minutiae, such as the Superman suit worn by Ben Affleck in Hollywoodland (a 2006 film about actor Reeves and his suicide), plus concept art from the 1997 unfilmed production of Superman Lives.
The WB Supergirl series, Man of Steel, Batman v. Superman, and Smallville are also represented in this auction.
The oldest find outside of Action #1 and some original artwork? That would be a 1946 ring created to promote the 1940-1951 radio series The Adventures of Superman. This metal ring came in a Kellogg’s cereal box. (We assume if you swallowed it, only Superman could save you.)
These items go on the block December 19, which means you can consider any auction wins to be an amazing holiday present. Particularly if you win Action Comics #1. Profiles in History values it at $800,000 - $1,200,000.
Via ProfilesinHistory. |
All work and no vacations make millennials stressed and less productive. Flickr / Starlit Beaches While the American workforce becomes more transitory, with employees working at home or freelancers taking jobs from full-time employees, the concept of the vacation from work gets eroded.
A study conducted by Alamo Rent a Car on vacation habits found that 40 percent of all Americans who receive paid vacation benefits did not use all of their allotted time off in 2014. Nineteen percent said they did not use at least five days of their paid vacation time in 2014.
The study asked those who did not use all of their allotted time why they did not use it, and almost half said they were simply too busy at work to do so.
Then there are those people who work during their vacation, and Millennials are most "guilty'' of that. Thirty-four percent of Millennials said they worked every day of their vacations. They also reported that the effect of that work load was a decrease in productivity when they got back from their vacation.
The study compared American employees who used all of their vacation time against those that did not and found that 54 percent of those who use all of their vacation time did not work during their time off while only 37 percent of those who did not use all of their time were able to unplug completely.
Some companies allow workers to carry over unused vacation time to the next year, but the Alamo study found that the carryover has an economic effect. Citing research by Oxford Economics in 2014, U.S. companies carried forward $65.6 billion in accrued time off costs, which averaged to a cost per employee of $1,898. Companies with more than 500 employees who allow time off to be carried over paid $2,609 per employee as a result of the carryover.
Who couldn't use an extra 1.6 days off work? REUTERS/Cathal McNaughton Among employees who are not allowed to carry over their paid time off, the average worker left unused 1.6 days in 2013.
The Oxford study found that only 77 percent of all paid vacation time was actually taken by employees in 2013.
Multiple studies show that productivity is negatively affected when an employee does not fully release from work during vacation. The HR consulting firm Randstad studied the issue of working during vacation and found that 40 percent of Millennials feel guilty about using their vacation time, while only 18 percent of Baby Boomers feel the same way.
"There's an impact on productivity, there's an impact on allowing people to release and come back refreshed," said Randstad chief HR officer Jim Link in an interview with Forbes. |
The US has blocked Europe's official ombudsman from accessing Europol documents regarding surveillance and terrorist financing – forcing the watchdog to end a probe into America's relationship with the Euro cops.
Europol is the European Union’s law enforcement agency, and the ombudsman investigates complaints of maladministration on the Continent.
Under the so-called Swift agreement, the EU shares citizens’ financial records with the US Treasury in order to help track down alleged terrorists – however there are worries that strict rules protecting privacy are being broken.
Following a complaint via an MEP in 2013 that Europol was not making enough information about the Swift program public, the European ombudsman, Emily O'Reilly, decided to investigate. However despite her watchdog role, she too was denied access to documents – specifically an official report examining whether requests from the US are “proportionate and necessary.”
Europol said the disclosure of that inspection report, dated March 2012, was not possible as the US refused to give the necessary consent to release it. (The cops' supervisory body publishes summaries of these inspections on its website.)
The Terrorist Finance Tracking Program (the formal name for the Swift agreement) has been in force since August 2010. Europol must weigh up requests for information from the Feds against Europeans' data protection rights, and it is overseen by a joint supervisory body. It was this body’s report on Europol's info-handover that O'Reilly was prevented from examining.
“We have not inspected the document, and so can make no assessment as to whether it should or should not be released, or indeed whether parts of it should be released. It may well be the case that it contains sensitive data from the US and so should not be released - but we have no way of knowing without sight of the report,” she told the European Parliament’s civil liberties committee on Thursday.
“I should also point out that the purpose of the report is to check that the agreement fully respects the rights of EU citizens. For the first time in its 20-year history, the European ombudsman was denied its right under statute to inspect an EU institution document, even under the guarantee of full confidentiality," she added.
“Our inquiry has now been closed. We have been unable to exercise our democratic powers.” ® |
In other news, we were on It's intentional that bandit quest respecs aren't super easy. I suspect the difficulty will be too high for a level 30 player, but pretty simple for someone who runs end-game content. This is similar to using a lot of Orbs of Regret to change a substantial part of your passive tree.In other news, we were on TV in New Zealand again today! YouTube |
Lead Developer. Follow us on: Twitter Facebook | Contact Support if you need help! Posted by Chris
on Grinding Gear Games on
Good news. Especially for those new to the game. Posted by Soranor
on on Quote this Post
Hey Chris! Any news on if you are going to allow more than 200 members in a guild? Thanks! :) Danskere: PM mig, hvis I har brug for en guild. Posted by ongZ
on Alpha Member on Quote this Post
" ongZ Hey Chris! Any news on if you are going to allow more than 200 members in a guild? Thanks! :)
We're going to try to slowly add more over time. 250 next patch maybe? We're going to try to slowly add more over time. 250 next patch maybe? YouTube |
Lead Developer. Follow us on: Twitter Facebook | Contact Support if you need help! Posted by Chris
on Grinding Gear Games on Quote this Post |
World markets surged Friday as news of Chinese plans to spend billions on roads, rail and other infrastructure projects, added to hopes for more global stimulus following the European Central Bank's bond buying plan.
The official Chinese news agency Xinhuanet reported Friday that the National Development and Reform Commission, China's top economic planner, approved 55 investment projects worth 1 trillion yuan, or $157.7 billion.
In response, the Shanghai Composite index (SHCOMP) closed up 3.7%, while Hong Kong's Hang Seng (HSI) gained 3.1%. Japan's Nikkei (N225) rose 2.2%.
Markets in Europe were higher in midday trading Friday, with France's CAC 40 (CAC40) and Germany's DAX (DAX) each up about 1%.
European Central Bank president Mario Draghi raised hopes Thursday for more aggressive stimulus in support of the euro, with a plan for unlimited bond purchases by the ECB. Markets in Europe and the U.S. soared on his comments. Part of Friday's rally in Asia is likely due to the ECB announcement as well, since the European debt crisis has become a major drag on manufacturing in China and other Asian countries.
Draghi's rescue plan
The news out of the ECB and China helped to lifted the euro against the dollar, but Japan's yen slipped compared to those currencies.
U.S. stock futures were higher Friday, but pulled back after a disappointing U.S. jobs report.
The government's August report showed employers added fewer workers than expected to payrolls. The report dashed hopes for stronger numbers after payroll processing firm ADP said private sector employers added 201,000 jobs in the month on Thursday, or roughly twice the number reported by the Labor Department. |
"Street Gangs" redirects here. For street gangs, see Gang
River City Ransom,[a] later released as Street Gangs in the PAL regions, is an open world action role-playing beat 'em up video game for the Nintendo Entertainment System. It was developed by Technōs Japan and originally released in Japan on April 25, 1989. It is the third game in Technos' Kunio-kun series released for the console, preceded by Renegade and Super Dodge Ball. Like its predecessors, River City Ransom underwent great changes in its storyline and graphical presentation during its localization in order to make the game more palatable in the Western market. It was one of the first console games published by North American subsidiary American Technos.
Remakes of the game have been released for the Sharp X68000, PC-Engine Super CD-ROM², and Game Boy Advance (GBA). The NES version was re-released for the Nintendo Wii Virtual Console in 2007 as well as the Nintendo Wii U Virtual Console in October 2015. It was also released on the Nintendo 3DS Virtual Console in the PAL Regions in July 25, 2013 and in North America in November 14, 2013. It was released again on the Nintendo Switch Online Service on its launch day, September 18, 2018.
Gameplay [ edit ]
River City Ransom. Gameplay of
The plot follows high school students Alex and Ryan as they cross River City in an attempt to rescue River City High and Ryan's girlfriend Cyndi from the clutches of a villain called "Slick".[9] Along the way, they battle with gangs of students (with names such as "The Generic Dudes", "The Frat Guys", "The Jocks" or "The Squids") and several gang leaders which act as bosses or sub-bosses.
River City Ransom is a beat 'em up game with action role-playing elements. The game is non-linear,[10] allowing players to explore an open world,[11] in a sandbox manner.[12] The fighting style is very similar to Double Dragon, in that the player can move freely around the screen while pressing buttons to punch, kick, or jump. Objects such as brass knuckles, steel pipes, and trashcans can be used as melee weapons or thrown at enemies.[9] However, the characters' effectiveness in battle is determined by several statistics and their knowledge of fighting techniques, such as Grand Slam, Stone Hands, and Dragon Feet, which are purchased as books in shops throughout the city using funds recovered from defeated gang members.[9] This loot may also be spent on various food items and spa treatments which serve to not only revitalize the player's stats, but may also permanently increase attributes like "Punch" and "Kick" (Foods and items offer varying levels of improvement).
The player can input passwords that keep track of their character's stats, skills, possessions, money, and defeated bosses.[9] There are a total of nine gangs in the original NES version (which are distinguished by the color of their t-shirts) whom the player will encounter during the course of the game, each with their own characteristics and attacking patterns.
Development [ edit ]
Downtown Nekketsu Monogatari. The Famicom cover artwork of
River City Ransom is an English localization of the video game Downtown Nekketsu Monogatari, which is the third title starring Technōs Japan's mascot character Kunio, who previously appeared in Nekketsu Kōha Kunio-kun and Nekketsu Kōkō Dodgeball Bu (the Japanese versions of Renegade and Super Dodge Ball respectively). This is the first game in the series where Kunio teams up with his rival Riki, who fought against Kunio in the previous games. The gangs the players fight in the Famicom version are all students from different high schools and many of the characters introduced in this game would reappear in subsequent Kunio-kun games (particularly those that were directed by Sekimoto and Yoshida).
In addition to anglicizing all of the characters' and locations' names, as well as the game's dialog in the English translation, the characters' sprites were also redrawn, replacing their Japanese school uniforms with t-shirts and jeans.
The number of difficulty settings was reduced from three to two (the easiest difficulty setting was removed and the Medium setting in the Famicom version became the Novice setting in the NES version) and an alternate 2-player mode (2P Play B) which disables player-against-player damage was removed too. In addition to a Password feature, the Japanese version also features support for the Turbo File, a peripheral released only in Japan that allows the player to save and load game data.
River City Ransom was the first console game localized by Technōs Japan's U.S. subsidiary, American Technos Inc. Although most of Technōs Japan's previous games (such as Renegade and Double Dragon) were released in North America as well, they were licensed out to other publishers. The second and final NES game released by American Technos was Crash 'n the Boys: Street Challenge, which was also a Kunio-kun game.
Ports [ edit ]
X68000 [ edit ]
Downtown Nekketsu Monogatari was ported to the Sharp X68000, a Japanese computer platform, and released in April 1990. This version of the game, which was developed by SPS and published by Sharp,[6] features several enhancements to the Famicom original, such as displaying three enemy characters on-screen instead of just two, slightly more colorful graphics, an expanded game world, and new items and special techniques for the player (including some that were only used by certain enemy characters in the Famicom version, such as the headbutt and the whirlwind kick). The new locations includes several new shops (such as a dojo) and the schools of each enemy gang, each featuring two new bosses. In addition to the player's regular stats, the player also has individual stats for all the special techniques their character has acquired. The more frequently a special move is used to finish off enemies, the stronger that particular move becomes. Unlike the Famicom version, the X68000 does not feature adjustable difficulty settings. The player can save and load their progress in one of ten save files provided by the game itself.
PC Engine [ edit ]
The PC Engine Super CD-ROM² version of Downtown Nekketsu Monogatari, released on December 24, 1993, was published by Naxat Soft and developed by KID, the same team that did the PC Engine versions of Nekketsu Kōkō Dodgeball (Super Dodge Ball), Double Dragon II: The Revenge, and Downtown Nekketsu Kōshinkyoku.[13] This version features enhanced graphics, an arranged redbook soundtrack and fully voiced characters, with the voices of Kunio and Riki performed by Ryō Horikawa and Nobutoshi Canna respectively. The player's progress is saved in this version on the PC Engine's backup memory. The rest of the game is almost identical to the Famicom version.
Game Boy Advance [ edit ]
River City Ransom EX for the Game Boy Advance North American cover offor the Game Boy Advance
A GBA version of the game, titled River City Ransom EX (ダウンタウン熱血物語ex, Downtown Nekketsu Monogatari ex) was released in Japan on March 5, 2004 and in North America on May 26, 2004.[8][7] This remake was developed by Million and published by Atlus. The most notable change from the original version is the loss of a true cooperative mode. Instead, the game can be played with an AI-controlled partner, and players may exchange the data of their own characters to fight alongside each other. The GBA version also includes a vast number of configurable options that can adjust game play on the fly, such as changing AI behaviour, the number of enemies in one map area, and shop item reshuffling frequency. The password system is replaced by battery backup, which allows saving up to 12 characters. Character's appearances, keystrokes for learned techniques, even enemy characters can be customized and saved using secret shop items. A saved game does not store story progress or reputation, but it does store the player's statistics, techniques, current items and money, player's name, and customized appearances. The player can gain additional computer-controlled allies and form a "posse" who helps the player on his adventure. Some of these boss characters are from the original NES version, while others are taken from later Downtown Nekketsu games. The player can be accompanied by up to three AI-controlled partners.
Wii [ edit ]
The original NES version of River City Ransom was re-released on the Wii's Virtual Console service in Japan on October 23, 2007, in PAL regions on February 21, 2008, and in North America on April 21, 2008.[14][15][16] The western NES titles, graphics, and storylines for the latter two releases were left intact.
Nintendo 3DS [ edit ]
The original NES version of River City Ransom was also released on the 3DS Virtual Console available through the 3DS eShop in Japan on November 28, 2012, PAL region on July 25, 2013 and North America on November 14, 2013.[17][18] Like other 3DS Virtual Console games, the user is able to create a restore point in the game. It also features a two player mode via download play. Only one person needs to own a copy of the game in order to play, and restore points are disabled during two player mode.
Wii U [ edit ]
The NES version was released for a third time on the Virtual Console in 2015 for the Wii U platform[19][20].
Nintendo Switch [ edit ]
The original NES version of River City Ransom was also released on the NES emulator available through the Nintendo Switch monthly service. Made available worldwide September 18, 2018, it features HD graphics, and the ability to create save states.
Reception [ edit ]
The Japanese version, Downtown Nekketsu Monogatari, was considered highly successful and would be followed by several spinoffs (including seven subsequent Famicom installments) until Technos Japan's closure in 1996. Of these seven games, Downtown Special: Kunio-kun no Jidaigeki dayo Zen'in Shugo features the same gameplay system as Monogatari, with the main difference being that the characters are re-enacting a jidaigeki play.
Outside Japan, River City Ransom was not highly successful when initially released. However, due to its unique gameplay and sense of humor, it is today considered a cult classic.[26] This cult following, combined with the game's character and humor, inspired parallel works.
It initially received mixed reviews upon release. Japanese magazine Famitsu reviewed the game under its original Japanese title of Downtown Nekketsu Monogatari and gave it a generally positive review, stating that it is a fighting game which skillfully incorporates RPG elements, scoring it 28 out of 40.[21] French magazine Player One reviewed the game under its European localised title of Street Gangs and gave it a highly positive review, concluding that it is not to be missed and scoring it 93%.[4] UK television programme GamesMaster generally panned Street Gangs, with one reviewer saying he "would rather sit in a vat of horse manure than play this game, give it to your worst enemies", with an overall score of 32%.[3]
Retrospective reviews have been very positive. IGN said the "fighting mechanics are exceptionally achieved," and "the RPG-esque elements" give it "a ton of depth and replayability." They concluded that it is "a classic, cult-followed, NES brawler that's still as deep and engaging as it was in the 8-bit era," scoring it 9 out of 10.[22] Thunderbolt scored it 10 out of 10, concluding that the "RPG elements, non-linear style of gameplay and highly fun multiplayer all set this game on a pedestal above all other fighting games in recent (and not so recent) memory."[10]
In 2012, GamesRadar ranked it the seventh best NES game ever made. The staff felt that it was more memorable than Ghosts 'n Goblins, Legend of Kage, and Double Dragon, and is still influential.[24] In 2014, GamesRadar ranked it the eleventh best NES game of all time.[25]
Legacy [ edit ]
In 1994, a prequel was released for the Super NES titled Shin Nekketsu Kōha: Kunio-tachi no Banka.
In 2002, an aspiring game designer, tester for Atari, and longtime fan of the game obtained the title's trademark and began work on a sequel aptly titled River City Ransom 2. The project was halted when it was announced at the Electronic Entertainment Expo in 2003 that River City Ransom EX was to be released the following year.[27] However, a true sequel to the game was announced on March 18, 2011. Downtown Nekketsu Monogatari 2 (ダウンタウン熱血物語2) was developed by Miracle Kidz for a Japanese release on WiiWare in 2011. An online PC version was due out in 2012.[28] On October 22, 2012; however, the game was put on hold due to an announcement that the developers were freezing development to focus on making completely original games.[29]
On April 22, 2013, the Canadian independent developer, Conatus Creative, announced development on an officially licensed follow-up game, named River City Ransom: Underground, scheduled for Windows in August 2014.[30] On September 9, 2013 Conatus Creative launched a campaign on the crowdfunding site, Kickstarter, seeking CA$180,000 in funding for the game. On October 6, 2013, they successfully reached their funding goal. The campaign ended on October 9, 2013, having collected $217,643, approximately 120% of the original goal. After years of development and negotiations with Arc System Works (which, as Technōs Japan's parent company, currently own the rights for the Kunio-kun franchise), the game was released on Steam for Windows, OS X and Linux on February 27, 2017.[31]
River City: Tokyo Rumble was released for the Nintendo 3DS on August 8, 2013 in Japan, December 29, 2015 in Korea, and September 27, 2016 in the United States.
Notes [ edit ]
^ Originally released in Japan as Downtown Nekketsu Monogatari ( ダウンタウン熱血物語 , Dauntaun Nekketsu Monogatari, lit. Downtown Hot-Blooded Story) |
True believers inflame conflict and impede progress in society because they simply can’t be reasoned with. What is a true believer? Here’s a test. When confronted with credible data counter to your worldview, do you: (1) modify your position to incorporate the new data, or (2) dismiss, ignore, or otherwise explain away the new data and double down on your existing worldview? If you chose number two, you’re a true believer.
True believers are stuck in a positive feedback loop: the more evidence against their position, the more entrenched they become. No mental mechanism exists to break the loop. They only accept evidence that agrees with their preconceived notions, and, conveniently, insist they’re the sole arbiters of what constitutes “evidence." There’s a sieve around their brain that screens out troublesome data. Any topic where facts are inconsistent with their beliefs is taboo because it simply can’t be true. Open-minded heretics pursuing such topics will be slandered, ridiculed, and ostracized. It’s quite the racket.
Ironically, true believers often moralize about the importance of facts and insist they’re the only ones who are “reality based.” However, in practice, they confuse facts with assumptions, beliefs, conjecture, and opinion. If you take an incorrect assumption, assume it as fact, and extrapolate from that assumption, even if the logic of the extrapolation is sound, the whole idea is wrong because the foundational assumption is wrong. Garbage in, garbage out. Yet, since true believers mistake their incorrect assumption for fact, and tout their impeccable extrapolation, you’re the kook. This is what passes for logic in the true-believer community.
True believers haunt any subject: science, religion, health, history, economics, politics. The distinction is not the subject matter, but the treatment of evidence and dismissal of same. True believers are not restricted to any particular political affiliation, ideology, culture, gender, age, metaphysical belief system, or education level. They can occur anywhere, but seem especially concentrated in partisan politics, dogmatic religion, and scientific materialism.
Dogmatic religion has obviously been a hotbed of true believers for millennia, and the resultant destruction is well chronicled. But don’t commit the fashionable stupidity of thinking that the recognition of a larger reality, beyond the physical, is equal to religion, or that most spiritual people are true believers. This only happens when core spiritual principles transmogrify into religious dogma. There is only one truth, but many ways to express that truth.
Science has, for centuries, been vital to discovering evidence about the natural world and countering religious dogma. But calling yourself a “scientist” doesn’t inoculate you from true-believer status. Science is an empirical study that is both open minded and skeptical. Not all scientists practice this. Dogmatic adherents to scientific materialism, despite abundant evidence to the contrary, are a perfect example. (They will argue vehemently against this characterization, but present them with evidence countering materialism and see what happens.)
Formal education has nothing to do with it. Some of the biggest true believers out there hold advanced degrees from elite universities. Because it’s not about what you think you know, it’s about how you deal with facts on the ground. It’s ultimately about humility, honesty, and judgement. It’s about being open to anything, and skeptical of everything, especially things you just know are true. Open your sieve. If the facts don’t fit your model of reality, the problem is your model.
The loudest voices in society are true believers, obsessively pushing their faith-based “facts” upon you. Their cluelessness and complete lack of self-awareness compels their sanctimonious blathering, particularly on cable television, social media, and internet comment sections (anonymously, of course). You have to give them credit for passion, at least, and pure doggedness. I guess.
True believers are a much smaller proportion of the population than their volume would suggest, though they encompass a disproportionate share of the intelligentsia. Fortunately, the antidote to the true believer, the opened-minded skeptic, is quieter but much more numerous. They are the backbone of society.
True believers are not interested in solving problems, they’re interested in converting you to their dogma. As such, they are not only irritating, but dangerous. Treat the true believer as you would a toddler in full tantrum. Direct confrontation is not advised. Presenting them with facts will trigger their positive feedback loop. If you’ve found yourself in a debate with a true believer, simply change the subject or walk away. Or, if their tantrum doesn’t abate, maybe give them a hug; they sure seem to need one.
Look, this screed against true believers may sound harsh and judgmental, and perhaps it is. True believers are human beings deserving of empathy and respect like everyone else. Nobody’s perfect, and everyone is probably a true believer on occasion. It’s difficult to give up an entrenched belief. Refrain from the ubiquitous shrieking and creepy groupthink so prevalent today. Be kind. The last thing society needs is another self-righteous fool screaming some goofy dogma. When real facts are on your side, no screaming is necessary. Lead by example and live honestly and compassionately. Everyone’s in this together. Truth eventually prevails.
Always. |
About seven seconds into the video, a teenager raises the specter of death.
“Get out the water, you’re gonna die,” one of the teens shouts to a disabled man whom his friends are watching struggle fully clothed in a fenced-in pond. “You shouldn’t have gone in,” says another. The kids laugh.
“He keeps putting his head under,” another says. “Wow.” Once the group realizes the weight of the situation, one of the boys prods another.
“Bro, you scared to see a dead person?” he asks.
Jamel Dunn, 32, drowned on July 9 in Cocoa, Fla., a coastal city east of Orlando. The teenagers, aged 14 to 16, filmed the incident as they laughed and mocked Dunn, then posted the video to social media. The video, which police called “extremely disturbing,” was found by detectives and handed over to Brevard County state attorney’s office, which recently released it to Florida Today.
“He started to struggle and scream for help and they just laughed. They didn’t call the police. They just laughed the whole time. He was just screaming … for someone to help him,” Yvonne Martinez, spokeswoman for the Cocoa Police Department, told the paper, “He started to struggle and scream for help and they just laughed. They didn’t call the police. They just laughed the whole time. He was just screaming … for someone to help him,” Yvonne Martinez, spokeswoman for the Cocoa Police Department, told the paper, which posted only audio of the incident . Both the police department and Brevard County state attorney’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The teens were identified and questioned by detectives investigating the case, but they are unlikely to face charges. They were not directly involved in Dunn’s drowning, and good Samaritan laws — which typically involve protections for bystanders helping on the scene of an emergency — don’t apply to the case, police said.
Dunn was at the pond following an argument with his fiancee shortly before the incident and walked in on his own, Martinez said.
“They were watching him,” she said about the teenagers. “Everybody is just horrified by this.”
Dunn’s fiancee filed a missing people report on July 12 . His “badly decomposed body” was found on July 14, and a family member identified Dunn from the video circulating online. Dunn walked with the aid of a cane and had two young children, Florida Today reported.
Police said there appeared to be little regret from the teens involved during and after the incident. One of the teens stared ahead while he was questioned while his mother cried next to him, Martinez said.
“There was no remorse, only a smirk,” she said.
Simone Scott, who identified herself as Dunn’s sister, lambasted the teenagers for not contacting first responders.
“(Okay), I agree they don’t have to help, but they should have called 9-1-1,” she wrote Thursday on Facebook. She also expressed frustration with the lack of charges and slow pace of authorities.
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“No one never reached out to my family to come identify his body before it hit the news, and until this day we haven’t identified his body,” Scott said.
Scott posted the video, along with a black image with white text: “How could you witness someone die and not be charged with anything? #share”
The Brevard County state attorney’s office said that “While the incident depicted on the recording does not give rise to sufficient evidence to support criminal prosecution under Florida statutes, we can find no moral justification for either the behavior of people heard on the recording or the deliberate decision not to render aid to Mr. Dunn.”
According to the police, Dunn was last seen in a red hat reading “Only God can judge me.”
Read more: |
NEW YORK — Illinois joined New York and New Jersey in imposing mandatory quarantines for people arriving in the United States with a risk of having contracted Ebola in West Africa, but the first person isolated under the new rules, Kaci Hickox, a nurse returning from Sierra Leone, strongly criticized her treatment and said she would contest her quarantine in court.
Hickox was placed in quarantine at Newark after returning on Friday from working with medical charity Doctors Without Borders in Sierra Leone.
According to her boyfriend, Ted Wilbur, a nursing student at the University of Maine at Fort Kent, all Hickox wanted to do was come to Fort Kent, where she had arranged to stay at his off-campus home for a 21-day, self-imposed quarantine.
“She was going to land in Presque Isle on Monday and then self-quarantine in Fort Kent,” Wilbur said Sunday afternoon. “That is what the CDC wanted her to do and what is ethically, morally, medically and scientifically the right thing to do.”
Instead, upon arriving in Newark, Hickox was transferred from the airport to a hospital, where she was placed in isolation. She described a confusing and upsetting experience at the airport and worried the same treatment was in store for other American health care workers trying to help combat the epidemic.
“I … thought of many colleagues who will return home to America and face the same ordeal,” Hickox wrote in The Dallas Morning News. “Will they be made to feel like criminals and prisoners?
“I am scared that, like me, they will arrive and see a frenzy of disorganization, fear and, most frightening, quarantine,” she said in the article.
Under a policy introduced Friday, anyone arriving at John F. Kennedy International Airport or Newark Liberty International Airport after having contact with Ebola patients in Liberia, Sierra Leone or Guinea must submit to a mandatory quarantine for 21 days. Three weeks is the longest documented period for an Ebola infection to emerge.
Hickox spent nearly six hours at the Newark airport after landing before she was told what would happen to her.
“She called me from the airport after landing and said she hoped the screening would go quickly and with no problems,” Wilbur said Sunday. “At that point, she had not heard about [the New York City Ebola case]. Then she told me she was being detained and was told she was being quarantined.”
Hickox wrote in the The Dallas Morning News article, “Eight police cars escorted me to the University Hospital in Newark. Sirens blared, lights flashed. Again, I wondered what I had done wrong.
“I had spent a month watching children die, alone. I had witnessed human tragedy unfold before my eyes. I had tried to help when much of the world has looked on and done nothing.”
According to Wilbur, who on Sunday said Hickox had indicated she did not wish to speak further to the media, his girlfriend had been in Sierra Leone running a 35-bed clinic since September. While there, she supervised close to 40 medical staff members.
“Coming back last week was not like welcome home from a Bermuda vacation,” Wilbur said. “It was more like, welcome home from hell.”
Wilbur said Hickox described her quarantine living conditions as a 15-yard-long tent with a plastic sheeted floor in the parking lot in front of University Hospital in Newark.
“She is peeing and defecating into a box and in two days has had one sort of a rinse bath that was in a bucket,” Wilbur said. “She is upset and she is distraught and she got maybe three hours of sleep last night.”
Hickox’s confinement at the Newark hospital raises constitutional and civil liberties issues, given that she remains asymptomatic and has not tested positive for Ebola, according to her attorney Norman Siegel, a prominent civil liberties lawyer.
“The policy is overly broad when applied to her,” he said.
Hickox will contest her quarantine in court, Siegel said Sunday, arguing the order violates her constitutional rights.
Wilbur likened Hickox’s experience to being falsely imprisoned and accused New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo of grandstanding and politicizing the Ebola reaction during an election year.
“It was not like she was going to get anybody sick,” Wilbur said. “Being that my house is miles outside of [Fort Kent] and Northern Maine Medical Center had already been OK’d as a place she could go so there would have been no problems.”
Earlier this month, NMMC began reviewing its infection prevention and control policies and procedures as they applied to the management of Ebola, according to a news release issued by the hospital last week.
The hospital activated its emergency response team on Oct. 17 to ensure that all the necessary safety measures are in place to detect a possible Ebola case, protect health care personnel and the public, and respond appropriately should it become necessary, according to the release.
Hospital CEO Peter Sirois said late Sunday the review and emergency team activation was in no way connected to Hickox’s plans to travel to Fort Kent and said they were not aware of those plans.
“We did this due to our being proactive to what was going on with Ebola,” Sirois said. “We wanted to make sure we were ready in case anyone presented at the hospital with it.”
Should anyone present at NMMC with the disease, Sirois said the facility is equipped to provide a temporary quarantine setting until the patient could safely be taken to a CDC-designated location.
State quarantines were imposed after a New York City doctor was diagnosed with the disease Thursday, days after returning to the city from working with Ebola patients for Doctors Without Borders in Guinea.
Dr. Craig Spencer, now being treated at Bellevue Hospital Center in Manhattan and described as in stable condition, was the fourth person to be diagnosed with the illness in the United States and the first in the country’s largest city.
His case, and the fact he was out and about in the city in the period before his symptoms emerged, set off renewed worries in the United States about the spread of the disease, which has killed thousands of people in West Africa. The concern over Ebola has become a political issue ahead of Nov. 4 congressional elections.
New York Mayor Bill de Blasio did not directly criticize the quarantine policy at a news conference but took issue with how Hickox had been treated.
“This hero, coming back from the front having done the right thing, was treated with disrespect,” the mayor said. “We owe her better than that.”
Illinois adopts quarantine restriction
Illinois will also require a mandatory quarantine of anyone who has had direct contact with Ebola patients in those countries, Gov. Pat Quinn said in a statement Friday. His announcement did not explicitly discuss it, but the new measure was likely aimed at people arriving at Chicago O’Hare International Airport.
The airport is one of five U.S. airports where health screening is in place for passengers whose journeys originated in the three West African countries that have borne the brunt of the worst Ebola outbreak on record. Such passengers are now obliged to route their journeys into the United States through those five airports.
Quinn’s office and local health officials did not respond to requests for further comment.
Health officials in Virginia, where Washington Dulles International Airport is located, said the state is reviewing its quarantine policies. In Georgia, where the Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport is located, officials were not immediately available for comment.
The mandatory quarantines imposed by states exceed current federal guidelines, although the Obama administration is discussing similar measures.
President Barack Obama urged Americans on Saturday to be guided by “facts not fear” as they worry about the spread of Ebola. “We have been examining the protocols for protecting our brave health care workers, and, guided by the science, we’ll continue to work with state and local officials to take the necessary steps to ensure the safety and health of the American people,” he said in his weekly radio address.
A new battle zone
Ebola has killed almost half of more than 10,000 people diagnosed with the disease — predominantly in Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea — although the true toll is far higher, according to the World Health Organization.
The virus is spread through direct contact with bodily fluids from an infected person. It is not transmitted by people who are not showing symptoms, but the quarantine measures in New Jersey, New York and Illinois were prompted in part by the fact that Spencer traveled around the city between arriving home and developing symptoms Thursday, including riding the subway, taking a cab and going to a bowling alley.
New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio said he was not consulted in advance of the new screening rules.
“The state has the right to make its decision, just like the CDC does, and we’re going to work with them,” he told reporters after visiting a sandwich shop where Spencer ate earlier in the week. The shop was briefly closed Friday before health officials allowed it to reopen.
Asked if he thought Dr. Spencer had behaved irresponsibly by going out around town, de Blasio said, “I think that’s a really inappropriate characterization. … Here is a doctor who went into the medical equivalent of a war zone. This is no different than a soldier that goes into battle to protect us.”
Hickox’s account of her treatment echoed concerns of critics of the mandatory quarantines who say they could discourage Americans from going to help control the epidemic in West Africa.
New Jersey’s health department said that Hickox broke into a fever soon after being quarantined and was taken to University Hospital in Newark. She later tested negative for Ebola.
But Hickox disputed that account in her article. She said her temperature was normal when tested orally at the hospital, but showed a fever when she was tested using a noncontact forehead scanner, reflecting the fact she was flustered and anxious.
Doctors Without Borders also criticized Hickox’s treatment, saying she had been issued an order of quarantine but it was not clear how long she would be held in isolation.
“Doctors Without Borders is very concerned about the conditions and uncertainty she is facing,” the group said in a statement. |
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Operating of Invisible Solar modules is based on the low molecular density. Each module is composed of a non-toxic and recyclable polymeric compound we properly developed to encourage the photon absorption.
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Astonishing surfaces Terracotta, Stone, Concrete and Wood.
Invisible Solar is extremely adaptable and can take the appareance of main building materials, offering many possible combinations of shapes and colors.
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Where to install
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Shingle Prototype that is waiting for production stage. Prototype's details
Dimensions: 25,00 x 40,00 cm
Peak-power: 4,55 Wp
Protection: IP68
Static load: 5.000kg Stone Prototype that is waiting for production stage. Prototype's details
Dimensions: 31,00 x 19,00 cm
Depth: 2,50 cm
Peak-power: 1,59 Wp
Protection: IP68
Static load: 5.000kg
Concrete Prototype that is waiting for production stage. Prototype's details
Dimensions: 19,50 x 19,50 cm
Depth: 6,00 cm
Peak-power: 3,00 Wp
Protection: IP68
Static load: 5.000kg Wood Prototype that is waiting for production stage. Prototype's details
Dimensions: 47,50 x 8,50 cm
Peak-power: 1,15 Wp
Protection: IP68
Static load: 5.000kg |
by Erin Kirkland
Perhaps no other agency moniker is as familiar as that of national parks. Providing access, protection, and valuable historical information, national parks are considered sacred ground by many as hallmarks of family vacation destinations. Sharing of a legacy, if you will.
In the United States and Canada, at least, most national parks see the highest number of visitors during summer months, thanks to school schedules and decidedly more favorable weather patterns. Bustling with activity between May and October, national park visitors scarcely have time to breathe for the number of opportunities to hike, swim, boat, climb, fish, or tour millions of acres set aside for their use by federal governments.
When snow begins to blanket the landscape, however, the hordes depart, leaving behind a fresh, new way to explore. From snowshoeing to skiing, dog mushing to photography, winter in a national park provides unique perspective, perhaps in the way it was first intended. For children, winter visits to a national park will go above and beyond the usual family vacation. Even arriving and setting up camp or locating accommodations can be a challenge, requiring teamwork, flexibility, and a sense of humor. Rewards, however, can be great: Following a set of snowshoe hare tracks across a powdery meadow, spying a bison breathing out great clouds of smoky mist as he stands with herd mates under a Ponderosa pine, or glimpsing the aurora borealis sweeping across the starlit sky, nature’s theater. These are reasons to go. And, perhaps, reasons to stay.
Still not convinced? Try this rationale for making tracks to a national park near you this winter, along with a few tips for savvy parents.
Affordability. In general, most national parks suspend entrance fees during the winter months, and, for those inclined to camp, most overnight fees as well. Hotels and resorts, if open, often reduce rates to a shockingly low amount after the holiday season, making a mid-winter escape surprisingly affordable.
Accessibility. Ever visit a popular national park during the summer and find a line for popular attractions stretching back to the entrance area? While high-season vacations are busy for all the right reasons, an off-season trip means fewer crowds and unique opportunities to glimpse natural landscapes and official landmarks without elbowing your way toward the front for a group photo.
Activities. Winter opens wide a door to amazing outdoor recreation, including snowshoeing, sledding, Nordic skiing, snowmachining, and even winter camping. Miles of trail and unplowed park roads are at your disposal, making for a quality family adventure without too much effort. Of course, for those families wanting a hard-core backcountry experience, national parks offer that, too. Nothing says teamwork like hauling a tent, stove, sleeping bags, and shovel into the inner sanctum of mother nature’s backyard, and most kids will never forget it. Do check in at the appropriate Park Service winter headquarters, however, prior to departure. Many national parks have strict regulations about notification by visitors during the sparsely-staffed winter months, and some require permits.
Where should you go? Luckily, the U.S. and Canada sport a wide range of winter outing options, ranging from semi-urban to strictly wilderness, and all feature different means of providing kids with a truly authentic outdoor experience.
In Canada, try Parks Canada’s helpful search tools for locating a park and planning trips. Parks are divided into regional areas for easier planning, and provide detailed descriptions of experiences by featured contributors, year-round.
In the United States, the National Park Service provides a comprehensive website for each park, with planning tools, resources, and activities for kids. Many parks have a whole section dedicated to winter visits.
Other resources in the U.S. include the National Parks Travel Guide, a clearinghouse of national park trips, activities, itineraries, and wildlife information, and the National Park Foundation, an advocacy-based website dedicated to supporting the efforts of national parks.
Erin Kirkland is managing editor of Outdoor Families Magazine, author of Alaska On the Go: Exploring the 49th state with children, and publisher of AKontheGO.com, a website dedicated to Alaska family travel. She lives in Anchorage, Alaska. |
If you have been following mass media over the past few days, you will have learned from an economist at the U.S. Department of Labor that defenders of religious freedom are “Nazis.” Take a moment to ponder that assertion. Roll it around in your head for a while. You’ll be hearing a lot more fighting words as we enter the next phase of Christian life in America.
Sample the hate that has been spewed at the state of Indiana in the past week, and faithful Christians in recent years, by gay activists and their allies. We are “bigots,” “Neanderthals” and “haters,” whose views must be ritually rejected by anyone hoping to keep a job in today’s America — even in a Catholic high school. Where will this end? Is there a logical stopping point for this aggression, where Christians are left in peace?
History teaches that mass vilification rarely stops short of spilling blood. The French Jacobins who spent the 1780s slandering the clergy in pornographic pamphlets went on in the 1790s to slaughter Christians by the hundreds of thousands. The Turks paved the way for killing a million Armenian Christians with a wave of propaganda. The Bolsheviks followed their “anti-God” crusade of the 1920s with starvation camps and firing squads. The Communist governments of Eastern Europe obeyed the same script, as scholar Anne Applebaum documents in her sobering study The Iron Curtain. The Hutu government of Rwanda prepared for its assault on the once-powerful Tutsis by incessantly describing them as “cockroaches” on radio broadcasts, which triggered a genocide.
If the media, the law and our elite institutions succeed in lumping Christian sexual morals in with white racism, how long will it be before believing Catholics, Protestants, Orthodox (and many religious minorities) find themselves labelled as members of “extremist sects,” no more to be trusted with the care of their own children than the Branch Davidians were?
Does that sound crazy to you? Then ask yourself why the German government, and the European Court of Human Rights, felt justified in seizing a Christian home-schooled student — with the apparent approval of the Obama administration. Think about the moral views you teach your own kids. Would your local education bureaucrats approve?
Perhaps Chicago’s cardinal, Francis George, wasn’t guilty of hyperbole when he said, “I expect to die in bed, my successor will die in prison and his successor will die a martyr in the public square.”
Joining him would be many Christians who affirm the Gospel in its integrity — instead of the neutered version that’s now sweeping the denominations to swell the ranks of the persecutors. See the Episcopalians and Presbyterians who are now blessing same-sex marriages; see “Catholic” universities such as Marquette, which fired a professor for defending the Catholic Catechism on this subject, and bishops such as Paul Bootkowski of Metuchen, N.J., who backed up a Catholic school that suspended a Catholic teacher for her Facebook comments critical of gay activism. With shepherds like these, who really needs wolves?
From Libertarian to Totalitarian in Twenty Years
It’s stunning how quickly the demands of gay activists went from libertarian (“Don’t arrest us for sodomy”) to totalitarian (“Take part in our weddings or we’ll destroy your livelihoods.”)
But I am not surprised. I was in New York City when the radical gay activists of ACT UP targeted John Cardinal O’Connor for upholding biblical teaching on sexuality — even as he spent millions offering free care for indigent victims of AIDS. The “Stop the Church” demonstrations featured images of O’Connor in Nazi uniform, and culminated on Dec. 10, 1989, in an orchestrated attack on St. Patrick’s Cathedral during a Mass, where gay militants shouted down the celebrant, and demanded Holy Communion — only to throw it down and stomp on the body of Christ.
This bigoted attack on a religious service did not discredit ACT UP; indeed, you can now read an article celebrating it courtesy of the U.S. government-sponsored Radio Free Europe. Here’s a triumphalist video of the event, which includes appalling footage inside the cathedral:
If Indiana caves and guts its religious freedom law — as Gov. Mike Pence has already promised — it will prove an equal triumph for those who are so enraged at Christian teaching that they are willing to persecute Christians.
If these zealots succeed, they will tear up the civil peace in this country, forcing millions of Americans to choose between church and state. If laws or government policies beggar Christian businesses, close Christian colleges and schools and force faithful Christians into third-class citizenship — making us virtual dhimmis, like the Christian Copts in Egypt — what should we do? What should be our response now that we know what they want to do, and are overplaying their hand, but before they complete their coup d’etat?
We need to ask ourselves some brutal questions: How should the faithful in the U.S. military respond? What about those in the state and local police? City, state and federal employees? What about religious shareholders in corporations led by anti-Christians, such as Apple?
Should we engage in large-scale, non-violent civil disobedience, as black Americans once did in the face of Jim Crow laws? We have the numbers to bring this country to a sudden screeching halt, if we can stand up to the media’s blows and spitting. Those who resist these unjust laws will be treated with all the violence and contempt that was poured out on the pro-life Operation Rescue in the 1980s and ’90s. Local cops from West Hartford, Connecticut, to Los Angeles, California, brutalized teenagers, old women, even nuns and pregnant mothers.
But we need not act alone, like these isolated bakers and florists. The marriage deconstructionists can only succeed by dividing us, vilifying us and picking us off one at a time. This is the essence of their strategy — they’re now trying it with an entire state. Tim Cook (or Apple’s shareholders) would backpedal in an instant if he learned the hard way that he was insulting and infuriating 2/3rds of American states, and half the population.
The frog must jump out of the pan, before it boils.
We should not let the possibility or even the likelihood of “failure” make us timid. Witness is utterly different from propaganda, more fragile but far more enduring.
For centuries, the early Christians endured far worse than we might face, dying in the Colosseum to the taunts of jeering crowds — whose grandchildren would flee the moral chaos of collapsing Rome and flock to the underground churches. All the persecution that a government like China can deal its native Christians has not stopped the church from exploding there, and striking fear at the highest levels of a totalitarian government. The battered church in Poland led the movement that brought down the Iron Curtain, through sober, persistent resistance.
Perhaps the future we face is the one that Cardinal George envisioned. Speaking of a future bishop who would someday die a martyr, George predicted, “His successor will pick up the shards of a ruined society and slowly help rebuild civilization, as the church has done so often in human history.” If we stand for eternity, then history is on our side.
For Part One of this analysis, see #Boycott Indiana: Same-Sex “Marriage” and the End of Tolerance in America. |
TORONTO — Metro Inc.’s customers have shown a clear preference for home delivery of online goods, the grocery company’s chief executive said Wednesday, confirming plans to extend its e-commerce service into Ontario at the end of this fiscal year or in early fiscal 2019.
The news comes as industry players grapple with increased costs due to a minimum wage hike in Ontario passed in the province’s legislature today, and stiff competition in the market thanks to expansion from Costco, and Amazon’s push into stores with its August purchase of Whole Foods. While most grocery players in Canada had been noncommittal about the prospect of delivering fresh groceries prior to Amazon’s announcement, the Whole Foods deal appeared to galvanize the Canadian players’ digital strategies.
Rival Loblaw had long said it preferred a “click and collect” e-commerce model for picking up online grocery orders outside of its stores, but last week the company announced a partnership with Instacart that will allow Toronto customers to receive home delivery of groceries starting on Dec. 6. Walmart, which began grocery delivery in some areas of Toronto last spring, is expanding its service to the adjacent suburbs next month.
“(Home) delivery economics are challenging, but we are making progress,” Metro chief executive Eric Le Fleche told analysts on a Wednesday conference call to discuss fourth-quarter results, which saw higher earnings and a slight rise in same-store sales.
Metro, with stores in Quebec and Ontario, now offers click and collect at seven of its stores in Quebec, as well as home grocery delivery in Montreal, Gatineau and Quebec City, covering 60 per cent of the province’s population. There is “clearly a customer preference for home delivery,” said the CEO.
Metro has said it expects to incur $45-$50 million in extra costs in 2018 from the minimum wage hike in Ontario, and in response La Fleche said the company hopes to improve productivity and will scale back hours at some stores.
“Some 24-hour stores will no longer be 24-hour stores,” he said. “We have to manage the hours the best we can without reducing customer service.”
The minimum wage is set to rise to $14 an hour on Jan. 1 from its current level of $11.60, with the increase to $15 coming in 2019.
In the meantime, Metro has felt the pain of Costco’s expansion. The popular warehouse club is on course to open seven stores in Canada in 2017.
“There is a big club format that has added a lot of square feet in the last 18 months,” La Fleche said. “That has an impact on the whole market.”
Over a million square feet of grocery space was added to the market in the last year, La Fleche said. “To say that has no impact would be lying. It creates competition, it creates a heavily promotional environment and it has an impact.”
Metro added to its market clout with the $4.5-billion friendly takeover of pharmacy chain Jean Coutu Group announced last month. The combined retailer will have $16 billion in annual revenue and a network of over 1,300 stores in Quebec, Ontario and New Brunswick.
In the fourth quarter ended Sept. 30, Metro earned $154.9 million, or 66 cents per share, compared with profit of $145 million (60 cents) in the same period a year ago. That beat analyst mean estimates by a penny.
Shares fell 34 cents to $41.21 in midday trading Wednesday.
Sales were $3.23 billion, up from $2.93 billion. Same-store sales, a key measure of industry performance that strips out the effects of added square footage, rose 0.4 per cent. Last week Loblaw reported same-store sales growth of 1.4 per cent, excluding gasoline.
Financial Post
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In the ongoing transatlantic spying charade, this week was France's turn to feign outrage. Paris acted as required by the increasingly battered European playbook on what to do when a new NSA spying bombshell drops.
It labeled the incident "unacceptable," summoned the US ambassador and called a meeting of the Defense Council. French President Francois Hollande then raised the issue in a phone conversation with US President Barack Obama, who promptly assured his counterpart that he was no longer a target and that his country was an "indispensable" ally.
DW's Michael Knigge
Sound familiar? That's because it is. Pretty much the same playbook was used two years ago when it was revealed that the NSA had tapped into German Chancellor Angela Merkel's phone - with one major difference.
While Berlin reacted to an incensed German public by floating a so-called no-spy-deal with Washington - an entirely unrealistic endeavor that was officially shelved last year - Paris is smart enough to not go that far.
French espionage
With good reason, because France itself is not shy when it comes to spying. The country has the second largest intelligence apparatus in Europe - only Britain's eager GCHQ is bigger - and is willing to use it. As disclosed last year by French daily Le Monde, the country's foreign intelligence outfit DGSE uses pretty much the same methods to collect mass data from its own citizens as the NSA does in the US - only with even less oversight.
And yes, of course France spies on its allies as well. In fact, Paris is generally considered to be one of the countries engaging in the most aggressive industrial espionage. Two years ago France, together with Russia and Israel, was named in the National Intelligence Estimate, the US intelligence community's assessment report, as having engaged in cyber-espionage for economic gains.
Only China was considered a bigger threat than the trio of countries including France. And back in 2009 a Wikileaks document quoted the head of a German satellite company complaining that French industrial espionage did more damage to the Germany economy than that of Russia or China.
Berlin, for its part, often plays coy, and due to a public more sensitive to intelligence and privacy issues than in most other countries, perhaps also has more scruples in deploying the full arsenal of espionage and surveillance tools. But Berlin also plays the game.
Three of Germany's neighbors and close allies - Belgium, the Netherlands and Austria - recently launched judicial probes into alleged widespread German espionage. The trio's charge that Berlin's foreign intelligence service helped the NSA to spy on them has an ironic ring given the German public's outrage over the NSA's spying on its trusted partner Berlin.
Transatlantic whack-a-mole
It might be an amusing spectacle to watch Europe and the United States engage in a new version of spying whack-a-mole - the famous game where players use a mallet to hit randomly appearing moles back into their holes only to have them pop up again elsewhere - every week.
The only problem is that this charade has real-life consequences for the transatlantic relationship. The cumulative damage done is an erosion of trust. In Germany - until now arguable the country where the NSA spying revelations hit hardest - "America's image has become more negative" in recent years, a new Pew poll found.
What's more, while Germany, according to the study, is the only country where more than half say the US does not respect personal freedom, this perception "has become increasingly common among Europeans over the last two years."
Debate, not hypocrisy
To counter that trend governments in Europe and Washington finally need to come clean on the vexing issue of spying on allies. The truth is that in one form or another most are spying on others as well as being spied upon by others. Another truth is that at least since the Edward Snowden disclosures, every government that takes intelligence and security issues seriously knows this - and has made its peace with it.
But the European public has not, because governments have not engaged it in a serious debate about spying. That's why European leaders instinctively feel the need to put up a show of anger and resentment whenever another case of spying on some prominent politician pops up, thereby undermining not only the transatlantic relationship, but ultimately also their own credibility.
It is high time for them to acknowledge the reality of spying and their country's own role in it. Only then can we finally move on and have the robust transatlantic debate about intelligence, privacy and security that is long overdue instead of the hypocritical outrage over listening in to the calls of one top politician or another. |
Today we repealed House Bill 2, but this is just the first step. pic.twitter.com/7XIplKFjEh
March 30 (UPI) -- North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper on Thursday signed into law a repeal of House Bill 2 -- the controversial measure addressing transgender public restroom use -- after the compromise package was passed earlier by the general assembly.
Under the deal, House Bill 142, the "bathroom bill" will go away in exchange for the loosening of state anti-discrimination ordinances that led Republicans to craft the bill in the first place.
"House Bill 2 has been a dark cloud over our great state of North Carolina," Cooper said in a video message Thursday evening. "This is just a first step. I will continue to work hard for statewide protections."
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There are three main parts of the compromise -- repealing HB2, giving the state authority over regulation of multiple occupancy restrooms, showers or changing facilities to the state, and imposing a moratorium on local municipalities passing related ordinances until Dec. 1, 2020.
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The repeal was approved by a vote of 70-48 in the House and 32-16 in the Senate before it was sent to Cooper.
"This is a significant compromise from all sides on an issue that has been discussed and discussed and discussed in North Carolina for a long period of time," Senate leader Phil Berger told the Senate Rules Committee Thursday. "It is something that I think satisfies some people, dissatisfies some people, but it's a good thing for North Carolina."
HB2 legally required all transgender students and state employees in North Carolina to use public restrooms for their birth sex. Opponents viewed the measure as discriminatory and it led to wide-scale condemnation and severe economic ramifications for the state -- including the NBA moving this year's all-star game from Charlotte and the National Collegiate Athletics Association stripping hosting duties from the city of Greensboro for this year's men's basketball tournament.
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"I think this will address issues of who we are, how inclusive we are and whether everyone is valued," Senate Democratic Leader Dan Blue said.
Since its passage in March 2016, the law drew substantial criticism -- as well as a lawsuit from the U.S. Department of Justice -- and has come close to repeal on a few occasions. It was expected to be written off the books in December, under the guidance of newly-elected Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper, but that repeal effort failed at the last minute.
For the better part of a year, HB2 represented an effective political standoff between the state government and the city of Charlotte. In February 2016, the city passed Charlotte Ordinance 7056, which barred discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity in "public accommodations." Republican leaders, viewing the law as an overreach in granting transgender freedoms, created HB2, or the Public Facilities Privacy & Security Act, to block it.
In December, Charlotte abruptly scrapped its ordinance and outgoing Gov. Pat McCrory called for a special legislative session to follow suit with HB2. That session did nothing, largely out of Democrats' concern for a GOP provision for a six-month ban on cities passing related ordinances. In other words, Republicans wanted assurances that Charlotte wouldn't simply revive its law once HB2 was discarded -- a concern that's behind the 2020 moratorium outlined in Thursday's agreement.
"I urge [lawmakers] & [Cooper] to finally stick with this deal that still respects privacy," McCrory tweeted. "Let Supreme Court resolve issue for our nation."
"It is something that I think satisfies some people, dissatisfies some people, but it's a good thing for North Carolina," Berger said.
However, there were a number of opponents to Thursday's deal -- mostly advocates unhappy with making what they consider a watered-down and ineffectual deal that does nothing to improve the civil rights of the state's lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender population.
"Fake repeal of HB2 leads to [a] real lawsuit from us," the American Civil Liberties Union tweeted Thursday, adding that they urged Cooper to veto the compromise. "We'll see you in court."
"This is not a repeal of HB2. Instead, they're reinforcing the worst aspects of the law," James Esseks, director of the ACLU LGBT Project, replied. "North Carolina lawmakers should be ashamed of this backroom deal that continues to play politics with the lives of LGBT North Carolinians." |
To get some sense of just what a monster it has become, try counting the number of times in a week you see some permutation of the “Keep Calm and Carry On” poster. In the last few days I’ve seen it twice as a poster advertising a pub’s New Year’s Eve party, several times in souvenir shops, in a photograph accompanying a Guardian article on the imminent doctors’ strike (“Keep Calm and Save the NHS”) and as the subject of too many internet memes to count. Some were related to the floods – a flagrantly opportunistic Liberal Democrat poster, with “Keep Calm and Survive Floods”, and the somewhat more mordant “Keep Calm and Make a Photo of Floods”. Then there were those related to Islamic State: “Keep Calm and Fight Isis” on the standard red background with the crown above; and “Keep Calm and Support Isis” on a black background, with the crown replaced by the Isis logo. Around eight years after it started to appear, it has become quite possibly the most successful meme in history. And, unlike most memes, it has been astonishingly enduring, a canvas on to which practically anything can be projected while retaining a sense of ironic reassurance. It is the ruling emblem of an era that is increasingly defined by austerity nostalgia.
I can pinpoint the precise moment at which I realised that what had seemed a typically, somewhat insufferably, English phenomenon had gone completely and inescapably global. I was going into the flagship Warsaw branch of the Polish department store Empik and there, just past the revolving doors, was a collection of notebooks, mouse pads, diaries and the like, featuring a familiar English sans serif font, white on red, topped with the crown, in English:
KEEP CALM
AND
CARRY ON
It felt like confirmation that the image had entered the pantheon of truly global design “icons”. As an image, it was now up there alongside Rosie the Riveter, the muscular female munitions worker in the US second world war propaganda image; as easily identifiable as the headscarved Lily Brik bellowing “BOOKS!” on Rodchenko’s famous poster. As a logo, it was nearly as recognisable as Coca-Cola or Apple. How had this happened? What was it that made the image so popular? How did it manage to grow from a minor English middle-class cult object into an international brand, and what exactly was meant by “carry on”? My assumption had been that the combination of message and design were inextricably tied up with a plethora of English obsessions, from the “blitz spirit”, through to the cults of the BBC, the NHS and the 1945 postwar consensus. Also contained in this bundle of signifiers was the enduring pretension of an extremely rich (if shoddy and dilapidated) country, the sadomasochistic Toryism imposed by the coalition government of 2010–15, and its presentation of austerity in a manner so brutal and moralistic that it almost seemed to luxuriate in its own parsimony. Some or none of these thoughts may have been in the heads of the customers at Empik buying their printed tea towels, or they may have just thought it was funny. However, few images of the last decade are quite so riddled with ideology, and few “historical” documents are quite so spectacularly false.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Imperial War Museum handout of a Dig for Victory poster by Mary Tunbridge. Photograph: Mary Tunbridge/PA
The Keep Calm and Carry On poster was not mass-produced until 2008. It is a historical object of a very peculiar sort. By 2009, when it had first become hugely popular, it seemed to respond to a particularly English malaise connected directly with the way Britain reacted to the credit crunch and the banking crash. From this moment of crisis, it tapped into an already established narrative about Britain’s “finest hour” – the aerial Battle of Britain in 1940-41 – when it was the only country left fighting the Third Reich. This was a moment of entirely indisputable – and apparently uncomplicated – national heroism, one that Britain has clung to through thick and thin. Even during the height of the boom, as the critical theorist Paul Gilroy flags up in his 2004 book, After Empire, the blitz and the victory were frequently invoked, made necessary by “the need to get back to the place or moment before the country lost its moral and cultural bearings”. The years 1940 and 1945 were “obsessive repetitions”, “anxious and melancholic”, morbid fetishes, clung to as a means of not thinking about other aspects of recent British history – most obviously, its empire. This has only intensified since the financial crisis began.
The “blitz spirit” has been exploited by politicians largely since 1979. When Thatcherites and Blairites spoke of “hard choices” and “muddling through”, they often evoked the memories of 1941. It served to legitimate regimes that constantly argued that, despite appearances to the contrary, resources were scarce and there wasn’t enough money to go around; the most persuasive way of explaining why someone (else) was inevitably going to suffer. Ironically, however, this rhetoric of sacrifice was often combined with a demand that consumers enrich themselves – buy their house, get a new car, make something of themselves, “aspire”. Thus, by 2007‑08, when the “no return to boom and bust” promised by Gordon Brown appeared to be abortive (despite the success of his very 1940s alternative of nationalising the banks and thus “saving capitalism”), the image started to become popular. It is worth noting that shortly after this point, a brief series of protests were being policed in increasingly ferocious ways. The authorities were allowed to make use of the apparatus of security and surveillance, and the proliferation of “prevention of terrorism” laws set up under the New Labour governments of 1997–2010, to combat any sign of dissent. In this context the poster became ever more ubiquitous, and, peculiarly, after 2011, it began to be used in what few protests remained, in an only mildly subverted form.
Few images of the last decade are quite so riddled with ideology, and few ‘historical’ artefacts are so utterly false
The Keep Calm and Carry On poster seemed to embody all the contradictions produced by a consumption economy attempting to adapt itself to thrift, and to normalise surveillance and security through an ironic, depoliticised aesthetic. Out of apparently nowhere, this image – combining bare, faintly modernist typography with the consoling logo of the crown and a similarly reassuring message – spread everywhere. I first noticed its ubiquity in the winter of 2009, when the poster appeared in dozens of windows in affluent London districts such as Blackheath during the prolonged snowy period and the attendant breakdown of National Rail; the implied message about hardiness in the face of adversity and the blitz spirit looked rather absurd in the context of a dusting of snow crippling the railway system. The poster seemed to exemplify a design phenomenon that had slowly crept up on us to the point where it became unavoidable. It is best described as “austerity nostalgia”. This aesthetic took the form of a yearning for the kind of public modernism that, rightly or wrongly, was seen to have characterised the period from the 1930s to the early 1970s; it could just as easily exemplify a more straightforwardly conservative longing for security and stability in hard times.
Unlike many forms of nostalgia, the memory invoked by the Keep Calm and Carry On poster is not based on lived experience. Most of those who have bought this poster, or worn the various bags, T-shirts and other memorabilia based on it, were probably born in the 1970s or 1980s. They have no memory whatsoever of the kind of benevolent statism the slogan purports to exemplify. In that sense, the poster is an example of the phenomenon given a capsule definition by Douglas Coupland in 1991: “legislated nostalgia”, that is, “to force a body of people to have memories they do not actually possess”. However, there is more to it than that. No one who was around at the time, unless they had worked at the department of the Ministry of Information, for which the poster was designed, would have seen it. In fact, before 2008, few had ever seen the words “Keep Calm and Carry On” displayed in a public place.
The poster was designed in 1939, but its “official website”, which sells a variety of Keep Calm and Carry On merchandise, states that it never became an official propaganda poster; rather, a handful were printed on a test basis. The specific purpose of the poster was to stiffen resolve in the event of a Nazi invasion, and it was one in a set of three. The two others, which followed the same design principles, were:
YOUR COURAGE
YOUR CHEERFULNESS
YOUR RESOLUTION
WILL BRING
US VICTORY
and:
FREEDOM IS
IN PERIL
DEFEND IT
WITH ALL
YOUR MIGHT
Both of these were printed up, and “YOUR COURAGE … ” was widely displayed during the blitz, given that the feared invasion did not take place after the German defeat in the Battle of Britain. You can see one on a billboard in the background of the last scene of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s 1943 film, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, when the ageing, reactionary but charming soldier finds his house in Belgravia bombed. Of the three proposals, KEEP CALM AND CARRY ON was discarded after the test printing. Possibly, this was because it was considered less appropriate to the conditions of the blitz than to the mass panic expected in the event of a German ground invasion. The other posters were heavily criticised. The social research project Mass Observation recorded many furious reactions to the patronising tone of YOUR COURAGE … and its implied distinction between YOU, the common person, and US, the state to be defended. Anthony Burgess later claimed it was rage at posters like this that helped Labour win such an enormous landslide in the 1945 election. We can be fairly sure that if KEEP CALM AND CARRY ON had been mass-produced, it would have infuriated those who were being implored to be calm. Wrenched out of this context and exhumed in the 21st century, however, the poster appears to flatter, rather than hector, the public it is aimed at.
Keep Calm and Carry On: The secret history Read more
One of the few test printings of the poster was found in a consignment of secondhand books bought at auction by Barter Books in Alnwick, Northumberland, which then created the first reproductions. First sold in London by the shop at the Victoria and Albert Museum, it became a middlebrow staple when the recession, initially merely the slightly euphemistic “credit crunch”, hit. Through this poster, the way to display one’s commitment to the new austerity regime was to buy more consumer goods, albeit with a less garish aesthetic than was customary during the boom. This was similar to the “Keep calm and carry on shopping” commanded by George W Bush both after September 11 and when the sub-prime crisis hit America. The wartime use of this rhetoric escalated during the economic turmoil in the UK; witness the slogan of the 2010-15 coalition government, “We’re all in this together”. The power of Keep Calm and Carry On comes from a yearning for an actual or imaginary English patrician attitude of stiff upper lips and muddling through. This is, however, something that largely survives only in the popular imagination, in a country devoted to services and consumption, where elections are decided on the basis of house-price value, and given to sudden, mawkish outpourings of sentiment. The poster isn’t just a case of the return of the repressed, it is rather the return of repression itself. It is a nostalgia for the state of being repressed – solid, stoic, public spirited, as opposed to the depoliticised, hysterical and privatised reality of Britain over the last 30 years.
At the same time as it evokes a sense of loss over the decline of an idea of Britain and the British, it is both reassuring and flattering, implying a virtuous (if highly self-aware) consumer stoicism. Of course, in the end, it is a bit of a joke: you don’t really think your pay cut or your children’s inability to buy a house, or the fact that someone somewhere else has been made homeless because of the bedroom tax, or lost their benefit, or worked on a zero-hours contract, is really comparable to life during the blitz – but it’s all a bit of fun, isn’t it?
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Unlike many forms of nostalgia, the memory invoked by the Keep Calm and Carry On poster is not based on lived experience.
The Keep Calm and Carry On poster is only the tip of an iceberg of austerity nostalgia. Although early examples of the mood can be seen as a reaction to the threat of terrorism and the allegedly attendant blitz spirit, it has become an increasingly prevalent response to the uncertainties of economic collapse. Interestingly, one of the first areas in which this happened was the consumption of food, an activity closely connected with the immediate satisfaction of desires. Along with the blitz came rationing, which was not fully abolished until the mid-1950s. Accounts of this vary; its egalitarianism meant that while the middle classes experienced a drastic decline in the quality and quantity of their diet, for many of the poor it was a minor improvement. Either way, it was a grim regime, aided by the emergence of various byproducts and substitutes – Spam, corned beef – which stuck around in the already famously dismal British diet for some time, before mass immigration gradually made eating in Britain a less awful experience. In the process, entire aspects of British cuisine – the sort of thing listed by George Orwell in his essay “In Defence of English Cooking” such as suet dumplings, Lancashire hotpot, Yorkshire pudding, roast dinners, faggots, spotted dick and toad in the hole – began to disappear, at least from the metropoles.
The figure of importance here is the Essex-born multimillionaire chef and Winston Churchill fan, Jamie Oliver. Clearly as decent and sincere a person as you’ll find on the Sunday Times Rich List, his various crusades for good food, and the manner in which he markets them, are inadvertently telling. After his initial fame as a New Labour‑era star, a relatively young and Beckham-coiffed celebrity chef, his main concern (aside from a massive chain-restaurant empire that stretches from Greenwich Market in London to the Hotel Moskva in Belgrade) has been to take “good food” – locally sourced, cooked from scratch – from being a preserve of the middle classes and bring it to the “disadvantaged” and “socially excluded” of inner-city London, ex-industrial towns, mining villages and other places slashed and burned by 30-plus years of Thatcherism. The first version of this was the TV series Jamie’s School Dinners, in which a camera crew documented him trying to influence the school meals choices of a comprehensive in Kidbrooke, a poor, and recently almost totally demolished, district in south-east London. Notoriously, this crusade was nearly thwarted by mothers bringing their kids fizzy drinks and burgers that they pushed through the fences so that they wouldn’t have to suffer that healthy eating muck.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Essex-born multimillionaire chef and Winston Churchill fan, Jamie Oliver
The second phase was the book, TV series and chain of shops branded as the Ministry of Food. The name is taken directly from the wartime ministry charged with managing the rationed food economy of war-torn Britain. Using the assistance of a few public bodies, setting up a charity, pouring in some coalfield regeneration money and some cash of his own, Oliver planned to teach the proletariat to make itself real food with real ingredients. One could argue that he was the latest in a long line of people lecturing the lower orders on their choice of nutrition, part of an immense construction of grotesque neo-Victorian snobbery that has included former Channel 4 shows How Clean Is Your House?, Benefits Street and Immigration Street, exercises in “Let’s laugh at picturesque prole scum”. But Oliver got in there, and “got his hands dirty”.
However, the story ended in a predictable manner: attempts to build this charitable action into something permanent and institutional foundered on the disinclination of any plausible British government to antagonise the supermarkets and sundry manufacturers who funnel money to the two main political parties. The appeal to a time when things such as food and information were apparently dispensed by a benign paternalist bureaucracy, before consumer choice carried all before it, can only be translated into the infrastructure of charity and PR, where we learn what happens over a few weeks during a TV show and then forget about it. A “permanent” network of Ministry of Food shops – pop-ups that taught cooking skills and had a mostly voluntary staff – were set up in the north of England in Bradford, Leeds, Newcastle and Rotherham, though the latter was forced to temporarily close following health and safety concerns in June 2013, reopening in September 2014.
Much more influential than this up by your bootstraps attempt to do a TV/charity version of the welfare state was the ministry’s aesthetics. On the cover of the tie-in cookbook, Oliver sits at a table laid with a 1940s utility tablecloth in front of some bleakly cute postwar wallpaper, and “MINISTRY OF FOOD” is declared in that same derivative of Gill Sans typeface used on the Keep Calm and Carry On poster. This is familiar territory. There is a whole micro-industry of austerity nostalgia aimed straight at the stomach. There is Oliver’s own chain of Jamie’s restaurants, where you can order pork scratchings for £4 (they come with a side of English mustard) and enjoy neo-Victorian toilets. Beyond Oliver’s empire, middle-class operations such as the caterers Peyton and Byrne combine the sort of retro food common across the western world (lots of cupcakes) with elaborate versions of simple English grub including sausage and mash. Some of the interiors of their cafes (such as the one in Heal’s on Tottenham Court Road in central London) were designed by architects FAT in a pop spin on the faintly lavatorial institutional design common to the surviving fragments of genuine 1940s Britain that can still be found scattered around the UK – pie and mash shops in Deptford in south-east London, ice-cream parlours in Worthing in Sussex, Glasgow’s dingier pubs, all featuring lots of wipe-clean tiles.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Make Do And Mend Photograph: Make Do And Mend
Other versions of this are more luxurious, such as Dinner, where Heston Blumenthal provides typically quirky English food as part of the attractions of One Hyde Park, the most expensive housing development on Earth. Something similar is offered at Canteen, which has branches in London’s Royal Festival Hall, Canary Wharf and – after its scorched-earth gentrification courtesy of the Corporation of London and Norman Foster – Spitalfields Market. Canteen serves “Great British Food”, “beers, ciders and perrys [that] represent our country’s brewing history” and cocktails that are “British-led”. The interior design is clearly part of the appeal, offering a strange, luxurious version of a works canteen, with benches, trays and sans serif signs that aim to be both modernist and nostalgic. It presents the incongruous spectacle of the very comfortable eating and imagining themselves in the dining hall of a branch of Tyrrell & Green circa 1960. Still more bizarre is Albion, a greengrocer for oligarchs, selling traditional English produce to the denizens of Neo Bankside, the Richard Rogers-designed towers alongside Tate Modern. Built into the ground floor of one of the towers, it sells its unpretentious fruit and veg next to posters advertising flats that start at the knock-down price of £2m.
Closer to reality as lived by most people is a mobile app called the Ration Book. On its website, it gives you a crash course on rationing, when the government made sure that in the face of shortage and blockade the population could still get “life’s essentials” in the form of the famous book, with its stamps to get X amount of dried egg, flour, pollock and Spam. It is an app that aggregates discounts on various brands via voucher codes for those facing the “crunch” – the people the unfortunate Ed Miliband tried to reach out to as the “squeezed middle”. The website states: “Our team of ‘Ministers’ broker the best deals with the biggest brands, to give you the best value.” Is there any better way of describing the UK in the second decade of the 21st century than as the sort of country that produces apps to simulate state rationing of basic goods, simply to shave a little bit off the price of high street brands?
This food-based austerity nostalgia is one way in which people’s peculiar longing for the 1940s is conveyed; much more can be found in music and design. Walk into the shops at the Royal Festival Hall or the Imperial War Museum in London, and you will find an avalanche of it. Posters from the 1940s, toys and trinkets, none of them later than around 1965, have been resurrected from the dustbin of history and laid out for you to buy, along with austerity cookbooks, the Design series of books on pre-1960s “iconic” graphic artists such as Abram Games, David Gentleman and Eric Ravilious, plus a whole cornucopia of Keep Calm-related accoutrements. A particularly established example is the use of the 1930s Penguin book covers as a logo for all manner of goods, deliberately calling to mind Penguin’s mid-century role as a substantially educative publisher. Then there are all those prints of modernist buildings, ready for Londoners to frame and place in their ex-council flats in zone 2 or 3: reduced, stark blow-ups of the outlines of modernist architecture, whether demolished (the Trinity Square car park in Gateshead seen in Get Carter) or protected (London’s National Theatre). The plate-making company, People Will Always Need Plates, has made a name for itself with its towels, mugs, plates and badges emblazoned with various British modernist buildings from the 1930s to the 1960s, elegantly redrawn in a bold, schematic form that sidesteps the often rather shabby reality of the buildings. By recreating the image of the historically untainted building, it manages to precisely reverse the original modernist ethos. If for Adolf Loos and generations of modernist architects ornament was crime, here modernist buildings are made into ornaments. Still, the choice of buildings is politically interesting. Blocks of 1930s collective housing, 1960s council flats, interwar London Underground stations – exactly the sort of architectural projects now considered obsolete in favour of retail and property speculation.
At Jamie’s restaurants you can order pork scratchings for £4 and enjoy neo-Victorian toilets
Many of the buildings immortalised in these plates have been the subject of direct transfers of assets from the public sector into the private. The reclamation of postwar modernist architecture by the intelligentsia has been a contributory factor in the privatisation of social housing. An early instance of this was the sell-off of Keeling House, Denys Lasdun’s east London “Cluster Block”, to a private developer, who promptly marketed the flats to creatives. A series of gentrifications of modernist social housing followed, from the Brunswick Centre in Bloomsbury (turned from a rotting brutalist megastructure into the home of one of the largest branches of Waitrose in London), to Park Hill, an architecturally extraordinary council estate in Sheffield, given away free to the Mancunian developer Urban Splash, whose own favouring of “compact” flats has long been an example of austerity sold as luxury – although after the boom, its privatisation scheme had to be bailed out by millions of pounds in public money. Another favourite on mugs and tea towels is Balfron Tower, a council tower block about to be sold to wealthy investors for its iconic quality. It is here, where the rage for 21st-century austerity chic meets the results of austerity as practised in the 1940s and 1950s, that a mildly creepy fad spills over into much darker territory. In aiding the sell-off of one of the greatest achievements of that era – the housing built by a universal welfare state – the revival of austerity chic is the literal destruction of the thing it claims to love.
• The Ministry of Nostalgia by Owen Hatherley is published by Verso (£14.99). To order a copy for £11.99, go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min. p&p of £1.99. |
Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Eyewitness call to 999: ''It just missed a couple of the houses''
A man has been sentenced to a year in prison for endangering the safety of an aircraft when he grabbed a helicopter as it took off in Bristol.
Bristol Crown Court was told Houshang Jafari, 58, became "extremely angry" after the helicopter landed near his flat, causing debris to hit his car.
The court heard how Jafari grabbed one of its skid bars as the pilot tried to take off with four passengers on board.
The pilot managed to take off safely despite Jafari's actions last March.
Image caption The court was told Jafari also kicked the helicopter
Dr Mark Blockland, who was in charge of the helicopter, was credited in court for using his "considerable skill" to allow it to take off safely despite it lurching violently.
Sentencing Jafari, Judge Michael Roach said it was a "deliberate and much more a reckless and dangerous act" and, despite the fact he was a business and family man, he had "no choice" other than to send him to prison.
The court had previously heard Dr Blockland had landed close to Dower House to pick up two passengers.
Jafari was said to have become angry when the private aircraft blew debris at his Range Rover.
He approached the helicopter, threw a bag of rubbish at its nose and then kicked it.
As the pilot tried to take off, Jafari grabbed the skid bar as it was about 6ft (1.83m) off the ground.
This caused the helicopter to lurch to the right. An eyewitness told the court the aircraft narrowly missed nearby houses as it "swerved around" and "flew erratically" away.
Pictures of the incident taken by another resident of Dower House were shown to the court. |
by Don Paskini
George Osborne has announced a new Tory policy which I don’t understand: they want to give every household a new entitlement to £6,500 of energy saving technologies. They provide government guarantees to enable companies to borrow the money to install this energy saving equipment in homes across the country.
This money would be repaid through savings on energy bills resulting from the improved energy efficiency. So homeowners would be given the opportunity to have energy saving equipment fitted to their homes without any upfront costs. They claim this will unleash £20 billion of private investment if half of all households take this up.
So if I’ve got this right, homeowners can in effect borrow £6,500 to get energy saving equipment installed, and then pay it back over the next few years out of savings from lower energy bills.
The thing I don’t understand is how this fits with the Tory economic argument that Debt is Bad. The average yearly energy bill, according to moneysupermarket.com, is £1,350, so it is going to take people an awfully long time to pay back £6,500 out of the savings from lower energy bills.
So either a large chunk of this £20 billion is going to be paid upfront by the government and not recovered (which means in effect higher government spending, which the Tories oppose) or it means people taking on extra debt and paying it off over ten or more years (the Tories say private debt is currently too high already, so it is strange that they would have policies which encourage more of it).
I think that with some considerable tweaks, the government funding the installation of energy saving technologies in homes is probably a good idea (though, for example, it seems a bit harsh that under the Tory plans people like me who rent can’t get it installed and it is only for people who own their own homes).
But it is interesting that this new flagship Tory policy contradicts their overall economic strategy and analysis and instead appears to be more influenced by Labour’s and Barack Obama’s approach of the government spending more money in the short term in order that we can all reap the benefits in the longer term. |
State Takes Over Arkansas School District That Had To Make Teachers Wear Underwear
Things have gone from bad to worse for the public school system in Little Rock, Ark.
In August 2013, the district announced — to the great dismay of the teachers union — a dress code that would require teachers to wear underwear. Every single day. Female teachers would have to wear bras, too. And the very worst of all: No spandex. (RELATED: Little Rock School District Will Now Make Teachers Wear Underwear)
Now, a mere 18 months later, the Arkansas Department of Education has voted to assume control over management of the school district, the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette reports.
The narrow 5-4 vote on Wednesday by the state school board effectively wrests control of the district from the local school board (but keeps Superintendent Dexter Suggs on the job on an interim basis).
The state school board intervened because the Little Rock school district is home to six schools which are deemed to be under academic distress. Three are high schools. Two are middle schools. One is an elementary school.
The 5-4 vote for a takeover came after state education officials had also voted 5-4 against a compromise plan that would have entailed a state-local partnership.
“At some point you just have to go in a new direction,” board chairman Sam Ledbetter told the Democrat-Gazette.
Ledbetter proved to be the deciding vote on both ballots.
“Bottom line, it was the best thing for students,” board member Vicki Saviers told the Little Rock newspaper.
Greg Adams, the president of the Little Rock school board, expressed disappointment.
“My concern now and my hope is the kids of Little Rock will be served well and that the leadership that’s going to be there will be able to find effective ways for the kids,” Adams said.
The August 2013 announcement of a new dress code declared that “foundational garments shall be worn and not visible with respect to color, style, and/or fabric.”
T-shirts, patches and other clothing containing slogans for beer, alcohol, drugs, gangs or sex were similarly prohibited. Other verboten garments included cut-off jeans with ragged edges and cut-out dresses.
“Tattoos must be covered if at all possible.” No flip-flops. “No see-through or sheer clothing.” No jogging suits, either (though gym and dance teachers got a pass on that one).
In a letter to the teachers union rank and file, local teachers union president Cathy Koehler explained her fear that “if an employee refuses to go home and change they can be considered insubordinate and risk losing their job based on an opinion.”
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Image copyright Getty Images
The RAF Tornado mission in Iraq, which was supposed to be disbanded last March, will be extended until "at least" March 2017. Why has this veteran Cold War combat jet proved so enduring?
The cockpit of a supersonic Tornado attack bomber is a much more peaceful place than you might expect.
"It's incredibly quiet," says Jas Hawker, a former RAF wing commander who flew the aircraft over Iraq and Kosovo. "The pilot and the navigator could drop their oxygen masks and talk to each other. It's not silent but it's a lot quieter than people think."
It also has a rather retro feel, as befits a four-decade-old model approaching the end of its time in service. "It's still full of 1980s dials," says Hawker. There isn't the array of screens you might see in more modern fighters, he adds.
Despite this, it's just been given a new lease of life.
Image copyright Getty Images
The eight Tornado GR4 fighter bombers launching ground attacks against the Islamic State group in Iraq - Number 12 Squadron, which is deployed in Cyprus - were due to be disbanded last year and replaced with more modern Eurofighter Typhoons.
But then Prime Minister David Cameron announced the Tornados' mission would continue until March 2016, and on Tuesday Defence Secretary Michael Fallon announced it would be extended by a further year.
It's a distinction for an aircraft that was conceived in the late 1960s, flew for the first time in 1974 and entered service in 1980. The RAF's Tornado fleet is due to retire in 2019, the date having been brought forward from the original deadline of 2025.
The jet is very much a product of its era. The Panavia Tornado was developed jointly by the UK, Germany and Italy to fly low and fast, avoiding Soviet air defences. Over time its bombing capacity was developed.
Compared with the Typhoon, which entered service with the RAF as recently as 2007, the much older Tornado is less manoeuvrable, having been primarily designed to fly quickly in straight lines at a low level.
But the GR4 has a major advantage over the newer model, says Nick de Larrinaga, Europe editor of IHS Jane's Defence Weekly: "They can carry the Brimstone air-to-surface missile which the RAF has found very useful." These are designed to minimise collateral damage and are capable of hitting moving targets.
Because the Tornado is a relatively large aircraft, it can carry a lot of these - 12 in four sets of three. As yet, the Typhoons are not equipped to carry them. Until Brimstone can be integrated with the newer jet, the GR4 has an advantage.
Image copyright Getty Images
Tornados were used more than Typhoons during Nato air strikes in Libya in 2011 because the former were equipped with Brimstone and the latest 500lb Paveway IV laser and GPS-guided bomb. Typhoons have only been able to use Paveway IV since 2014, and in Libya they had to use the older and larger 1,000lb or 2,000lb Paveway II.
The GR4 is also equipped with Reconnaissance Airborne Pod for Tornado (Raptor), a sensor that is capable of taking highly detailed images day or night.
While the Eurofighter Typhoon project has faced delays and overspends since it was conceived in 1984, the Tornado remains a dependable aircraft. In the RAF, it is also popular with pilots.
"It's actually quite easy to fly," says Hawker. It's computerised and has hydro-mechanical flight controls. The variable-sweep wings, which allow the pilot to configure the wings according to flying speed, are swept backwards and forwards manually. The two-seat cockpit is fairly spacious in comparison with other combat aircraft, although crews can be strapped to their seats for up to eight hours at a time during missions.
But, Hawker says, the large number of sensors can be difficult to operate - this is generally done by the navigator in the rear seat.
There were different versions of the Tornado. The British developed an air defence version, the F3, to intercept Russian bombers, which was retired in March 2011 and replaced with the Typhoon. There was also a reconnaissance variant, the GR1A, which was superceded by the GR4A, and an anti-shipping model, the GR1B. Germany and Italy also had an electronic combat/reconnaissance (ECR) version.
It's the interdictor/strike (IDS) variant that is currently flying missions from Cyprus to Iraq. Originally designated the GR1, some 228 entered service in the early 1980s and 142 of these were upgraded to being GR4s between 1997 and 2003.
Some 60 GR1s took part in Operation Granby, the British military deployment during the 1991 Gulf War. Six of them were lost. RAF Pilot John Peters and navigator John Nichol were paraded in front of cameras by their Iraqi captors after their Tornado was shot down . The two flight lieutenants were held captive for a total of 47 days.
RAF Tornado GR4 specifications
Image copyright Getty Images
Engines: Two RR RB199 Mk103 turbofans
Thrust: 16,000lb each
Max speed: 1.3 Mach
Length: 16.72m
Max altitude: 50,000ft
Span: 8.6m
Aircrew: Two
Source: RAF website
RAF Tornados took part in the 1999 Kosovo war and the GR4 upgrade was completed in time for Operation Telic, the UK's deployment in Iraq from 2003 to 2011. Tornados were used in Afghanistan from 2009 until the withdrawal of UK forces in 2014. According to the Ministry of Defence, they flew over 5,000 sorties and logged more than 33,500 flight hours during this time.
In 2010, the coalition government's Strategic Defence and Security Review concluded that the Harrier GR7/GR9 should be retired and that the Tornados could be the RAF's main strike aircraft until the Typhoon was ready to assume the role.
For all that it was conceived during the Cold War, the Tornado has proved remarkably effective at modern warfare, where targeted air attacks are a key part of military action, says de Larrinaga.
"If you go back to the RAF during World War Two, they would count a hit as any bomb within five miles of the target," he says. "Five metres would be considered a miss these days. The emphasis is really on precision."
But as aircraft grow older they become more expensive to repair, hence the gradual phasing out of the Tornado in favour of the Typhoon.
While there are plenty of pilots still trained to fly them, there are fewer Tornado navigators since the RAF stopped training them in 2009, says defence analyst Paul Beaver. Nonetheless, the GR4 remains popular with those who fly and operate it.
"The crews like it because it's dependable," he says. "You press a button and it starts."
More from the Magazine
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RAPE Crisis Scotland, Engender, Scottish Women’s Aid, and The National are joining forces to call for the Scottish Government to introduce an offence of incitement of hatred against women.
It comes as protests have been organised in a bid to disrupt the Scottish meetings of militant misogynists who follow the teachings of rape advocate Roosh V.
As revealed in yesterday’s National, the so-called “pick-up artist”, who has called for rape to be made legal, has organised meetings for his supporters to attend in Glasgow’s George Square and Edinburgh’s Grassmarket this Saturday. Roosh V himself is unlikely to be there.
At the time of going to print a petition calling on the Scottish Government to ban the American from coming to this country had been signed more than 25,000 times.
Organisers say hundreds have expressed an interest in attending the demonstrations. Sandy Brindley from Rape Crisis Scotland said that the planned meet-up showed that there was a gap in the law.
“Lots of other jurisdictions include women in their hate crime legislation. We don’t have any hate crime legislation for women and I do think what this exposes is a gap in the criminal law. If what he is doing is promoting rape then an incitement to hatred offence would enable us to deal with that.“
This new offence, Brindley said, would deal with online misogynistic abuse and rape threats: “I think what we need is clear legislation that says this is a crime, it’s incitement to hatred and you could be prosecuted for it.”
A Scottish Government spokesman said “threats of sexual violence” would be covered by the Criminal Justice and Licensing (Scotland) Act 2010.
“It provides that it is a criminal offence for a person to behave in a threatening or abusive manner that would be likely to cause a reasonable person to suffer fear or alarm. This would include threats of sexual violence,” he said.
National columnist Vonny Moyes, who organised the Glasgow protest, said it was important to make a stand: “It’s important that we don’t approach this combatively – there’s no point fighting fire like for like. We are a reasonable country, full of brilliant, compassionate and inspiring women, and men who believe in them. Hiding or refusing to stand up for ourselves only feeds his theory that we’re submissive and easily manipulated.”
The National asked Roosh V for a comment, sharing some of the concerns of our readers. He simply said: “Whoever contacted you is an idiot, and you yourself are an idiot if you believe their hysterical and false claims.”
There was consensus across the political parties and parliaments over Roosh V’s planned meetings.
Scottish Conservative leader Ruth Davidson tweeted: “Never heard of this guy before but it – and he – sound disgusting and dangerous.”
In Westminster, Edinburgh MP Tommy Sheppard tabled a motion condemning “the organisation of sexist and hate-mongering meetings across the United Kingdom by so-called pick-up artists Roosh V”, arguing: “Not enough is done to educate men who may become predators”.
Hamilton, Larkhall and Stonehouse MSP Christina McKelvie tabled a similar motion in the Scottish Parliament saying the speeches were “clear acts of incitement that must not be tolerated by the law”.
There has been a similar outcry in Australia, where reports of a meet-up in the Sydney Herald saw demonstrations and petitions organised.
Roosh V, real name Daryush Valizadeh, has written 22 books. He claims they are guidebooks on “seducing” women. In one book, Bang Iceland: How To Sleep With Icelandic Girls In Iceland, he justifies having sex with a girl too drunk to give consent.
“I realised how drunk she was. In America, having sex with her would have been rape, since she couldn’t legally give her consent. It didn’t help matters that I was relatively sober, but I can’t say I cared or even hesitated,” he writes.
In an article last year he called for rape to be made legal on private property, arguing a woman who consented to go into a man’s house had consented to have sex.
Events have been organised by Roosh V in 43 countries.
Cat Boyd: We must all stand against misogyny
The National View: United we stand, saying no to each and every form of everyday sexism |
Brendan Mckay Could Excel as a Two-Way Player
The Tampa Bay Rays announced they will let their fourth overall pick pitch and hit in the minor leagues
Quinn Allen Blocked Unblock Follow Following Jun 17, 2017
It’s not too often you hear of a player being selected in the draft as a hitter, and pitcher. Hunter Greene, the second overall pick by the Reds, was selected as a right handed pitcher thanks to a triple digit fastball. He could have also gone as a first round talent at shortstop, where he possesses a very strong arm and excellent bat speed at the plate.
Then there is Brendan Mckay, a junior out of the University of Louisville. He was arguably the best left handed pitcher in college baseball and one of the best pure hitters this past season. The 21-year old compiled a 31–10 record on the mound in three seasons at Lousville, with a 2.15 ERA and 385 strikeouts in just 310 innings. At the plate in 2017 he slashed a .343/.464/.657 line with 17 homers. Mckay has led the Cardinals to a College World Series appearance.
Initially the Rays did select Mckay as a first basemen. But after the draft, they made it clear they will let him pitch and hit once he starts his minor league career. He’s had one of the best two way careers in the history of college baseball. There is certain guys in the big leagues who were great two way talents in college, but didn’t get a chance to do it at the professional level. Names like AJ Reed, Brian Johnson, and Micah Owings come to mind. Mckay’s 2017 season was one of the best on both sides of the ball since John Olerud’s 1988 campaign at Washington State. That year Olerud hit .464/.558/.876 with 21 doubles, 23 home runs and 81 RBI as a first baseman and went 15–0 with a 2.49 ERA and 113 strikeouts in 122.2 innings. Of course, Olerud went on to have a very successful big league career as just a first basemen.
I think Brendan Mckay has a legitimate chance to make the big leagues as a two way player. He has all the stuff to be a starting pitcher, but I think the bat is too valuable. A move to the bullpen could be benefit his career.
A reliever and first basemen
Mckay spent his college career as a starting pitcher and first basemen. He typically sits between 90 and 94 mph as a starter, with the velocity dropping into the high 80’s in the latter innings. But if he made the transition to the bullpen, I guarantee you would see the velocity increase. This guy is clearly a rare talent who can literally do it all. Eventually if he continues to be a starting pitcher and a first basemen, his body will break down.
As a reliever, he can come in for one or two innings and give it all he’s got. Even though there isn’t typically a lot of throwing done at first base, you don’t want him being sore all the time. Once he gets some coaching from professional pitching coaches, I believe he will be that much better on the mound.
He’s going to hit, I don’t think there is any doubt about that. He led the US Collegiate National team last summer with a .326 average, facing some of the best competition around the world. If there is any serious possibility of Mckay pitching and hitting once he gets to the big leagues, I believe it will be as a reliever. His stuff will be more explosive when he comes in for one or two innings. This way, he can still play first base everyday, or even DH.
Most polished player in the draft
Mckay has nothing left to prove at the collegiate level. He has lit it up in all aspects of the game, both on the mound and at the plate. He is probably the most pro ready guy in the entire 2017 draft. Mckay has a very simple approach at the plate, with very good discipline. He doesn’t have much movement in his hands or front foot when he loads up, but he has extremely quick hands. His power outlet has definitely increased over three years at Louisville, which will carry right over to pro ball, especially facing bigger arms. MLB.com projects Mckay to be a 20+ home run guy in the majors. The maturity level, bat speed and power is all there. Here’s a video below showcasing his impressive bat.
Like I mentioned above, he was the best left handed pitcher in college baseball. He has a great feel for pitching. What makes him so successful despite not having a huge fastball is the deception in his delivery. He hides the ball very well prior to releasing, making it very difficult for hitters to pick up the pitch. Mckay has great fastball and curveball command,with the changeup being a working progress. Below is a look at Mckay on the mound.
He’s a big, strong kid at the tender age of 21. He could fill out and mature even more, which is only going to help his game be that much better.
A glimpse into the future?
Brendan Mckay could be starting a trend of two way players in pro ball. Right now, he will be the first to do both. But there could be more guys coming along in the next few years who can pump gas on the mound and rake at the plate.
Only time will tell.
But for Brendan Mckay’s sake, I believe a reliever role will allow Mckay to focus on the offensive side of his game as well, because after all the Rays draft pick is just as valuable at the plate. |
CLOSE The college football season doesn't start until the fall but it's never too early to start looking ahead. USA TODAY Sports
Washington State Cougars coach Mike Leach. (Photo: Kirby Lee, USA TODAY Sports)
Mike Leach is still angry at certain people from Texas Tech. He says they cheated him and stole his money.
And he’s not letting this go. After his controversial firing by Tech in 2009, the former Red Raiders football coach still wants the school to pay him what he says he’s owed for that year, when Tech had one of its best seasons ever at 9-4.
By his calculations, he’s owed about $2.5 million, including $1.6 million in guaranteed income from his television and radio shows and other marketing deals.
“This thing won’t really go away,” Leach told USA TODAY Sports. “And it’ll never go away until this thing is settled. And it should be settled, because why should the future generation bear the black eye and the cloud that their university cheated their most successful coach in history? And why should I bear that, some of the 10 most productive years of my career? I was cheated out of my salary, and all the great memories that I, fans, players and coaches had, are diminished.”
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Leach, now entering his sixth season as the head coach at Washington State, previously sued Tech for monetary damages but lost when the Texas Supreme Court rejected his appeal in 2012. He lost on the basis that Tech, as a state institution in Texas, had sovereign immunity that protected it from being successfully sued for damages.
And that’s what really gets him steamed, even now, years after that and other related grievances were dismissed in state court. So why not just let it go?
Leach has a few reasons.
Leach’s legacy
Leach says he never got his day in court to air out the details of his firing, denying him justice in his view because of Tech’s immunity to his lawsuit. And because there’s been a change in leadership at Tech, he’s gained hope that current school administrators would reconsider out of fairness.
He’s also proud of what he accomplished in Lubbock, with a legacy that includes one of his former Red Raiders quarterbacks — Kliff Kingsbury — now leading the program as head coach. Leach won more games (84) than any other coach in Tech history and wants the school, his former players and himself to be able to celebrate that legacy instead of having this dispute tarnishing it and making it awkward.
Mike Leach at Texas Tech in 2008. (Photo: Douglas Jones, USA TODAY Sports)
Next year, for example, will be the 10th anniversary of Tech’s 11-2 season of 2008. If the school wanted to take advantage of that anniversary to boost fan pride, would it honor the players, but avoid mentioning Leach? When Leach retires someday, will Tech ever want to bring Leach back to Lubbock to honor that era and rekindle all the good feelings that came with it?
Tech hasn’t won more than eight games in a season since he left, and his popularity has strong staying power among Red Raiders fans.
“I had a great time at Texas Tech,” said Leach, who coached at Tech for 10 seasons. “Texas Tech is a fantastic place with fantastic people, with a few notable exceptions. Texas Tech should be allowed to celebrate their legacy, and so should I. Any way you slice it, it was the winningest period in the history of Tech. We went to more bowl games than any other time in history … And then for 2009, to not pay me? Think about how egregious that is.”
Tech has disputed Leach’s assertions and has said it paid Leach what he was owed according to his contract.
“The courts have ruled on this matter," the school said in a statement Thursday. "We have resolved this issue and have moved forward.”
`There hasn’t been justice’
After beating him in court, the school doesn’t have to pay him another dime unless it can be persuaded otherwise.
The controversy stems from events in December 2009, when Tech fired Leach for legal cause over his alleged mistreatment of a player suffering from a concussion. That player was Adam James, son of former ESPN broadcaster Craig James. Craig James told then-Tech chancellor Kent Hance in an e-mail that his son was punished by Leach for having a concussion and was locked in an electrical closet for hours — a story that Leach denies and was contradicted by witness statements.
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“I didn’t lock Adam James anywhere. I didn’t tell Adam James to go anywhere,” Leach said. “I told the trainer to get him off the field.”
Leach’s 2009 contract with Tech says that if he were fired “for cause,” then the university’s “sole obligation” is to pay him his base pay of $300,000 and other performance incentives. Tech officials say he was fired for cause, but Leach says that cause wasn’t proven in court and was false.
Leach says he got the $300,000 in base pay but not the $1.6 million in “guaranteed” income, or the $800,000 retention bonus that was due to him if he was the school’s coach on Dec. 31, 2009.
Tech fired him a day earlier, avoiding that expense, but Leach says that bonus was “six years in the making” and due that year.
In addition to the concussion issue, Hance also indicated Leach cursed at him at one point, which Leach says is a lie.
USA TODAY Sports reached out to Hance and got a response from Dicky Grigg, an attorney who represented Tech in the Leach litigation.
"Before Coach Leach was terminated, Texas Tech officials worked with him to try to resolve an extremely volatile situation," Grigg said in a statement. "Coach Leach’s response: Cuss out his boss, sue his employer, and demanding millions and millions of dollars.
"Ultimately, Leach’s mistreatment of a student-athlete with a brain concussion, coupled with his subsequent insubordinate behavior, left the university with no choice but to fire him. Coach Leach was justifiably terminated for cause in conformity with his contract."
Grigg said Tech should not pay Leach.
"Even after Coach Leach sued Texas Tech, we actively participated in trying to settle the case, but the Leach team was totally unreasonable," Grigg said. "The courts determined Texas Tech does not owe Leach any money. Although I do not speak for the University, in my opinion, given the courts’ rulings, it would be improper for Texas Tech to pay Coach Leach. This matter is over."
Griggs' statement is totally false. He is lying on behalf of Kent Hance. What do you expect, he is Hance's attorney. — Mike Leach (@Coach_Leach) June 30, 2017
The worst thing about this is my case has never been heard. The TTU administrators responsible for this hid behind sovereign immunity. — Mike Leach (@Coach_Leach) June 30, 2017
Hance retired as Tech chancellor in 2014. Leach still has particular ire for him and the sovereign immunity protection that Tech used to shield itself from his lawsuit — a concept he says undermines the credibility of contracts with public entities in Texas. “You’d be hard-pressed to name any first-world country that does business that way,” Leach said of the Texas law.
And he’s not ready to bury the issue. To him, it’s about principle and pride, not just money. In 2014, an anonymous party of “alumni and fans of Texas Tech” took out a full-page advertisement in the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal, asking Tech to “do the right thing,” pay Leach and not hide behind sovereign immunity. It didn’t work. After this story was published, Leach further criticized Tech on Twitter.
“There hasn’t been justice on this,” Leach said. “I think that there needs to be. How is this justified? I mean, it’s not justified any way you slice it. If they think it’s justified, let’s go to court. You prove your case in court. They don’t want to go near a court room because they know what will happen, because they flat-out cheated me. And they lied, and they stole. And they know that’s what they did, and they wouldn’t be so resistant to go to trial if they were confident in their case. And they haven’t refuted any of the facts because they can’t.” |
The title of Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds' eighth studio album was not, as some may have expected, ironic or sarcastic. He may sometimes be theatrical, he may sometimes be hyperbolic, but the Black Crow King is never one to make light of what he knows to be the biggest governing force in his life. At the beginning of 1993, Cave was recently married, reveling in fatherhood and was by his own account a happier human being than he'd been in some time. He had just returned to London after spending three years with his young family in Brazil and, after a few extra jaunts about Europe with the Bad Seeds hot off the success of Henry's Dream, Cave holed up in a little pub on Portobello Road and began writing his next album. And while death still pervades and darkness still penetrates its lines, domestic bliss made Let Love In a comparatively positive record.
In preparation of writing this article, I've been reading Ian Johnston's biography of Cave Bad Seed. Having been published before Cave dropped Murder Ballads, the book wraps up a short time after the release of Let Love In, declaring it "not only one of the most accomplished and fully realised records of Cave's entire career, but also the most commercially successful". While the latter claim was usurped by Murder Ballads a few years later, I'm inclined to believe the former statement still rings true.
Musically it is the culmination of the preceding records. More focused, less wild, but still smouldering with intensity. Most importantly, it is a conscious effort on Cave's part to inject more of himself into the subject matter of the lyrics and rely less heavily on stepping into the shoes of various characters. Most of his work is inward looking, but Let Love In is notably personal.
The album came together shortly after his relocation from Sao Paulo to London. Though the previous two records contained some samba-flecked moments of Brazilian influence, I think that the number one thing that his time in Brazil gave Let Love In was introspection. Spending years in a country without learning the language caused Cave to become more isolated than he'd ever been. Yet it wasn't entirely exile. Cave's marriage to Brazilian journalist Viviane Carneiro and the birth of his son Luke in 1991 kept him steeped in inspiration. Let Love In came out of happiness just as the later The Boatman's Call would come out of heartbreak.
Before exponentially expanding his bodycount and cast of deranged characters on the next record, Cave and the Seeds took a deliberate detour first. Yet ever the "reliable old beast", as Cave called them, the Bad Seeds provided work that could have easily found a home sketching the scene of another massacre on Murder Ballads. The differences are subtle; many protagonists are less caricatured, struggling with much more inner conflict than the cold and murderous sociopaths sauntering through much of Cave's back catalogue. But the album doesn't stand alone as such. He would be equally personal later in his career and was equally hateful on earlier work. Let Love In just has it all: the seething punk and the roving balladeer.
The bookends 'Do You Love Me' and 'Do You Love Me (Part 2)' are near-perfect and were among the first to be recorded, though according to Cave they took months to put together. The latter in fact went through hundreds of edits. It tells the story of a child's first sexual experience through his molestation by a man with "sly, girlish eyes" in a movie theatre. Flawlessly executed, the narrative seems almost ethereal, like an out of body experience, but at the heart of it brandishing a dark truth: once that innocence is taken, you can only keep on moving on. You will be hard pressed to find a lyric more effective at portraying the confusion and surrealism experienced by a child so violated.
Luckily the opener is not quite as horrific. 'Do You Love Me', in its tolling bells and sinister, sleazy atmosphere, does address inner conflict but it also looks at the reasons why we suffer for love. The descending trudge of the chorus line is made funeral dirge by The Bad Seeds' booming backing vocals before rolling into the lovely intro to 'Nobody's Baby Now'. Playing as he often has on his obsession with Jesus as an enigmatic figure, Cave plays a man confused by the loss of his love and trying to come to terms with a decision and the human behaviour around it. However, it isn't clear whether it is by the hand of the narrator or "she" that the subject of affection comes to be "nobody's baby now".
Aside from the swaying western-tinged title track, the two other slow numbers 'Ain't Gonna Rain Anymore' and 'Lay Me Low' come back-to-back near the end of the record, where Cave brings the listener through an account of a tumultuous affair's end before penning his own obituary. Well, I suppose it's not so much an obituary as a (stunningly accurate) prediction of how his death would be handled by his fans, friends, media and naysayers respectively.
Then there is the lit firecracker that is 'Jangling Jack'. Cave's "ode to America" is made purposefully short and hateful. He'd grown disillusioned with the States; from his point of view, it was riddled with corruption, and was injudiciously steering international politics out of control. 'Jangling Jack' is a throwaway that serves its purpose well but also provides some of the sizzling angst of his early work, in many ways it's the token punk rocker. Though Cave's apology for everything he'd ever done ever, 'Thirsty Dog' is swiftly behind in that race, led by Blixa Bargeld's frantic guitar.
'Loverman', is a raucous tale of hard living – a man attempting to take power over himself and raise himself up by taking power over another. The Bad Seeds are on form with bridle and ballast here, bringing low and doomy accompaniment in the verses before roaring and undulating with drum fills into the chorus of Cave's howled lines like "So help me / Cause I am what I am what I am what I am".
'Red Right Hand', much like its central character, ain't what it seems. The lyrics were mostly improvised, as opposed to the hours he pored over the opener and closer, but it remains just as powerful, taking a few further swipes at America and its culture of overwrought sentimentality. A stone cold classic and a gem in the band's live set to date. In hindsight this album would be a stepping stone in the Bad Seeds' commercial development, even though the biggest success to come would turn the initial intent of Let Love In on its head. Murder Ballads solidified Cave's reputation as a storyteller, letting loose a slew of vivid anti-heroes of all shapes and sizes. It was as if the lascivious characters Cave had been depriving of a voice clawed to the surface and burst forth to wreak havoc and leave nothing but blood and bodies in their wake. Some of the tracks even began to take shape before Let Love In was completed, and left to simmer over the three year interim.
But even given this hindsight Let Love In is still a perfect encapsulation of everything Bad Seedsian. This incarnation of the band was so strong at this point and as a result Let Love In benefits from true collaboration and mutual interpretations. It's kaleidoscopic; a whirling, careening carnival of ugly noise and dark lust underpinned by beauty and passion. It's everything you could expect from them and everything you could want, plus a few things even your darkest morbid curiosities would never dare to ask for. |
Taking Comparative Advantage Seriously By Pierre Lemieux
by Pierre Lemieux
Some geographical conditions can be changed by human entrepreneurship or government intervention. If hothouses have been built with a government subsidy and their cost is sunk, don’t they now represent a comparative advantage?
A recent Wall Street Journal story reports that the longer growing season of Mexican farmers is seen as a cause of dumping and that a renegotiated North American Free Trade Agreement may have to compensate for this comparative advantage of Mexico:
American farmers, however, complain that their Mexican rivals enjoy unfair advantages, including low-cost farm labor, state subsidies and a year-round growing season that lets them dump cheap berries on the U.S. market when the two countries’ growing seasons overlap in the late spring.
Perhaps the reporter’s or editor’s interpretation was a bit loose (the reporter did not respond to my inquiry regarding whom exactly he was citing). But note how, in a similar way, French farmers complain against the unfair weather advantage of their Spanish competitors:
French farmers and winegrowers dumped some two tons of peaches and nectarines in front of the Spanish consulate … in order to denounce Spanish competition, deemed “unfair.” … For [a fruit growers’ spokesman], “a European solution is needed.”
It is difficult to believe if you haven’t seen it with your own eyes, but economic savvy is even less common in France than in America. This is a bit distressing nearly two centuries after French economist Frédéric Bastiat wrote his petition of candle makers disadvantaged by the competition of the sun. “If an orange from Lisbon sells for half the price of an orange from Paris, it is because the natural heat of the sun,” Bastiat noted.
In The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith defended the importation of wine even if “[b]y means of glasses, hotbeds, and hot walls, very good grapes can be raised in Scotland, and very good wine too can be made of them.” As he explained, domestic production would cost “about thirty times the expence for which at least equally good can be brought from foreign countries.” Or, to borrow an example from William Taussig, very good pineapples could be grown in Maine with similar means.
Geography, weather, and other natural conditions create justifiable comparative advantage in trade. Except if one is an ascetic, it is not rational to produce by oneself what somebody else can produce more cheaply in another climate.
However – and here is a little challenge – the distinction between “natural” and “artificial” conditions is not as neat as one might think. Some geographical conditions can be changed by human entrepreneurship or government intervention. If hothouses have been built with a government subsidy and their cost is sunk, don’t they now represent a comparative advantage? Ski resorts can be built and artificial snow made, possibly with government subsidies. Ignorant people can be instructed, even in government schools. Moreover, some phenomena straddle the distinction between the natural and the artificial, that is, phenomena like language, culture, and morals (see chapter 1 of Friedrich Hayek‘s vol. 1 of Law, Legislation and Liberty).
The question is, which features of the world count in comparative advantage? Swiss producers’ strong work ethic and Canadians’ use of English help determine their comparative advantage. Economies of scale benefit producers who have come to serve a larger market. Market institutions and a political system favorable to enterprise also help determine comparative advantage. But don’t the Chinese government’s subsidies and other assistance to Chinese businesses also help determine the latter’s comparative advantage? Similarly, aren’t the subsidies that aircraft maker Bombardier got from the Canadian and Québec governments now part of the company’s comparative advantage?
Such interrogations are related to an important argument made by Paul Krugman in an article later published in the Journal of Economic Literature (“What Should Trade Negotiators Negotiate About?” 35-3: 113-120). Krugman argued that government regulations and taxes are part of the comparative advantage landscape; they do change relative prices, but trade proceeds – and should be left to proceed – from that point on.
This comprehensive concept of comparative advantage does not invalidate arguments against inefficient or immoral regulations, taxes, or subsidies. We may wish (often contra Krugman) that these measures do not exist in our own country, and try to persuade foreigners that they should not be subjected to them either. But they do not extinguish comparative advantage and negate all benefits from trade.
Except perhaps in extreme cases (for example, trading in stolen goods, such as goods made with slave labor), foreign governments’ interventions do not justify another government prohibiting its own residents from trading with the regulated or subsidized foreigners. One can wish that one’s trading partners were freer and thus more productive and wealthy, but it remains beneficial to trade with them, even if not as much as it would be in an ideal world where everybody were perfectly free.
As Krugman suggests, this wide view of comparative advantage reconciles free trade and political decentralization at the world level. It is beneficial and possible to have both. On the one hand, political decentralization is necessary to preserve liberty and experimentation, as opposed to a world government. Different peoples can have different sets of regulations, including less regulation. There is no need to impose standards or regulatory harmonization in “free trade” agreements. On the other hand, the benefits of free trade are preserved because comparative advantage continues to exist under intervention, although with some distortions. The distortions introduced by a world government monopoly would certainly be worse.
This line of argument supports the idea that unilateral free trade is beneficial: it is in the interest of (most of) a country’s residents to be free to import at will whatever obstacles other national governments impose on their own citizens or subjects. |
In Friedrich Hayek’s magnificent essay The Use of Knowledge in Society, Hayek writes:
It is about this question that all the dispute about “economic planning” centers. This is not a dispute about whether planning is to be done or not. It is a dispute as to whether planning is to be done centrally, by one authority for the whole economic system, or is to be divided among many individuals.
After writing my recent post on Richard Conniff’s article about Irving Fisher’s eugenic leanings, it struck me that a similar framing can be made with respect to eugenics.
The debate about eugenics, apart from being one-sided, is normally framed as to whether there should be centralised planning about who should be able to breed (or not). However, without eugenic decisions from the top, there is still planning about who breeds and who doesn’t. This is in the form of sexual selection, with males and females choosing their partners with the aim of having smarter, more attractive children. The result of this process is that some people do not get to reproduce, despite their wish to, due to the decisions of others.
Accordingly, this is not a dispute about whether planning is to be done to not, It is a dispute about whether planning is to be done centrally, by one authority for the whole population, or is to be divided among many individuals. |
Three years ago, Operation Cast Lead saw Israel send troops into the Gaza Strip in response to the thousands of rockets and mortars launched into Israeli civilian areas. Which other government in the world wouldn't defend its citizens in such circumstances? If some wish to portray this operation as a "massacre", they would have to ignore the facts to do so.
John Stuart Mill wrote in 1862 that "war is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things". Indeed today, even with laws, regulations and technology intended to lessen the horrors of battle, war is always ugly and tragic. But sometimes, it is still an essential response to something far uglier.
In 2006, following the Israeli disengagement and pullout from the Gaza Strip, there was an increase of 436 per cent in the number of Palestinian rockets launched towards Israel from that very territory. For some time, Israel resisted a large-scale military response to such acts deliberately aimed at civilians. As a result, the attacks got worse, and every country, including Israel, has the moral responsibility to defend its people from such actions.
Increased Palestinian terror attacks from Gaza were the cause of Operation Cast Lead. Yet Israel's is a conscript army. Indeed Israel goes to extraordinary lengths to protect its young soldiers (witness the efforts make to secure the release of the kidnap victim Gilad Shalit), and does not send them to war easily.
In the three years since the operation, there has been an unprecedented 72 per cent decline in the number of rockets launched from Hamas-controlled Gaza. No surprise, then, that Israel's Defence Forces Chief of Staff should call the operation "an excellent operation that achieved deterrence for Israel vis-a-vis Hamas". (However, that deterrence is still not enough to have prevented Palestinians from launching 1,571 rockets since the operation, including one attack with an anti-tank missile on a clearly identifiable Israeli school bus.)
Just as Israel's erection of a security fence to prevent homicide bombers from infiltrating Jerusalem saw a bigger than 90 per cent reduction in such attacks, Operation Cast Lead was undeniably effective in reducing terror attacks from the Gaza strip. The numbers speak for themselves.
Colonel Richard Kemp, former commander of British troops in Afghanistan, has repeatedly commented that, "during its operation in Gaza, the Israeli Defence Forces did more to safeguard the rights of civilians in a combat zone than any other army in the history of warfare." Furthermore, he points out that the steps taken in that conflict by the Israeli Defence Forces to avoid civilian deaths are shown by a study published by the United Nations to have resulted in, by far, the lowest ratio of civilian to combatant deaths in any asymmetric conflict in the history of warfare.
Kemp explains that by UN estimates, the average ratio of civilian to combatant deaths in such conflicts worldwide is 3:1 -- three civilians for every combatant killed. That is the estimated ratio in Afghanistan. But in Iraq, and in Kosovo, it was worse: the ratio is believed to have been 4:1. Anecdotal evidence suggests the ratios were very much higher in Chechnya and Serbia. In Gaza, it was less than one-to-one.
Since the 22-day Gaza operation, Israel has also been demonstrably fastidious in its efforts to protect civilian lives while targeting combatants. The Israel correspondent for Jane's Defence Weekly sites Israel's record this year, saying "the IDF killed 100 Gazans in 2011. Nine were civilians. That is a civilian-combatant ratio of nearly 1:10."
In fact, Israel's effort to combat the Hamas regime in the Gaza strip, while still safeguarding the rights of civilians, can be seen in her actions away from the battlefield as well. Despite the continued and sustained terror attacks from the area, around 60 per cent of Gaza's electricity comes from Israel, rather than from Gaza's other neighbour, Egypt, against whom no missiles are launched by the Palestinians.
Israel allows thousands of tonnes of goods to pass into Gaza weekly, and provides a large amount of the strip's water. If destroying infrastructure were truly Israel's aim, as some claim, this goal could be achieved without the risk to Israeli soldiers inherent in operations which see them sent into the Gaza strip.
It is time to stop blaming the Israeli government and defence forces for protecting Israeli civilians. Instead, we must demand that Palestinian leaders (and their apologists) work towards improving the welfare of their own citizens, rather than constantly attacking Israel's.
www.jonathansacerdoti.com. |
"Come on, Isra! We've been had! We need to go, unless you want to be found by the police!"
"Hang on, Basil, I've almost got it. I just need a few more seconds." Isra leaned out from his position in the rafters, reaching towards a large hanging Dust crystal in the room's centre. His fingers tapped along the side of the crystal, starting it to swing. His fingers continued to push the crystal as it swung closer, until he could finally grab it. Yanking it from its string, he dropped down to the floor. "Gotcha. Alright, where's our exit, seeing as you were so intent on leaving?"
"Em and Cam already bailed. We could try the back door, I'm not sure if they've locked that down yet."
"I doubt we've got time to discuss it, so let's hope they haven't. Lead the way." Isra wrapped the crystal in a rag as Basil darted out, moving towards the back of the shop, and, if luck was willing, safety.
Isra and Basil peered around the back door before stepping out, well aware of the Vale Police Department's standard operating procedure for breaking and entering. Isra looked down at the crystal he'd looted, still wrapped firmly in its rag. "Basil, I've got an idea. Get out of sight of the door." Basil raised an eyebrow, uncertain of his friend's idea and its content, but soon discarded such thoughts, nodding and retreating into the shadows of the hallway. Confident that Basil would be able to escape, Isra unwrapped the crystal. "Now, this should make quite the distraction if I get the throw right." Isra examined the crystal for a few moments, noting the size and cleavage points present, before settling on where and how he should aim for it to land and how far away he should be when it goes off. Walking back towards the storefront, Isra shook the crystal until it glowed with a faint red light. Fire. Isra grimaced at this revelation. It had to be fire. Couldn't be lightning or something that'd give me a pretty lightshow.
Reaching the door to the storefront, Isra made one last check of the size of the crystal. Bigger than my hand. Maybe half again as big. There's no way I can get far enough to not get hurt. Isra opened the door a little, watching the bustle of activity outside the store. Good. They're not inside. Should help a little. Opening the door completely, Isra threw the crystal, aiming just beneath the front windows, and took off into the back rooms. Hearing the tinkling of the crystal shattering on the floor, he shouted for Basil to run, and braced himself for the inevitable impact. The pressure wave hit Isra first, knocking him against the wall, followed seconds later by a tongue of flame stretching down the corridor, missing him by inches. As the fire receded, Isra sighed. That was too close. Basil better have made it out. "Whatever. It's not like I'm going anywhere inconspicuously. Get me while I'm hot, Vale." He sighed, inspected the damage to his clothes, then shut his eyes and surrendered himself to sleep.
Bright lights soon woke Isra from his rest. Trying to discern their source through bleary eyes returned only silhouettes dressed in blue. Rubbing his eyes, Isra decided to start the inevitable conversation off. "Vale Police?"
The officer next to Isra responded. "Yes, we were called here about a B&E. Now it's arson. I don't suppose you'd know anything about that?"
"Arson? No sir. Do I look like the kind of person who goes around burning buildings?" Isra gestured to himself, still ash-covered and slightly singed from the fire.
"Look, I'll level with you. Even if the arson wasn't you, we've still got you for the breaking-and-entering. So, if you know who or what set fire to this shop, you'd do well to say so now."
"Really, officer? While I'm sure that you might think the phrase 'No honour among thieves' is a universal constant, let me assure you it isn't. On that note, though, I will admit that no person was responsible for the fire. It was the giant Dust crystal that the owner was using for lighting in there."
"The same crystal that was missing when we arrived?"
"So you noticed. Well, there comes a time in every caper where you need to cut your losses and run. Sometimes, you forget you have an incredibly volatile crystal in your possession, and when said crystal gets uncomfortably warm, you tend to throw it away, not realising that it's going to detonate rather explosively and set a shop on fire. And that is how you wind up in a predicament like mine."
"Nice story, covers a lot of holes. It's not getting you out of that arson charge, though."
"Damn. Alright, take me to the station. Do I get a phone call? Or can I just tell you who I'm going to contact and your men will arrange something?"
"I'm open to the second."
"Thank you for your open mind. I intend to contact my parents, Michaeus and Helia Feher, and inform them that I have again been detained for crimes against the state of Vale. They at least deserve to know where I've been all night."
"Michaeus Feher as in Pastor Michaeus Feher?"
"The same. Yeah, I know, what's some altar boy doing out late at night with unsavoury sorts who break into shops? It's not difficult to figure out. I'll let you have a go."
The officer shook his head, pulling out his scroll, and began, as far as Isra could tell, searching Isra's surname in the database. As his image came up on the screen, the officer chuckled. "Thought I'd seen you before. Five prior arrests, all dismissed due to either a lack of evidence or, ahem, 'intervention'."
"That's the one. Say, shouldn't we be doing this in a secure room?"
"Why? You're expressing no interest in running, we've got the place completely locked down, and there's, quick count, four other officers here, all with body-cams. You're no more or less secure here, and this conversation is no more or less admissible in court here than in an interrogation room. But that's beside the point. Stand up, hands behind your back. Isra Feher, you have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will-"
Isra stood, obeying the officer's orders. "Yes, I know. Anything I say can and will be used against me in a court of law. I have the right to counsel. If I cannot arrange for or afford counsel, counsel shall be provided to me at public expense. I understand these rights as they have been read. Done. I'll wait for you to take me to the car." Isra grinned as he heard the officer grow more discontented with Isra's behaviour. Marched out through the front door of the Dust shop, Isra nodded politely at the officers who turned to look at him, until he was ushered into the squad car.
Isra looked up from the desk he'd been placed at, only to see his parents walking in, instead of the detective he'd expected. "Oh no. Mom, Dad, I can explain. Last night-" Isra was cut off by his father. "Last night you should have been inside! We put you under curfew for a reason!" Isra stood, bringing himself eye-to-eye with his father. "Yes. Last night I should have been inside. But I wasn't. Did it ever occur to you why? It wasn't because I'm some kind of reprobate, good only to populate Vale's growing underclass. It wasn't because 'I'm just a teenager going through a phase'. It was because I am bored of the church. Bored of the robes, bored of the ceremony, bored of having to get up early to be charitable to people who, while I'm sure they have good intentions, don't seem to be making any actions towards self-improvement."
Helia leapt in before Michaeus could retort. "And what would you do, Isra? Would you tell them that they aren't trying to improve themselves? Would you try and guide them? That's not the point of the Order."
"I know, Mom. The point of our Order is to provide people with the ability to improve themselves, not the drive to do so, but it's ridiculous. Our sermons, our charity… it's a nice sentiment, but it's not doing anything. And here is where we arrive at why you're talking to me, in a police interrogation room, for the sixth time in as many months, for the sixth charge of breaking and entering. I. Don't. Want. This. The Order, the good-naturedness, the turning a blind eye, I don't want to be a part of it. I know my initiation's coming up in six months' time. I know that once I'm in, I'm not getting out. So I want you to know I don't want in. Every time I've brought it up, you've both shut me down, saying 'I'll understand better when I'm older'. How old do I have to be to be able to shrug my shoulders at dozens of people showing up for free food? How old do I have to be to smile politely as we have barely a dozen people showing up to anything that doesn't involve food? When am I supposed to accept that?"
Michaeus glowed, incandescent with rage. Before he could unleash it, however, he was stopped again by Helia. "And where would you rather go, Isra?"
Isra sighed and sat down, tapping his fingers on the table. "I know you're both mad that I don't want a part of the church, so, I worked out a solution there. There are dozens of volunteers who are infinitely more qualified than I am to manage the day-to-day affairs. As for my own plans," Isra's hands curled into fists in anticipation of his parents' refusal. "I want to go to Beacon."
Isra's father, still glowing, regarded his son almost with disgust at this revelation. "You want us to get you out of trouble for the sixth time, so that you can play hero at Beacon? I fail to see what is so great and mighty about being a Hunter to you. You'll go out, you'll fight Grimm, and then you'll inevitably be killed by Grimm. That's no life."
"It's better than what I think the church can offer. There's a lot of people who were made homeless by the Grimm. Some of them even remember the time when the Cerulans would have taken up arms for such a claim. Is it so bad that I'm trying to recapture that time?"
"Tell me, Isra, have you ever read any records of that time? The Cerulans of then were never praised. We were reviled for our methods. The Hunters – the same group that operates Beacon – made sure that the Cerulans were a target of hatred. And you want to go to their school, learn their ways, all because somebody who you discarded as 'useless' not two minutes before said 'Old Cerulans would've done something'?"
"Yes. If words won't motivate somebody into doing something, then maybe doing something to restore what they've lost will. And I think the Hunters can use all the people they can get, especially if things like that Breach a couple of days back are a risk."
Isra's mother, deep in thought, shook her head faintly. "You're asking us to get an arson charge swept under the rug, Isra."
"Tell them what I told you. They let me off the hook, I'll go to Beacon, get my house in order, and they'll never have to worry about me again."
Isra's parents exchanged a glance, before leaving. Isra walked up to the door, placing his ear against the window inside it. While Isra couldn't make out any distinct words, he could recognise his mother's voice, negotiating with both his father and one of the officers. The discussion went on for a considerable period, with Isra becoming more convinced by the minute he wouldn't get his wish.
After what seemed like an eternity of waiting, the door finally opened. Framed in it was the officer he presumed he heard outside. "I don't like this, but you've got your deal. You will be released from confinement for a probationary period to be served at Beacon Academy. In keeping with regular probation procedure, if you should happen to be justifiably tied to any criminal activity during your time at Beacon, or before you are judged sufficiently reformed, then you will be detained and the full extent of the law will be used to prosecute you. Do you understand?"
"Yes, sir," Isra nodded, raising his wrists for the handcuffs to be removed. "And the shop?"
"Your parents will pay for damages incurred."
Isra rubbed his wrists, relishing the lack of metal there. "Thank you for this opportunity. At the risk of sounding clichéd, you won't regret this decision."
The officer opened the door, ushering Isra through it. "What have I got to regret? I'm not the one who's risking a prison sentence. Especially when the alternative's Beacon."
Isra frowned at the dismissive way the officer referred to Beacon, before adopting a more neutral, if slightly chastised, expression as he approached his parents. Isra noticed his father's expression hadn't changed since they last talked. "Alright, here he is. I had the desk sergeant put in a call to Beacon as well. They just need you to confirm your son's intent, and they'll tell you where to go from there."
Isra's mother nodded, shepherding him out to the car. "You know how risky being a Huntsman is, don't you?"
"Yes, mom. I'm well aware of the risks of becoming a Huntsman. There's a few dozen books, mostly diaries, on the subject in the attic. I'm under no romantic pretences about the job. Speaking of, I'd like a key to the attic. There's a few things up there I'd like to have a closer look at, now that I know I'm going to Beacon." Isra's father, who'd been silent since they'd left, snorted at his request.
"There's only old relics up there. I don't see why you'd want to have access."
"Dad, when was the last time you went into the attic? Those 'relics' have more use than you'd think. I'm fairly certain I saw some armour up there once, and I know I could scrounge up a weapon if I looked hard enough."
"Alright, if you think you can find anything useful in that mess, I don't see why I shouldn't let you up there. You might tidy the place up, at least."
"Thanks, Dad. Is it alright by you if I go up there, Mom?"
"I'm agreeing with your father here, Isra. I don't think you'll find anything useful, but far be it for me to stop you looking."
Pulling up outside the church, Isra collected the attic key from his mother, before vanishing up the ladder into the attic, eager to track down the suit of armour he'd seen. He edged through the labyrinth of boxes, filled with books that he'd read, cover-to-cover, detailing the early Hunters, when humanity was at the brink of extinction. Whilst he searched, he could hear his parents making the arrangements for his enrolment at Beacon downstairs. What intrigued him, though, was the fact that his parents talked to whomever was on the phone in the same way they'd talk to an old friend. It was almost like he was listening to a social call, not a request for him to attend Beacon. As he listened, he narrowed down the armour's location to a single corner, stacked high with boxes and paintings. As he began climbing, he heard a sentence that seemed so uncharacteristic of his parents echoing up from below. "It's been good talking again, Ozpin, but I think we should get to business, no? We're calling in that favour." Favours? Ozpin, head of Beacon Academy, owes my parents favours?
He paused in his climb to try and get a better idea of what was being said, only to soon be returned to the real world when the stack of boxes he was climbing began to sway. Checking around him, he pushed forwards, forcing the boxes to fall away from him. As the stack collapsed, he heard a distinctive 'clang', indicating he'd found the suit he was looking for. Moving boxes away from where the clang came from, he soon pulled up a cuirass, thankfully undamaged by the collapse, and covered in a thick layer of dust. Setting it aside, he continued digging, soon emerging with the rest of the suit, with the exception of thigh armour, which was lacking from the outset.
Arranging the armour on the floor of the attic, Isra searched around to find something to match it and, ideally, cover the rather obvious gap in the armour around his thighs. Still lying amid the scattered boxes which held the armour, Isra found a set of chain mail, which seemed to match the armour he'd pulled from the same pile. Checking to see if it covered the areas his plate armour didn't, he placed the now-completed suit inside one of the empty boxes that had been scattered, before beginning his slow descent down the ladder to the main floor. Walking through the main chapel, Isra saw his parents deep in discussion with a tall, white-haired man, almost immediately recognisable as Professor Ozpin. He would have stopped to listen, except that, given his recent behaviour and decisions, he felt that his parents might not look kindly upon him eavesdropping. So he continued onwards to the storage closet, where the grease and polish was kept. Still hearing murmurs from the conversation outside, Isra nudged the closet door open slightly with his foot, trying to surreptitiously learn as much about the conversation as he could.
"So, Michaeus, Helia told me that Isra had plans of attending Beacon. I was also contacted by Vale's police force regarding using Beacon as a type of probation in light of a particularly bad case of property damage. Assuming the two events are related, you are asking me to take in somebody with several arrests for varying crimes, ranging from petty theft to arson. Can you offer evidence to suggest that Isra's behaviour will change in any noticeable way once he arrives at Beacon?"
"Look, Oz, we both know I can't provide any evidence that he'll change once he's at Beacon. All I can say is that he was, before six months ago, perfectly good-natured and obedient. Six months ago, he turned 17, and was informed of his impending church initiation."
A note of interest entered Ozpin's voice. "A 'church initiation'? And what does that entail?"
"Isra would agree to give himself entirely to the service of the church, including any and all material possessions. He is then subjected to several tests of faith. Should he fail any of those tests, he will be stripped of whatever non-clerical status he may have and exiled from the church."
"And it didn't occur to you that this very news might be what drove Isra to crime? A sort of rebellion against a system he found wanting?"
"Of course not. We wouldn't have ensured his release had we known this was his plan. He would have been exiled after the first time and that would be the end of the matter."
Isra, having paused from his polishing of the armour to listen more intently, shut the door quietly, returning to his polishing with more intensity. He had no idea that was what awaited him if he remained with the church. All he did know was that if his life was entwined with it past the ceremony, it would be all the more difficult to leave. Knowing that his choices were now to either go to Beacon or risk being stuck in poverty without a reasonable chance to receive any form of charity, he steeled himself for whatever Beacon had to offer.
When Isra left the closet, the suit of armour was dazzlingly bright, and moved without even a hint of noise or effort. Having already been aware of the rather distinctive change in the armour's shape from lacking any cuisses, he appropriated the lower half of one of the order's distinctive cerulean robes also in the closet, cutting it cleanly in the centre to allow for more freedom of movement, before adding it to his suit. Placing the finished outfit back in the box, Isra scaled the ladder leading to the attic again, this time in search of a weapon. While he knew that the scattered boxes he'd left strewn about the attic would complicate his search, he also figured that it would make searching through the stacks of boxes that much easier if half of them were already spilling their non-liquid contents out onto the attic floor.
Returning to the pile that he'd discovered his armour in, Isra hoped to find a weapon that might hail from the same origin as the armour he possessed. It didn't take him long to find one in the form of a long sceptre, still shining despite the years it had to have lain unused. Examining it revealed a small button, rising above the rest of the rod just enough that it couldn't be accidentally pressed. He looked it over for any idea of what the button would do once pressed, but found no answer forthcoming. He held the sceptre at arm's length and pressed the button, instinctively raising a hand between it and his face, should the button he pressed result in some explosive reaction.
His concerns proved unfounded, as a grinding noise emanated from within the sceptre, only for a small tube to eject itself out of the base. He put the sceptre down, ignoring it in favour of the small tube that it had produced. A quick tap revealed it to be hollow, but a careful inspection yielded no indication of what the tube may have contained. He looked in the pile for any tubes that matched the one the sceptre had ejected and found several, each containing a different variant of Dust. Well, this is new. I'd seen Dust-based weapons, but not ones that actually needed Dust to run. He picked up the sceptre and one of the tubes, filled with a white-blue powder. Ice? Doesn't matter, it's probably just a power source anyway. He inserted the tube into the small receptacle that the empty tube had fallen out of and pressed the button again.
This time, the mechanisms inside worked quietly, save for a short hiss as the base of the sceptre closed around the tube Isra had inserted. The sceptre began to vibrate in his hand as it worked, with a trio of metal pieces rising from the rounded top, with two of them folding out into a crossguard while the third continued to extend outwards, ending when it was about four times the length of the rod it protruded from. Isra inspected the new additions carefully, trying to determine exactly how this weapon managed to create something far larger than itself, only for the extension to suddenly widen, transforming the longer section into a sword's blade, albeit one with the strange addition of an edge with the same white-blue colour of the Dust he'd loaded in. So, it's a longsword with a Dust-infused blade. Not exactly a ground-breaking design. He practiced a few slashes and thrusts that his father had taught him, smiling as he tested the balance of the blade. Balanced towards the blade. Bad for blocking, great for heavy swings. This wasn't designed for fighting people. He looked around for a box which may have held the weapon before he scattered them in his search for armour, eyes settling on one box with what appeared to be a scabbard still half-inside.
Taking the scabbard out of its box and inspecting it proved confusing, as the width of the throat was only large enough to accommodate the rod without the blade, not with it. Placing the tip of the sword at the entry soon demonstrated the solution, as the blade folded back into the origin rod, allowing the weapon to fit snugly within the scabbard. As Isra's hand left the grip, the scabbard extended up, surrounding the handle, save for the button that controlled the transformations, with a trigger and stock. A rifle. Made from the scabbard. Alright, let's give this a look. He picked up the new weapon, snorting with amusement as a set of sights popped out of the weapon's body. He nudged the door to the attic shut with his foot as he set his sights on a grey brick on the opposite wall. He pulled the trigger and watched as a small blossom of ice appeared on the brick he targeted. Shoots the same Dust as what's loaded, I guess. Hope I can get the sword back. Further inspection of the 'scabbard' revealed a button just above the trigger, near where his thumb rested. A quick tap of the button caused the mechanisms holding the sword in place to release, allowing him to retrieve the weapon again. As the barrel cleared the scabbard, the blade folded back out in near-perfect synchronisation. So, we've got a stupidly high-tech weapon hiding out in a church attic that's a sword or a rifle, depending on whether it's in the scabbard. Perfect weapon for a Huntsman, if the books are anything to go by.
He rifled through the pile one final time, discovering several more tubes of Dust in varying states of fullness. He walked over to the private Dust supply that the church kept in the attic and topped off the ones that weren't filled before placing them in an empty box to carry back down. As he assessed his haul, he decided to search the pile for one final item – a belt to attach the rifle-scabbard to, so he wouldn't be carrying it everywhere. Let's see… I'm six-three, and legs are half your height, or so I've heard. That means my torso's three-one-point-five. To cross it, I'd need a belt or bandolier that's about six and a half feet long. Sounds reasonable.
His search yielded nothing approaching his expectations, but it did yield two belts with just enough length to handle what he intended once he tied them together. Slinging two protrusions on the scabbard through the free holes in the belts proved an adequate sling for the weapon, as it could support its weight without either belt breaking. Returning his attention to the box of tubes, he picked up a third belt, arrayed with a series of small containers, and placed that alongside them. He made one last scan of the pile to see if anything else caught his fancy before picking up the box, sliding the sword into the scabbard and readying himself for the descent back into the church.
Descending the ladder, carefully shifting the box's weight around to avoid dropping himself or it off the ladder, he found his mother waiting for him at the bottom, looking upwards with an air of bemusement at the sight of Isra trying to carry a box down with a rifle hanging off his back by a very improvised sling. "You've been busy. Haven't seen much of you all day."
"Figured that was for the best, seeing as Dad was how he was when we left the station."
"I'm not going to say if that was a sensible choice or not, but I think you know what I'm getting at. Find everything you needed?"
Isra nodded, indicating the box he was carrying.
"Good. The headmaster at Beacon expects you to be at the school campus by 10 tomorrow morning. Lucky you that we know important people, huh?"
"Yeah. And… thanks, for not flying off the handle like Dad did."
Helia smiled. "The church life isn't for everyone. Some people, like your father, don't quite realise that sometimes. As far as I'm concerned, as long as you don't turn crime into an occupation, it doesn't matter what you do with your life. It's yours to live. Dinner's in the kitchen, if you want any."
"Thanks. I'll probably get some rest, though. Busy day and everything."
"Don't forget to eat. There won't be home cooking at Beacon, unless they let students make their own food."
"I won't, Mom. Good night."
Victoria shifted in her seat as they drove through the checkpoint, drawing a short question from Magnus. "Need to get your armour refitted, Consul?"
"No, sir. Just… nervous."
"Nervous about what?"
Their conversation was interrupted as one of the guards approached their vehicle, asking for identification. Victoria passed her ID to Magnus, who passed it, along with his own, to the guard.
"Nervous about where we're going. Forgive my reservations, sir, but there's not a lot outside the walls for the Cerulan Order. Just Grimm, some villages and a lot of ruins."
Magnus laughed at the short list the consul gave him, thanking the guard when the IDs were returned to him. "You've got a lot to learn, Victoria. There are some things that only me and a handful of people are party to right now, and you're about to be inducted into that circle." As the gate opened, he plugged in a set of coordinates into a GPS unit and passed it to her. "On that note, it wouldn't feel right to just go showing a consul around without a little work. Tell me, where do those coordinates point? Don't press the 'find' button until I say so."
Victoria looked down at the unit in her hands, and the string of numbers on its display. "Uh… do you want me to give you an exact answer, or do you want working?"
"Whichever one makes you more comfortable."
Victoria raised an eyebrow at the Princep's peculiar turn of phrase, taking a few brief moments to decipher any hidden meaning in the statement before discarding it and returning her attention to the coordinates in front of her. "Alright… Reading these directly, the leftmost is the kingdom identifier. That's the Valish code, so it's in Vale somewhere."
"Yes, and…"
"The next number is the relative location – 100 kilometres, and the letters say north-east."
"And…"
"That gives us a sector to refer to next set of numbers to. I don't have a map handy, but the only landmark I can think of that falls in that part of the wilderness would have to be…" Victoria trailed off as the location dawned on her.
"That location would have to be…"
"Sir, this is going to sound crazy, but it's Fort Penumber, isn't it?"
Magnus smiled. "Press the 'find' button and see if you're right."
Victoria obeyed the command, watching as the small computer ran through the same process she had minutes earlier, zooming in on a nigh-featureless section of land, marred only by the large black square that Victoria recognised as the ruins of Fort Penumber – former headquarters of the Cerulan Order of Vale.
"Sir, it's a ruin. There's nothing there for us to see. Unless this is some character-building exercise-"
Magnus waved her to silence. "There's only nothing there for you to see because you're looking at it from above. From the ground, there is so much more the fort has to offer. Study up, Consul, because we're going to be there for a while."
A/N:
Hello readers!
Now the story begins in earnest. We meet one of the new prospects for Beacon, and how he came to be there. Leave reviews, follow and/or favourite if you enjoyed it and want to see more faster.
Another chapter will go up tomorrow, in keeping with what I said in the prologue's note. |
A data warehouse is a way of structuring a database so that it is easy to answer business questions about your data. In a traditional database model, it would be difficult to construct a query that determines how much profit came from credit card sales. In a dimensional data warehouse, it’s a relatively simple JOIN. Unlike a typical database where data objects are modeled based on their relationships, a dimensional data warehouse schema has two table types: Dimension and Fact. Dimension tables are the nouns of the data warehouse world - think users and products . They are largely denormalized. Fact tables are verbs - they represent events happening, and are mostly comprised of foreign keys to the dimension. Think of them as a subject (dimension) and a predicate (fact). If you’re overwhelmed, don’t worry. We’ll get to some practical examples in just a second.
I highly recommend reading Samson Hu’s excellent article Building Analytics At 500px, where he describes the analytics pipeline he built at 500px, including comparisons of technologies outside the scope here. It makes BI/Analytics much approachable to the everyday programmer, going into detail about the why of things (whereas this article intends to answer how).
The two major tools we’ll be using are Luigi and re:dash.
Luigi manages all three phases of our ETL transforms. ETL means “Extract-Transform-Load”, and is the process by which our regular data finds its way into our data warehouse. The Extract phase pulls down data from many different sources (regular databases, redis, log files, even external APIs). Luigi shines brightest at this phase, easily aggregating data from multiple sources but I only used it to consume postgres data. The transform phase takes this data and denormalizes it into the fact and dimension tables (thought at this point they’re still in-memory data structures). The Load phase is the simplest, taking those data structures and inserting them into our database (typically a RDBMS like postgres).
re:dash is our dashboard, giving us shareable insights into the data. re:dash has three main advantages:
We use plain ol’ SQL queries
Queries are easily shareable among teams
Auto-population of graphs from our SQL data
Before we can use either of these, we’ll need some data.
Generating the data
Our dummy business is Gustav Park (“Gustav” being Norse for “Staff of the Gods”), a small theme park. Our generation script needs to create a sizeable amount of data, including some weighting so we’ll be able to “discover” trends in our re:dash boards. The schema needs to be fairly naive (not that hard!) so Luigi has something to do.
My data generation script ended up being an impressive mishmash of various ways to call Math.random() in knotted promises. Several changes during the Luigi phase of things meant my data generation script became a series of hacks.
Were I to do this again, I’d generate the data in a more declarative style, instead of the procedural way it is now. I originally wrote the code to simulate interactions throughout the day (step-by-step) but I now realize how silly that is (No need to generate entirely fake data in order).
I planted three trends in the data to find later:
Patrons who use the app to buy things are more likely to spend money at the park
Most entry tickets are sold before 9, and the transaction is most likely processed through a credit card.
Valentina’s Wacky Funhaus is unusually good at converting card users to install the app
(Unintentionally, it’s possible for a customer to buy something before they’ve entered the park. Whoops!)
It’s a me, Luigi!
Now we’ve got some data and want to shuffle it around. Luigi lets us define a series of atomic tasks, defined as a directed, acyclic graph. Each of these performs a single action (say, pulling all of the customer data from postgres).
Each task can depend on other tasks:
In this case, I have two categories of tasks: Gets and Inserts. Each Get pulls a category of data from postgres, applying a few transforms along the way and outputting the tab-separated data into a file in the data directory. Once the Get is complete, the Insert task uses Luigi’s built in postgres.CopyToTable task to insert the consumed data into our database.
Finally, there’s the task AllData , which requires every Insert task. This is done so I only have to trigger a single task to cause everything to cascade. If something fails along the way, Luigi will only re-run failed tasks, which is both a blessing and a curse. The trouble starts when there’s a task that technically succeeded but outputted incorrect data. I wrote a quick cleanup script ( reset.py ) for when things go haywire.
Our Schema
We can’t go further without describing the data warehouse schema. There are three dimensions (customers, stores, products) and two facts (purchases, entrances). One glaring omission is that it is not possible to track what payment type was used to purchase an entry ticket.
Let’s look at the difference between the main customers table and the dimension. (aside from the d_ prefix)
The main table:
CREATE TABLE customers ( id SERIAL PRIMARY KEY , paymentId int REFERENCES paymentTypes , customerName VARCHAR ( 100 ), hasNewsletter bool );
The dimension:
CREATE TABLE D_customers ( id SERIAL PRIMARY KEY , has_app bool , has_newsletter bool , is_child bool );
Aside from my egregious abuse of camel_case and underScore, only one property survives unscathed - has_newsletter . paymentId and customerName just aren’t useful for the customers dimension. paymentId gets attached to the purchases fact and we can glean no useful data from knowing our 1,895th entrant is named Dave.
On the other hand, we now have has_app and is_child - both procured during the transform process. These are very useful for analytics, we will see that app users end up spending more (and making us more of a profit). Children are more likely to go after cotton candy than a soft pretzel.
On the other hand, let’s look at f_purchases :
CREATE TABLE f_purchases ( id SERIAL PRIMARY KEY , customerId int REFERENCES D_customers , productId int REFERENCES D_products , storeId int REFERENCES D_stores , paymentType VARCHAR ( 100 ), timeOfPurchase time , profit int );
It’s mostly foreign keys to dimension tables. There are three denormalized data which are explicitly related to the fact and not any dimension.
re:dash
Finally, it’s time to see all this wonderful data we’ve created! The install process for re:dash is pretty straightforward but creating your first query can be a bit tricky (protip: Sometimes the data gets out of sync and nothing shows up - just refresh the page). Create a query from the menu: Queries -> New Queries . A query will remain in draft form until you edit the title by clicking on it.
Let’s try and prove one of our original assertions - customers who use the app spend more than customers who just pay by plastic. We won’t even need a join -this is a simple query:
SELECT paymenttype AS payment_type , AVG ( profit / 100 ) AS profit FROM f_purchases AS pur GROUP BY paymenttype ORDER BY profit DESC
This gives us:
payment_type profit iOS app 3.61 Android app 3.59 Credit Card 3.51 Debit Card 3.43
Not a huge difference but it’s certainly there. Our efforts are bearing fruit! Let’s try a more complicated question: Are there any age differences in product preference? This would be incredibly complicated in any database but only requires two joins for us:
SELECT COUNT ( * ) AS nums , c . is_child AS is_child , pro . productname AS product_name FROM f_purchases AS pur LEFT JOIN d_customers AS c ON c . id = pur . customerid LEFT JOIN d_products AS pro ON pro . id = pur . productid GROUP BY is_child , product_name
re:dash also provies some excellent graph support. Some fiddling around with the graph options gives us:
Excellent! We can see that children prefer sugary things like cotton candy and soda and adults go for the carb-loaded soft pretzels. There’s many more queries that can be run against the data - you can find them here.
Plugging in some of those examples, our dashboard starts to look pretty good (astute readers will notice the bug in my random number generator):
At this point, go nuts! Play around in re:dash and try to find some more interesting data points. For an added challenge, try and add in a purchase type for entrances. |
South Korea’s women’s ice hockey team needed almost two decades to record their first ever victory.
The scoreline for Saturday’s breakthrough result would suggest it was worth the wait – and right on time with the Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang less than year away.
The South Koreans, currently ranked 23rd in the world out of 38 countries, romped to a 20-0 win over Thailand on Saturday in the opening game of the round-robin stage at the Asian Winter Games in Sapporo.
Winter Olympics 2018: veterans could grab record medal haul for USA Read more
The 20 goals came on a whopping 108 shots, compared to a scant one for Thailand.
While they followed their historic triumph with Monday’s 3-0 loss to Japan and Tuesday’s 1-0 setback against Kazakhstan, South Korea can earn a bronze medal with a victory over 16th-ranked China on Thursday at Tsukisamu Gymnasium.
A podium spot would represent a giant leap forward for a team that went winless in each of the four Asian Games it had previously entered, scoring only four goals in 15 games. The nadir was a 29-0 defeat to Japan in Changchun a decade ago.
“At the time, Japan had 136 shots on target, and we couldn’t get past their offense line,” Shin So-jeong, the team’s longtime goaltender, told the Korea Joongang Daily. “My entire body was bruised from blocking pucks coming at an average speed of 100kph [60mph], but what hurts most is when others talk about our team in negative ways.”
Japan goaltender Nana Fujimoto had nothing but praise for the South Korean side after Monday’s hard-fought contest, which offered a preview of next year’s assured group-stage clash at the Winter Games in Pyeongchang.
“They are so much better than they used to be,” Fujimoto told the Mainichi. “They came out with an underdog mentality. They have a solid system and they executed it well. They have some girls who can really skate. We’ve got a year to go and we are going to have to get stronger, because they certainly will.”
South Korea have charted improvement since hiring American Sarah Murray, a former defenseman who won a pair of NCAA championships as a player with the Minnesota-Duluth Bulldogs, to serve as national team coach in 2014.
Consider that the South Koreans had been outscored 102-1 by Japan in six previous meetings, with their rivals scoring 20 or more goals in three of them. On Monday, they held Japan scoreless through two periods before the favorites broke through in the final stanza.
“We’re showing people that we’re not being given this great present to go to the Olympics. We’re showing more and more that we’ve earned it and that we deserve to be there,” Murray told Yonhap News Agency last week. “I think the players are starting to realize that we’re not going to the Olympics just to enjoy the experience. ... We want to win and surprise people and show what Korean hockey can do.”
Murray, whose father Andy helmed Canada to three world championships and coached the NHL’s Los Angeles Kings and St Louis Blues, leads a team drawn mostly from untraditional backgrounds.
Han Soo-jin graduated from Yonsei University with a degree in piano perfromance, Ko Hae-in has a background in short-track speed skating, while Park Eun-jung is a Korean-Canadian who once played at Princeton University before taking leave from her medical studies at Columbia to compete in the Winter Olympics.
South Korea will have their hands against 16th-ranked China full in their bid for a historic first medal. They’ve been outscored 90-2 in seven all-time meetings between the countries, all losses. |
Anyone who would like to see more female coaches in professional tennis might want to join the Andy Murray fan club.
Volunteer to wear a T-shirt with an “A” on it, and join three others to spell out “A-N-D-Y” while standing in the nosebleed seats at Arthur Ashe Stadium, as some of his fans did at the United States Open last week. Sing his praises between sets, as others did by modifying the pop song “I Want Candy.”
Supporting Murray doesn’t just mean you are pulling for a great player, though he certainly looked like one on Monday when he advanced to the quarterfinals. Supporting Murray also means that you are supporting his decision to choose Amélie Mauresmo as his coach. When he hired her this summer, he broke the stereotype that top men can’t be coached by women, and he said his choice wasn’t about gender, but about finding a good fit.
Murray, who is ranked No. 9 in the world, is a friend to the women’s game. He learned the sport from his mother and has long promoted gender equality in interviews and on Twitter. But supporting female players and succeeding with one as a coach are two different issues. |
Editor’s note: Navin Chaddha is managing director of Mayfield, an early-stage venture capital firm. He holds 35 patents, is a serial entrepreneur, has been involved with two dozen IPOs and acquisitions, and is a lifelong cricket fan.
The software-defined data center should be a call to all entrepreneurs focused on enterprise infrastructure that the past does not predict the future, but it can be undone by it.
And the past was great. It was great for entrepreneurs and VCs. Categories for hardware-based servers, storage, networking and security were created in the past 30 years that still generate $200 billion-plus in annual sales. The margins were fat, product lock-in was substantial and barriers to entry were high. The game plan worked for everyone and everyone had the same game plan: Focus on hardware.
But that game plan no longer works. Established infrastructure categories are getting disrupted with newer technologies that disaggregate software from hardware, all of which has now been reduced to commodity boxes stripped down to their essential components and nothing more. The innovation now starts (and ends) with software.
Today’s enterprise infrastructure startup leaders need to be focused on pairing innovative software with commodity off-the-shelf (COTS) hardware. They are, in essence, software “infrapreneurs.”
The software infrapreneurs we’re seeing are coming out of either Internet-generation companies like Google, Facebook, Amazon and Yahoo, or had significant terms at hardware companies such as Cisco, EMC, Hewlett-Packard and Sun Microsystems/Oracle.
To individuals in both groups, the advantages of software-led companies are obvious. They recognize that a hardware-focused approach has limitations and that the real opportunity in infrastructure today is via software (see also Marc Andreessen’s article in The Wall Street Journal from 2011 on “Why Software is Eating the World” for software’s impact on a number of different industries).
These CEOs are passionate about design, conscious of the power of community, are willing to sacrifice tradition, and bring different business models, sales strategies and license models vs. past leaders. The changes they will create are predictable — more flexible technology, easier to use, based on open technologies, and cheaper to use — but the winners and losers are still being decided.
The server market is a good example of what will happen to other hardware infrastructure segments. VMware figured out how to separate software from the server it runs on, increasing the operational and economic efficiency of data centers everywhere. Virtualization technology spread, sucking up the innovation previously contained in the servers, reducing the leverage that hardware vendors had on their customers.
As software did more, hardware did less. Server economics are now defined by high volumes and low margins. The changes here have played a part in deep structural overhauls at the world’s three largest server manufactures: Dell went private in 2013; IBM exited the market last year by selling its server business to Lenovo; and Hewlett-Packard is in the process of splitting itself into two. Through it all, VMware grew stronger.
So, while the server segment of the data-center ecosystem is solved, other areas remain unsolved. Altogether, enterprise infrastructure represents a more than $200 billion opportunity. This isn’t a comprehensive list, but this is what we see as the biggest opportunities for infrapreneurs looking to impact the future:
Compute: We mentioned VMware’s undoing of the server market. Now it’s faced with its own disruptive threat in the form of container technology from the likes of Docker and CoreOS. The infrapreneurs we’re seeing here are changing how apps are developed, deployed and managed. This is an area that is relatively new but has taken hold at the most fundamental levels of the data center. We’re now seeing advancement here from infrapreneurs on various fronts.
Networking: Networking is undergoing tremendous upheaval. This hardware appliance-dominated market is being ripped apart by software-defined vendors like Cumulus Networks’ Linux OS for switching and Versa Networks’* network function virtualization (NFV) for L4-L7 services. New companies in this segment are riding the COTS hardware wave and providing capex and opex savings, networking automation, consolidation of different network functions, agility and scalability.
Storage: Software is invading proprietary storage systems from multiple angles, upending the business of legacy hardware storage vendors. InkTank (acquired by RedHat) and Swiftstack* are examples of companies providing software-defined storage on COTS hardware. These two, among others, are helping to reduce capex and opex significantly and enable scale-out architectures. Additionally, disruptors in this segment enable the purchase of heterogeneous storage hardware without having to worry about 1) interoperability issues, 2) under- or over-utilization of specific storage resources and 3) manual oversight of storage resources.
Security: In the security space, there are two primary disruptions happening: On-premise security products are being remade into cloud products and a new generation of companies are providing security functions in software on COTS hardware. New age companies that provide software on COTS hardware are moving beyond protecting traffic at the perimeter of a data center to protect data as it moves laterally within a software-defined data center and can create the next Palo Alto Networks. Demand for this sort of technology is a direct result of new capabilities required by an increasingly software-centric world.
Management: We also see a need for next-gen systems management companies that can manage this new world. What will it take to build tomorrow’s IBM Tivoli? The Holy Grail here is a single dashboard that can represent the health and status of all of an enterprise’s systems. We haven’t seen it yet, but we’ve been around long enough to know that when a great problem exists, a great solution is in the works.
For each of the above, the common linkage is software. The opportunity throughout the software-defined datacenter space is to implement software-centric subscription sales models to disrupt the business model of legacy vendors selling via upfront purchases of hardware appliances.
Infrapreneurs will find plenty of opportunity in the enterprise infrastructure space for years to come if they stay focused on using software as the means to innovate. The future is waiting.
*Mayfield investments |
What's the next move for the Detroit Red Wings?
Craig Custance: It's time to sell. There's going to be a temptation to give this current group every minute of opportunity to get back in the playoff race and keep the playoff streak alive, but the better move would be to join the sellers while it's still such a strong sellers market. The Red Wings have three goalies. They could move one of them. They have winger Thomas Vanek, who absolutely should be traded, even if the Red Wings want to bring him back again in the summer. Brendan Smith is a strong skating defenseman who has the skill to play in a top four -- with his contract expiring, he should be moved. Defenseman Mike Green could be valuable to a contender, too, if teams don't mind the term left on his contract. Steve Ott brings sandpaper and a strong veteran presence in the dressing room. The Red Wings shouldn't have trouble moving players once they're ready to go down that path.
The Red Wings have been down and out a lot this season. AP Photo/Paul Sancya
Pierre LeBrun: A popular response to this question by many is to go with a total rebuild of the roster. To which I say: What exactly does that mean and how do you go about it? For starters, June's draft pool is not as strong as recent years, so there's very little reason to tank this season. Secondly, the Wings could still make the playoffs. Sure, I agree this roster obviously isn't good enough. But is there a Connor McDavid or Auston Matthews franchise player available to build around in the next three years? Likely not. So, I think all you can do if you're GM Ken Holland is replace some parts with younger ones bit by bit, but with a new rink next season also try to stay competitive.
Scott Burnside: This takes me back about 10 years when Brendan Shanahan had moved on to the New York Rangers and Steve Yzerman had retired and was learning the other side of the hockey business and the team was handed to Pavel Datsyuk, Henrik Zetterberg and Niklas Kronwall. It's time again to find out whether there is another generation to step into the breach in Detroit. Datsyuk is gone and it's time for Zetterberg and Kronwall to go, too. The Green experiment, one that never made a ton of sense, should end as soon as possible, too. Easier said than done and not suggesting it's something that happens overnight. But history has shown that the Red Wings can make wide-ranging changes in personnel and never miss a beat, and so we'll see if GM Ken Holland has any magic left in his bag of tricks.
Joe McDonald: A record-extending 26th consecutive trip to the Stanley Cup playoffs seems unlikely for the Red Wings. They've missed veteran forward Datsyuk, who returned home to Russia to play in the KHL. The offseason acquisitions of Frans Nielsen, Vanek and Ott have paid dividends in each of their respective roles, but the lack of superstars in their prime and with a defensive unit that's still a work in progress, the Red Wings have struggled. Now what? Stay the course. Sure, they could sell at the deadline, but the young core still needs seasoning. Those players could gain valuable experience once again by learning how to battle down the stretch instead of throwing in the towel and making unwanted moves.
Corey Pronman: Sell and rebuild. The issue to me is more on the likelihood of success. The Red Wings have a decent, albeit not outstanding farm system. Evgeny Svechnikov, Vili Saarijarvi, Joe Hicketts, Dennis Cholowski, Tyler Bertuzzi are all fine to very good prospects, but none of them are game-changers. They have a couple of good, albeit not outstanding young players, Dylan Larkin notwithstanding with the big team. There is a reasonable path forward, given their young depth that doesn't take five years to become a good team again, but they need another foundational piece or two. Larkin is as evidence you don't always need a top 3 pick. However, the odds are against a full revival of the organization by 2019, given how hard finding those foundational pieces is. This could require the kinds of patience Red Wings fans haven't had to exhibit since before the Yzerman years.
Rob Vollman: Ever since Nicklas Lidstrom's retirement in 2012, Detroit's blue line has been due for an overhaul. If the Red Wings simply wait for the $20 million in overpriced contracts for their current top four to expire, and for their solid organizational strength to start providing effective replacements, then it could be several seasons before they are truly competitive again. That's why the organization's top priority should be finding ways to accelerate the departure of their older defensemen, while seeking to acquire high-value replacements -- even at the cost of some of their great young players up front. |
The majority of workers across the U.S. still commute by personal car, but residents of certain states take greener means of transportation, including public transit, walking, biking or carpooling.
While technically a federal district and not a state, Washington, D.C. has the greenest commuters in the country, according to the U.S. Census Bureau's 2013 American Community Survey. The survey shows that 57% of D.C. commuters get to work in more sustainable ways, primarily by public transportation and on foot. New York takes the second spot with 35%, followed by Massachusetts with 15%.
See also: The 20 Most Socially Progressive Countries in the World
Tennessee, Mississippi and Alabama have the lowest number of green commuters, with more than 9 in 10 commuters using a car to get to work, and less than 1% of workers using public transportation.
It's important to note, however, that simply using public transportation doesn't necessarily mean "green," considering buses and trains still produce carbon dioxide emissions. Vehicles that use compressed natural gas, electricity or other low-carbon fuels can help reduce emissions.
Released earlier this year, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's "Fifth Assessment Report" noted that on the current trajectory, greenhouse gas emissions from transportation (including cars, trains, planes and ships) are set to be one of the greatest drivers of manmade climate change, and could even remain unaffected by future mitigation measures.
The following chart, created by statistics portal Statista, shows the top 10 places in the U.S. where commuters are getting to work through alternative means. |
Curious about dab differences on 7/10? We've got a guide breaking down the variations.
This article originally published in 2015, but in honor of 7/10 — the de facto dab holiday — we wanted to resurface this gem for your smoking pleasure. Enjoy!
Over the past five years the cannabis world has been turned upside down with dabs, how to consume them and the surrounding culture. Concentrates (otherwise known as hash oil, dabs, wax, shatter, etc.) carry a heavier dosage while leaving the unneeded plant matter behind. Some methods require solvents like butane, while solventless techniques use things like water or gravity to isolate resin heads. The clear representation of the terpene profiles in both taste and smell is just one of the many reasons that some people prefer extracts over raw cannabis.
Solvent-based concentrates are a mix of oils, waxes, cannabinoids, and terpenoids that are extracted using solvents like butane, CO2, and ethanol. Butane Hash Oil (BHO) started to gain popularity in the early 2000s, and now finds itself as a staple of both medical and recreational markets. The variation with solvents is noticeable by its color, taste, and consistency of the end product. BHO can result in stable shatters to sticky sap, while CO2 usually makes for an oily product.
Butane Hash Oil can be made with either open blasting or a closed loop system. Blasting is done by stuffing raw cannabis into a glass tube and pouring filtered butane through the packed glass. The liquified butane dissolves the trichome heads and cannabinoids because the crystals are coated with a nonpolar wax. Butane is also nonpolar and works as a solvent to gather the resin into a plate below the tube. The solvent remaining in the liquid is then purged out and what’s left is what we know as Butane Hash Oil.
The blasting method has been deemed dangerous after causing explosions that resulted in the death of several amateur manufacturers, but there’s a safer process for those who still want to make concentrates. Closed loop extraction machines use filtration systems to keep the solvents from getting loose. In states like Colorado, concentrate makers are legally required to use a sanctioned machine in order to produce products.
After extracting dabs, there are still unwanted fats, lipids, plant waxes, and plant material that need to be removed from the concentrates. Winterizing and dewaxing are two ways to clean up what has been ran through the tube. Winterizing uses ethanol to separate the solution from your dabs over a two-day period. Dewaxing uses cryogenics (or low temperatures) to do the same thing, but doesn’t use a chemical to do so. Instead, a vacuum oven is ran at low temperatures to get rid of the butane smell and to alter the appearance.
If using chemicals to administer your serving of phytocannabinoids is a bit much, there are always the traditional and updated methods of making solventless hash. The pure unrefined flavor and smell makes for a smooth smoke unlike anything raw cannabis has to offer. Despite there not being any chemicals, the chance for mold is very possible if the hash isn’t dried correctly. Still, the methods that have survived decades and centuries live on in those who prefer natural concentrates. Early hash was collected resin glands by people rubbing cannabis flowers in their hands to make a piece of “Charras.” This process originated in parts of East Asian and made its way through India, The Himalayas, Turkey, and Morocco as far back as the year 100 A.D.
Photo of live resin (extracted from marijuana)
Since the beginning of hashmaking, the techniques have seen vast improvements. Water hash is based on the principle that the resin glands of cannabis are denser than the water used to extract it. By using a variety of meshes and cold water, the oil glands are separated and reside on the material while the leaves and plant material float. The water is then drained and the hash is dried before being pressed.
Rosin is an easily accessible method that gained popularity just a few years ago. By taking a small piece of cannabis flower and sticking it in parchment paper, the internal oils can be squeezed out using a hair straightener that’s ran at its lowest temperature. Now that we’ve seen a demand for the very clean and clear solventless hash, companies have begun making modified t-shirt presses to accommodate a larger run.
For fresh product that is oozing with crystals, there’s a method that will simply collect the parts that are shaken off. Dry sift is made by bouncing nugs off of micron screens that filter resin heads into different categories of quality. After the sift is collected, it is often pressed between parchment paper to turn it into a more dabbable material. Although some people use a hair straighter, it’s possible to melt the concentrates by using your fingers.
If you’re new to the game, be sure to try a little bit of every variety in terms of cannabis extracts. No matter your preference, there’s a vast array of choices to dab that offer their own benefits for everyone. Happy 7/10 everyone! |
Christian Berle, the acting executive director of the Log Cabin Republicans, a gay organization, applauded the judge’s action, saying it would make the armed forces stronger.
“Lifting the ban on open service will allow our armed forces to recruit the best and brightest,” Mr. Berle said, “and not have their hands tied because of an individual’s sexual orientation.”
Alexander Nicholson, the named plaintiff in the lawsuit, said “we sort of won the lottery,” considering the breadth of the decision. Mr. Nicholson is executive director of Servicemembers United, an organization of gay and lesbian troops and veterans.
The government has 60 days to file an appeal. “We’re reviewing it,” said Tracy Schmaler, a Justice Department spokeswoman, adding that there would be no other immediate comment. The government is expected, however, to appeal the injunction to the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit to try to keep it from taking effect pending an appeal of the overall case.
Such a move would carry risks, said Richard Socarides, who was an adviser to President Bill Clinton on gay rights issues. “There will be an increasingly high price to pay politically for enforcing a law which 70 percent of the American people oppose and a core Democratic constituency abhors,” he said.
Critics of the ruling include Tony Perkins, the president of the Family Research Council and a proponent of the don’t ask, don’t tell law, who accused Judge Phillips of “playing politics with our national defense.”
In a statement, Mr. Perkins, a former Marine, said that “once again, an activist federal judge is using the military to advance a liberal social agenda,” and noted that there was still “strong opposition” to changing the law from military leaders.
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Mr. Perkins predicted that the decision would have wide-ranging effects in the coming elections. “This move will only further the desire of voters to change Congress,” he said. “Americans are upset and want to change Congress and the face of government because of activist judges and arrogant politicians who will not listen to the convictions of most Americans and, as importantly, the Constitution’s limits on what the courts and Congress can and cannot do.”
The don’t ask, don’t tell law was originally proposed as a compromise measure to loosen military policies regarding homosexuality. Departing from a decades-old policy of banning service by gay, lesbian and bisexual recruits, the new law allowed service and prohibited superiors from asking about sexual orientation. But the law also held that service members could be dismissed from the military if they revealed their sexual orientation or engaged in homosexual acts.
Since 1993, some 14,000 gay men and lesbians have been discharged from the service when their sexual orientation became known, according to Mr. Nicholson’s group.
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The law has long been a point of contention, and President Obama has asked Congress to repeal it.
At an afternoon briefing on Tuesday, the White House press secretary, Robert Gibbs , said the injunction was under review, but that “the president will continue to work as hard as he can to change the law that he believes is fundamentally unfair.”
The Department of Justice, however, is required to defend laws passed by Congress under most circumstances.
In February, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and Adm. Mike Mullen , the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff , asked Congress to repeal the law.
The House voted to do so in May, but last month the Senate voted not to take up the bill allowing repeal. Advocates for repeal have pushed for that vote to be reconsidered after the midterm elections.
Jim Manley, a spokesman for the Senate majority leader, Harry Reid , said, “Senator Reid is encouraged by the decision, and still hopes to be able to take the bill to the floor after the elections in November.”
Mr. Gates was on an official visit to Vietnam when Judge Phillips’s action was announced on Tuesday. “We have just learned of the ruling and are now studying it,” said Geoff Morrell, the Pentagon press secretary. “We will be in consultation with the Department of Justice about how best to proceed.”
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After her initial ruling in September, Judge Phillips, who was appointed by Mr. Clinton, sought recommendations from the parties as to what kind of legal relief should follow.
The Log Cabin Republicans recommended a nationwide injunction. The Department of Justice sought narrower action.
Arguing that “the United States is not a typical defendant, and a court must exercise caution before entering an order that would limit the ability of the government to enforce a law duly enacted by Congress,” the Justice Department noted that the law had been found constitutional in other courts.
It asked that the judge’s injunction apply only to members of Log Cabin Republicans and not to the military over all.
In the other recent cases in which federal judges have pushed back against laws that restrict gay rights, a judge in California struck down that state’s ban on same-sex marriages in August. And in July, a federal judge in Massachusetts ruled that a law prohibiting the federal government from recognizing same-sex marriages , the Defense of Marriage Act, was unconstitutional, opening the way for federal benefits in such unions.
While Mr. Obama has been critical of the Defense of Marriage Act, the Justice Department has defended it in the federal court challenge. On Tuesday, the department filed an appeal in the case and issued a statement that might well be echoed in coming weeks in the military case.
“As a policy matter, the president has made clear that he believes DOMA is discriminatory and should be repealed,” said Ms. Schmaler, the department spokeswoman. “The Justice Department is defending the statute, as it traditionally does when acts of Congress are challenged.”
Advocates for gay rights said they were cheered by the direction of the three recent rulings.
Chad Griffin, the board president of the American Foundation for Equal Rights, which sponsored the litigation against California’s same-sex marriage ban, said that “with the momentum of these three court decisions, I think it really is the beginning of the end of state-sanctioned discrimination in this country.” |
Sanctuary is full of heroes and they deserve to be honored. Thankfully for us, there are talented artists who are up to the challenge of immortalizing these champions through exceptionally-detailed and life-like works of art.
This week’s community spotlight shines brightly on talented fan artist Marie-Michelle Pepin and her incredible Diablo III 3D character art. Marie-Michelle has sculpted and painted some astounding renders of both the Witch Doctor and Monk. Marie-Michelle shared with us a number fantastic images of Witch Doctor model and all the extraordinary care she put into crafting this powerful spiritual warrior.
Marie-Michelle's monk model is just as impressive! You can find the final painted 3D model, as well as the specular-normal mapped version, wire-frame version, and high-resolution sculpt of her Monk below. Her DeviantArt gallery also contains further images of her process on these two stalwart heroes.
Want to see more of Marie-Michelle’s work? Check it out on DeviantArt, CGHub, CGSociety, YouTube, and on her official website. |
With Yoan Moncada and Travis Shaw gone, it has been widely speculated that Sandoval will be in the starting lineup at Fenway Park when the Red Sox open their season April 3 against the Pirates.
FORT MYERS, Fla. -- On the eve of the official opening of Spring Training, Red Sox manager John Farrell spoke Sunday of the competitions that are to ensue. And there might be no more prominent storyline than Pablo Sandoval's quest to win back his job at third base.
FORT MYERS, Fla. -- On the eve of the official opening of Spring Training, Red Sox manager John Farrell spoke Sunday of the competitions that are to ensue. And there might be no more prominent storyline than Pablo Sandoval's quest to win back his job at third base.
With Yoan Moncada and Travis Shaw gone, it has been widely speculated that Sandoval will be in the starting lineup at Fenway Park when the Red Sox open their season April 3 against the Pirates.
:: Spring Training 2017 preview ::
However, Farrell made it clear that nothing will be given to the veteran, who has had a tough initiation to the Red Sox after signing a five-year, $70 million contract in November of 2014.
"Pablo has done a great job of getting himself in better shape," said Farrell. "But what he does on the field and if he can get back to previous levels before signing here as a free agent, that's what we're hopeful of. But it's a spot to be in competition for."
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Brock Holt is Sandoval's main competition, but he is invaluable as a rover who can play seven of the nine positions.
The roster would be most functional and productive with Sandoval getting the majority of at-bats at third base, which is why the Red Sox have a strong rooting interest in his comeback from ineffectiveness and injuries.
Video: Farrell talks readiness for Spring Training 2017
"I know this," said Farrell. "He's driven, he's highly motivated and he hasn't lost his skills. At least the ingredients are there for him to be a productive player again."
Another noteworthy nugget from Farrell is that knuckleballer Steven Wright is still building his arm strength back up from the right shoulder bursitis that kept him off the mound for the most of last season's stretch run.
"He's making improvement," Farrell said. "This has probably taken longer than he anticipated, than we certainly anticipated. He's back throwing to 120 feet. He's throwing flat ground right now. He still needs to continue to build some arm strength at this point in camp. He's yet to throw off a mound. But the arm strength he's demonstrated through his throwing program, that has been a steady progression throughout the winter."
Video: Farrell discusses the Red Sox pitching staff
"We'll get a better read exactly when everybody goes through their physicals [Monday]. We'll get a better read of arm strengths and accurate measurements overall. If we were to take this next week and continue to build that arm strength before we get him on the mound, I don't want to rule that out, but we'll get a better read on that [Monday]."
The timetable for Wright will determine how much competition there is in the rotation, where there are three quality pitchers vying for the final two spots in Wright, Eduardo Rodriguez and Drew Pomeranz.
Rodriguez and Pomeranz have had some health issues of their own. E-Rod had a scare with his right knee while pitching in winter ball and Pomeranz had an experimental stem cell shot for his left elbow after the season.
While Rodriguez was recently given a clean bill of health after a checkup in Boston, the club will have a better idea of Pomeranz's progression during camp when he undergoes his physical.
Video: Farrell discusses expectations for the 2017 Red Sox
Though Rodriguez still has Minor League options, it sounds as if Farrell would prefer for the odd man out in the rotation to be part of the bullpen.
"Hopefully that's the case," said Farrell. "Hopefully we get through Spring Training, and there's nothing unforeseen that's taken place. We've got six quality guys that are vying for those five spots. I think the beauty of this is we return a good team, a team that we're excited about, but yet there's some clear-cut competition here in camp. I think it's going to make for a very strong Spring Training for us." |
Microsoft is selling more Lumia smartphones and signed new Windows Phone licensing deals recently, but its mobile platform hasn't kept pace with rivals in key markets.
It's still early days for Microsoft's new handset business following its acquisition of Nokia devices in April. The company this week reported Lumia shipments of 9.3 million for its first quarter of 2015 — a figure that exceeds shipments of Lumia phones for all quarters under Nokia .
Despite selling more devices overall, Windows Phone hasn't enjoyed the same share of smartphone sales that it did under Nokia: the OS's share peaked in 2013 at just over 10 percent before dipping to 8.1 percent in the three months to the end of March of 2014 — up year on year but down from the previous quarter, according to figures by Kantar Worldpanel ComTech.
A similar pattern has played out in three months to September 2014, with Kantar reporting today that Windows Phone had a 9.2 percent share of sales in Europe's big five countries: Germany, Great Britain, France, Italy and Spain. The figure is down 0.3 percentage points year on year.
For the period, Windows Phone accounted for 9.6 percent of all smartphones in Great Britain, 10.6 percent in France, 15.2 percent in Italy and three percent in Spain. Windows Phone saw small year on year declines across all markets except for Italy, where it was up 1.5 percentage points.
Microsoft continues to struggle in China, where Windows Phone accounts for just 0.4 percent of sales in the period, down from 3.2 percent a year ago. Basically though, its tiny share of sales has been consistently low over the past year as Android takes a bigger slice of the country's smartphone market, up from 80.4 percent a year ago to 83.4 percent in this period.
Xiaomi and Huawei are driving Android's growth in China, Kantar's strategic insight director Dominic Sunnebo told ZDNet. There, Xiaomi dominated in China with a 30 percent share of smartphone sales, followed by Samsung with an 18.4 percent share.
In the US, Windows Phone took 4.3 percent of sales in the quarter, down 0.3 percentage points on last year. The biggest mover in the US was Android, which grew 4.5 percentage points over the year to 61.8 percent, ahead of iOS, which declined 3.3 percentage points to 32.6 percent. Still, Kantar notes that smartphone sales have grown 35 percent over the past year in the US.
The period only contains a week of iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus sales since the devices started shipping in the UK on 19 September followed a week later by other major markets in Europe. Nonetheless, across Europe's largest five markets, iOS was up 1.5 percentage points from 13.9 percent last year to 15.4 percent, while Android retained its dominance with its share up 1.4 percentage points from 72.5 percent last year to 73.9 percent.
"Apple has also experienced market share and volume increases across all major European markets, as well as in China and Australia, in part thanks to the launch of its new handsets. Across Europe’s top five markets, the iPhone 6 has outsold the larger iPhone 6 Plus by five-to-one," said Sunnebo.
Read more on Windows Phone |
The man who wishes to persuade people will not be negligent as to the matter of character, … for who does not know that words carry greater conviction when spoken by men of good repute than when spoken by men who live under a cloud, and that the argument which is made by a man’s life is of more weight than that which is furnished by words?”
-Isocrates (436-338 BCE)
Consider This: Liberals fight with Pathos, also known as appeals to emotion. Conservatives were once big into Logos, also known as appeals to logic, however they’ve now taken to Pathos as well. Everyone is trying to sell you with sob stories, hearsay from grandson to grandmother, pathetic tribalist drumbeats about red lines and red herrings, and insufferable newfound respect for the rest of the world, while the world wants nothing to do with America’s concern. If feelings and facts can’t deliver action items, perhaps it is time to reflect on Ethos, the appeal to character, in the modern era and how it might very well reshape rhetoric in the 21st century.
In Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman makes a variety of arguments that support Marshall McLuhan’s “Medium is the Message” concept regarding a televised culture. In the book, the author bemoans the transition between typography to photography and its effects in epistemology, or the study of knowledge. In one chapter, the phrase “And now…this!” is discussed as the formatted transition of human existence into a palatable, unreal creation for the nightly news. A catastrophe is discussed for 45 seconds, the phrase is uttered and we forget about the crisis just explained for a sleek advertisement about the newest gizmo in its place. This fiction is produced to an increasingly cynical audience who, with the help of the internet, can bullshit any argument with a handful of jargon and the self-confidence only widespread narcissism could employ. Imagine a million Fletch’s bubbling up undigested ideas in forums like twitter, facebook or reddit and that’s the new way information travels. Around the world, people like myself stand in defiance of our limited knowledge to say something we think is important to share.
But what differentiates my post with the countless other posts comprised of similar ideas? I believe the distinction is found in the appeal to character. What is character? Aristotle provided three important ingredients in the making of Ethos: practical wisdom [phronesis], virtue [arete] and good will [eunoia]. I’m going to go out on a limb here and add my own additional ingredient: appearance of a genuine nature. Cardboard cutout candidates have been ousted before by the folksy outlier, the Jimmy Carters, the Sarah Palins, the Mr. Smiths that seem to go to Washington filled with a life untarnished by insider politics. Even career politicians have gotten in on the game by acting aloof. Compare George W. Bush in his 200o campaign with his 2004 campaign. Where once a stimulating intellectual that was elected for criticizing America’s role as “policeman of the world”, Mr. Bush then transformed himself into a good ol’ boy with a draw with great success.
Another example could be found in Barack Obama’s unnerving 2007 “Take the Bullet Out!” speech in comparison with his milquetoast recent oratory. One speech attempted to connect candidate Obama with the black community using a rare inflection and lack of annunciation not found at, say, the MLK 50 year anniversary speech, speaking to an audience composed of the same makeup. Why? Why is it that these renegades whom fight the status quo immediately compose themselves as stable, non-volatile statesmen as soon as they’re in power? And how is their appeal to character not affected?
The answers to these questions are two fold. Firstly, the nature of politics offers an advantage to the candidate with the stronger popularity. To grow popularity, one might do two things: make themselves look good through a list of ‘accomplishments’ or rally against the other guy through a list of grievances. Hatred is the stronger force at work most times, which means the up-and-comer is more likely to denigrate the present incumbent, ‘politics as usual’ or some zeitgeist that one individual has no control over. The new guy spits on the old guy, joins the ranks of the political elite and then shuts up in order to avoid having the old guys spit back. The people take the oratory that got him into office as just another ploy to get their money and their vote, and move on. Politicians are succeeding because the choice of Americans is now cut between delusion or apathy, not Democrat or Republican.
A respect for ethos would change this. A leader with the chops of a Cincinnatus, the roman farmer/twice elected dictator whom wished to plow his fields before growing a cult of personality. This man was assigned the task of leading the Romans to the Battle of Mons Algidus where he defeated Gracchus Clelius and then… went back to farming immediately after his deed was done. Then, impressed with his goal oriented lack of aspiration, the people of Rome asked him back a second time only for him to serve his purpose then go back to his private affairs. Another example is George Washington, whom voluntarily abdicated his tenure after eight years and finished by writing a farewell address that stressed the ethos of a leader now detached from his lofty position.
After speaking of his choice not to pursue a third term, Washington makes this paragraph:
Here, perhaps, I ought to stop. But a solicitude for your welfare, which cannot end but with my life, and the apprehension of danger, natural to that solicitude, urge me, on an occasion like the present, to offer to your solemn contemplation, and to recommend to your frequent review, some sentiments which are the result of much reflection, of no inconsiderable observation, and which appear to me all-important to the permanency of your felicity as a people. These will be offered to you with the more freedom, as you can only see in them the disinterested warnings of a parting friend, who can possibly have no personal motive to bias his counsel. Nor can I forget, as an encouragement to it, your indulgent reception of my sentiments on a former and not dissimilar occasion.”
The former president may have used an appeal to character through humility and good will, but the advice that follows is indeed benefited from his admission and removed from the feeling of direct solicitation. I believe this is the cure for cynicism.
Leaders that treat people as peers rather than an audience, who speak with candor about the appearances they present, and who value the phrase ‘The Buck Stops Here’ with actions and culpability will stand out of this tumultuous era more powerful than any modern politician. We haven’t seen a figure like that in a while, but that person is coming. It’s only a matter of time.
Question: Is Ethos really the ‘New Leader in Persuasive Rhetoric’ or was that just an eye-catching title? |
Although Verizon hasnt officially announced it yet, many users with Verizon-branded Moto Z and the Moto Z Force have been getting reports of the device receiving and OTA update for Android Nougat 7.0. We can confirm that both the Moto Z and Z Force units we have are now downloading the update once we manually checked for them.
The software version of the OTA update is NCL26.86-11 for the Z Force Droid and NCL25.86-11 for the Moto Z Droid. The OTA measures in at around 1,500MB and it has an estimated install time of 20 minutes. It gets seriously warm, so take any Moto Mods or covers off to let it cool during installation.
The installation notes mention new Nougat features like split-screen (which is now baked into Android Nougat), App quick-switching (double tap the app switcher to switch between your two most recent apps).
This is the first Nougat update for Moto devices and still among the first Marshmallow devices to be updated to Nougat. But still not as fast as the time Verizons Moto X was the first to get KitKat back in 2014, even before Nexus devices that were up for the update. One of the upsides of having minimally modified software is the ability to release them before other OEMs.
The update is rolling out now so if you dont have the notification yet, head to Settings > System updates > Check for system update. When we did it, it pulled the OTA down right away.
Let us know if you were able to install the update! |
The Dallas area continues to grow rapidly across all racial and ethnic groups, according to the latest data from the U.S. Census Bureau, with Asian growth rates leading the way through the first three years of the decade.
But it was the group with the most modest growth rates — even a net loss in Dallas County — that had demographers buzzing about a turnaround for counties with large urban populations.
“Let’s look at Dallas County,” said Steve Murdock, director of the Hobby Center for the Study of Texas at Rice University. “There was growth in the Asian population, no doubt about it. But we also see a turnaround in growth in the non-Hispanic white population.”
While Dallas County showed a loss of 1,436 non-Hispanic whites from the 2010 census through July 1, 2013, that’s minuscule compared with losses in the previous decade, Murdock said.
“If you had the same pattern going on as you had in the last decade, you would have lost a good number more,” he said. “At this rate, you might lose 5,000 over this decade, compared with the loss of 198,000 over the last decade. We’re seeing the same thing in Harris County, where it changed from a negative to a positive.”
While non-Hispanic whites continue to move to suburbs, it could be that some younger folks and empty-nesters are finding urban centers more attractive for lifestyle reasons. And, demographers say, those leaving are being replaced by others looking for jobs, either from other parts of Texas or out of state.
“When you look at the state level,” said Lloyd Potter, the Texas state demographer, “we’re seeing positive immigration of non-Hispanic whites.”
The splashy numbers, though, came from growth rates in the Asian population — up 20 percent in Denton County, 18.5 percent in Rockwall, 18.1 percent in Collin, 14.9 percent in Dallas and 10.8 percent in Tarrant — over the last three years. In many ways that’s a continuation of the trends from 2000 to 2010, when Asians and Hispanics were the two fastest-growing groups in the state.
Hispanic growth rates were still double-digit in Collin, Denton and Rockwall counties at 11.2, 13.7 and 14 percent, respectively, for the three-year period, “but the rate of growth is down in Collin” compared with the previous decade, Murdock said.
The data provides some positive signs for the coming years, too, Potter said.
“I looked at [the three years individually] and when I looked at Harris County, the rate of change for 2012-13 increased a little more than it had in the previous two years,” he said. “It has momentum, and the momentum has picked up a bit.”
The Texas economy gets most of the credit for that, Potter said.
“In the areas that are growing economically, in the areas where there is job growth, that’s where we’re seeing the greatest in-migration of Asians,” he said.
The non-Hispanic black population is growing rapidly as well — up 19.6 percent in Denton, 18.1 percent in Collin, 12.5 percent in Rockwall, 10 percent in Tarrant and 5.8 percent in Dallas.
Much of the growth across the region and the state comes from migration, Potter and Murdock agreed, and that migration is driven largely by jobs.
“Overall, I think we’re seeing that Hispanic growth rates are down, but the non-Hispanic white losses have been significantly reversed,” said Murdock, a former director of the U.S. Census Bureau.
He used Travis County as an example.
“From 2000 to 2010, Travis County added about 59,000 non-Hispanic whites,” Murdock said. “This time, it has added 41,000 non-Hispanic whites in the first three years,” an annual rate that roughly doubles that of the previous decade.
The migration of job-seekers to Texas has changed the place in another way, too, Potter said. The state is getting older.
In 2010, the typical Texan was 33.6 years old: 32.6 for males, 34.6 for females. That climbed to an average of 33.8 in 2011, 33.9 in 2012 and 34 in 2013.
“When you look at the median age of migrants, it tends to be a little older than the median age of the population,” Potter said, “and that does contribute to our rising median age.
“Part of it is the aging of the population, but I thought we’d at least stay where we were because of natural increase” through births, he said.
“We’re still at the low end,” Potter said, “but it looks like we’re getting a little older.” |
If you're a gun owner living in Allentown, you may once again be required to report a lost or stolen firearm to the police.
The city is poised to reinstate firearms restrictions it lifted last year after state lawmakers passed a law that exposed Pennsylvania municipalities to lawsuits from gun-rights groups such as the National Rifle Association. The state Supreme Court struck down the state law Monday.
Allentown's restrictions, enacted in 2008, banned firearms from city property and parks, and required gun owners to report lost or stolen firearms to police within 48 hours. Mayor Ed Pawlowski said he plans to reintroduce the lost and stolen guns proposal to City Council next week.
"Now that it has been repealed by the state Supreme Court, it's more than appropriate in light of what has happened in Orlando and quite honestly the amount of shootings that continue to occur in cities across the country," Pawlowski said Thursday.
Advocates say requiring gun owners to report lost or stolen firearms makes it harder for so-called "straw buyers." Straw buyers obtain guns for felons or others who are prohibited from purchasing guns, and then claim the gun was lost or stolen if it resurfaces in the commission of a crime.
Gun rights advocates, such as Kim Stolfer, chairman of Firearms Owners Against Crime, say such restrictions don't work and violate state law. Police should simply enforce existing laws making it illegal for a felon to buy a gun, they say.
"Not a single one of these lost and stolen laws was ever enforced," Stolfer said. "All this is is political theater."
Pawlowski said he has asked the city's legal team to research the ban on guns in city parks and buildings to make sure it doesn't run afoul of any other state gun laws.
"I think it's more than reasonable to say we should not have guns on a playground," Pawlowski said. "You shouldn't at least have the ability to carry weapons in a public building like City Hall and council chambers."
Sen. Daylin Leach, D-Montgomery, speaks about state court ruling overturning a 2014 law allowing the NRA to sue municipalities for tougher gun laws. Leach was lead plaintiff in lawsuit to overturn the law. Sen. Daylin Leach, D-Montgomery, speaks about state court ruling overturning a 2014 law allowing the NRA to sue municipalities for tougher gun laws. Leach was lead plaintiff in lawsuit to overturn the law. SEE MORE VIDEOS
City Council President Ray O'Connell said he thinks council will have the votes to reinstate the ordinances, which passed unanimously in 2008.
"I'm in full support, absolutely, [considering] what has been happening lately in this country," he said.
One member of the 2008 city council that passed the restrictions said the city should never have repealed them.
"We as a society have to stop being afraid of the threat of a lawsuit from the NRA and do what is best for the lives of our residents," said state Rep. Peter Schweyer, D-Allentown, who fully supports reinstating both ordinances.
Allentown is not alone in responding to the Supreme Court's repeal of the NRA lawsuit legislation. Easton rejected similar restrictions in 2008, but Mayor Sal Panto Jr. plans to reintroduce them in the coming weeks.
During a Wednesday meeting of City Council, Panto said he will do so in separate bills. One would ban individuals from possessing guns on city-owned property, including public parks; the other would require anyone whose gun is lost or stolen to report it missing within 24 hours.
Easton's current ordinance says it is illegal to discharge a firearm in a public park, but allows gun owners to have them on the property. Panto said guns cannot be brought into Northampton County or City Council meetings.
Panto tried to get council to bite in November 2008 but was turned aside because members didn't think the city should establish an ordinance that didn't match state law, which had no such provisions.
Both bills will be brought before council at its 6 p.m. July 12 meeting.
Bethlehem repealed a $2 fee it had in place for permits to carry a gun in 2015 after the NRA put the city on notice that it could be sued. Solicitor William Leeson has advised the city to wait before trying to reinstate that provision or pass additional restrictions.
The Supreme Court struck down the state law for procedural errors, not on the merits of the legislation, he said. The law was passed after being tacked on to unrelated legislation, a no-no, the court ruled. So Bethlehem may want to wait to see whether state lawmakers try to put the law back in place.
Stolfer said he has already talked with state senators who plan to introduce a new bill.
There is likely to be some effort, but passage will be more difficult in the current political environment, said Shira Goodman, executive director of CeasefirePA, the state's leading anti-gun violence group.
"I think they will have some trouble passing it," she said. "The governor will veto it and there could be some legal challenges if it passes."
State law generally prohibits municipalities from enacting gun restrictions that go beyond state regulations, but firearms rights groups had complained it was difficult for individual residents to show they had been harmed in order to challenge the local laws.
The invalidated law gave groups like the National Rifle Association the ability to sue without being a resident of the municipality that passed the disputed law, and forced the municipality to cover the legal costs of any such group.
About two dozen municipalities repealed local gun laws in 2015 following the law's passage. The National Rifle Association sued several cities that resisted, including Philadelphia, Pittsburgh and Lancaster.
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Staff writer Nicole Radzievich contributed to this story. |
Irish people want Catholicism’s influence to be removed from the Republic
A fascinating new poll conducted by the Irish radio station Newstalk has found that attitudes to Catholicism have shifted significantly since the publication of the Ryan report into child abuse in Catholic-run institutions.
Of the 1,108 people questioned, 51% said they would not welcome a visit to Ireland by the Pope. This stands in stark contrast to the euphoric response the previous Pope received on his visit there in 1979 when practically no opposition was expressed to the visit.
Just 4% of those who responded to the poll said they had actually changed their Mass-going habits since the publication of the Ryan Report, but changing attitudes towards the Catholic Church’s involvement in the day-to-day life of the country are evident in the 70% who said all primary schools should be run by the State.
Just over half (52%) believe religion has no place in schools, as they say religious instruction should only take place outside the classroom, but the majority don’t believe children in school should be exposed to the details of the Ryan Report, with 68% opposing religious teaching incorporating lessons on clerical abuse. The poll was conducted last week, illustrating that feelings about the report are not abating, even a month after publication.
Those in favour of the State taking control of all primary schools made comments such as: “It’s about time that Ireland became a secular state. Theocracy has had its day here” and “The Church can run schools if they want, but they should receive zero funding from the State.”
Meanwhile, the Church is bracing itself for the release of another report within the next few weeks. This one is about the handling of sex-abuse allegations against priests of the Dublin archdiocese.
See also:
Monks & Nuns say Irish Church made them into scapegoats
Civil marriage may overtake church weddings by 2012 |
The World Food Program says it has distributed food aid to a record 3.3 million Syrians in October, up from 2.7 million in September but still short of its four-million person target.
The U.N. agency says regional insecurity is hampering its ability to distribute aid to some parts of Syria.
Large swathes of territory near Aleppo and Hassekeh remain inaccessible to aid agencies, and WFP spokeswoman Elizabeth Byrs says other areas are becoming inaccessible due to the intensification of the conflict, especially in areas near Damascus.
WFP has been unable to access 38 locations for more than one year including Moadamiyeh, near Damascus, she said, explaining that the agency has made nine unsuccessful attempts to reach these places over the past year.
“WFP is still very concerned about the fate of many Syrians trapped in conflict areas and still in need of urgent food assistance," she said. "We are monitoring worrying reports of emerging malnutrition among children in besieged areas and WFP is ready to step up nutrition support if we get access to these hot spots.”
This week an estimated 1,800 Syrian civilians fled Moadamiyeh due to a rare moment of convergence between Syrian government forces and rebel fighters.
Residents have been cut off from food, medical supplies and other basic items, and thousands of civilians reportedly remain trapped in the town.
Byrs says the Syrian Red Crescent was on hand to help those people who managed to leave Moadamiyeh.
“They are supporting these poor people who have been malnourished for months and weeks and they are providing additional nutritional food and trying to give them the proper food rations they need.”
Byrs says in October WFP has been successful in distributing food to some areas that had been inaccessible for many months, including areas in Homs that have not been reached for the past six months and several areas in rural Damascus. |
Earlier this month, online security expert Jacob Appelbaum said Hillary Clinton has a personal grudge against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and if elected she will work overtime to make his life a living hell.
Clinton’s vendetta stems from the release of diplomatic cables by the journalism organization. Many of the cables portray the former secretary of state in a less than flattering light.
Late Tuesday, WikiLeaks posted a tweet that may or may not compound Clinton’s woes in regard to her use of an unsecured email server:
Is this email the FBI's star exhibit against Hillary Clinton ("H")? https://t.co/MsKTZUJdHB pic.twitter.com/VkeA6X7Bkx — WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) June 1, 2016
See the email thread here.
The latest excuse offered by Clinton is that she unknowingly violated federal regulations and did not deliberately remove confidential data in order to send it through her unsecured server.
The above tweet reveals beyond a doubt Clinton is lying.
If the FBI does not act on this latest information, we may conclude Clinton is receiving preferential treatment and she will not be forced to step down as the Democrat presidential nominee, to say nothing of facing prosecution.
Earlier this month prosecutors and FBI agents investigating Clinton said they did not find sufficient evidence that she intended to break classification rules. A grand jury has not convened in the case and influential Democrats, including Senator Dianne Feinstein, have pushed hard to make the scandal go away before the election.
Thus far, the corporate media has ignored the latest WikiLeaks document. |
Pope says injustice, oppression, give rise to "scandalous social inequalities"
* Pope says injustice, oppression, give rise to "scandalous social inequalities"
* Political leaders must demonstrate outstanding honesty and integrity
* Tens of thousands line streets of Manila to see Francis
* Aquino says pope's visit a "security nightmare"
By Philip Pullella and Manuel Mogato
MANILA, Jan 16 (Reuters) - Pope Francis called on the Philippine government on Friday to tackle corruption and hear the cries of the poor suffering from "scandalous social inequalities" in Asia's most Catholic country.
The pope went to the Malacanang presidential palace for an official welcoming ceremony led by President Benigno Aquino as tens of thousands of ecstatic Filipinos lined the streets.
Francis, a champion of the poor, pulled no punches in calling for a more just and caring society in the Philippines, which is about 80 percent Catholic.
"It is now, more than ever, necessary that political leaders be outstanding for honesty, integrity and commitment to the common good," he said.
After meeting Aquino, Francis later celebrated a Mass in Manila's colonial-style cathedral. He made a surprise detour from his schedule after the Mass when he went across the street for a brief visit a Church-run home that cares for former street children, many of whom were once child prostitutes and members of youth gangs.
Aquino, the only son of democracy champion and former president Corazon Aquino, took office in 2010 on the promise of transparency, good governance and battling corruption to lift the Philippines from poverty.
But he has struggled to shed the country's image as one of the most corrupt in Asia as he continues to defend his allies, while at the same time chasing down politicians, bureaucrats and generals associated with the past administration.
Francis was driven to the palace from his residence at the Vatican embassy in a small blue Volkswagen Touran, in keeping with his simple, no-frills style. Enthusiastic crowds had started gathering four hours before he arrived.
The Philippines has laid on the largest security operation in its history, with about 50,000 police and soldiers on hand. Francis' car was flanked by police vehicles, which sometimes made it difficult for people to see him.
"It has been somewhat of a security nightmare for us," Aquino told the pope in his address.
Francis was saluted by presidential guards at the Spanish colonial palace and greeted by hundreds of people waving Vatican and Philippine flags. Children rushed up to embrace him as he walked along a red carpet on the palace grounds.
"REJECT CORRUPTION"
The pope urged government officials "to reject every form of corruption, which diverts resources from the poor, and to make concerted efforts to ensure the inclusion of every man and woman and child".
Since taking office, Aquino has executed wide-ranging reforms in graft-laden agencies such as the customs and internal revenue bureaus, helping improve the Philippines' ranking in watchdog Transparency International's corruption perceptions index (CPI) to 85 last year from 94 in 2013 and 105 in 2012.
But cases of high-level officials in central and local governments misappropriating public funds for personal gain still abound. At least 25 percent of the country of about 100 million are poor, according to the Philippine statistics agency.
"The great Biblical tradition enjoins on all peoples the duty to hear the voice of the poor," he told Filipino leaders.
"It bids us break the bonds of injustice and oppression which give rise to glaring, and indeed scandalous, social inequalities. Reforming the social structures which perpetuate poverty and the exclusion of the poor first requires a conversion of mind and heart," he said.
Aquino said that, while the Church was instrumental in the ousting of former dictator Ferdinand Marcos in 1986, it "suddenly became silent in the face of the previous administration's abuses". Aquino's father was assassinated in 1983 when he returned from exile to oppose Marcos.
The president was referring to the government of former president Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, who has been detained on corruption charges since 2012.
The Mass was celebrated on the same site where a church was first built with bamboo and palm leaves in 1581. Two rows of boys dressed as Swiss Guards lined its steps as he entered. In his homily, Francis said many were still "living in the midst of a society burdened by poverty and corruption".
Later on Friday he was due to hold a rally with Filipino families. As many as 12 million people have left to find work in other countries, making the Philippines the fourth-largest recipient of remittances worldwide.
About half of the population has been affected by decades of labour migration and the strain has come at a significant social cost.
Francis has made defence of vulnerable migrants and workers a central issue of his papacy. (Additional reporting by Rosemarie Francisco and Neil Jerome Morales; Editing by Paul Tait)
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles. |
To add to that strangely almost familiar winning feeling as I left the match last night and read through twitter on the drive home (someone else was driving i should point out.), were tweets talking about an announcement of a new player, probably today. Ooh, that sounded good, it's been one way so far, with plenty of players leaving and only Andrew Weideman coming back, and a nice goal aside, I remain underwhelmed by that, that's all about the cap space and dp slot. Would this finally be the impact player to take up that space? The player who would improve the team and hopefully become a longish term cornerstone of Paul Mariner's new direction?
Excitement was dampened by a tweet from Asif Hossain saying the following "Player announced tomorrow won't be headline grabbing but he is useful, hard working and seems nice. A Mariner-type guy." Hmmm, might be good, and we do need plenty of those type of players, but doesn't really get the pulse going does it?
Well, enthusiasm at WTR Towers plummeted further when John Molinaro spoiled the surprise and told us it's going to be Quincy Amarikwa.
Yeah, that Quincy Amarikwa who at the age of 24, in his 4th MLS season, has a grand total of 4 goals in 56 appearances with the San Jose Earthquakes and Colorado Rapids. As a striker. To paraphrase from Team America: Amarikwa! Fuck, Meh!
That's harsh of course, there are hopefully more exciting and impactful signings coming, and if Amarikwa had been snuck in after those guys towards the end of the window, I'd be shrugging and saying, well I guess it's a decent depth pick up. Just because the order's different shouldn't change that reaction, if he's all we end up with out of this transfer window, I'll be pissed, but that's unlikely. We need all the bodies we can get up front, I'm presuming his contract will be appropriately small and hopefully he can contribute in some small way. If he can do well enough to stick around next year, excellent. If not, oh well, at least he was a warm body for the reserve team.
It's an OK addition, that's all, and that's all it was ever supposed to be, but any time you want to bring in the important players Paul, that'd be cool. |
PUEBLA, Mexico – US Soccer Federation president Sunil Gulati stressed on Thursday that while the CONCACAF U-20 Championship is important for US Soccer and the players involved, it’s not the end-all, be-all in judging youth development.
“These competitions are always a good barometer of where we are,” Gulati told MLSsoccer.com after US training on Thursday. “But they’re not the only barometer we have in terms of development. It can’t be the only barometer.”
Gulati pointed to the fact Argentina and Brazil didn’t qualify for the upcoming FIFA U-20 World Cup, even with the former enjoying home advantage, as evidence that slip-ups do happen.
READ: US U-20s ugly but effective in 2-1 win over Haiti
Nevertheless, the aim is to get the US team qualified for the World Cup in Turkey and Gulati gave the gathered players a pep talk at the end of Thursday’s training, wishing them luck and emphasizing the significance of the competition to their fledgling careers.
“It’s an important first crack at getting to a world championship,” said Gulati of the current U-20 group.
There has been some talk about the number of Latino players in this US U-20 squad, with six starting the first game against Haiti.
READ: Real Salt Lake's Luis Gil set for center stage for US U-20s
The issue has been a constant theme in the US soccer media since Jurgen Klinsmann announced he would be looking to incorporate Latino players at the grassroots of the game in his first press conference as US coach.
It’s a difficult subject for Gulati, who is adamant that each individual coach picks their own players based on the specific needs of the squad.
“If we do well and there are a number of Latin players in the team, that’s great,” stated Gulati. “If we don’t do well, I don’t know what it tells us.”
Tom Marshall covers Americans playing in Latin America for MLSsoccer.com. Contact him at [email protected]. |
CIA HISTORICAL REVIEW PROGRAM
RELEASE AS SANITIZED
18 SEPT 95
SECRET
No Foreign Dissem
XXXX XXXXX XXXXX XXX XX a Soviet upper-stage space vehicle.
THE KIDNAPING OF THE LUNIK
Sydney Wesley Finer
A number of years ago the Soviet Union toured several countries with an exhibition of its industrial and economic achievements. There were the standard displays of industrial machinery, soft goods, and models of power stations and nuclear equipment. Of greater interest were apparent models of the Sputnik and Lunik space vehicles. U.S. intelligence twice gained extended access to the Lunik, the second time by borrowing it overnight and returning it before the Soviets missed it. This is the story of the borrowing, which required the efforts of many people and close cooperation between covert and overt intelligence components.
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On View Abroad
The Soviets had carefully prepared for this exhibition tour; most of the display material was shipped to each stop well in advance. But as their technicians were busily assembling the various items in one exhibition hall they received a call informing them that another crate had arrived. They apparently had not expected this item and had no idea what it was, because the first truck they dispatched was too small to handle the crate and they had to send a second.
The late shipment turned out to be the last-stage Lunik space vehicle, lying on its side in a cabin-like crate approximately 20 feet long and 11 feet wide with a roof about 14 feet high at the peak. It was unpacked and placed on a pedestal. It had been freshly painted, and three inspection windows cut in the nose section permitted a view of the payload instrument package with its antenna. It was presumably a mock-up made especially for the exhibition; the Soviets would not be so foolish as to expose a real production item of such advanced equipment to the prying eyes of imperialist intelligence.
Or would they? A number of analysts in the U.S. community suspected that they might, and an operation was laid on to find out. After the exhibition closed at this location, a group of intelligence officers had unrestricted access to the Lunik for some 24 hours. They found that it was indeed a production item from which the engine and most electrical and electronic components had been removed. They examined it thoroughly from the viewpoint of probable performance, taking measurements, determining its structural characteristics and wiring format, estimating engine size, and so forth.1
XXXXXXXXX XXXXXXX XXXXXX XXXXXXX XXXXXXX XXXXXXXX XXXXXXX XXXXXXX XXXXXXX XXXXXXX XXXXXXX XXXXXX XXXX XXXXXX XXXXXXXXX2 A few XXXXX XXs had been copied from the Lunik during this operation, but not with sufficient detail or precision to permit a definitive identification of the producer or determination of the XXXXXXX system used. It was therefore decided to try to get another access for a factory XXXXX team.
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Plans and Problems
As the exhibition moved from one city to another, an intercepted shipping manifest showed an item called "models of astronomic apparatus" whose dimensions were approximately those of the Lunik crate. This information was sent to the CIA Station nearest the destination with a request to try to arrange secure access if the Lunik should appear. On the basis of our experience at trade fairs and other exhibitions, we in factory markings preferred access before the opening of an exhibition to the alternatives of examining it while in the exhibition hall or after it had left the grounds for another destination.
Soon the Lunik crate did arrive and was taken to the exhibition grounds. The physical situation at the grounds, however, ruled out access to it prior to the show's opening. Then during the show the Soviets provided their own 24-hour guard for the displays, so there was no possibility of making a surreptitious night visit. This left only one chance: to get to it at some point after it left the exhibition grounds.
In the meantime our four-man team of specialists from the joint Factory Markings Center had arrived. We brought along our specialized photographic gear and basic tools. We each went out and bought a complete set of local clothes, everything from the skin out. We held a series of meetings with Station personnel over the course of a week, mutually defining capabilities and requirements, laying plans for access and escape, and determining what additional equipment we would need. The Station photographed the Lunik crate repeatedly so we would get a better idea of its construction. The photographs showed that the sides and ends were bolted together from within; the only way to get inside was through the roof. We therefore bought more tools and equipment-ladders, ropes, a nail puller, drop lights, flashlights, extension cords, a pinch bar, a set of metric wrenches, screwdrivers, hammers.
After the exhibition the displays would be carried by truck from the exhibition grounds to a railroad station and loaded onto freight cars for their next destination. For the interception we had to choose between the truck run and the rail haul. The initial preference was for the latter; it seemed the freight car carrying the Lunik might most easily be shunted onto a siding (preferably into a warehouse) for a night and resume its journey the next morning. A detailed check of our assets on the rail line, however, showed no good capability for doing this. Careful examination of the truckage to the station, on the other hand, revealed a possibility.
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Lunik on Loan
As the exhibition materials were crated and trucked to the rail yard, a Soviet checker stationed at the yard took note of each item when it arrived. He had no communications back to his colleagues at the fair grounds, however. It was arranged to make the Lunik the last truckload of the day to leave the grounds. When it left it was preceded by a Station car and followed by another; their job was to determine whether the Soviets were escorting it to the rail yard. When it was clear that there were no Soviets around, the truck was stopped at the last possible turn-off, a canvas was thrown over the crate, and a new driver took over. The original driver was escorted to a hotel room and kept there for the night. The truck was quickly driven to a salvage yard which had been rented for the purpose. This yard was open to the sky but had a 10-foot solid wood fence around it. With some difficulty the truck was backed in from a narrow alley and the gates closed; they just cleared the front bumper. The entire vicinity was patrolled by Station cars with two-way radios maintaining contact with the yard and the Station.
Action was suspended for half an hour. Everything remained quiet in the area, and there was no indication that the Soviets suspected anything amiss. The Soviet stationed at the rail yard waited for a short time to see whether any more truckloads were coming, then packed up his papers and went to supper. After eating he proceeded to his hotel room, where he was kept under surveillance all night. The markings team, in local clothes and without any identification, were cruising in a car some distance from the salvage yard. We were now given the all-clear to proceed to the yard and start work. We arrived about 7:30 p.m. and were let in by a two-man watch-and-communications team from the Station. They had put all our equipment and tools in the yard, and food and drink for the night.
Our first task was to remove enough of the crate's roof to get in. It was made of 2-inch tongue-and-groove planks nailed down with 5-inch spikes. Two members of the team went to work on these, perspiring and panting in the humid air. The effort not to leave traces of our forced entry was made easier by the fact that the planks had been removed and put back several times before and so were already battered. While this was going on there was a rather unnerving incident. When we had arrived at the salvage yard it was dark; the only lights were in the salvage company's office. Now, with two men on top of the crate prying up planks, street lamps suddenly came on, flooding the place with light. We had a few anxious moments until we learned this was not an ambush but the normal lamp-lighting scheduled for this hour.
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Photographers at Work
The other two of us were meanwhile assembling the photographic gear and rigging up the drop lights with extension cords. We had ladders up at each end of the crate, and when the planks were off we dropped another ladder inside each end. The Lunik in its cradle was almost touching the sides of the crate, so we couldn't walk from one end to the other inside.
Half the team now climbed into the front-nose-end with one set of photographic equipment and a drop light. They pulled the canvas back over the opening to keep the flash of the strobe units from attracting attention. They removed one of the inspection windows in the nose section, took off their shoes so as to leave no telltale scars on the metal surface, and squeezed inside. The payload orb was held in a central basket, with its main antenna probe extended more than half way to the tip of the cone. They filled one roll of fihn with close-ups of markings on it and sent this out via one of the patrolling cars for processing, to be sure that the camera was working properly and the results were satisfactory. The word soon came back that the negatives were fine, and they continued their work.
We on the other half of the team had tackled the tail section. Our first job was to gain access to the engine compartment by removing the Lunik's large base cap; this was attached to its flange by some 130 square-headed bolts. We removed these with a metric wrench and by using a rope sling moved the heavy cap off to one side.
Inside the compartment the engine had been removed, but its mounting brackets, as well as the fuel and oxidizer tanks, were still in place. At the front end of the compartment, protruding through the center of a baffle plate that separated the nose: section from the engine, was the end of a rod which held the payload orb in place. A four-way electrical outlet acting as a nut screwed onto the end of this rod was keyed by a wire whose ends were encased in a plastic seal bearing a Soviet stamp. The only way to free the orb so as to let the nose team into the basket in which it rested was to cut this wire and unscrew the outlet.
We checked with Station personnel and were assured they could duplicate the plastic, stamp, and wire. So we decided to go ahead and look for markings in the basket area. We cut the wire and passed it to one of the patrolling cars. The pair in the nose section photographed or hand-copied all XXXXXX in the basket area while we did those in the engine compartment. The Soviets, in removing all electrical connections and gear, had overlooked two couplings in the basket; these we took back to headquarters for detailed analysis. Before we had finished, the new seal-wire, plastic, and stamp-was delivered to the yard.
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Returned in Good Condition
The exploitation of the Lunik was now complete; all that remained was to put things back together and close up the crate. The first job, re-securing the orb in its basket, proved to be the most ticklish and time-consuming part of the whole night's work. The baffle plate between the nose and engine compartments prevented visual guidance of the rod into position, and the rod was just long enough to screw the outlet on beyond the baffle plate. We spent almost an hour on this, one man in the cramped nose section trying to get the orb into precisely the right position and one in the engine compartment trying to engage the threads on the end of a rod he couldn't see. After a number of futile attempts and many anxious moments, the connection was finally made, and we all sighed with relief.
The wire was wrapped around the outlet and its ends secured in the plastic. The nose and engine compartments were double-checked to make sure no telltale materials such as matches, pencils, or scraps of paper had been left inside. The inspection window was replaced in the nose section, and with some difficulty the base cap was bolted into position. After checking the inside of the crate for evidence of our tampering, we climbed out. The ladders were pulled up, the roof planks nailed into place, and the canvas spread back over. We packed our equipment and were picked up by one of the cars at 4:00 a.m.
At 5:00 a.m. a driver came and moved the truck from the salvage yard to a prearranged point. Here the canvas cover was removed, and the original driver took over and drove to the rail yard. The Soviet who had been checking items as they arrived the previous day came to the yard at 7:00 a.m. and found the truck with the Lunik awaiting him. He showed no surprise, checked the crate in, and watched it loaded onto a flatcar. In due course the train left. To this day there has been no indication the Soviets ever discovered that the Lunik was borrowed for a night.
The results of analysis on the data thus collected were published in a XXXXXXX Center Brief.3 They included probable identification of the producer of this Lunik stage, the fact that it was the fifth one produced, identification of three electrical producers who supplied components, and revelation of the system XXXXXXXXXX that was used here and conceivably for other Soviet space hardware. But perhaps more important in the long term than these positive intelligence results was the experience and example of fine cooperation on a job between covert operators and essentially overt collectors.
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Bibliography
1 For the ultimate contribution of this information and a sketch of the Lunik see "Intelligence for the Space Race," by Albert D. Wheelon and Sidney N. Craybeal, in Studies V 4, p. 1 ff, in particular pp. 9-11.
2 XXXXXXXXXXXXXXX XXXXX XXXXXXX XXXXXXX XXXXXXX XXXXXXX XXXXXXX
3 MCB No. 60-1, Analysis of XXXXXXXXXXXXXX the Last Stage of the Soviet "Lunik" Space Vehicle, SECRET NOFORN XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX XXX X XXXXXXX
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SECRET
No Foreign Dissem |
Earlier this week, Take-Two's brand new label Private Division was named publisher of Obsidian's big and secret, in-development role-playing game.
Take-Two, the parent company of 2K and Rockstar, is a big name, and what big names have been doing recently - Activision Blizzard, EA and Warner - is pushing loot boxes in their games. The question naturally followed: will Private Division push Obsidian to do the same?
It prompted an official response from the studio as well as a very short video featuring the leaders of the new Obsidian game project, Leonard Boyarsky and Tim Cain.
Said Obsidian's written statement: "We're extremely excited about our upcoming RPG, and we know you are too. We wish we could tell you all about it right now... but we're going to hold off until the time is right. What we did want to talk about was a question a lot of you have been raising: 'Will this upcoming game feature any loot boxes or other microtransactions?' "The answer is simply: 'no'. No microtransactions, of any kind, in our game."
In the very short video shared on Twitter, Leonard Boyarsky was asked whether there would be any microtransactions in the new game, to which he bluntly answered "nope". Tim Cain was then asked whether there would be any loot boxes, to which he equally bluntly answered "nope".
And now, a message from Leonard Boyarsky and Tim Cain.https://t.co/xfb4CUl0Ov pic.twitter.com/VvajRMEDeO — Obsidian (@Obsidian) December 15, 2017
Obsidian's written statement continued: "We also wanted to say a word about our partnership with Private Division, our publisher on this title. Far from 'pushing' us to put anything - microtransactions or otherwise - into our game, Private Division has been incredibly supportive of our vision, our creative freedom, and the process by which we work to make RPGs. They have been fantastic partners, and we are extremely excited to work with them through release, to put what we know is going to be an amazing game into as many hands as possible."
And finally: "As always, thank you so much for your support. We know we couldn't do what we do without our fans, and we want you to know that we put you guys first in every decision we make."
I was lucky enough to visit Obsidian in August this year and good grief did I make sure you knew about it. I rummaged through Obsidian's unused-game-idea drawer; I discovered what the cancelled Xbox One exclusive Stormlands was all about; I wrote a making of Alpha Protocol; I found out Fallout: New Vegas wanted a choice of three playable races; and I learned why Obsidian once turned down Game of Thrones. (Although my favourite piece of all actually came from you and your favourite memories of Obsidian games.)
More importantly, while touring the studio and quizzing the co-founders on everything I could possibly think of, it quickly became apparent Obsidian was hiding a big secret. Easily the biggest project in development at Obsidian - one occupying the bulk of the 175-person team - I wasn't allowed to know about.
"We're making a big RPG - and it's not Fallout!" was all Feargus Urquhart, Obsidian CEO, could say. And now we know Fallout co-creators Leonard Boyarsky and Tim Cain are leading the charge, it seems like a pertinent quote indeed.
All the secrecy, however, didn't prevent us - Chris Bratt went with me - accidentally ambling, on camera, right into the middle of the development area for the new game. Still, Urquhart was quick on the draw and redirected us elsewhere with a characteristically bubbly giggle.
What Obsidian's new RPG will be we don't know. But I do know Obsidian - despite all the success of Pillars of Eternity - still desires, more than anything, to make big, multiplatform games.
"Most of the gaming I do on my PlayStation 4 tends to be the big releases," Obsidian co-owner Chris Parker told me. "Those are the games that I play, those are the games that I love, those are the games that I want to make and compete with. Given a choice, I want to go spend all the money on a big budget title and make something that's unbelievable." |
Last summer, the Initial Coin Offering fundraising model hit mainstream success thanks to impressive, if not obscene, project valuations.
Fast forwarding to December, the ICO hype has cooled off after reports of legal issues for $200 million Tezos and poor market performance for $154 million Bancor.
Over six months, the ICO success rate plummeted from 50% to less than 20% according to tokendata.io. Projects find it hard to meet their valuation target as market concentration increases and demand stagnates.
Fierce competition
The ICO eco-system remains immature, although a staggering growth rate that outperforms start-up seed investment.
ICO investors do not seem to focus enough on the release of Minimum Viable Product or achievement of product-market fit. This phenomenon leads to sometimes absurd scenarios where an ICO without any prototype can raise considerable amounts of funds while some with a working product and a validated model struggle to raise cash.
With the emergence of extensive documentation and smart contract development libraries, less tech-savvy talent have all the means to conceptualise, set up and launch a successful ICO.
It results in a scenario where most of today's ICOs have no MVP, prototype or validation.
Instead of focusing on product development, many projects allocate their resources into a building a trustworthy environment for investors by designing appealing web application's visual experiences, providing 24/7 chat support via instant chat or incentivising community affiliation.
ICOs with attractive aesthetics, original visual experiences and outstanding community relations tend to attract most investment.
Targeting whales rather than a broader audience?
Market dynamics have shifted drastically in the past couple of months:
ICO supply has increased creating a highly competitive landscape.
Established cryptocurrency have witnessed impressive returns, diluting ICO return on investment rate.
Web design and community support appear to be as important as the stage of product development for investors.
No matter what, ICOs cannot expect capital to come "passively" like before, but rather to actively seek an audience in line with the project's mission and vision, whether they are thousands of investors or a handful of high net worth cryptocurrency hodlers.
To do so, projects can target either collective investment pools or institutionalised investors, each having different set of needs. Institutions expect face to face interactions, while collective pools require a 24/7 chat service.
The means to attract investment from large funds are more conventional than targeting smaller ticket-size investors who sometimes act more emotionally than logically.
First come first serve
An ICO investor is before anything a _cryptocurrency_ investor.
Therefore ICOs are competing with :
Established digital assets and cryptocurrencies.
ICOs that closed a fundraising round and are listed on exchanges.
The increased attention towards the "captains of crypto", Bitcoin, Litecoin, and Ripple to name a few, has undoubtedly negatively impacted ICO investment as a whole.
The sudden rise in Bitcoin price creates a sell pressure on every altcoin, including freshly liquid ICOs. As the capitalisation of Bitcoin increases, altcoins saw their BTC capitalisation shrink at impressive rates.
The dilution may have created an ICO risk-averse environment amongst investors:
Why invest in tokensales if hodling major cryptocurrencies result in unprecedented returns?
ICOs that occurred before last month's price pump have made handsome profits from their round of investment. The increment reduces cash constraints for early players but creates an even more competitive landscape for future ICOs.
That being said, attracting investors from outside the cryptocurrency realm should not be that difficult. New ICOs can benefit from the hype and give the opportunity to anyone to take part in a decentralised venture.
The complexity here is in targeting an audience and providing services in line with their investment expectations.
Long gone are the days where investors are merely looking to "flip" their tokens once they hit the exchange. To attract capital, ICOs have to invest in their operations, deploy fantastic community management and create a responsible, regulated and elegant environment for investment. |
Donald Trump has said he would be “honored” to meet the North Korean dictator, Kim Jong-un, “under the right circumstances”.
Donald Trump builds relations with authoritarian Asian leaders Read more
Trump did not make clear what preconditions would have to be met for such a meeting to occur, but his administration has demanded a freeze on nuclear and long-range missile tests as well as a readiness to negotiate North Korea’s complete nuclear disarmament.
Trump and his senior officials have also stressed that they will consider military options for constraining Kim’s regime if it perseveres with testing nuclear warheads or continues the development of intercontinental ballistic missiles capable of reaching the continental US.
The administration has sent an aircraft carrier and a guided missile submarine to the region, as a sign of its resolve, though most military analysts say pre-emptive strikes could trigger a catastrophic war.
Trump made his suggestion of talks earlier on Monday in an interview with Bloomberg News. “If it would be appropriate for me to meet with him, I would absolutely,” he said. “I would be honored to do it. If it’s under … the right circumstances. But I would do that.”
“Most political people would never say that,” he added. “But I’m telling you under the right circumstances I would meet with him. We have breaking news.”
At Monday’s White House press briefing, spokesman Sean Spicer said “a lot of conditions” would have to be met before any summit meeting, and that North Korea’s provocative behaviour would have to be “ratcheted down immediately”.
Spicer added that Pyongyang would have to “show signs of good faith” and added: “Clearly the conditions are not there right now.”
President Trump has made several complimentary references to Kim, describing him in a CBS interview over the weekend as “a smart cookie”. Spicer also offered qualified praise, claiming: “He’s obviously managed to lead his country forward,” while noting: “He is a young person to be leading a country with nuclear weapons.”
In the years since the armistice ending the Korean war in 1953, there has never been a meeting between US and North Korean leaders. In 2000, the then secretary of state Madeleine Albright met Kim’s father, Kim Jong-il. There has been no high-level contact since then.
Trump first offered to meet Kim Jong-un last June, during the election campaign, in order to highlight his differences with Hillary Clinton.
“What the hell is wrong with speaking? And you know what? It’s called opening a dialogue. It’s opening a dialogue,” Trump said. “If he came here, I’d accept him, but I wouldn’t give him a state dinner like we do for China and all these other people that rip us off when we give them these big state dinners.”
He went on to suggest he would serve Kim – and other visiting leaders – “a hamburger on a conference table”.
However, his overtures were stonewalled by Pyongyang on Monday, with the North Korea’s foreign ministry saying the country would speed up measures to bolster its nuclear program “at the maximum pace” in response to the new US sanctions.
A statement from the foreign ministry spokesman said the government was ready to respond to any option taken by the United States.
It said that during recent US-South Korean military drills, “US aggression hysteria” reached its highest point and the situation on the Korean peninsula inched closer “to the brink of nuclear war.”
Trump's stance on North Korea missile defence 'chaotic', says Seoul media Read more
Since coming to office in January, Trump has sent conflicting signals about his administration’s policy on North Korea, its readiness to use force, the culpability of China in failing to rein Pyongyang in, and its readiness to talk directly to Kim’s regime.
Last week, the secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, raised the possibility of direct talks as long as denuclearisation of the Korean peninsula was on the agenda. Last July, the North Korean regime declared itself in favour of that goal.
Asked for details about the exact preconditions for talks, a state department spokesperson said by email: “First and foremost these provocative tests must end. Then we will look for other indications [North Korea] is really ready to engage.”
The diplomatic wrangling comes as a controversial missile defence system whose deployment has angered China became operational in South Korea on Monday.
Washington and Seoul agreed to the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (Thaad) battery deployment in July in the wake of a string of North Korean missile tests.
“It has reached initial intercept capability,” an official said. |
Update - October 31: We have adjusted these estimates after the release of new numbers from Sony and Nintendo.
Original Story
Getting an accurate read on how well the new generation of consoles is selling is a difficult job, and it's complicated by sporadic and sometimes vague numbers provided by the console makers themselves. After taking a dive into the most recent numbers, Ars estimates that the PlayStation 4 has sold at least 42 percent more units worldwide than the Xbox One through September. This makes Sony's system responsible for at least 59 percent of hardware sales in the two-console market (PS4 and Xbox One).
Estimating Xboxes
Determining those ratios was not a simple process. As a starting point, we used Microsoft's announcement that it had shipped five million units of the Xbox One as of mid-April. Since then, the company has only released quarterly reports on how many total Xbox systems have shipped, lumping the Xbox 360 and the Xbox One together, which obscures the new console's true market performance.
For the April to June quarter, there were 1.1 million combined Xbox shipments. For the July through September quarter, there were 2.4 million combined Xbox shipments. Add all those numbers together, and you get an absolute ceiling of 8.5 million potential Xbox One shipments through September. For the new system to hit that ceiling, though, you'd have to assume that Microsoft has shipped exactly zero Xbox 360 units in the last six months, which is obviously false.
So how many Xbox 360 units did Microsoft ship in that time? We don't know for sure, but we can try to extrapolate from the previous years' performance. From quarterly reports, we know that Microsoft shipped 2.3 million Xbox 360 units in the April to September time frame in 2013. That's down from 2.8 million during the same six-month period in 2012.
We can only presume that Xbox 360 shipments continued to fall in 2014, with the drop enhanced by the intervening release of the Xbox One. But how enhanced? Let's be generous to the Xbox One and assume that Xbox 360 sales absolutely tanked, plummeting to one-third of their 2013 levels. That would mean about 766,000 of Microsoft's 3.5 million combined Xbox shipments for April to September 2014 were taken up by the Xbox 360, leaving about 2.75 million shipments for the Xbox One in that time. Adding that estimation back in gives us 7.75 million Xbox One shipments through the end of September.
Of course, shipments to stores are not the same as sales to consumers. Maybe stores are stuck with millions of unsellable Xbox One units clogging up their warehouses. Or perhaps every single shipped Xbox One has been gobbled up by a rabid customer base, leaving store shelves bare.
The truth is somewhere in the middle, of course, as stores tend to only order shipments of consoles they expect to sell to consumers in the near future. Wedbush Morgan analyst Michael Pachter tells Ars that game retailers usually order enough product to keep their stocks full for four weeks. Thus, almost everything shipped to retailers by the end of September would usually be sold through to consumers by the end of October.
Pachter told Ars that outside of the holidays, retailers might maintain a bit less than four weeks of stock for console hardware (as opposed to software), so let's be generous and say that retailers worldwide are, on average, sitting on only two weeks of Xbox One shipments that they have yet to sell to consumers. That would mean roughly 333,000 of the last roughly two million Xbox One shipments were not yet sold through to consumers by the end of September. Subtract those from our total shipment numbers, and we get our final estimate of about 7.42 million Xbox One units sold to consumers worldwide through the end of September.
Pondering PlayStations
For the PlayStation 4, the estimation process is a little simpler. Sony announced on August 12 that it had sold 10 million PS4 units through to consumers worldwide. That announcement came 130 days after the company announced seven million sales, meaning Sony had sold an average of just over 23,000 PS4 units a day in the intervening period.
Even assuming PS4 sales absolutely cratered after that, selling half as quickly, Sony would still have sold about 560,000 additional PS4 units in the 49 days from August 12 to the end of September. Add that, and we get a floor of about 10.56 million PS4s sold through the end of September, compared to a ceiling of about 7.42 million Xbox One units sold by the same time.
Dividing those numbers out leaves us with the PS4 selling about 42 percent better than the Xbox One, with Sony's system representing about 59 percent of the two-console market. And remember, this estimate is making assumptions that are quite generous to the Xbox One and quite pessimistic for the PlayStation 4. The real ratio might be even less encouraging for Microsoft.
Why does it matter?
Is the sales lead that the PS4 has built up big enough to really skew the market for console video games? Probably not yet. Most third-party game publishers would be crazy to simply ignore over 40 percent of their potential market, and millions of potential purchases, by focusing solely on the PlayStation 4 (absent some sort of outside incentive ). This is why third-party console exclusives are much rarer than they were in the era of the original PlayStation and PlayStation 2, where Sony's systems had a dominant market share and became the de facto standard for many third-party franchises.
Microsoft might need to worry if Sony's lead keeps expanding. An Xbox One with roughly 40 percent of the worldwide market is hard to ignore. An Xbox One that is whittled down over time to 25 or 30 percent of the market make it easier for publishers to decide to pass on ports (see: publishers' reaction to the Wii U's light sales ). Already, developers like Crytek are saying they're "not 100 percent happy with Xbox One sales."
There's no guarantee that this kind of market attrition will happen, of course—the Xbox One could easily bounce back and grab more market share in the future, or at least hold on to its respectable 40-ish percent. That might require a major turnaround in consumer sentiment, though, as the PS4 has outsold the Xbox One for the last nine months in the US, and that the Xbox One is basically a non-factor in Japan, where Sony's system is selling well. Then again, Microsoft is reportedly selling a lot of Xbox One units in China this month, so maybe that new market will help buoy the system's prospects. |
Mark Z. Danielewski is the author of some of the most daring, experimental novels in the last two decades. He’s here in the Philippines as a guest of National Book Store’s annual Readers and Writers Festival. In this interview, conducted both over email and in person, the writer both rejects the novel and affirms his love for it, while talking about how current events are shaping the narrative of his latest, ongoing work.
Philbert Dy: Your work tends to involve challenging the form of the novel, in ways both conceptual and physical. Where does this impulse come from?
Mark Z. Danielewski: I think my impulse to create in textual and visual ways is common in everyone. I just refused to heed those who told me a novel couldn’t look like what I had in mind. And I suppose that refusal is just as much about creative endeavors as it is about the civic responsibility to defend the right of the individual.
PD: How much does the physical object of the book still matter to you?
MZD: Not a lot. I’m not attached to what we expect a book to look like or act like. However, the material itself drives toward a certain kind of representation. In the case of The Familiar, voice finds shape and place in pages and spine. The novel enacts a description of space and time that exists in the heaviness of each volume — just carrying one will make you stronger — as well as in their inherent lightness — the more you read, the faster you will read them. By the end, twenty-seven volumes will be a struggle to lift and yet you will already carry it, effortlessly. You will know by heart how abandoning materiality allows the freedom of thought to take flight.
“with one eye on your end, and one eye on your practice, you will never be able to practice fully.” I think it’s the same way. If you’re constantly thinking about the form that it ends up becoming, you’re distracted from the work at hand.
PD: That strikes me as a strange attitude for a writer, who in general are usually protective of print as a medium. Where does this come fromt?
MZD: I think the blunt truth is that I’ve gotten older. House of Leaves came out in 2000, so I’ve been doing this for seventeen years. Early on, of course, there was this sense of place by having a book that you imagined placed in a bookstore. When I was young and very poor, I would wander into bookstores, and I would look at these books that I love from authors that I admire and think “maybe one day my book will be there.” When you’re talking to a younger author, there’s that experience. But for me, that slowly evaporated. It’s sort of like someone who’s been in a long, meaningful relationship. When you’ve never experienced that, you’re tantalized by that first moment of falling in love; that rush, that euphoria. And it’s wonderful. There’s no denying it. But as you get older and you create something more meaningful with someone, you realize that’s really nothing. That’s not what matters most in your relationship. Love becomes something much more capacious and larger.
I think another element as well is that I spend a long time on my books. So, the end product is less significant. I’ve been working on The Familiar for eleven years. It’s not even complete; four volumes have come out, the fifth is coming out in a month, and I’m working on the sixth. So, its end result is the smallest part of the labor and love and the creation that’s involved in the project. The image of the object, the materiality, has given way to something else. I don’t think I’m that unique, but one sign of maturity is letting go of these adolescent attachments. In fact, all attachments, to tell you the truth.
PD: How very Buddhist of you.
MZD: There is a bit of that, without necessarily attaching it to a particular belief. I would simply attach it to a practice of being open to the world. There was something that the Buddha discovered, something that Christ discovered. There are lessons along the way, and we can open up to the fact that for us to experience the magnificence of the world, we can’t be tethered to certain ideas and certain prejudices. It’s from those prejudices that a lot of unkindness and cruelty and injustice can arise.
PD: But in putting so much thought into how your books are designed, there must be some concern in this digital age how your books might look as an ebook, or an audiobook.
MZD: Yes, but again I think it’s the wrong way to go about creating something. You don’t create something by looking at the end product. There’s an old martial arts koan I heard many years ago. A student asks the master how long it will take him to become a black belt. The master says five years. Well what if I worked twice as hard? Ten years. Well what if I worked even twice as hard? Forty years. And he goes, well why when I work harder does it keep taking me longer? The master’s response is “with one eye on your end, and one eye on your practice, you will never be able to practice fully.” I think it’s the same way. If you’re constantly thinking about the form that it ends up becoming, you’re distracted from the work at hand. I’m very open to…if the work suddenly wanted to become something else, I’ll allow it to become that.
This is really what The Familiar is about: you can sort of say “oh it’s about a girl who finds a cat,” but really, it’s about how we have a conversation with the sensation of time that exceeds a decade. Your lifetime might last somewhere around a century. You’re building a family, or starting a company, and it takes decades. And if you’re just on Twitter and Instagram experiencing these momentary things, you’re going to be deprived of how to understand something that’s in a much larger scale. Once you get to scale, form itself becomes less significant.
So let’s say readership doesn’t make it, but Netflix of HBO says let’s do the series and conitnue it in a film. Why not? Let’s say I figure out how to do it in terms of sculpture, and I make bronzes out of the last volumes, why not? If it avails itself to that form, of course.
PD: Then why start out as a novel at all?
MZD: Because that’s how it speaks to me. I love it as a novel. But at the same time, as much as I love it, I don’t to attach myself to that feeling, either.
PD: I imagine a serial story poses very different challenges for an author. What have you found has been most difficult about it?
MZD: The pace is relentless. I’m right now in the midst of Volume 6 while Volume 5 (the conclusion to Season One) is coming out at the end of October with a tour already set for early November. And Volume 6 is due at the end of December. Even now in Manila I have to work on the book.
PD: Did you go back to the classic serials for inspiration and guidance? Or is it really just the form of television that’s guiding the work?
MZD: Somewhat. A perusal of Dickens plus fantasy books and YA (the usual suspects). Manga too (Lone Wolf & Cub). Nonetheless, the emerging form of the television show as novel took precedent.
PD: What are your favorite television shows now, and how do they inform The Familiar?
MZD: Contemporary classics come down to The Sopranos, Deadwood (unfinished), Battlestar Galactica, Breaking Bad. More recently I’ve immersed myself in Better Call Saul, Fargo (the one-season model is interesting), Game of Thrones, and I’m looking forward to starting the new Twin Peaks. My interest lies mostly with those shows that aim for a conclusion wherein the story becomes of lesser importance in light of larger themes. For example, The Wire moves from police procedural to a brilliant analysis of how a municipality struggles to survive as that better place we want all cities to be.
PD: What is it like collaborating with other people on a novel, a traditionally solitary venture?
MZD: The work is still mostly solitary with the added exhilaration that here and there visual components or research offers at the least some camaraderie and now and then a friendship. That’s nice.
PD: Can you take us through the process of creating a graphic for The Familiar? And do the design elements influence the prose in any way?
MZD: The design goes hand in hand with the writing. Changing a font will change the voice of a character. Changing the character will alter the layout and so on. These days, because I am so far along, the characters themselves reveal new visualizations which in turn alter the narrative course. I know what will happen in Volume 25 but I also know that I might not know what will happen in Volume 25. Xanther’s forest, for example, was anticipated, but how that place grew out of hashtags and forward slashes came from her mind and of course from the ra(n)ging feline creature stalking the novel . . .
PD: What have been your most memorable experiences in researching the elements of The Familiar?
MZD: The novel constantly demands that I move beyond myself, beyond the me. I get to talk to engineers, travel to Singapore, engage with former gang member, detectives. Each volume presents a new set of challenges and adventures. They’re all exciting and memorable. The fact that there is so much left to write means that my visit to the Philippines could very well reveal a pivotal moment in a future volume. That kind of anticipation is always thrilling.
PD: There is a question of temporality. You’re writing a serial novel over a long span of time, and the world’s very different from just 2014, where the story is currently set. How much do current events factor into what you’re writing?
MZD: They do, and that’s the interesting thing. It’s the perspective I have on a particular time. Now whether the time changes through other volumes, we’ll see. But we all have that experience; in this moment right now, we are influenced by what happened before us, and what’s going to happen. We anticipate some things correctly, and we fear things incorrectly. We try to ground ourselves in the moment, but at the same time, we recognize that we cannot function without a certain amount of anticipation. Let’s build our buildings so that they can withstand at earthquake. It’s not happening in the moment, but we have to plan for a certain eventuality. These two things have to live in concert. I don’t want to deprive the time of the novel, 2014, of itself. But at the same time, the way The Familiar is created, it allows a kind of porosity. Events of the future can settle in its contours.
To simplify it, if I bring up Donald Trump in volume 6, it’s going to reverberate in a very specific way that I know. The character might say, “oh, Donald Trump is on The Apprentice,” and we’ll know he became this appalling president a few years later. That kind of thing will play in constantly.
PD: So what are you thinking about now with regards to current events? Is there something weighing on you?
MZD: (Laughs) It’s incredibly heavy and incredibly light. I’m sort of classically American in experience: my mother is from a family that immigrated back in the 1600s, and my father is an immigrant, so I have these two experiences from my parents. One signifies the longevity of the country that preceded the revolution, and the other embraces America as a means of reinvention and acquiring a new culture. For any great country to function, it needs to look at its systems. A great leader knows that he or she won’t be recognized for the personality that they impress upon their population. They will be recognized and remembered for the system that stays in place. We think of Nero as a fool, but Pericles of Athens as someone who engendered a system of democracy and changed the world. We think of Napoleon as a military tyrant, but we remember George Washington for serving one term and then leaving behind this system that has enormous meaning. What weighs on me is whether or not the United States will be able to pass this test as they have to absorb the leadership of someone who isn’t qualified to be in that role. But nonetheless, it’s an opportunity for the system of democracy to preserve this apparatus of freedom. In that sense, it’s terrifying, but it’s also extremely exciting.
People constantly come up to me and say House of Leaves scared me, and let me tell you why I’m scared. And I tell them, listen, what you’re going to tell me, is all about you. You’re going to reveal to me what scares you, because that’s the way the book is created. It creates a space for the reader to engage their fears.
PD: What do you see as the future of prose and the novel? Is this something you think about? How does prose compete in an era of blockbuster movies and television?
MZD: If anything, the novel anticipates the end of blockbuster movies and television because it presents an experience that neither can compete with.
PD: What is it about the experience of the novel you find so powerful?
MZD: What I’ve always done, and I stand by this, is I never underestimate the reader, and I offer an experience that you can’t get anywhere else. Reading a book is not the same as seeing a movie. I won’t sell the rights to my books. But text and the way I use images manages to evoke and explore feelings and thoughts that a reader can’t access anywhere else.
A simple example: one of the most common cheats in a horror movie is to just initiate a loud sound when a door opens or a shadow passes. It’s a way of teasing out a reaction from the audience, and it’s really unearned. Anyone can do it. You can say that shadow was scary, but it really wasn’t. It was just the loud sound, which everyone’s going to jump at. In a book, to elicit those feelings, it required a much more complicated negotiation in the way you think and the way you feel. That is always the quest of literature: where you encounter a world that is familiar, or strange, and then it becomes a mirror to who you are and what you’re feeling. People constantly come up to me and say House of Leaves scared me, and let me tell you why I’m scared. And I tell them, listen, what you’re going to tell me, is all about you. You’re going to reveal to me what scares you, because that’s the way the book is created. It creates a space for the reader to engage their fears.
PD: This question of forms is interesting, since you’ve openly stated that your books are informed by other mediums. Why do that at all?
MZD: In some ways, I think it’s easy way to describe what’s going on. If I tell you House of Leaves is about a movie, it’s going to be familiar to you, and you’re going to understand it. And if I tell you The Familiar is a 27-volume novel that’s about a conversation with long time, your eyes are going to glaze over. But if I tell you, it’s like a television series, it gives you an entrance into something that will ultimately will not be that. Even though it will elicit those things, it moves far beyond it. And maybe in some ways, what I write is a competitive tangling with these forms, to in each case say, “no, the novel does it better.” The novel can do this in this way, and it’s so much more than that.
So maybe in some ways, I really am a crusader for the novel. As much as I talk about being open to forms, and I do believe that, I really love the novel. I love its capacity to handle that which has no other place in the world. My affinities are always with the people that never feel completely at home. And these books are exactly that. It speaks to that individuality.
PD: What are you currently reading?
MZD: As I’m about to leave for Manila, I’m circling a few options. I’m about to finish Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle: Book 2 while circling The Vorrh by B. Catling, Incarceration Nations by Baz Dreisinger, Fierce Kingdom by Gin Phillips, La Medusa by Vanessa Place, and Debths by Susan Howe. theMystery.doc also just landed on my doorstep.
Mark Z. Danielewski will have at Author Spotlight Event on August 26, 3PM, at the Raffles Makati, as part of National Book Sotres Readers and Writers Festival. |
Simon Wells (born 1961) is an English film director of animation and live-action films. He is the great-grandson of author H. G. Wells.
Early life and education
Born in Cambridge, he attended The Perse School and De Montfort University where he studied audio-visual design. Upon graduating he found a job at Richard Williams's studio where he animated commercials and other projects. Wells later supervised the animation on Who Framed Roger Rabbit.
Career
After the closing of Richard Williams Studio, Wells became a member of Amblimation, a studio owned by Steven Spielberg, where he served as director on films such as An American Tail: Fievel Goes West, We're Back! A Dinosaur's Story and Balto. Wells was set to direct a sequel to Casper, but the project was cancelled.
After the closure of Amblimation Wells joined DreamWorks where he worked as storyboard artist on many animated projects, he also directed The Prince of Egypt which was nominated for an Annie Award.
In 2002 he directed his first live-action film, a film adaptation of his great-grandfather's book The Time Machine.
Wells went back to DreamWorks Animation, where he continued as a story artist for films such as Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron (2002), Shrek 2 (2004), Madagascar (2005) and Flushed Away (2006). [1]
In 2011 he co-wrote and directed Mars Needs Moms using motion-capture technology during the filming.
Family
Wells resides in Los Angeles with his wife, Wendy, and daughters Meredith and Teagan. [1]
Filmography
Film
References |
Secretary of State John Kerry has yet to publicly respond to requests that he apologize to the State Department employees who were fired during the so-called “lavender scare.”
State Department spokesperson John Kirby told the Washington Blade on Tuesday during his daily press briefing that he doesn’t “have an update specifically . . . on a response” to the letter that U.S. Sen. Ben Cardin (D-Md.) sent to Kerry on Nov. 29.
“We will, of course, respond to the senator appropriately about that,” said Kirby.
Cardin notes in his letter that “at least 1,000 people were dismissed from” the State Department “for alleged homosexuality during the 1950s and well into the 1960s before the ‘scare’ ran its course.” The Maryland Democrat cites the State Department’s Bureau of Diplomatic Security that says employees “were forced out . . . on the ostensible grounds that their sexual orientation rendered them vulnerable to blackmail, prone to getting caught in ‘honey traps’ and made them security risks.”
The State Department also had a screening process in place that Cardin said sought to “prevent those who ‘seemed like they might be gay or lesbian’ from being hired.”
“The men and women who serve in our nation’s diplomatic corps represent some of the finest public servants America has to offer,” he told the Blade last month in a statement. “Not too long ago, however, many were harassed, hunted and forced out of their jobs by their own government because of their perceived sexual orientation. This unacceptable and un-American behavior, called the ‘lavender scare,’ has never been fully acknowledged by the federal government.”
The Human Rights Campaign cited Cardin in a separate letter it sent to Kerry on Dec. 22.
“While the policies and practices of that era have been reversed and the State Department has recently made enormous progress to provide equal opportunities and conditions for LGBTQ employees and their families, the State Department has never issued a formal apology for the actions taken during that time,” wrote HRC Government Affairs Director David Stacy.
Stacy also urges the State Department to create a permanent exhibit in the National Museum of American Diplomacy “to memorialize the victims and help to ensure that no other vulnerable group be targeted in the future.”
“We all recognize that this was a troubled part of our history here at the State Department,” Kirby told the Blade on Monday. “But beyond that I don’t have a specific update for you.”
Trump urged to remove pro-LGBT State Dept. officials
Family Research Council President Tony Perkins last month urged President-elect Trump to remove State Department officials who support the promotion of LGBT and reproductive rights abroad.
A spokesperson for the Trump transition team said in response to Perkins’ request that it is “simply absurd” to “think that discrimination of any kind will be condoned or tolerated in a Trump administration.” Kirby told the Blade during his Dec. 19 press briefing that the statement was “pretty succinct, pretty clear, pretty concise about where they stand on discrimination.”
“You know very well our views on human rights at large, not just here at the State Department but around the world,” said Kirby. |
Now THAT'S what I call a bear hug! Mother takes her fluffy polar cubs outdoors for the very first time
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When you've spent the first three months of your life snuggled up to your mother in her den, the Arctic seems a cold and daunting place.
So a reassuring cuddle never comes amiss.
These heart-warming images of a polar bear's introduction to the outside world were taken on the coast of Alaska.
The mother bear spends about three weeks with the cub in the area of her snow hole, allowing it to acclimatise, before leading it out on to the sea ice to learn the art of seal hunting.
I love you, Mum: The cub snuggles against its mother as the pair appear to take a little nap in the powdery Arctic snow
The pictures were taken by U.S. environmentalist Steven Kazlowski, 40, who was touring the region with an Inupiat Eskimo guide.
Spending months at a time away on expeditions, Mr Kazlowski has only now been able to share them with the world.
Mr Kazlowski said: 'We set up camp over two miles away, built a snow blind nearer to the den so we could watch without disturbing them, and then waited patiently.
'The mother would emerge with her little one in tow, and I was able to photograph them for a couple of days until, one calm clear evening, she left with her cub to head out on the sea ice.
'The cub was probably 13-14 weeks old or so. It was probably born early January last and spent its first weeks huddled up to mum safely inside the den.
'It's always exciting to see polar bears in nature. I will never tire of it as they are fascinating creatures. It is always special.'
Peekaboo: The mother polar bear and her cub just outside their snow den, pausing as the newborn takes in the great wide world for the first time
It's spring! The cub's excitement at the brand new world is obvious to see
However Mr Kazlowski , who this year lectured at the UN climate change conference COP-15 in Copenhagen, said he feels that sights like this will soon be lost to the history books thanks to global warming.
The oceans where the bears depend on the formation of summer sea ice so that they can hunt out at sea appear to be changing at an alarming rate, he said.
He said: 'Photographing bears I have seen first-hand how the Arctic is changing drastically in our lifetime.
'This past April, temperatures over the Chukchi Sea reached a record-breaking 40f (4c).
'In some areas the sea ice was extremely thin. Polar bears need that ice to survive. The Arctic environment is paying the price for the way our society has lived.' |
by
Last Thursday, news reports were largely devoted to the March 22 Brussels terror bombings and the US primary campaigns. And so little attention was paid to the verdict of the International Criminal Tribunal for (former) Yugoslavia (ICTY) finding Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic guilty of every crime it could come up with, including “genocide”. It was a “ho-hum” bit of news. Karadzic had already been convicted by the media of every possible crime, and nobody ever imagined that he would be declared innocent by the single-issue court set up in The Hague essentially to judge the Serb side in the 1990s civil wars that tore apart the once independent country of Yugoslavia.
Although it bears the UN stamp of approval, thanks to the influence of the Western powers, ICTY is essentially a NATO tribunal, with proceedings in English according to a jurisprudence invented as it goes along. Its international judges are vetted by Washington officials. The presiding judge in the Karadzic case was a South Korean, O-Gon Kwon, selected surely less for his grasp of ethnic subtleties in the Balkans than for the fact that he holds a degree from Harvard Law School. Of the other two judges on the panel, one was British and the other was a retired judge from Trinidad and Tobago.
As is the habit with the ICTY, the non-jury trial dragged on for years – seven and a half years to be precise. Horror stories heavily laced with hearsay, denials, more or less far fetched interpretations end up “drowning the fish” as the saying goes. A proper trial would narrow the charges to facts which can clearly be proved or not proved, but these sprawling proceedings defy any notion of relevance. Nobody who has not devoted a lifetime to following these proceedings can tell what real evidence supports the final judgment. The media stayed away from the marathon, and only showed up to report the inevitable “guilty” verdict condemning the bad guy. The verdict reads a bit like, “they said, he said, and we believe them not him.”
There was a civil war in Bosnia-Herzegovina from April 1992 to December 1995. Wars are terrible things, civil wars especially. Let us agree with David Swanson that “War is a crime”. But this was a civil war, with three armed parties to the conflict, plus outside interference. The “crime” was not one-sided.
Muslim False Flags
The most amazing passage in the rambling verdict by Judge O-Gon Kwan consists of these throw-away lines:
“With respect to the Accused’s argument that the Bosnian Muslim side targeted its own civilians, the Chamber accepts that the Bosnian Muslim side was intent on provoking the international community to act on its behalf and, as a result, at times, engaged in targeting UN personnel in the city or opening fire on territory under its control in order to lay blame on the Bosnian Serbs.”
This is quite extraordinary. The ICTY judges are actually acknowledging that the Bosnian Muslim side engaged in “false flag” operations, not only targeting UN personnel but actually “opening fire on territory under its control”. Except that that should read, “opening fire on civilians under its control”. UN peace keeping officers have insisted for years that the notorious Sarajevo “marketplace massacres”, which were blamed on the Serbs and used to gain condemnation of the Serbs in the United Nations, were actually carried out by the Muslim side in order to gain international support.
This is extremely treacherous behavior. The Muslim side was, as stated, “intent on provoking the international community to act on its behalf”, and it succeeded! The ICTY is living proof of that success: a tribunal set up to punish Serbs. But there has been no move to expose and put on trial Muslim leaders responsible for their false flag operations.
The Judge quickly brushed this off: “However, the evidence indicates that the occasions on which this happened pale in significance when compared to the evidence relating to [Bosnian Serb] fire on the city” (Sarajevo).
How can such deceitful attacks “pale in significance” when they cast doubt precisely on the extent of Bosnian Serb “fire on the city”?
The “Joint Criminal Enterprise” Label
ICTY’s main judicial trick is to have imported from US criminal justice the concept of a “Joint Criminal Enterprise (JCE)”, used originally as a means to indict gangsters. The trick is to identify the side we are against as a JCE, which makes it possible to accuse anyone on that side of being a member of the JCE. The JCE institutionalizes guilt by association. Note that in Yugoslavia, there was never any law against Joint Criminal Enterprises, and so the application is purely retroactive.
Bosnia-Herzegovina was a state (called “republic”) within Yugoslavia based on joint rule by three official peoples: Muslims, Serbs and Croats. Any major decision was supposed to have the consent of all three. After Slovenia and Croatia broke away from Yugoslavia, the Muslims and Croats of Bosnia voted to secede from Yugoslavia, but this was opposed by Bosnian Serbs who claimed it was unconstitutional. The European Union devised a compromise that would allow each of the three people self-rule in its own territory. However, the Muslim leader, Alija Izetbegovic, was encouraged by the United States to renege on the compromise deal, in the hope that Muslims, as the largest group, could control the whole territory. War thus broke out in April 1992.
Now, if you asked the Bosnian Serbs what their war aims were, they would answer that they wanted to preserve the independence of Serb territory within Bosnia rather than become a minority in a State ruled by the Muslim majority. Psychiatrist Radovan Karadzic was the elected President of the Bosnian Serb territory, “Republika Srpska”. However, according to ICTY the objective of the Serbian mini-republic was to “permanently remove Bosnian Muslims and Bosnian Croats from Serb-claimed territory … through the crimes charged”, described as the “Overarching Joint Criminal Enterprise”, leading to several subsidiary JCEs. Certainly, such expulsions took place, but they were rather the means to the end of securing the Bosnian Serb State rather than its overarching objective. The problem here is not that such crimes did not take place – they did – but that they were part of an “overarching civil war” with crimes committed by the forces of all three sides.
If anything is a “joint criminal enterprise”, I should think that plotting and carrying out false flag operations should qualify. ICTY does not seem interested in that. The Muslims are the good guys, even though some of the Muslim fighters were quite ruthless foreign Islamists, with ties to Osama bin Laden.
One of the subsidiary JCEs attributed to Karadzic was the fact that between late May and mid-June of 1995, Bosnian Serb troops fended off threatened NATO air strikes by taking some 200 UN peacekeepers and military observers hostage. It is hard to see why this temporary defensive move, which caused no physical harm, is more of a “Joint Criminal Enterprise” than the fact of having “targeted UN personnel”, as the Muslim side did.
The final JCE in the Karadzic verdict was of course the July 1995 massacre of prisoners by Bosnian forces after capturing the town of Srebrenica. That is basis of conviction for “genocide”. The Karadzic conviction rests essentially on two other ICTY trials: the currently ongoing ICTY trial of Bosnian Serb military commander General Ratko Mladic, who led the capture of Srebrenica, and the twelve-year-old judgment in the trial of Bosnian Serb General Radislav Krstic.
The Karadzic verdict pretty much summarizes the case against General Mladic, leaving little doubt where that trial is heading. Karadzic was a political, not a military leader, who persistently claims that he neither ordered nor approved the massacres and indeed knew nothing about them. Many well informed Western and Muslim witnesses testify to the fact that the Serb takeover was the unexpected result of finding the town undefended. This makes the claim that this was a well planned crime highly doubtful. The conclusion that Karadzic was aware of what was happening is inferred from telephone calls. In the final stages of the war, it seems unlikely that the Bosnian Serb political leader would compromise his cause by calling on his troops to massacre prisoners. One can only speculate as to what “a jury of peers” would have concluded. ICTY’s constant bias (it refused to investigate NATO bombing of civilian targets in Serbia in 1999, and acquitted notorious anti-Serb Bosnian and Kosovo Albanian killers) drastically reduces its credibility.
What exactly happened around Srebrenica in 1995 remains disputed. But the major remaining controversy does not concern the numbers of victims or who is responsible. The major remaining controversy is whether or not Srebrenica truly qualifies as “genocide”. That claim owes its legal basis solely to the 2004 ICTY judgment in the Krstic case, subsequently echoed (but never investigated) by the International Court of Justice.
“Procreative Implications”
That judgment was very strange. The conclusion of “genocide” depended solely on the “expert” opinion of a sociologist. It was echoed again in the Karadzic case. ICTY reiterated its earlier judgment that the “killings demonstrate a clear intent to kill every able-bodied Bosnian Muslim male from Srebrenica. Noting that killing every able-bodied male of a group results in severe procreative implications that may lead to the group’s extinction, the Chamber finds that the only reasonable inference is that members of the Bosnian Serb Forces orchestrating this operation intended to destroy the Bosnian Muslims in Srebrenica as such.”
In other words, even though women and children were spared, Srebrenica was a unique genocide, due to the “severe procreative implications” of a lack of men. The ICTY concluded that “the members of the Srebrenica JCE… intended to kill all the able-bodied Bosnian Muslim males, which intent in the circumstances is tantamount to the intent to destroy the Bosnian Muslims in Srebrenica.” Thus genocide in one small town.
This judgment is widely accepted without being critically examined. Since wars have traditionally involved deliberately killing men on the enemy side, with this definition, “genocide” comes close to being synonymous with war.
In fact, not all Srebrenica men were massacred; some have lived to be witnesses blaming the Bosnian Muslim leadership for luring the Serbs into a moral trap. Moreover, there were many Muslim soldiers temporarily stationed in Srebrenica who were not natives of the town, and thus their tragic fate had nothing to do with destroying the future of the town.
Never mind. ICTY did its job. Karadzic, aged 70, was sentenced to 40 years in prison. As if to make a point, the verdict was announced on the 17th anniversary of the start of NATO bombing of what was left of Yugoslavia, in order to detach Kosovo from Serbia. Just a reminder that it’s not enough for the Serbs to lose the war, they must be criminalized as well.
The verdict is political and its effects are political. First of all, it helps dim the prospects of future peace and reconciliation in the Balkans. Serbs readily admit that war crimes were committed when Bosnian Serb forces killed prisoners in Srebrenica. If Muslims had to face the fact that crimes were also committed by men fighting on their side, this could be a basis for the two peoples to deplore the past and seek a better future together. As it is, the Muslims are encouraged to see themselves as pure victims, while the Serbs feel resentment at the constant double standards. Muslim groups constantly stress that no verdict can possibly assuage their suffering – an attitude that actually feeds international anti-Western sentiment among Muslims, even though the immediate result is to maintain the Yugoslav successor states as mutually hostile satellites of NATO.
The other political result is to remind the world that if you get into a fight with the United States and NATO, you will not only lose, but will be treated as a common criminal. The US-led NATO war machine is always innocent, its adversaries are always guilty. The Roman Empire led the leaders it defeated into slavery. The United States Empire puts them in jail. |
Jean-Paul Calderone wrote an excellent blog post on the right way to structure a python project. This post will build on that post by covering concrete examples of how to write imports, how to distribute your package, and what not to do.
As an example, we’ll be looking at my own project, passacre. There is a python package called passacre immediately in the root of the project (i.e. not in a lib or src directory). Here’s what’s inside it:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 passacre/__init__.py passacre/__main__.py passacre/application.py passacre/config.py passacre/generator.py passacre/multibase.py passacre/test/__init__.py passacre/test/test_application.py passacre/test/test_config.py passacre/test/test_generator.py passacre/test/test_multibase.py passacre/test/util.py passacre/util.py
Intra-package imports
There is exactly one way code in your package should be importing other code inside your package, and that’s with absolute imports.
Basic imports
So, in this code, passacre.config needs to import some things from passacre.multibase . The import looks like this:
1 from passacre.multibase import MultiBase
Note that the import uses the fully-qualified name of the module, passacre.multibase . This is important for two reasons:
It makes your code very explicit in what you’re importing. Your code will continue to work in the future. There’s a very, very old method of doing imports (“implicit relative imports”) wherein one would write from multibase import Multibase instead, but this is gone in python 3. It should’ve been removed from python 2.7, but unfortunately, they forgot to do it.
There is another style of imports also covered in PEP 328, wherein the code would look instead look like this:
1 from .multibase import MultiBase
I’ll only mention explicit relative imports once more in this post; I very much prefer the look of absolute imports, but this is primarily an issue of style.
Test module imports
passacre also comes with a test suite in the passacre.test submodule. These tests necessarily have to import the passacre code to test it. Here’s what the passacre.test.test_multibase module does to import passacre.multibase :
1 from passacre.multibase import MultiBase
“But wait! That’s the same as before!” you cry. Since the fully-qualified module name is always the same, the imports are also always the same. This is another advantage of absolute imports—you always know exactly what you’re getting.
Sibling subpackage imports
For demonstration purposes, we’ll pretend that there’s another subpackage passacre.test2 that contains even more tests. Here’s the imaginary addition to the package structure:
1 2 passacre/test2/__init__.py passacre/test2/test_multibase.py
This test_multibase module needs to use some utility function from passacre.test.util , so it imports the function:
1 from passacre.test.util import excinfo_arg_0
Using absolute imports means that it doesn’t matter where in the project a module is when you try to import another module. Python will always look up the module to import from the root of your package.
Shadowed standard library module imports
Something I’m sure everyone has done at some point in their python career is name a module the same as a module in the standard library. If I wanted a passacre.socket module that used the standard library socket module, import socket should give me the standard library module instead of passacre.socket . PEP 328 covers this too by adding a __future__ feature absolute_import , which is on by default in python 3.0 and higher.
Activating absolute_import has exactly one effect: disabling implicit relative imports. Since __future__ features only affect the module enabling them, I can simply add from __future__ import absolute_import to passacre/socket.py and any import socket calls in it will import the standard library socket module.
Distribution
Once your package has some code in it that can run, you’ll probably want to let other people use your package as well.
setup.py
setup.py is your package’s entry point into distutils or setuptools. Every package should have one, as that’s how your code gets put into the right place for your users. I won’t go too much into detail in how to use them; the links above are for tutorials which will explain how to get started.
My own rule of thumb is to use distutils unless I absolutely require a feature from setuptools. Some people will say to always use setuptools, and that’s okay too.
Executable scripts
Jean-Paul’s post recommends putting python scripts in the bin directory of your project root. This is fine advice, but there are newer methods which mean you don’t need a bin directory at all.
First, there’s __main__.py . This is not quite the same as an executable script, but it allows a package to be executed via python -m . For example, passacre/__main__.py means that one can execute python -m passacre and the __main__.py file will be executed. PEP 338 has more details on exactly how this works.
passacre/__main__.py is fairly small:
1 2 from passacre.application import main main ()
Since __main__.py is executed directly, the actual main function should live elsewhere if you actually want to be able to test it. This way, test code can also from passacre.application import main and be able to call that function.
python -m is not limited to executing packages. For times when you want to quickly run some module that has an if __name__ == '__main__': block in it, you can use python -m passacre.thatmodule . Importantly, this will ensure that python recognizes your whole package, which means that your imports won’t fail.
Sometimes a project wants explicit binaries instead of requiring their users to use python -m . For this case, setuptools has automatic script creation. Here’s an excerpt from passacre’s setup.py file:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 from setuptools import setup # [...] setup ( # [...] entry_points = { 'console_scripts' : [ 'passacre = passacre.application:main' ], }, )
(The actual setup.py uses extras, but that’s not important for this blog post.)
This console_scripts definition makes a passacre executable that does the same thing as the __main__.py script did: imports the main function from passacre.application and calls it.
Using distutils or setuptools to generate and/or install your python scripts is important—as a part of the install process, the shebang line (e.g. #!/usr/bin/env python ) will be rewritten to use the python that ran setup.py . So, if someone does /usr/local/bin/python2.6 setup.py install , passacre will start with #!/usr/local/bin/python2.6 .
Additionally, python -m and automatic script creation can be used beautifully together—a project can have a scripts subpackage containing one module for every executable script. For example, passacre_generate could be passacre_generate = passacre.scripts.generate:main and also contain:
1 2 if __name__ == '__main__' : main ()
For projects with a lot of scripts, this is a good organization method to keep the scripts separate from the more library-ish code.
Documentation
Please have some, especially if you’re distributing your package. Docstrings are a good start, but a tutorial written with sphinx and/or a README with usage examples goes a long way.
Common pitfalls
Don’t directly run modules inside packages
Seriously. Never ever ever do this. What I mean specifically is doing python passacre/__main__.py , or python passacre/test/test_application.py , or anything else that starts with python passacre/ . This will prevent python from knowing where the root of your package is, and so absolute imports and explicit relative imports will fail, or not import the code you think it should be importing.
If you think you have to do this, you’re wrong. Instead, you probably want to use python -m , or generate an executable script to run, or use a test runner. If you don’t think any of those cover your use case, leave a comment and I’ll show you a better method.
Don’t set PYTHONPATH to try to make it go
If you think you have to set PYTHONPATH , you’ve probably fallen victim to the first pitfall and are trying to execute a module directly. With proper package layout and proper imports, you won’t need to set PYTHONPATH to run your code.
Don’t modify sys.path from code in your package
Like modifying PYTHONPATH , but worse because it’s easier to affect other people using your code. Never do this, as it will break and make people trying to use your code very annoyed.
Don’t make your project root a package
Your project root should contain a python package, not be a package itself. If you do this, your setup.py will be very confusing (or not work at all) and it will be very difficult to run your code.
Conclusion
Really, writing a python package isn’t hard. The rules above are very simple and will lead to simple, easy-to-read-and-understand python code. |
To lend some context to this review, I was a big fan of the first Transformers film. Sure, it was loud and the camera shook too much, but it was a great summer film and a solid take on the idea that alien robots wanted nothing more than to turn into Earth vehicles and fight each other. Peter Cullen came back to voice Optimus Prime, and just when the human characters became intolerable, there was another battle scene. I went into Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen with high hopes that this film would offer more of the same, and thinking the critics were merely being snobs when they panned it.
Boy, was I wrong. This is what happens when the first film in a series becomes a monstrous hit, and no one at the studio dares to say no to you.
The movie is over two-and-a-half hours long, and about half of the film could have been cut with no harm to the narrative, such as it is. You see the mother from the first movie eat pot brownies and go completely insane. Why? I have no clue. There is a female Transformer whose job it is to seduce Sam Witwicky, and in one scene she grows a tail. Why? So we can see her underwear. There are new Transformers, but they are introduced only to do nothing for most of the movie, and then die.
For some reason, in this film the Transformers spit... often. They spit on characters. They spit when they're talking. One character spits on two people in a lingering shot that shows how scary it is to have a menacing character spit on you. There are two new Autobots who seem to wrap up every racial stereotype from a nightmarish Larry the Cable Guy routine into horrific vocal and character design, and the movie gives them nearly as much time as Optimus Prime. One has a gold tooth.
The special effects may have been amazing in the first film, but they take a major step backwards here; the robots barely seem to interact with the space they're in, and rarely seem to be lit from the same light sources as the "real" characters. The answer to this seemed to be setting some scenes in completely computer-generated backgrounds and settings. The movie might as well have been animated in many places. A few revelations don't make much sense, either. The Transformers and Decepticons are machines—but they're grown in organic egg sacs?
The story makes very little sense, and introduces so many strands and subplots that by the end it's nearly impossible to care about anything. The humans pepper everyone with machine gun rounds for very little reason, as it never seems to do anything to anyone. The human characters have very little to do, and no reason to be near each other; there isn't a single relationship that is used for dramatic purposes in a believable way. Megan Fox reprises her role so she can stand around and look hot, jiggling in the appropriate ways when she runs endlessly in slow motion. During one scene, her new pet Decepticon humps her leg as she smiles at him. I guess we know where those egg sacs come from now.
We learn that Barack Obama dislikes the Autobots, and becomes something of a bad guy when he uses bureacracy to try to stop them. We learn that while StarScream is Megatron's lackey, Megatron is also the lackey of a character called The Fallen, who glowers menacingly throughout the film, and looks like a Lego Bionicle character gone tragically wrong. The movie is based on a line of toys, so there were plenty of parents who brought their young kids... who proceeded to cry every time one of the characters was brutally murdered. Remember, if you spray coolant and not blood, you get to keep your PG-13 rating!
By the end of the movie you're stuck in an interminable firefight where dozens of Autobots and Decepticons die, and you'll be trying to figure out which is which.
I tend to be a compulsive note-taker when I'm tasked with reviewing something, but nothing about the new Transformers film made me feel the need to get my pen out. I can barely remember anything about the movie hours later, other than it was loud and went on forever. I do have one, lone note: "parachute poop." The movie wants to point out that even machines have bodily functions, and it does so every chance it gets. At one point you see a robot's swinging testicles, and a character remarks on them. The audience laughs.
The editing is a mess, the jokes are low-brow, the racial humor is cringe-worthy, and the film meanders forever until we find out that the lion had courage all along. There is an item that can bring characters back to life, but of course it can't be used when it really counts. The end of the movie sets up the inevitable sequel, which will likely cost $1 billion, be filmed entirely in slow motion, and still not make a lick of sense. |
(CNN) Myanmar is facing growing condemnation from the Muslim world over its failure to halt the violence directed toward the minority Rohingya ethnic group, amid protests across the globe.
So far, an estimated 123,600 Rohingya have fled to neighboring Bangladesh to escape escalating violence in their native Rakhine State, according to a United Nations official in Bangladesh.
Leaders of countries with majority Muslim populations including Malaysia, Indonesia, Bangladesh and Pakistan have led efforts to increase pressure on the Myanmar government.
Malaysia's foreign minister summoned Myanmar's ambassador to express its concern, according to state-run Bernama news, and Indonesian Foreign Minister Retno Marsudi held talks Monday with Aung San Suu Kyi, the de facto leader of Myanmar. Marsudi was due to meet with her counterpart in the Bangladeshi capital Dhaka on Tuesday.
"(Indonesia) speaks not only on behalf of global Muslim concerns but also ASEAN (the Association of Southeast Asian Nations). It feels a real sense of urgency," Herve Lemahieu, research fellow at Sydney's Lowy Institute, told CNN.
In contrast, Western leaders have have so far appeared reluctant to speak out strongly on the issue. According to Lemahieu, the Western world's attention is still fixed elsewhere in Asia, on the nuclear standoff in North Korea.
"On the other hand, people, particularly in the West, are torn between their affection with the cause of Aung San Suu Kyi and then the very gory reality," he said.
United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres released a statement Tuesday saying he is "deeply concerned about the security, humanitarian and human rights situation in Myanmar's Rakhine state."
Guterres said "the authorities in Myanmar must take determined action to put an end to this vicious cycle of violence and to provide security and assistance to all those in need."
Also Tuesday, UNICEF released a statement saying that, of the Rohingya who have crossed into Bangladesh, "as many as 80% of them are women and children."
"In Bangladesh, UNICEF is scaling up its response to provide refugee children with protection, nutrition, health, water and sanitation support," the organization said.
Local residents attend a mass protest in Chechnya's provincial capital Grozny, Russia, on Monday.
The government of Myanmar, which is also known as Burma, blames "terrorists" for starting the violence. Rohingya militants killed 12 security officers in border post attacks almost two weeks ago, according to state media, intensifying the latest crackdown.
The Rohingya, who are denied citizenship by Myanmar, are considered some of the most persecuted people in the world. The predominantly Buddhist country says they are Bangladeshi and Bangladesh says they're Burmese.
It is the second time in less than a year that a military crackdown has led to a mass exodus.
Phil Robertson, deputy director of Human Rights Watch, said while efforts were being made by the UN and through diplomatic channels, more nations needed to speak out.
"(Countries) could say more and they should say more. The government of Burma takes a look at these things and they count what people are saying publicly versus what they're saying privately," he said.
Indonesian activists protest against Myanmar in Surabaya, Indonesia's second-largest city, on Tuesday.
Protests across world for Rohingya
In solidarity with the Muslim minority, tens of thousands of people marched through the Chechen Republic's capital city of Grozny.
According to a government statement, the protest in Chechnya, which is part of the Russian Federation, was attended by more than a million people.
Protests in Chechnya are heavily regulated and typically orchestrated by authorities, said former Moscow Bureau Chief Jill Dougherty, who added that the protests could be an effort by Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov to position himself as a global Muslim leader.
On his official Instagram account, Kadyrov labeled attacks on Rohingya as "genocide."
There were reports of smaller protests outside Myanmar embassies in countries around the world, including Indonesia, Pakistan, Germany and Australia.
Pakistani Foreign Minister Khawaja Muhammad Asif on Monday expressed "deep anguish" at the continuing violence, which he termed "deplorable."
Even the Afghan Taliban issued a statement against the bloodshed, using its channel on the Telegram app. "We similarly call on Muslims worldwide to not forget these oppressed brothers of yours," read the message.
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi was due to arrive in Myanmar Tuesday for talks with the country's leadership, including Suu Kyi, but analysts said it was unclear how big a priority the Rohingya were. The visit was scheduled before the latest outbreak of violence.
"As far as the Rohingya issue is concerned, yes, it is an issue for Myanmar, yes, it is an issue for the region, including India, and in the discussions with his counterpart I'm sure he'll bring up the issue," said K. Yhome, senior fellow at India's Observer Research Foundation.
A local resident chants slogans during a mass protest in Chechnya's provincial capital Grozny, Russia, on Monday.
Refugees trapped, thousands flee
Rohingya refugees have continued to pour over the border into Bangladesh ever since the latest outbreak of violence on August 25, according to the United Nations.
Speaking Friday, a spokesman for Guterres said the UN head was "deeply concerned" and urged calm.
Satellite images released by Human Rights Watch showed entire villages burned to the ground in the ongoing clash between Myanmar military forces and Rohingya militants.
Refugees are bringing with them horrific stories of devastation and murder from inside Rakhine State . "Everything, destroyed by the military. Now we are without food or blankets ... Genocide is going on there," refugee Mohammed Harun told CNN.
Just across the border, activists claim at least another 30,000 refugees are stuck in the mountains along the Naf river, unable to cross into Bangladesh but afraid to return home.
Video provided to CNN by activists showed men, women and children stranded in dense jungle, making shelters out of sticks and sheets.
JUST WATCHED Who are the Rohingya and why are they fleeing? Replay More Videos ... MUST WATCH Who are the Rohingya and why are they fleeing? 02:30
"The human lives that are most vulnerable must be rescued immediately without delay," executive director of Burma Human Rights Network (BHRN), Kyaw Win, said in a statement.
'We will rape you and kill you'
Amid the protests, the BHRN released a new report into the methodical persecution of the minority Rohingya by Myanmar's government.
"The National League for Democracy (NLD) has never spoken up in defense of the human rights of the Rohingya and Daw Aung San Suu Kyi's government has kept in place all laws and policies which discriminate against Rohingya," the report's conclusion said.
Protesters in Kolkata, India, burn Myanmar's Aung San Suu Kyi in effigy on Monday.
In writing the report, the activists conducted more than 350 interviews over an eight-month period from people across Myanmar, including inside Rakhine State, where access is often restricted.
Among those interviewed were witnesses to the 2016 Myanmar military crackdown, which led to an exodus of refugees across the border into Bangladesh.
"The military entered our hamlet, brought together all the women and took them to the ... forest," two sisters aged 16 and 14 told interviewers after fleeting to Bangladesh.
"They beat some women very badly while asking, 'Where are the guns that were taken from our barracks? Tell us or we will rape you and kill you'."
Others described the campaign of theft and property destruction that had been directed at the Rohingya.
"They tied people to poles inside the home then burnt down the homes," 13-year-old Win Maw told interviewers, adding that he doesn't know if his parents are alive or dead. |
Pirate-Movie-Productions Alaska segment from PERCEPTIONS with Gigi Ruf, Elias Elhardt, and Manuel Diaz
Alaska, the final frontier…the place where dreams come true or frustration takes over hand, just in a blink of an eye….
Snow conditions were difficult this year in AK, much like everywhere else last season, but nevertheless, Gigi, Elias and Manuel gathered beginning of April in Haines, to end the season, fully motivated with some proper freeriding. Gigi and Manuel have been riding together the last couple of years up in Alaska, so they are a routined team, pushing and helping each other. Elias was the Rookie in the crew, but there couldn’t be a better match and the dream team was complete.
Download the Full Movie PERCEPTIONS at iTunes HERE
Watch more snowboard videos HERE |
The Week in Review
The National Security Agency has overstepped its legal authority, according to an audit cited in published reports on Friday. “We have got to do everything we can to combat terrorism and protect the American people,” Sen. Bernie Sanders said on The Thom Hartmann Program, but he renewed his call for legislation to limit surveillance to cases when intelligence and law enforcement authorities have specific reasons to be suspicious of someone. Around the world, it was a week of bloodshed in Egypt as government security forces cracked down on demonstrations loyal to the elected leader deposed by the military. In this country, Sanders applauded students who gathered petitions from people all over Vermont supporting legislation to require labels on food made from genetically engineered ingredients. He pressed the case for modernizing the Postal Service instead of cutting services. And in a Monday op-ed written with Sen. Elizabeth Warren for The Huffington Post, Sanders and weighed into the debate over the Federal Reserve’s role in restoring full employment.
NSA Domestic Spying The Washington Post broke the story on National Security Agency infractions based on top-secret documents provided by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. The violations, many of them accidental, mostly involved unauthorized surveillance of Americans or foreign intelligence targets in the United States. Both are restricted by law and executive order. Sanders has introduced the Restore Our Privacy Act to put strict limits on sweeping powers used by the NSA and Federal Bureau of Investigation to secretly track telephone calls by millions of innocent Americans who are not suspected of any wrongdoing. "We must give our intelligence and law enforcement agencies all of the tools that they need to combat terrorism but we must do so in a way that protects our freedom and respects the Constitution's ban on unreasonable searches," Sanders said. Sign a petition supporting Sanders’ bill»
Bloodbath in Egypt Dozens of people were reportedly killed in renewed clashes on Friday as thousands of followers of the embattled Muslim Brotherhood took to the streets of Cairo and other cities facing police officers authorized to use lethal force if threatened. President Obama announced Thursday that the United States had canceled joint military exercises with Egypt in the wake of a crackdown on Wednesday by security forces left 640 people dead. Obama asked his staff to “reassess” U.S. aid to Egypt, but he held back from actually reducing or canceling the $1.3 billion in annual aid, much of which goes to the military.
Food Labels Vermont Public Interest Research Group organizers on Thursday celebrated the largest-ever summer outreach campaign. VPIRG canvassers went door-to-door in cities, towns and villages throughout Vermont and collected about 30,000 signatures in support of legislation to require labels on food that contain genetically modified organisms. Sanders, who introduced legislation in Washington to make it clear that states have the right to require GMO food labels, spoke to the volunteers outside the Statehouse in Montpelier. “The truth of matter is that labeling of GMOs is not radical concept. It's done throughout Europe and dozens and dozens of countries throughout world, so if people tell you it can't be done – it's too complicated – they're not telling you the truth,” the senator said. Watch a report on WPTZ-TV »
USPS The Postal Service would have posted a profit for last quarter without the "unnecessary burden" imposed during the Bush administration that it must sock away more than $5 billion a year in a fund that already has more than enough set aside to pay for future retirees’ health care, Sen. Sanders told Ed Schultz on Thursday. Listen to the interview»
The Fed As President Obama weighs a replacement for Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, Sens. Sanders and Elizabeth Warren said the next central banker must address whether the Fed’s top priority is meeting its full-employment mandate, whether to break up “too-big-to-fail” banks, whether the deregulation of Wall Street contributed to the recession and whether $2 trillion that financial institutions have parked at the Fed should be used to help small- and medium-size businesses create jobs. Read the column for The Huffington Post »
Vermont Students Head to Pine Ridge Reservation Seven students and a teacher from Mt. Mansfield Union High School in Jericho, Vt., are leaving on Saturday for a trip to one of the poorest counties in the United States. Their goal is to help the Oglala Lakota Sioux on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. Working with a non-profit organization, the Vermont students will spend several days learning about the history and people of the South Dakota Black Hills. Senior Ana Wright said she wanted to make the trip because these families “are living in terrible conditions” and “we should definitely help them because no one should be living like this.” Sanders praised the students for their willingness to confront such challenges. Read a Vt. Bernie Buzz article » |
The Entertainment Software Association today announced it would receive $950,000 from the state of California to pay for legal fees from last year's Supreme Court case over violent video games.
The ESA, a trade group that represents video game publishers in the U.S., was the lead respondent in the Brown v. EMA court case that would have banned the sales of violent video games to minors. The ESA said it would donate a portion of the proceeds to develop after-school educational programs for underserved communities in Oakland and Sacramento.
“Senator Yee and Governor Schwarzenegger wasted more than $1 million in taxpayer funds at a time when Californians could ill afford it,” said Michael D. Gallagher, president and CEO of ESA in a statement. “However we feel strongly that some of these funds should be used to improve services for California’s youth.” |
SINGAPORE - Over nine in 10 Bangladeshi migrant workers here are given unclean and unhygienic food to eat from caterers, a new survey has found.
Most also complained that they do not get enough food, according to a survey of 500 workers led by a National University of Singapore (NUS) research centre.
"In our research we thought salary disputes was the main thing they faced, but through talking to the workers it turned out that food was a bigger problem," said Professor Mohan J. Dutta, director of the Center for Culture-Centred Approach to Research and Evaluation (Care), speaking at a media conference on Thursday.
"That food can be so integral to health can be something so simple but easily overlooked."
The two-year research project funded by an NUS grant also saw a month-long awareness campaign launched on Thursday to highlight the food issues migrant workers face. This includes a television commercial, bus and MRT ads and a 10-minute documentary.
One issue Prof Dutta and his team found over the course of their two-year project was that despite clear regulations on how long food can be stored and how it should be labeled, many packets of food did not have labels.
"Workers mentioned falling sick from eating the food," he said, adding that many workers reported food meant for lunch being prepared by companies 12 hours earlier.
The workers surveyed were contacted at MRT stations, Little India, grocery stores, dormitories and through migrant worker group HealthServe, which partnered Care in the project.
Separately, a survey by migrant worker group TWC2 of 195 maids found that four in 10 of those who did not get a weekly day did not receive payment in lieu. Some 20 respondents had no days off at all.
The survey was conducted from July 2013 to October 2014, after it became mandatory at the start of 2013 for employers to give maids one rest day a week or payment in lieu.
In its report, TWC2 made several recommendations to the Government, including stepping up random checks on employers to enforce the weekly day off legislation.
It also recommended giving maids the same provisions as those under the Employment Act so that they are entitled to a full 24-hour rest period each week and to double their daily wage as compensation for working on their day off. The survey found that the average compensation maids received, if they did receive any, was $17.50, or around one day's pay.
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Audi was a pioneer in the area of autonomous car technology but the automaker has been overtaken by rival Mercedes-Benz in the race to offer cars that can drive themselves. That won’t be the case for long as Audi’s next-generation A8, due on the market in 2017, as a 2018 model, will be able to drive itself in certain situations.
The information was revealed to Motoring by Stefan Moser, head of product and technology communications at Audi. Moser explained that autonomous cars will drive much “better than human beings" as they can’t be distracted.
Moser went on to reveal that Audi would like to be one of the first to offer a car that can be driven all the time in autonomous mode but said the technology will likely have to wait for legislation to catch up. In Germany, for example, cars are currently allowed to drive in autonomous mode for only 10 seconds at a time.
Audi recently showcased an RS 7 concept car that could lap a race track at race car speeds completely on its own. To do this it relied on highly accurate GPS data as well as a special 3D camera. However, Moser said Audi’s autonomous technology designed for the production world will be even more complex. He said there will be much more sensors as well as laser guidance systems that can see through fog and snow, as the system must be capable of working in all conditions.
Audi will preview the styling of its next-gen A8 with a concept at next month's 2014 Los Angeles Auto Show. The production version will be first shown in 2016 before going on sale the following year. The autonomous systems debuting on the car are likely to be a traffic jam assistant and highway autopilot.
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Syria has said its military command is still studying a proposal for an Eid al-Adha ceasefire with rebels, contradicting international mediator Lakhdar Brahimi's announcement that Damascus had agreed to a truce.
With the Muslim holiday beginning at sunset the day before, Thursday will be the first test of whether either side intends to silence their guns, at least temporarily.
Brahimi, the joint UN-Arab League special envoy, told a news conference in Cairo on Wednesday that both the government and most rebel groups would observe the truce for the Muslim holiday.
Within an hour, Syria's Foreign Ministry said in a statement that the proposal was still being studied and that "the final position on this issue will be announced (Thursday)".
A previous ceasefire arrangement in April collapsed within days, with the government and the opposition each accusing the other of breaking it.
Susan Rice, the American envoy to the United Nations, told reporters that "many are duly skeptical about prospects for even a temporary ceasefire, given Assad's records of broken promises".
She said the United States "strongly supports" Brahimi's call for a ceasefire, but she added that the "government must make the first move".
Brahimi has crisscrossed the Middle East over the past two weeks to push the warring factions and their international backers to agree to the truce - a mission that included talks with Syria's President Bashar al-Assad in Damascus at the weekend.
The Reuters news agency reported that Brahimi later on Wednesday told the UN Security Council that Assad had accepted a truce for the holiday, which starts on Thursday and lasts four days, during the talks.
Brahimi did not specify the precise time period for a truce. Nor did the initiative include plans for international observers.
Bloodshed continues
The latest developments came as opposition activists and Syrian state media traded blame on Wednesday for the killing of at least 25 people, including women and children, in the town of Douma near Damascus.
"There was a horrible massacre in Douma last night," the media office of the opposition network in Douma said in a statement.
"More than 20 civilians have been slaughtered by shabiha [pro-government militia] who were at a checkpoint and then stormed into a residential building nearby."
Syrian state television said 25 people had been killed by "terrorist members of the so-called 'Liwa al-Islam.'"
State media labels opposition members as "terrorists".
In southern Damascus, state television said a car bomb in killed six people on Wednesday.
"The terrorist explosion caused by the car bomb in Daf al-Shok caused the martyrdom of six citizens and 20 wounded," a report said.
Meanwhile, Syrian warplanes carried out bombing raids on the strategic northern town of Maarat al-Numan and nearby villages while rebels surrounded an army base to its east, activists said.
Five people from one family, including a woman and child, were reported killed in the air strikes.
Maarat al-Numan has fallen to the rebels, effectively cutting the main north-south highway, a strategic route for Assad to move troops from the capital Damascus to Aleppo, Syria's largest city, where the rebels have taken a foothold.
But without control of the nearby Wadi al-Daif military base, the rebels' grip over the road is tenuous.
The rebels say the ferocity of counter-attacks by government forces shows how important holding the base is to Assad's military strategy.
Residents flee
As violence in the country continued, hundreds of refugees poured into a makeshift refugee camp at Atimah overlooking the Turkish border, fleeing a week of what they said were the most intense army bombardments since the uprising began.
"Some of the bombs were so big they sucked in the air and everything crashes down, even four-storey buildings," one refugee, a 20-year-old named Nabil, told Reuters at the camp.
"We used to have one or two rockets a day, now for the past 10 days it has become constant, we run from one shelter to another. They drop a few bombs and it's like a massacre."
The army relies on air power and heavy artillery to push back the rebels.
Human Rights Watch said the Syrian air force had increased its use of cluster bombs across the country in the past two weeks.
The New York-based organisation identified, through activist video footage of unexploded bomblets, three types of cluster bombs which had fallen on and around Maarat al-Numan. |
Sanders campaigns in Nevada in February. (Jim Young/Reuters)
Concerns about party unity are on the increase.
In the wake of Bernie Sanders’s latest dustup with the Democratic establishment, some of his supporters are blanching.
“He talks about a revolution, but he needs to maybe define that in ways of civility, you know?” says Pete Gertonson, a Sanders superdelegate from Idaho. “He needs to get a grip on things and show us that he’s a leader. Is he gonna be the leader of an angry mob that he can’t control, or is he going to be the leader of something that will grow?”
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After last weekend’s violent Nevada state Democratic convention – where Bernie Sanders supporters shouted down speakers, threw chairs, and made death threats against the state party chairwoman for her supposed pro–Hillary Clinton bias – national party leaders widely expected the Vermont senator to condemn such behavior.
The Sanders campaign instead issued a scorched-earth statement after the convention’s close, blasting Democratic leadership in Nevada and across the nation while offering just a single line condemning “any and all forms of violence.” The senator also dodged a question from an NBC reporter, abruptly ending an interview when asked if he had a response to the violent behavior displayed by his supporters.
Sanders’s defiance hit a nerve, uniting leaders across the Democratic establishment in their condemnation of his response. “I thought he was going to do something different,” Senate minority leader Harry Reid said later on Tuesday. “Bernie should say something and not have some silly statement. Bernie is better than that.” DNC chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz said it “added more fuel to the fire.” Democratic senator Dianne Feinstein worried that the party could face the same kind of paralyzing unrest it experienced during the 1968 Chicago convention.
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And Sanders’s supporters aren’t exactly rallying to his defense. Almost none of his high-profile surrogates, save Arizona congressman Raul Grijalva, have publicly backed his stance. And some of his own superdelegates seem hesitant to support the senator’s continued intransigence; most are concerned over the effect further angry outbursts could have on party unity. Many Sanders superdelegates appear loath to discuss the Nevada turmoil. Calls to several Sanders-supporting congressional offices went unreturned or were politely rebuffed, and one state party committeewoman says she won’t speak about the issue until after her upcoming reelection.
Others are refusing to take sides.
Sanders’s defiance hit a nerve, uniting leaders across the Democratic establishment in their condemnation of his response.
“That’s what Senator Sanders felt at the moment,” says Dottie Dean, a Sanders delegate from Vermont. “I’m not gonna weigh in on what he said. I just feel that my focus needs to be on electing Democrats, and everybody’s going to have an opinion.” Dean also refuses to criticize Democratic leaders for their attacks on Sanders, saying she’s unaware of their specific comments on the issue.
But some Sanders delegates are going to the mat for the senator. They are accusing the Democratic establishment of manufacturing an artificial crisis out of the chaos in Nevada. “I think a lot of this is really overblown,” says Rich Cassidy, a Sanders superdelegate from Vermont. “There are millions of people supporting Bernie Sanders, and some of them have extreme views and extreme ways of expressing their views. And you can’t be held accountable for what the most extreme people who happen to be your supporters do.”
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Cassidy doesn’t give much weight to the Democratic establishment’s outrage over Sanders’s post-Nevada statement. “To say ‘Oh, he wasn’t forceful enough,’ that just strikes me as a way for people who want to be critical of Bernie Sanders to be critical of Bernie Sanders,” he says. “It’s just an excuse, and I don’t buy it.”
“I mean, we’re all Americans,” says Chris Regan, a Sanders delegate from West Virginia. “We all boo the referees when you feel like you’re getting hosed with a bad call. So if people feel like [the Nevada convention] wasn’t a fair procedure, then they have a bad reaction.”
But other Sanders delegates – even those who think the Democratic party has deeply mistreated the Vermont senator and his supporters – are uneasy over the growing tension. “What happened in Nevada still wasn’t right,” says Troy Jackson, a Sanders delegate from Maine. “Just like in Maine, we had Barney Frank here speaking on behalf of Hillary. People jeered him, and stuff like that. I didn’t think that was appropriate. I think he should’ve been able to speak for his candidate, even though I disagree with him wholeheartedly.”
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Despite the very real angst amongst Sanders supporters, the Democratic party leadership is hardly the only thing preventing him from winning a come-from-behind victory. Setting aside Clinton’s massive lead in superdelegates – always a bone of contention with the pro-Sanders crowd – the former secretary of state still has nearly 300 more pledged delegates than Sanders. Though the Vermont senator continues to rack up victories — most recently in Oregon, where he bested Clinton on Tuesday by over ten points – the Democratic party’s proportional system for assigning delegates and Clinton’s relative success in populous southern and eastern states means Sanders’s route to victory is now effectively foreclosed.
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Clinton finally said as much on Thursday, telling CNN the Democratic primary is effectively “already done” and that there’s “no way” she won’t be the nominee. But Sanders is refusing to back down, responding in a statement that the voters in West Virginia, Indiana, and Oregon “respectfully disagreed” with Clinton’s contention. “With almost every national and state poll showing Sen. Sanders doing much, much better than Secretary Clinton against Donald Trump, it is clear that millions of Americans have growing doubts about the Clinton campaign,” the campaign statement read.
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Sanders superdelegates say they will back Clinton when and if she gains the nomination in July. But just like their foes in the Democratic establishment, some worry his rank-and-file supporters will cause trouble should he take the fight all the way to the Democratic convention. Jackson says he’s not confident the party will unify before the convention. “I’m only in Maine here, but I hear a lot of animosity against Secretary Clinton. A lot of people don’t trust her.”
Others are keeping their fingers crossed. “I hope the Sanders people would realize that there are rules and procedures, and things take time, and you don’t get anywhere screaming and yelling,” Gertonson says. “Otherwise, we could be facing total chaos in July.” |
Drivers in many parts of Nova Scotia lined up to fuel up over the weekend amid a gas shortage, after a delayed delivery of gasoline to the Imperial Oil terminal in Dartmouth meant many stations ran out of gas completely.
CBC Nova Scotia surveyed a sampling of stations across the province between Sunday afternoon and Wednesday morning to see which areas had been hardest hit.
By Wednesday morning, regular gas shipments had returned to all stations in the Halifax area.
Just one station CBC called was awaiting delivery Wednesday.
See the full map.
Have an update? E-mail us or tweet us @cbcns with #gasshortage
Full list of stations surveyed, from A to Z
AMHERST
Esso
34 Nova Scotia 6
Wednesday at 7:30 a.m: Gas available.
ANTIGONISH
Old Post Road Service Centre
3085 Old Post Rd.
Tuesday at 11 a.m: Gas available
Esso
RR 7 Trans-Canada Highway
Tuesday at 11 a.m: Gas available
AULDS COVE
Circle K-Irving
13239 Route 104
Tuesday at 11 a.m: Gas available.
BRIDGETOWN
Esso
640 Granville St.
Wednesday at 7:30 a.m: Gas available.
BRIDGEWATER
Bridgewater NS Circle-K Irving
463 North St.
Tuesday at 11 a.m: Gas available
Wileville Circle-K Irving
2742 Highway 325
Tuesday at 11 a.m: Gas available
BROOKFIELD
Esso
Route 289 and Highway 2
Wednesday at 7:30 a.m: Gas available.
CHESTER
Irving
3839 North St.
Wednesday at 7:30 a.m: Gas available.
COLDBROOK
Esso
7194 Highway 1
Wednesday at 7:30 a.m: Gas available. .
DARTMOUTH
Port Wallis Circle-K Irving
200 Waverley Rd.
Wednesday at 7:30 a.m: Gas available.
Esso
908 Cole Harbour Rd.
Tuesday at 10:30 a.m: Gas available
Burnside Circle-K Irving
626 Windmill Rd.
Wednesday at 7:30 a.m: Gas available.
Just called Dartmouth Crossing Ultramar in Burnside & their gas was JUST delivered. Regular only. <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/halifax?src=hash">#halifax</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/dartmouth?src=hash">#dartmouth</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/burnside?src=hash">#burnside</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/GasShortage?src=hash">#GasShortage</a> —@pierrefraser
DIGBY
Shell
256 Highway 303
Wednesday at 7:30 a.m: Gas available.
ELMSDALE
Petro Canada
Nova Scotia 214
Wednesday at 7:30 a.m: Gas available.
ENFIELD
Esso
282 Kingston 2
Wednesday at 7:30 a.m: Gas available.
GREENFIELD
Wilsons
5077 Route 210
Wednesday at 7:30 a.m: Gas available.
GUYSBOROUGH
Cook`s Gas Bar
Nova Scotia Trunk 16
Tuesday at 11:30 a.m: Gas available
HALIFAX
Esso
6020 Young St.
Tuesday at 10:30 a.m: Gas available
Refuel Gas Bar
1145 Barrington St.
Wednesday at 7:30 a.m: Gas available.
Quinpool Rd Circle-K Irving
6515 Quinpool Rd.
Tuesday at 11:30 a.m: Gas available.
Lacewood Circle-K Irving
15 Fairfax Dr.
Tuesday at 10:30 a.m: Gas available
Fast Fuel (near Sobeys) off Larry Uteck "has lots of gas. Good until Wednesday" says employee. <a href="http://t.co/cDBaKesvtQ">pic.twitter.com/cDBaKesvtQ</a> —@Brett_CBC
<a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/gasshortage?src=hash">#gasshortage</a> Needs FastFuel <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/HammondsPlains?src=hash">#HammondsPlains</a> & <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/Kingswood?src=hash">#Kingswood</a> gas delivery ~ 1 hr ago. Irving nr Pockwock only diesel, signs over other pumps —@tlptlr
INVERNESS
Inverness Service Centre
15855 Central Ave.
Tuesday at 11:30 a.m: Gas available
LIVERPOOL
Liverpool Circle-K Irving
167 Bristol Ave.
Wednesday at 7:30 a.m: Gas available.
LUNENBURG
Lunenburg Circle-K Irving S/S
150 Victoria Rd.
Tuesday at 11 a.m: Gas available
Esso
1 Falkland St.
Wednesday at 7:30 a.m: Gas available.
MABOU
Archie's Esso
Route 19
Monday at 10:30 a.m: All types of gas available.
MEMBERTOU
Wilsons
101 Membertou St.
Tuesday at 11:30 a.m: Gas available
MIDDLETON
Petro Canada Middleton
1036 Brooklyn Rd.
Wednesday at 7:30 a.m: Gas available.
NEW MINAS
Shell
8868 Commercial St.
Tuesday at 10:30 a.m: Regular and diesel available.
New Minas Circle-K Irving Travel Plaza
5477 Prospect Rd.
Monday at 11:30 a.m: Gas available
OXFORD
Circle K-Irving
4602 Upper Main St.
Wednesday at 7:30 a.m: Gas available.
PORTERS LAKE
Ultramar
Nova Scotia 107
Wednesday at 7:30 a.m: Gas available.
PICTOU
Pictou Irving
91 Church St.
Tuesday at 11 a.m: Gas available.
SABLE RIVER
Sable River Convenience
1630 Route 103
Wednesday at 7:30 a.m: Gas available. .
SHEET HARBOUR
Irving
22512 Route 7
Tuesday at 11 a.m: Gas available
SHELBURNE
Shelburne Circle-K Irving
41 Falls Lane
Wednesday at 7:30 a.m: Gas available.
Shell
27 Falls Lane
Wednesday at 7:30 a.m: Gas available.
SOUTH OHIO
Esso
Main Road
Wednesday at 7:30 a.m: Gas available.
STELLARTON
Sobeys Fast Fuel
North Foord St.
Tuesday at 11 a.m: Gas available. They have been getting shipment from P.E.I., were never at risk of running out.
SYDNEY
Shell
412 Welton St.
Tuesday at 11:30 a.m: Gas available
TANTALLON
Esso
4 French Village Rd.
Tuesday at 11 a.m: Regular gas available, but not sure how long it will last.
Irving
5210 Saint Margarets Bay Rd.
Tuesday at 11 a.m: Regular and diesel available
TRURO
Esso
121 Nova Scotia Trunk 2
Tuesday at 10:30 a.m: Regular and diesel available, no premium
TUSKET
The gas is flowing again at the Tusket Ultramart! <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/NS?src=hash">#NS</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/gasshortage?src=hash">#gasshortage</a> —@tusketford
WEYMOUTH
MacAlpine Auto Sales & Service
5411 Hwy 1
Tuesday at 11 a.m: Gas available.
WHYCOCOMAGH
Irving
9243 Nova Scotia 105
Tuesday at 11:30 a.m: Gas available
WINDSOR
Ultramar
224 Wentworth Rd.
Tuesday at 11:30 a.m: Gas available.
WOLFVILLE
Gaspereau Gas & Convenience
Wednesday at 7:30 a.m: Out since Friday morning.
YARMOUTH
D.K. Muise Motors Ltd
9575 Arcadia St.
Wednesday at 7:30 a.m: Gas available.
Main Street Ultramar
509 Main St.
Wednesday at 7:30 a.m: Gas available. |
A week away from the second anniversary of Pope Francis’ election to the papacy, the Pew Research Center has released its latest report on the Pope’s popularity, and far from diminishing, the Pontiff’s approval rating in America continues to soar.
Church-going Catholics give him the highest scores with a whopping 95% favorable rating, but even among Americans of the most diverse stripes and belief systems the Pope garnered an overall 70% approval rating.
At just over six months from his September visit to the United States, Pope Francis’ popularity is higher now than at any point since his March 2013 election.
A particularly remarkable aspect of Francis’ celebrity is that it seems to eschew partisan polarization, with only “minimal differences” among Catholics by age, race, gender, ethnicity or political affiliation. The Pew Center found that the Pope’s undifferentiated fan club extends to whites and Hispanics, men and women, Republicans and Democrats, young and old.
Even among “nones”—people who describe themselves as religiously unaffiliated or nonbelieving—Francis is widely admired, with 68% expressing a favorable view of the pope, as opposed to the mere 39% of this group who approved of him right after his election. Perhaps more significantly, the percentage of “nones” who have an unfavorable impression of the Pope has decreased dramatically, from 27% in 2013 to 16% two years later.
The only dip in the Pope’s popularity in the United States came after his notorious “Who am I to judge?” comment, when asked about the presence of active homosexuals working in the halls of the Vatican. He made this comment at the end of July 2013, and two months later, his approval rating had sunk to its lowest point ever among U.S. Catholics, at 79%. By February 2014, however, Francis was back to enjoying the admiration of 85% of American Catholics.
Protestants, too, followed a similar pattern, with approval of the Pope dropping off in the late summer of 2013 only to rebound by early 2014. Among Catholics and Protestants alike, Francis now enjoys his most favorable ratings ever.
A clear conclusion from the latest survey is that people have come to a more settled opinion of the Pope and his positions. Both his approval and disapproval ratings have increased among Catholics and white evangelical Protestants as people have gathered a better idea of who the man is and what he stands for.
The numbers of U.S. Catholics favorable to Pope Francis surpass anything Pope Benedict saw during his 7-year pontificate, and rivals even the early years of Pope John Paul II, one of the most popular popes in modern history.
Francis’ upcoming visit to the U.S. in September will give Americans their first chance to observe the Pontiff first hand, and could either cool their admiration or further fuel it.
Follow Thomas D. Williams on Twitter @tdwilliamsrome. |
Sand in an hourglass might seem simple and straightforward, but such granular materials are actually tricky to model. From far away, flowing sand resembles a liquid, streaming down the center of an hourglass like water from a faucet. But up close, one can make out individual grains that slide against each other, forming a mound at the base that holds its shape, much like a solid.
Sand’s curious behavior — part fluid, part solid — has made it difficult for researchers to predict how it and other granular materials flow under various conditions. A precise model for granular flow would be particularly useful in optimizing processes such as pharmaceutical manufacturing and grain production, where tiny pills and grains pour through industrial chutes and silos in mass quantities. When they aren’t well-controlled, such large-scale flows can cause blockages that are costly and sometimes dangerous to clear.
Now Ken Kamrin of MIT’s Department of Mechanical Engineering has come up with a model that predicts the flow of granular materials under a variety of conditions. The model improves on existing models by taking into account one important factor: how the size of a grain affects the entire flow. Kamrin and Georg Koval, assistant professor of civil engineering at the National Institute of Applied Sciences in Strasbourg, France, used the new model to predict sand flow in several configurations — including a chute and a circular trough — and found that the model’s predictions were a near-perfect match with actual results. A paper detailing the new model will appear in the journal Physical Review Letters.
“The basic equations governing water flow have been known for over a century,” says Kamrin, the Class of ’56 Career Development Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering. “There hasn’t been something similar for sand, where I can give you a cupful of sand, and tell you which equations will be necessary to predict how it will squish around if I squeeze the cup.”
Blurring the lines
Kamrin explains that developing a flow model — also known as a continuum model — essentially means “blurring out” individual grains or molecules. While a computer may be programmed to predict the behavior of every single molecule in, say, a cup of flowing water, Kamrin says this exercise would take years. Instead, researchers have developed continuum models. They imagine dividing the cup into a patchwork of tiny cubes of water, each cube small compared to the size of the entire flow environment, yet large enough to contain many molecules and molecular collisions. Researchers can perform basic lab experiments on a single cube of water, analyzing how the cube deforms under different stresses. To efficiently predict how water flows in the cup, they solve a differential equation that applies the behavior of a single cube to every cube in the cup’s grid.
Such models work well for fluids like water, which is easily divisible into particles that are almost infinitesimally small. However, grains of sand are much larger than water molecules — and Kamrin found that the size of an individual grain can significantly affect the accuracy of a continuum model.
For example, a model can precisely estimate how water molecules flow in a cup, mainly because the size of a molecule is so much smaller than the cup itself. For the same relative scale in the flow of sand grains, Kamrin says, the sand’s container would have to be the size of San Francisco.
Neighboring chatter
But why exactly does size matter? Kamrin reasons that when modeling water flow, molecules are so small that their effects stay within their respective cubes. As a result, a model that averages the behavior of every cube in a grid, and assumes each cube is a separate entity, gives a fairly accurate flow estimate. However, Kamrin says in granular flow, much larger grains such as sand can cause “bleed over” into neighboring cubes, creating cascade effects that are not accounted for in existing models.
“There’s more chatter between neighbors,” Kamrin says. “It’s like the basic mechanical properties of a cube of grains become influenced by the movement of neighboring cubes.”
Kamrin modified equations for an existing continuum model to factor in grain size, and tested his model on several configurations, including sand flowing through a chute and rotating in a circular trough. The new model not only predicted areas of fast-flowing grains, but also where grains would be slow moving, at the very edges of each configuration — areas traditional models assumed would be completely static. The new model’s predictions matched very closely with particle-by-particle simulations in the same configurations.
Lyderic Bocquet, a professor of physics at the University of Lyon in France, sees Kamrin’s results as a big step toward a granular flow model with “trustable, predictive power.”
“There have been huge efforts over the last years to propose laws to describe granular flows, with the ultimate aim of designing devices or processes involving granular
materials,” Bocquet says. “The generalization to a broader system was still lacking. This is where Ken’s model could make the connection.”
The model, run on a computer, can produce accurate flow fields in minutes, and could benefit engineers designing manufacturing processes for pharmaceuticals and agricultural products. For example, Kamrin says, engineers could test various shapes of chutes and troughs in the model to find a geometry that maximizes flow, or mitigates potentially dangerous wall pressure, before ever actually designing or building equipment to process granular materials.
Kamrin says understanding how granular materials flow could also help predict geological phenomena such as landslides and avalanches and help engineers come up with new ways to generate better traction in sand.
“Granular material is the second-most-handled material in industry, second only to water,” Kamrin says. “I’m convinced there are a million applications.” |
Mankind dumps millions of tons of plastic into our oceans every year. An ambitious project slated to begin in the next decade will help eliminate existing waste by collecting trash in specific regions of the Pacific -- but it's vital for the rest of us to enact sustainable solutions if we want to avoid creating the same problem all over again.
That said, few of us really understand the situation firsthand.
"It's quite an abstract thing to talk about. It's very far away for people," Boyan Slat, founder of The Ocean Cleanup, told The Huffington Post in an interview earlier this week.
Slat, who's heading the plan to build a 62-mile, trash-capturing wall in the Pacific, didn't have his own awakening until he tried to get his diver's license.
"I never really thought about this problem. I was 16, I went diving to get my license. I did that and expected to see beautiful things. When I went, the water had a close resemblance to some sort of trash dump," Slat told HuffPost. "I saw more plastic bags than fish."
If seeing the waste meant something to him, perhaps it will mean something to you. We've collected a few images to put the Pacific's trash crisis into perspective. |
NEW YORK —Twenty-one individuals were indicted Wednesday following an extensive joint investigation by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) in New York and the New York City Police Department (NYPD), along with the Bronx District Attorney's Office. Eleven of those individuals were arrested in a takedown Dec. 20.
The 21 listed in the indictment are being charged with a variety of criminal offenses including: first, second and third-degree criminal sale of a controlled substance; first, second and third-degree criminal possession of a controlled substance; second and fourth-degree conspiracy; and other related charges. Two individuals, Mario Martinez, 46, of the Bronx and Joan Velez, 36, of the Bronx, have been indicted for operating as major traffickers, moving major narcotics throughout the New York Metropolitan area. Each face a maximum of 25 years to life in prison if convicted of that charge.
“These individuals are alleged to have trafficked large quantities of highly addictive drugs through our local communities and into our surrounding states,” said Angel M. Melendez, special agent in charge of HSI New York. “Our neighborhoods have been plagued with opioid addictions, and we will continue joint law enforcement efforts with the NYPD in order to rid our streets of the dealers and traffickers of these deadly drugs.”
“These narcotics traffickers operated an organized criminal network through which major quantities of illicit and potentially deadly drugs infected the streets of the Bronx during a period in which opioid-related deaths have been reaching epidemic levels. Through major cases like this one, the NYPD, along with our law enforcement and prosecution partners, continues to focus on the source and supply of illegal drugs and together we are committed to bring these criminals to justice," said NYPD Commissioner James O’Neill.
“Through the efforts of a year-long joint investigation, we have dismantled a major drug organization and charged the defendants with over 100 counts of various serious charges. Two of the defendants are charged with Operating as a Major Trafficker and could face life behind bars. The defendants allegedly peddled heroin and cocaine throughout the Bronx, spreading their operation to two other states. We will go wherever our investigation leads to make our borough safe and with our law enforcement partners, we will continue to pursue and prosecute those doing harm to our communities,” said the Bronx District Attorney Darcel D. Clark.
According to the 12-month wiretap investigation by HSI’s Violent Gang Unit (VGU), the NYPD Bronx Gang Squad, and the Bronx DA’s Special Investigations Bureau and Criminal Enterprise Bureau, defendants Mario Martinez and Joan Velez worked together to obtain and distribute narcotics. The defendants resold the narcotics throughout the Bronx and New York State, New Jersey and Connecticut.
Several of the defendants allegedly sold drugs along West Burnside Avenue in the 46th Precinct.
During the investigation, authorities seized over 10 kilograms of heroin, packaged in bricks and thousands of glassines, as well as various quantities of cocaine and crack-cocaine, $20,000 in cash and three firearms.
The charges contained in the indictment are merely accusations, and the defendant is presumed innocent unless and until proven guilty.
Defendants |
Piston is an open source game engine written in Rust (http://www.piston.rs).
Piston-Meta is 0.1!
Piston-Meta is a research project under the Piston project to explore the use of meta parsing and composing for data. Meta parsing is a technique where you use a rules to describe how to transform a text into a tree structure, in a similar way that a parser generator can generate code for reading a text by a grammar, except that the rules in meta parsing can be changed at run time, or even read from a text described by the same rules. Piston-Meta is inspired by OMeta developed at Viewpoints Research Institute in 2007.
Assuming you have a text document that you want to parse and convert into an application structure. The normal way is to use a library written specifically for that format, for example JSON. This has drawbacks for several reasons:
Changes in the document structure are entangled with the application code It requires one dependency for each document format Data validation is limited and hard Writing parsing logic manually is error prone and composing is duplicated work Error messages are bad
Piston-Meta solves these problems by using meta rules that fits for working with data, where good error messages are important, and where the abstraction level is the same as JSON building blocks. For more information see https://github.com/PistonDevelopers/meta/issues/1.
Piston-Meta allows parsing into any structure implementing MetaReader , for example Tokenizer . Tokenizer stores the tree structure in a flat Vec with “start node” and “end node” items.
extern crate piston_meta; extern crate range; use std::rc::Rc; use piston_meta::*; fn main() { let text = "foo \"Hello world!\""; let chars: Vec<char> = text.chars().collect(); let mut tokenizer = Tokenizer::new(); let s = TokenizerState::new(); let foo: Rc<String> = Rc::new("foo".into()); let text = Text { allow_empty: true, property: Some(foo.clone()) }; let _ = text.parse(&mut tokenizer, &s, &chars[4..], 4); assert_eq!(tokenizer.tokens.len(), 1); if let &MetaData::String(_, ref hello) = &tokenizer.tokens[0].0 { println!("{}", hello); } }
New features
Parsing is now working! This library contains the rules and parse algorithms. For examples, see the unit tests.
The deepest error is picked to make better error messages. When a text is parsed successfully, the result contains an optional error which can be used for additional success checks, for example whether it reached the end of a file.
Node (allows reuse a rule and reference itself)
(allows reuse a rule and reference itself) Number (reads f64)
(reads f64) Optional (a sequence of rules that can fail without failing parent rule)
(a sequence of rules that can fail without failing parent rule) Rule (an enum for all the rules)
(an enum for all the rules) Select (tries one sub rule and continues if it fails)
(tries one sub rule and continues if it fails) SeparatedBy (separates a rule by another rule)
(separates a rule by another rule) Sequence (rules in sequence)
(rules in sequence) Text (a JSON string)
(a JSON string) Token (expects a sequence of characters)
(expects a sequence of characters) UntilAnyOrWhitespace (reads until it hits any of the specified characters or whitespace)
(reads until it hits any of the specified characters or whitespace) Whitespace (reads whitespace)
Referencing other rules or itself
The Node struct is the basis for creating rules that can be referenced by other rules. When writing the rules, use the NodeRef::Name and then call Rule::update_refs to replace them with references. update_refs walks over the rules with a list of rules you want to put in, and replaces NodeRef::Name with NodeRef::Ref .
How to use the library for game development
Just combine rules that describe how a text is interpreted. For example:
weapons: fork, sword, gun, lazer_beam
Assume we wanted to read this into an array of weapons, we could make up a simple pseudo language for helping us figuring out the rules:
array: ["weapons:", w!, sep(until(",") -> item, [",", w?])]
w! means required Whitespace and w? means optional Whitespace . The arrow -> tells what field to store that data, which is the property of that rule. “sep” is an abbreviation for SeparatedBy , “until” is for UntilWhitespaceOrAny . The stuff in quotes are Token .
Now you have 2 options:
Write the rules in Rust directly, which requires recompiling each time you change the data format. Write the rules for parsing your pseudo language, then read the rules to read the data from a text document. This allows you to change the data format without recompiling.
The second option is useful combined with an Entity Component System (ECS) because it allows you to expand both the document format and your application with new features without recompiling. The technique is called “bootstrapping” because you are writing rules in Rust that describes how to read rules from a text document which is parsed into rules in Rust. This idea takes some time to get used to, so stick to the first option until you get familiar with the library and the meta thought process.
Bootstrapping
It is not as hard as it sounds, because you can use the pseudo language to read data to help you write the rules in Rust for it. Just look at the rule and write down a list of what you need to describe it.
array: ["weapons:", w!, sep(until(",") -> item, [",", w?])]
We need a rule for reading stuff like “array:”. We need a rule for reading a text string “weapons:” and “,”. We need a rule for reading “w!” and “w?”. We need a rule for reading ‘until(“,”)’. We need a rule for reading stuff like “[…]” that can contain 2, 3, 4 and itself 5. We need a rule for the whole document that repeats 1 followed by 5, separated by new lines
Write this down in your pseudo language:
1. label: [text -> name, ":"] 2. text: ["text -> ", text -> name] 3. whitespace: ["w", sel("!" -> required, "?" -> optional)] 4. until_any_or_whitespace: ["until(", text -> any_characters, ")"] 5. list: ["[", sep([w?, sel(text, whitespace, until_any_or_whitespace, list)], ",")] 6. document: [sep([label, w!, list], "
"]
Now, replace these rules with Piston-Meta rules (pseudo code):
let label = Node { name: "label", body: Sequence { args: vec![Text { property: "name" }, Token { text: ":" }] } }; let text = Node { name: "text", body: Sequence { args: vec![ Token { text: "text -> " }, Text { property: "name" } ] } }; ...
Confused?
Here is an overview of the process:
First you need some rules to parse the meta language, which you could read with Tokenizer and then convert to rules in Rust. These rules are then used to read the data, which then is converted to the application structure in Rust.
rules (for meta language) -> document (meta language describing rules for data) -> meta data -> rules (for data) -> document (data) -> meta data -> data
In general, meta parsing is about this kind of transformation:
rules (for X) -> document (X describing Y) -> meta data -> Y
This transformation is composable, so you can build an infrastructure around it.
How Piston-Meta started
When I first came on the idea of Piston-Meta, I had a problem: I wanted to parse something, but I did not quite understand what I should parse it into. Sometimes it gets very hard to see the whole picture of all the things that need to work together. So I just started to write down something explaining how to parse the things I was thinking on, and realized that this could be a self describing language. Within an hour, I had a first draft for how to parse the rules of the language.
I remembered OMeta that did something similar, and I started reading about it to see if I could use it. One of the key points of what meta parsing lets you do, is “bootstrapping” the rules. A language like OMeta can parse itself and other languages and translate from one language to another. This can be done by any general purpose programming language, but the difference is that OMeta is specifically designed for this task. You can quickly prototype a programming language and use OMeta to test it. Unfortunately it is not particularly good at error messages, which is a common reason people write parsers by hand.
There are many tools for parsing, for example parsing generators, which outputs the code you need to parse a text for a specific grammar, for example ANTLR. Unfortunately you can not change the rules on the fly, which is something you might want to do when working on a game.
Since I had a draft of the rules I wanted, I just started working on it.
How does the parsing algorithm work?
There is a lot of information on the web about parsers, but I am not an expert on these issues. So, I will describe this in my own words.
Piston-Meta uses look-ahead rules from bottom up that might fail, but instead of storing the data in temporarily, it sends it to the implementor of MetaReader . MetaReader has an associate type State which tells it when to roll back changes. There is only one method, so MetaReader needs to check the state and do roll back when receiving new data.
This means that if all rules starts with an expected token unique to that rule and parsing succeeds, it will not allocate data unecessary. A Tokenizer might contain extra data that needs to be truncated away with TokenizerState on success.
All rules can fail, so if you are putting a weird token at the end of a huge rule inside Select , it will roll back all the changes and try the next rule.
Error messages can be optional and actual. Optional error messages are useful when a rule might not fail when encountering an error. The parent rule compares all errors, optional or not, and picks the deepest one in the document. This is the most likely error message to be useful without any pre-knowledge. The error message might not match with the data read by MetaReader .
Performance
Piston-Meta uses Rc<String> in the rules, such that when parsing a document, it only allocates for the actual data and not for strings used as keys etc. It could in theory use &[char] for zero allocations, but this requires a lifetime constraint. The performance has not been tested yet.
Further work
Composing is the reverse operation of parsing, where you go from data to text. This would work similar to serializing, except you can change the format it serializes at run time. You could do this directly by printing out the text manually, but it might not be valid for the rules you choose. Ideally, you only need to edit the rules and both parsing and composing will work accordingly.
Making debugging easier, when there is something wrong with the rules, is also planned. This can be solved by adding a debug_id to each rule so you know which rule generated an error.
Originally I thought of making a meta language syntax, but this falls out of scope of the project for now because there are different tastes and usages. This could be done in another library, or we could build libraries that helps with bootstrapping. |
Image copyright Reuters Image caption Renho, who goes by one name, is a controversial choice
When Renho was elected the first female leader for Japan's main opposition Democratic Party on Thursday, she also broke another glass ceiling. She is the first person of mixed descent to hold the position.
Her late father was from Taiwan and her mother is Japanese. In Japan, where only 2%-3% of newborn babies are mixed-race, that is significant.
But Renho's appointment has not been without controversy, as she was accused of lying about whether she still had Taiwanese citizenship.
Dual nationality is not allowed in Japan, and anyone born to parents of different nationalities must choose one by the age of 22.
She has said she thought her father officially gave up her Taiwanese citizenship on her behalf when she was 17.
Image copyright Reuters Image caption Being mixed-race is a rarity in Japan
She says the process happened at the Taiwanese representative office in Japan and was in Mandarin, which she didn't understand so there was no way for her to confirm it had gone through.
It turns out it didn't - the official record in Taiwan has since confirmed that she still has citizenship.
She has since apologised and asked for her Taiwanese citizenship to be revoked, but the controversy is likely to follow her throughout her political career.
Her critics say the problem is that she lied about her nationality.
Renho - who goes by only one name - insists it was a mistake not a lie.
But the row has raised the question over whether Japan is ready to contemplate a mixed race leader.
Walking on thin ice
Being mixed-race is still a rarity in Japan with only 3.4% of children born in 2014 having a non-Japanese ethnicity parent.
The "exotic" looks of the "hafu" - the Japanese term for a bi-racial person - are embraced by the entertainment industry, but almost solely if their foreign parent was Caucasian.
"Japanese society and media fetishise half-white complexions," says Morley Robertson, a half-Japanese half-American journalist.
"I definitely have received better treatment over my life than those mixed with non-white parentage."
My own daughter is mixed race, and I have seen her getting compliments about her big eyes and long eyelashes - features she gets from her father, not me. As a teenager growing up in Tokyo, I confess I desperately wanted them too.
But Mr Robertson says having a Western look will only get you so far.
"That adoration can instantly turn into violent prejudice if social codes are violated," he says.
"If you act too Western in a company setting, asserting your views at a meeting when not asked to do so, you can end up being ostracised."
"Those of mixed-race background who 'have it easy' are always walking on thin ice. I have fallen through that ice many times myself," he adds.
Racial order
And if your non-Japanese parent is darker skinned, you are likely to face an even tougher time.
The first mixed-race person to win Miss Universe Japan in 2015, Ariana Miyamoto, remembers being bullied for having darker skin than other children as her father is African American.
This year's Miss World Japan who is half-Indian Priyanka Yoshikawa remembers being treated like "a germ".
Image copyright Associated Press Image caption Observers say there is an ingrained "racial order"
"I am almost certain that reactions would have been different, had they both been half-white," says Mr Robertson.
He speculates there is "an ingrained 'racial order' inherited from older generations in Japan, with whites at the top of the pyramid and blacks at the bottom".
While the younger generations are much less biased, stereotypes linger.
"According to this urban mythology, whites are more beautiful and creative, East Asians are second-best looking while proficient in math and science, while blacks are good at athletics and music," he adds.
Japan supremacists?
One ethnic group which tends to receive hatred, especially online, is Korean-Japanese people, most of whom came during Japan's colonial rule, and their descendants.
They have faced discrimination for decades partly because of what their detractors call "special privileges" such as the right to vote in some municipality referenda and claim benefits without taking on Japanese citizenship, although they only receive full voting rights if they renounce their Korean citizenship.
Many hide their real ethnic backgrounds by using adopted Japanese family names.
Calling a Japanese person "Korean-Japanese" is an insult often flung online, including at myself, especially those seen as overly critical of Japan, or not sufficiently loyal.
"There just aren't enough foreigners or mixed race people in the everyday life of most Japanese," says Mr Robertson, who doesn't believe there is malice in the racial stereotyping.
As for Renho, as the controversy over her citizenship raged on she insisted: "As a politician, I have never acted in a way other than being a Japanese citizen." |
When a fake games journo wants codes for your game, this is what you should do.
Devolver Digital received a totally legitimate request for Enter the Gungeon codes from a gentleman signing off as a reviewer at PC Gamer.
Being an accommodating sort, Fork Parker obliged by sending two codes over, writing, “hope you think it’s better than a 7.8!” which of course, was the score that the actual PC Gamer gave the title.
If the guy hadn’t already figured out that he’d been busted, the codes he received should’ve tipped him off.
The same jammy gits also contacted Craig Pearson asking for Rust codes, but as he pointed out in a tweet, the disclaimer at the bottom of their email reads, “PCGamer.press has no affiliation with PCGamer.com…nor any other company and represents a PCGamer that does reviews and previews.”
This is slipped in towards the end of a lengthy torrent of information about Future plc and PC Gamer, so it’s not as if they’re trying to be up front about it.
It goes without saying that there is no ‘other’ PCGamer doing reviews and previews, and that they’re just playing silly buggers. |
Facebook intern Paul Butler has been poring through some of the data held by the social networking firm on its 500m members.
The map above is the result of his attempts to visualise where people live relative to their Facebook friends. Each line connects cities with pairs of friends. The brighter the line, the more friends between those cities.
After tweaking the graphic and data set it produced a "surprisingly detailed map of the world," he said in a blog post.
"Not only were continents visible, certain international borders were apparent as well," he wrote.
"What really struck me, though, was knowing that the lines didn't represent coasts or rivers or political borders, but real human relationships."
However, large chunks of the world are missing, such as China and central Africa, where Facebook has little presence. |
I am always curious about other people’s vim workflow, especially when it comes to project management and goto definitions with ctags. I have now used vim quite some time and want to share my personal workflow. This is about how to create custom local vim configuration files per project and how to manage all of your ctag files easily.
TL;DR
So basically what I do is:
Go to my project root
Create vim project file
Create ctag files
Start coding
All done automatically with a one-liner:
$ make-vim-project all
1. The whole story
1.1 Install Dependencies
As I am currently using a MacBook due to work, I have to deal with OSX and therefore of course use homebrew to install my stuff. So first I need to get the exuberant version of ctags.
brew install ctags-exuberant
1.2 Vim and ctags
I am trying to separate programming languages into different ctag files. For example, one file for c/c++ , one file for shell-scripts , one file for javascript and so on. For this to work, I need to tell vim where to look for the files. The vim section looks like this:
"""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""" " CTAGS/CSCOPE """""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""" " Default/Generic tag file set tags=tags,.tags " Filetype specific tag files (This is used for global IDE tags) autocmd FileType c set tags=.tags_cpp,$HOME/.vim/tags/cpp autocmd FileType cpp set tags=.tags_cpp,$HOME/.vim/tags/cpp autocmd FileType css set tags=.tags_css,$HOME/.vim/tags/css autocmd FileType java set tags=.tags_java,$HOME/.vim/tags/java autocmd FileType javascript set tags=.tags_js,$HOME/.vim/tags/js autocmd FileType html set tags=.tags_html,$HOME/.vim/tags/html autocmd FileType php set tags=.tags_php,$HOME/.vim/tags/php autocmd FileType sh set tags=.tags_sh,$HOME/.vim/tags/sh
1.3 Vim and project files
Now I need a way to always tell vim where my project root is in order for it to look for the project specific ctag files. For this I am using local_vimrc via NeoBundle. Here is how to get it into vim.
" ---- PROJECT vimrc NeoBundle 'LucHermitte/lh-vim-lib', { \ 'name': 'lh-vim-lib' \} NeoBundle 'LucHermitte/local_vimrc', { \ 'depends': 'lh-vim-lib' \}
This plugin will check the root directory for a file called _vimrc_local.vim . The only thing I want to place into this file is the cd path, so it know the root of the project directory.:
$ cat /path/to/project/_vimrc_local.vim :cd /path/to/project
Whenever I open vim from within this project path, it will check if there a ctag files as defined in vim and ctags above.
1.4 Creating project and ctag files
The setup is almost complete and I just need to create the project and ctag files for every project in its root. So first creating the project file:
$ cd /path/to/project && echo ":cd $(pwd)" > _vimrc_local.vim
And then I will add the ctag files. Here is an example for a c/c++ project:
$ ctags -R -f .tags_cpp \ --file-scope=yes \ --sort=yes \ --c++-kinds=+p \ --fields=+iaS \ --extra=+q \ 2>/dev/null
This kind of sucks as I don’t want to issue those long commands every time I create a new project or update my ctags. So it needs to be automated or at least simplified.
1.5 Using a bash functions for project and ctag files
On the most simple form I just want to issue a single command which does everything for me. So I wrote a bash function make-vim-project :
$ make-vim-project Usage: make-vim-project <type> all Create ctags for every filetype web Create ctags for php, js, css and html cpp Create ctags for c/c++ shell Create ctags for bash/sh
Now I can create a c/c++ project easily by just typing this:
$ make-vim-project cpp
It will automatically create the _vimrc_local.vim as shown above and all c/c++ relevant ctag files. I also use this command once I update my project. So how does the function look and where do I put it?
First, it can be put anywhere in .bash_profile , .bashrc or any other custom bash file that is sourced by the main bash configuration file. Let’s have a look at the function itself:
#------------------------------------------------------ #-------- Vim Project make-vim-project() { local name dir name="_vimrc_local.vim" dir="$(pwd)" read -r -d '' USAGE <<-'EOF' Usage: make-vim-project <type> all Create ctags for every filetype web Create ctags for php, js, css and html cpp Create ctags for c/c++ shell Create ctags for bash/sh EOF if [ $# -ne 1 ]; then echo "$USAGE" return fi # CTAGS echo "Building ctags" if [ "$1" == "all" ]; then make-ctags make-ctags-css make-ctags-js make-ctags-html make-ctags-php make-ctags-sql make-ctags-shell make-ctags-cpp elif [ "$1" == "web" ]; then make-ctags-php make-ctags-html make-ctags-js make-ctags-css make-ctags-sql elif [ "$1" == "cpp" ]; then make-ctags-cpp elif [ "$1" == "shell" ]; then make-ctags-shell else echo "$USAGE" return fi # Vimrc echo "Creating local vimrc" echo ":cd ${dir}" >> "${name}" }
As you can see, the function just prints its usage, calls other make-ctags-* functions and creates the _vimrc_local.vim file. Have a look at the gist for the complete source of all other make-ctags-* functions:
cytopia/create-vim-project
Just for clarification, here is how one of the ctag functions will look:
make-ctags-cpp() { ctags -R -f .tags_cpp \ --file-scope=yes \ --sort=yes \ --c++-kinds=+p \ --fields=+iaS \ --extra=+q \ 2>/dev/null }
1.6 Project root
Let’s have a look what files are inside my project root after using make-vim-project all :
$ ls -la ... -rw-r--r-- 1 cytopia 1286676289 73381097 Oct 17 12:01 .tags -rw-r--r-- 1 cytopia 1286676289 72893221 Oct 17 12:02 .tags_cpp -rw-r--r-- 1 cytopia 1286676289 1776509 Oct 17 12:01 .tags_css -rw-r--r-- 1 cytopia 1286676289 409973 Oct 17 12:01 .tags_html -rw-r--r-- 1 cytopia 1286676289 64329626 Oct 17 12:01 .tags_js -rw-r--r-- 1 cytopia 1286676289 8989441 Oct 17 12:01 .tags_php -rw-r--r-- 1 cytopia 1286676289 6223 Oct 17 12:01 .tags_sh -rw-r--r-- 1 cytopia 1286676289 52748 Oct 17 12:01 .tags_sql -rw-r--r-- 1 cytopia 1286676289 32 Oct 17 12:02 _vimrc_local.vim
2. What next?
This workflow has evolved during over a year of vim experience and as my personal preference. I am still not quite satisfied with some manual work, especially for updating the ctags once you have added code. If any of you have some better workflows and/or can recommend other vim plugins that do the trick more automated, please let me know and share.
_ |
The Defense Advanced GPS Receiver (DAGR). Coordinates are for Rockwell Collins headquarters in Cedar Rapids, Iowa
The AN/PSN-13 Defense Advanced GPS Receiver (DAGR; colloquially, "dagger") is a handheld GPS receiver used by the United States Department of Defense and select foreign military services. It is a military-grade, dual-frequency receiver, and has the security hardware necessary to decode the encrypted P(Y)-code GPS signals.
Manufactured by Rockwell Collins, the DAGR entered production in March 2004, with the 40,000th unit delivered in September 2005. It was estimated by the news source Defense Industry Daily that, by the end of 2006, the USA and various allies around the world had issued almost $300 million worth of DAGR contracts, and ordered almost 125,000 units.[1] The DAGR replaced the Precision Lightweight GPS Receiver (PLGR), which was first fielded in 1994.
Due to the COMSEC electronics inside the DAGR, it is against US federal law (Title 18, United States Code, sections 641, 793, 798, and 952) for any individual or organization not authorized by the National Security Agency (NSA) to purchase or be in possession of the device, if knowing it to have been embezzled, stolen, purloined or converted from value of the United States or of any department or agency. When devices are no longer useful or operational, they are to be returned to an NSA-approved vendor (usually the original supplier), where they are destroyed.
Rockwell Collins also manufactures a GPS receiver known as the "Polaris Guide", that looks like a DAGR, but uses only the civilian C/A code signals. These units are labelled as "SPS", for "Standard Positioning Service", and may be possessed by non-military users.
Features [ edit ]
Comparison to PLGR [ edit ]
Parameter PLGR DAGR Introduced 1990 2004 Frequency bands Dual (L1 & L2) Dual (L1 & L2) Security PPS-SM SAASM Display Text only GUI with maps Number of channels (satellites) 5 12 (all in view) Anti-Jam resistance 24 dB 41 dB Time to first fix (TTFF) 360 seconds 100 seconds Time to subsequent fix (TTSF) 60 seconds < 22 seconds Weight 2.75 lb (1.25 kg) 0.94 lb (0.43 kg) Dimensions (in inches) 9.5" tall, 4.1" wide, 2.6" thick 6.4" tall, 3.5" wide, 1.6" thick
(Fits in 2-magazine ammo pouch) Battery life 13 hours (8 batteries) 14 hours (4 batteries) Reliability 2000 hours 5000 hours |
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