text
stringlengths 14
100k
| meta
dict |
|---|---|
Drought and low water levels have prompted the B.C. government to ban angling in some streams and rivers on Vancouver Island and the Gulf islands.
The province has upped the drought rating for both areas to its highest level — Level 4 — and brought in new restrictions to protect the waning aquifers.
"As we experience warmer and drier weather, it is important that we are able to react quickly to protect vulnerable fish stocks," says Steve Thomson, minister of forests, lands and natural resource operations.
The ban on fishing covers particularly vulnerable areas: Bamfield south to Victoria on the west coast and Campbell River south to Victoria on the east coast. The key rivers affected include:
Caycuse,
Chemainus.
Cowichan.
Englishman.
Gordon.
Little Qualicum.
Nanaimo.
Nitinat.
Oyster.
Puntledge.
San Juan.
Sooke.
Trent.
Tsable.
The Qualicum (known as Big Qualicum) and Quinsam rivers are exempt, because they are deemed to have water refuges adequate to protect fish.
B.C. fisheries biologists are monitoring 75 other key streams across the province, to ensure fish are not too stressed. Lake fishing is unaffected. | {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
「反日感情の要因は植民地支配に関わる問題がすべて。それ以外の部分で韓国人は日本という国や日本人を好ましく思っています」と語る金恵京氏（撮影／細野晋司）
日韓国交正常化５０周年という節目を迎えた２０１５年、両国の関係は好転したのか、悪化したのか？
週プレ外国人記者クラブ第１４回は、朝日新聞「ＷＥＢＲＯＮＺＡ」に寄稿する他、様々なメディアで活躍する韓国・ソウル出身の国際法学者、金恵京（キム・ヘギョン）氏に、２０１５年の日韓関係を振り返ってもらった。
＊＊＊
─２０１５年は戦後７０年、そして日韓国交正常化５０周年という節目の年でした。ここ数年は竹島／独島の領有権問題、従軍慰安婦の問題などでギクシャクすることの多い日韓関係ですが、この１年をどのように総括しますか？
金 私が韓国の高校卒業後、初めて日本に来たのは１９９０年代のことです。２０年近い時間が流れましたが、その間の日本の変化を皮膚感覚で実感しています。どのような変化かというと、９０年代には、歴史認識などの点で韓国とは相容れない部分はあったとしても、右であれ左であれ、一定の知識や経験が存在し、世論が一方に振れ過ぎることはなかったと思います。それが、日韓関係が悪化したと言われるここ数年は、日本人の中にも韓国に対して安易な方向に認識が流れやすくなったと感じます。
もちろん、歴史に真摯に向き合うリベラルな人は日韓問わず存在していますが、韓国でも植民地時代の記憶から日本への好意を持てない人がいます。そうした中での大きな問題は、両国のメディアが相手国のニュースを取り上げる時に、一部の極端な人たちの言動をフォーカスすることが多くなっている点です。
実際には、どちらの国にも日韓関係を良くしたい、もっと仲良くしたいと考えている人が多数を占めているのに、それぞれの国のメディアが取り上げるのは、目立ちやすい嫌韓／反日の話題ばかりなのです。さらに、こういった報道が一種の“公式”を持つようになってきていると思います。
“公式”の形としては、日本のTV報道で「韓国国内における反日感情の高まり」といったテーマを取り上げる時に、現在ではなく過去の映像を繰り返し使うケースが挙げられます。日本大使館の前で日本の国旗を燃やす人の映像や、３年近く前の朴槿恵（パク・クネ）大統領の発言などです。
日本のメディアとしては「感情的な韓国人／冷静な日本人」という図式で放送したいのかもしれません。ただ、実際には日本の中にもヘイト・スピーチや政治家の感情的な発言など、理性的とは言えないものもあります。そして、日本のメディアはそれらの言動よりも韓国での反日的な側面のほうに放送時間を多く割きます。一方で、韓国メディアも日本の目立った動きをフォーカスして取り上げてしまいます。
こういった報道によって、お互いにネガティブなイメージが定着していくことは非常に危険な状況だと思います。ただ、日韓関係の悪化が言われるようになったここ３年間を見れば、２０１５年は「やや落ち着きを取り戻した」という印象を私は持っています。
世界遺産登録をめぐる悲しい状況
─具体的に、その要因は？
金 ８月１４日に発表された「首相談話」が大きかったと思います。韓国側が何を評価したかといえば、従軍慰安婦の問題に言及した点です。従軍慰安婦という単語は用いられませんでしたが、「私たちは、二十世紀において、戦時下、多くの女性たちの尊厳や名誉が深く傷つけられた過去を、この胸に刻み続けます」と言ったのです。
従軍慰安婦問題は「アジア諸国への反省とお詫び」を明言した１９９５年の村山談話でも触れられることのなかった議題です。韓国は女性を男性が守るべきという儒教文化が根付いた国ですから、「自国の女性を守れなかった」という点で大きな悔いがあります。そのため、慰安婦問題を金銭的な部分ではなく、元慰安婦らの名誉を回復させるなど根本的な部分から解決しなければならないという思いが強いのです。そうした思いをもった韓国人にとって、従軍慰安婦問題に初めて言及した首相談話は評価されたのです。
─従軍慰安婦問題に関しては、過去に橋下徹前大阪市長やＮＨＫの籾井勝人会長が「どこの国でもやっていたこと」といった主旨の発言をして物議を醸（かも）したこともあります。同様の考え方、さらには「従軍慰安婦問題はなかった」と考える日本人がいるのも事実です。歴史認識の問題を考える時、これは日韓の間に横たわる懸案事項であると同時に、日本国内の問題でもあると感じます。
いわゆる“自虐史観”と、戦前・戦中の日本の行為を肯定するような“極右史観”の二極化が顕著で、原発をめぐる推進派と反対派、憲法をめぐる改憲派と護憲派のように日本人同士でも議論にすらならない傾向があります。
金 ２０１５年の日韓関係を振り返っても、７月に世界遺産への登録が決定した「明治日本の産業革命遺産」をめぐる問題がありました。製鉄・造船・炭鉱などの産業拠点の世界遺産への登録を日本側が申請したことに対して、韓国側は「それらの産業拠点で戦時中、朝鮮半島出身者の強制労働が行なわれていたことを明らかにすべき」という意見を述べたのですが、これに対して日本のメディアの多くが韓国に批判的な報道をしました。
それが建設的な批判であれば、日本であれ、韓国であれ問題ではありません。ただ、その批判が相手を貶（おとし）めることが目的だったり、問題自体がなかったと主張するのが目的ならば、これまで両国の関係者が積み上げてきた努力を無にしてしまうことを理解すべきです。意見が異なっていたとしても、相手の主張や先人への尊重は欠かせないものです。
この世界遺産登録問題の過程で、日本の佐藤地（くに）ユネスコ大使が「１９４０年代に一部の施設で大勢の朝鮮半島の人々などが意に反して厳しい環境下で労働を強いられた」という発言をしていますが、この発言に対して日本国内から批判が向けられたことは、日本の中での歴史認識の二極化を象徴していると思います。
最初に述べたように、極端で不寛容な姿勢が勢いを増す状況は韓国国内でも起きています。今年の７月には朴槿恵大統領の妹・朴槿令（パク・クンリョン）氏が「韓国が日本に謝罪を要求し続けるのは不当」といった主旨の発言をして、これに対して韓国国内から強い批判が起きました。佐藤ユネスコ大使や朴槿令氏のように、互いに歩み寄ろうという姿勢を示す人物の言動に対して、それぞれの自国内から批判が起きる状況は本当に悲しいことです。
植民地支配の事実を知らない学生が多い
─韓国人の反日感情には、韓国の歴史教育が少なからず影響しているはずです。この点は日本でも繰り返し、問題視されています。一方、日本でここ数年、急速に拡散している“極右的史観”の背景には、日本の歴史教育が近代史に触れていないことの影響が考えられます。
学校の歴史の授業は「明治維新まで」で終わってしまう。日本人の立場として、韓国の歴史教育に問題がないとは言いません。しかし、教育を受けた人間が左寄りの考えを持つか右寄りになるかといった判断材料となる歴史の事実を、そもそも「教えない」という日本の現状はさらに深刻だと思います。
金 世界遺産の登録の時に問題となった強制労働あるいは強制徴用については、実は日本でも全ての中学校の歴史教科書に明記されています。しかし、授業では十分に取り上げられていないのか、しっかりと学ばれていません。
私が現在、日本の大学で持っている授業でも、履修している学生の中に日本がかつて韓国を植民地支配していたという事実を知らない人が多いことに驚かされます。もちろん、日本では「韓国併合は植民地支配ではない」という認識がありますが、併合でも植民地支配でも、韓国人の民族自治の権利を日本が奪っていた時代があったことすら認識していないのです。
実は、韓国人の中にある反日感情の要因は、植民地支配に関わる問題がすべてと言えます。それ以外の部分、例えば日常の習慣、態度や文化などの面で、韓国人は日本という国や日本人を好ましく思っています。
であるからこそ、日本にはその時代に対する認識や知識を深めてもらいたいのです。事実を踏まえ、先人の努力を尊重する姿勢を教育の中で身に付けることが、将来的に両国を繋いでいくと思います。そして、それこそがよく言われる“未来志向の関係”なのではないでしょうか。
＊編集部註：このインタビュー取材後、日韓両政府が慰安婦問題の解決で合意に至ったことが発表されました。
●金恵京（キム・ヘギョン）国際法学者。韓国・ソウル出身。高校卒業後、日本に留学。明治大学卒業後、早稲田大学大学院アジア太平洋研究科で博士号を取得。ジョージ・ワシントン大学総合科学部専任講師、ハワイ大学韓国研究センター客員教授、明治大学法学部助教を経て、２０１５年から日本大学総合科学研究所准教授
●『柔らかな海峡―日本・韓国 和解への道』（集英社インターナショナル １５００円＋税）朝日新聞「ＷＥＢＲＯＮＺＡ」での好評連載に書き下ろしを加えた全２３編の評論、姜尚中氏と日韓関係の未来像を語る対談を収録
（取材・文／田中茂朗） | {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
The picture, above, of a metal grid sitting on the head of a dandelion without disturbing a single feathery tuft may look Photoshopped. But it’s not. It’s a real photograph of one of the more interesting developments in recent materials science—a metal “microlattice” that’s 100 times lighter than Styrofoam.
“It’s basically 99.9 percent air,” says Sophia Yang, a researcher at HRL Laboratories, where the microlattice was invented.
To make the metal microlattice, scientists begin with a polymer structure. This structure is created by shining ultraviolet (UV) light through a filter onto liquid polymer. The process forms a hardened 3D structure almost instantly. Depending on the chemical makeup of the polymer, the resulting structure could be soft or rigid, light or heavy. These microlattice structures have a variety of potential uses themselves—a soft polymer microlattice might be useful for creating comfortable but extremely protective bike helmets, for example.
“It feels almost like memory foam,” Yang says.
To create the metal structure in the dandelion picture, a polymer structure is coated with an extremely thin layer of nickel—about 100 nanometers thick, or 1,000 times thinner than a human hair. Then a chemical compound is used to dissolve the polymer inside the nickel. The result is a series of hollow tubes.
The structure mimics the composition of bones, which are rigid on the outside but mostly hollow on the inside.
Researchers at HRL have been working on the microlattice since 2007, when the process for creating the polymer microlattice was first created. Yang and others have since been working to scale up the product—the first piece of polymer microlattice was about 1 inch by 1 inch, while more recent structures have been as long as 5 feet—and develop additional processes, such as the metal-plating.
As HRL is jointly owned by Boeing and General Motors, researchers have focused on aerospace and automotive applications for microlattice. One of the most promising potential uses could be in aviation, Yang says, where various parts of an airplane’s structure could be built from the ultra-light metal microlattice. This could be any part of the airplane that “needs to be lightweight and yet structurally withstand a load,” Yang says.
This includes a plane’s floor, ceiling, galley walls, lavatory walls and more. These structures are typically made from honeycomb sandwich panels, solid sheets of material “sandwiching” hollow hexagonal columns resembling honeycomb. Honeycomb sandwich panels are widely used for their strength and lightweight nature. But metal microlattice is far lighter. Replacing honeycomb sandwich panels with microlattice could make planes significantly lighter, which means they’d need less fuel. This has major environmental advantages as well as economic ones. The same principle could apply to cars, and even to spaceships—HRL was recently tapped to work with NASA on the next generation of the space launch vehicle, fabricating ultra-light panels for the vehicle’s fuselage. Researchers estimate their materials could reduce the vehicle’s weight by as much as 40 percent.
"Lightweight and multifunctional materials and structures are one of NASA's top focus areas capable of having the greatest impact on future NASA missions in human and robotic exploration," said Steve Jurczyk, an administrator for NASA's Space Technology Mission Directorate, in a NASA press release. "These advanced technologies are necessary for us to be able to launch stronger, yet lighter, spacecraft and components as we look to explore an asteroid and eventually Mars."
Much further down the road, metal microlattice might have medical uses. The tiny tubes have potential to be used as an artificial lung, Yang says.
Breathing through the same material used to build rocket ships: now that’s living in the future. | {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
STRASBOURG, France (AP) - British Prime Minister Boris Johnson was accused by European Union officials Wednesday of failing to negotiate seriously and branded the “father of lies” by a lawyer in the U.K. Supreme Court, as his plan to leave the EU in just over six weeks faced hurdles on both sides of the Channel.
In Strasbourg, France, the European Parliament said it would be the fault of Britain, not the bloc, if the U.K. crashed out of the EU without a divorce deal on the scheduled Oct. 31 departure day.
In London, Johnson’s government battled to convince the U.K.’s top court that the prime minister’s decision to suspend Parliament for five weeks with Brexit looming was neither illegal nor improper. The government’s opponents claim Johnson illegally shut down the legislature to prevent lawmakers from scrutinizing his Brexit plans.
Government lawyer James Eadie told 11 Supreme Court justices that the decision to send lawmakers home until Oct. 14 was “inherently and fundamentally political in nature,” and not a matter for the judiciary. He said that if the court intervened it would violate the “fundamental constitutional principle” of the separation of powers.
But a lawyer for lawmakers challenging the shutdown accused the government of being “unworthy of our trust.”
“We’ve got here the mother of parliaments being shut down by the father of lies,” said attorney Aidan O’Neill. He urged the judges to “stand up for truth, stand up for reason, stand up for diversity, stand up for Parliament, stand up for democracy.”
The judges, for their part, wondered why Johnson had refused to provide a sworn statement to the court about his reasons for the suspension.
“Isn’t it odd that nobody has signed a witness statement to say: ‘This is true. These are the true reasons for what was done’?” said one of the judges, Nicholas Wilson.
The developments were the latest in a rocky week for Johnson, who pulled out of a news conference with the prime minister of Luxembourg on Monday because of noisy protesters nearby. On Wednesday he was berated by the father of a sick child over funding cuts to Britain’s health service as he visited a London hospital.
Johnson took power in July with a vow that Britain will leave the EU on Oct. 31 “come what may.” He promised to break a stalemate that saw the Brexit agreement struck between the EU and Johnson’s predecessor Theresa May rejected three times by Britain’s Parliament, prompting May to resign.
Many lawmakers believe a no-deal Brexit would be economically devastating and socially destabilizing, and have put obstacles in Johnson’s path, including legal challenges to the Parliament shutdown.
Last week, Scotland’s highest civil court ruled the move illegal, saying it had the intention of stymieing Parliament. The High Court in London, however, said it was not a matter for the courts.
The Supreme Court is being asked to decide who is right in a three-day hearing that ends Thursday. If it overturns the suspension, lawmakers could be called back to Parliament as early as next week.
Johnson insists he is working hard to get an agreement with the EU that will ensure a smooth departure. EU leaders are skeptical of that claim.
European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker said Wednesday that the risk of a no-deal Brexit remained “very real” because Britain still had not produced workable new proposals.
“I asked the British prime minister to specify the alternative arrangements that he could envisage,” Juncker said. “As long as such proposals are not made, I cannot tell you - while looking you straight in the eye - that progress is being made.”
Juncker, who met with Johnson on Monday, told a gathering of the European Parliament that a no-deal Brexit “might be the choice of the U.K., but it will never be ours.”
The main sticking point over a Brexit deal is the Irish border “backstop,” an insurance policy that would require Britain to respect EU trade and customs rules in order to avoid a hard border between EU member Ireland and the U.K.’s Northern Ireland until a better solution is found.
Pro-Brexit British politicians oppose the backstop because it would prevent the U.K. from striking new trade deals around the world. Johnson says he won’t back any Brexit deal unless the backstop is removed.
But the EU sees the measure as essential to ensuring an open border, which underpins the local economy and the peace process that ended decades of violence in Northern Ireland.
“I have no sentimental attachment to the backstop,” Juncker said. But he added that he remains committed to the purpose it serves, which is to prevent border structures that could be detrimental to peace in Northern Ireland.
“That is why I called on the British prime minister to come forward with concrete proposals, operational and in writing, on all alternatives that would allow us to reach these objectives,” Juncker said.
EU chief negotiator Michel Barnier said there was no point “pretending to negotiate.”
“It’s our responsibility to continue this process with determination and sincerity,” said Barnier, who offered to keep working “night and day” in order to find a deal that could satisfy both sides.
He said that if Britain left without a deal, major problems would still have to be resolved, including the future of U.K. and EU citizens hit by Brexit, peace in Northern Ireland and the protection of the EU’s single market and the Irish economy.
“None of these questions disappears,” Barnier said. “We need legally operative solutions in the withdrawal agreement to respond precisely to each problem - to address each risk - that Brexit creates.”
Lawmakers in the European Parliament pledged Wednesday to reject any deal without a backstop and insisted Britain would be “solely responsible for a no-deal departure.” The legislature must endorse any Brexit deal for it to be implemented.
European lawmakers also agreed to support a delay if Britain asked for one. They adopted a non-binding resolution supporting another extension to the Brexit deadline, which has already been postponed twice.
Just before the suspension, Britain’s Parliament passed a law ordering the government to seek a three-month delay to Brexit if no agreement has been reached by late October.
Johnson says he will not seek a delay under any circumstances, though it’s not clear how he can avoid it.
___
Lawless reported from London and Petrequin from Brussels. Associated Press writer Lorne Cook in Brussels contributed to this report.
___
Follow AP’s full coverage of Brexit and British politics at: https://www.apnews.com/Brexit
Sign up for Daily Newsletters Manage Newsletters
Copyright © 2020 The Washington Times, LLC. | {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
The events in Charlottesville this weekend demonstrated that America has a violent, racist right, and that it is organized, mobilized, and ready to kill. But instead of going after these already dangerous radicals, the FBI is busy radicalizing people who otherwise might not have bothered with political violence. This much is evident in the case of Jerry Drake Varnell, a man who was arrested in Oklahoma yesterday for a plot to bomb a bank that appears to have been entirely instigated by the Bureau.
Varnell is not a nice guy. He is said to have been motivated by hatred of the federal government and by far-right ideologies that he found online. How he found those ideologies, and who pushed him toward extremism, is unclear. What is clear, from a criminal compaint filed against Varnell, is that he was in contact with undercover FBI agents and informants who persuaded him to enact a violent plot, then staged that plot in order to arrest him for it.
The bombing that Varnell believed he was planning was entirely fake, concocted by the FBI to entrap him: What he thought was a bomb was not, what he thought was a stolen cargo van was not, what he thought was a detonator was not. The apparent entrapment was made more sinister by Varnell’s insistence, in conversations with the FBI agents whom he thought were his co-conspirators, on setting off the bomb at night, so as to minimize casualties. To some commentators, that sounded like the behavior of someone who wouldn’t have committed violence if the FBI hadn’t put him up to it.
It’s part of a long tradition for the FBI. Take, for instance, the three Brooklyn men the FBI arrested in 2015, who likely would not have wanted to travel to Syria or join ISIS if undercover agents had not convinced them that it was a good idea. Or think of the Somali-American teenager in Portland, Oregon, who was convinced to detonate a bomb in a parking lot by undercover agents he met through his mosque. In fact, what seems most unusual about the entrapment of Varnell was that this time the FBI targeted a right-wing white man, using a tactic that it most often reserves for young men of color.
It is interesting that the arrest of a white right-winger in an FBI sting comes just as the country is gripped by the events in Charlottesville. That various law enforcement agencies were caught off-guard by the danger these white supremacists pose only underscores the FBI still has no idea how to deal with the real far-right threat. | {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
The actress chats with TODAY’s Hoda Kotb and Jenna Bush Hager about studying for her role as an electrophysiologist in the upcoming film, “I, Frankenstein.” The Aussie star says doing different accents “comes naturally.” The film hits theaters this weekend. | {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
Good morning.
(Want to get California Today by email? Here’s the sign-up.)
In less than a decade, California has gone from being a standard-bearer for the ills of prison overcrowding to a national exemplar of reform, letting tens of thousands of people out of prison and reducing penalties for many crimes.
Important measures were passed by voters in 2014 and 2016, but only now is research starting to show the effects on crime in California. The new data is fueling a continuing debate, with national implications, about whether California should continue on the path of reform, or take a step back and get tougher, once again, on crime.
One recent study showed that an increase in crime in 2015 was not because of reforms. Another study determined that the reforms were not responsible for an increase in violent crime between 2014 and 2016 — that was from changes in reporting crime — but that they may have led to an increase in property crimes, specifically thefts from cars.
Adding to the body of evidence this week was a report on crime in 2017 released by the attorney general, Xavier Becerra. That report showed violent crime had increased 1.5 percent, while property crimes were down 2.1 percent. | {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
romaba 1 j aar geleden ( gewijzigd )
Hierover verschillen we van mening en dat mag. Zelf loop ik al heel lang me in de wereld van PSV maar ik kan u verzekeren dat Piet een heel belangrijk plaatsje heeft bij PSV en ik stoor me aan de onwaarheden en roddels die ik hier weer voorbij zie komen op deze site. Farfan KLOPT NIET ??? bij deze , uit de VIZuid-Amerikaanse voetballers hebben de naam grillig, egoïstisch en een beetje lui te zijn. Jefferson Farfán spot met al deze tradities. Mede dankzij een nimmer aflatende werklust en een groot teamgevoel is de Peruaan op zijn 21ste al de man die het verschil maakt voor PSV.Natuurlijk was Piet de Visser de man die Jefferson Farfán introduceerde bij PSV. Razend enthousiast was de superspeurder teruggekeerd van een toernooi in Chili, waar zijn haviksoog het Peruaanse talent had ontdekt. Hij pakt het rapport waarmee hij destijds naar Eindhoven snelde er nog maar eens bij. Pre-olympische spelen, 9 januari tot 19 januari 2004, vermeldt de omslag. ‘Wervelend, snel, doelgericht. Een karakterspeler, die de hele ploeg van Peru naar een hoger niveau tilt’, draagt De Visser voor uit eigen werk. ‘Naast de naam Farfán zette ik een sterretje. Zo wist PSV dat er sprake was van een zéér interessante speler.’ De aanbevelingen spoorden de club aan ook de scouts Hans Gillhaus en Hans van der Zee eens te laten kijken naar de kleine aanvaller. Nadat ook zij waren overtuigd door de Peruaanse parel, was de zaak rap beklonken.De rest is geschiedenis. In zijn eerste seizoen groeide Farfán meteen uit tot een grote belofte, een predikaat dat hij in zijn tweede jaar al ruimschoots voorbij is gestreefd. Hij is de onbetwiste aanvalsleider van PSV. Foquita (Zeehondje), noemen ze hem in Peru, maar dat heeft niets met zijn spel te maken. Op het veld is hij allesbehalve zijdezacht en ongevaarlijk. Als een hongerig roofdier struint Farfán over zijn territorium, loerend op een buitenkansje om zijn prooi te verschalken. Dat zijn tegenstanders vaak breder en groter zijn, deert hem niet. Met zijn krachtige lijf en ijzeren mentaliteit baant hij zich een weg door alle versperringen.......Een deel uit het artikel uit de VI Door:Geert-Jan Jakobs 7 JUNI 2018 | {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
It's fairly straightforward.
Find Bathroom (if none were found, fail, and requeue later) Go to Bathroom (if colonist failed on the route, wait and then find a new bathroom) Sit in Toilet Urinate Stand Up Success
"Go to bathroom" is actually its own state that is used when colonists have to go someplace. Almost every state involves the colonists going somewhere in the station.
Almost every state shares the same pattern:
Find Closest Object Go There Do Something
Queues
A collection of states composes a "queue".
Colonists always have a bunch of things that they want to do. If a colonist stopped everything just to use the bathroom or get food, nothing would ever get done.
Internally, colonists add all states to a queue. The code is something like:
colonist.QueueState(state, Priority.Needs, Category.Work)
Whenever a state finishes, the colonist starts the next one in the queue.
The order of states is determined by 2 things: Priority and Category.
Priority
Colonists care about some states more than others. For example, eating food is much more important than using the bathroom.
To ensure that colonists promptly keep themselves alive we have a priority system (from least important to most important).
Lowest Want_Normal Want_Urgent Job Normal Job Urgent Need_Normal Need_Urgent Highest
The rationale is fairly easy to see--needs are handled first, then jobs, then wants.
There's nothing forcing us to queue a state like "Eat Food" with a priority of Need. We could easily queue "Eat Food" with a priority of Want_Normal if a colonist isn't very hungry.
One inherent flaw of this system is that a colonist will always selfishly worry about his own needs even when he should be working.
Categories
To solve this issue, we use "categories".
The current categories are:
Nourishment Work Sleep Free Time Scared Any
Colonists have a schedule (that you can change however you want).
Throughout the day they're allowed to do different things. You wouldn't want your colonist to stop working in the middle of the day just to use the bathroom or get some food.
When morale is low, colonists replace the work category with free time.
There is an exception to this system, of course, and that's the "Any" category. States queued here can be performed at any time, regardless of schedule. A starving colonist would queue the "Eat Food" state as Need Urgent in the Any category. Otherwise a colonist would wait all day to eat something, and possibly die.
States can also be started immediately, interrupting the current state. A colonist would do this if a room lost oxygen or if they were being shot by pirates (among other things.)
Needs
Needs don't directly have anything to do with the fundamentals of colonist A.I, but they are very important for queueing states, so I'll briefly discuss them here (I'll probably have a future blog about needs).
Needs are things that colonists must routinely satisfy, or they die. Needs are things like hunger and thirst.
All needs are in the range 100 to 0. When a need reaches 0, something bad happens. Usually it's just a health impact (or death). In the case of the urinate need, colonists pee their pants (this prevents you from recycling the water they drank).
As need levels decrease, we queue states with various priorities.
So when hunger is at 75 we queue "Eat Food" as Want_Normal in the Nourishment category. Once it's at 25, we queue it as Need_Urgent in the Any Category (I'm making up these exact values).
When the same state is queued multiple time, the lower priority one is removed from the queue. This prevents the colonist from eating multiple times (once as Need_Urgent and again as Want_Normal).
Summary
To summarize:
Colonists have a schedule throughout the day. They'll perform states that are relevant to their current category. They always perform the most important state first.
States are a chain of actions.
Actions are the simplest unit of "thing" that the colonists can do.
Here's an example: | {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
Tobacco does not go in this! I just ready a disturbing article on Anal Tobacco use, and how it is on the rise among Teens everywhere who... | {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
can sprint and swim while wearing golden armor can't walk correctly while holding up a sword
13,256 shares | {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
Alabama themed name for my boat Posted by ReauxlTide222 Postedon 3/26/13 at 4:19 pm 1 0
Anyone have any suggestions? I didn't put this on the Alabama board because I thought some rival fans might have some funny ideas.
| {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
say the n word loudly around black people they will respect your bravery
130,972 shares | {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
HELSINKI (Reuters) - Finnish police searched a reporter’s home and seized her computer after she tried to destroy the hard drive to protect sources linked to a security story, her newspaper reported.
The journalist, Laura Halminen, said she tried to smash up her computer with a hammer in her home, but the laptop then started smoking and she called the fire brigade, according to an interview published by her employer Helsingin Sanomat.
Police officers who came to her home with the fire service to investigate the blaze then took her computer and searched her property, police said - a rare operation in a country rated high for protecting press freedom.
The case centered on a story that Halminen and another journalist wrote on Saturday about a Finnish intelligence center that they said monitored neighboring Russia and, they reported, was about to get new powers to watch Finns online.
After the article’s publication, Finland’s President Sauli Niinisto released a statement saying authorities had launched an investigation in to the leaking of material used in the story.
The reporter Halminen told her newspaper in the interview she had decided to destroy the computer “to make sure sources were protected in the best possible way”.
On Sunday, the police’s National Bureau of Investigation said, officers went to the property and found the computer burning in the basement. “After that, a special home search was ordered to be carried out in the apartment and basement,” the force added.
It said officers had had to act quickly because they feared material linked to an investigation could be destroyed. There were no reports of anyone being arrested or charged.
The newspaper said the police also took phones and memory sticks in what it called a “very worrying” raid. “A house search of this scale targeting a journalist is totally exceptional in Finland,” Editor-in-chief, Kaius Niemi, said.
Campaign group Reporters Without Borders ranked Finland third in its 2017 World Press Freedom Index, behind only Sweden and Norway. | {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
Kurt Kloss, Karlie’s father, is in the news after it was revealed that he was crowd-sourcing coronavirus advice for the White House. Kurt, a doctor, posted in a private Facebook group called “EM Docs,” asking what other people would suggest if they were “in charge of Federal response to the Pandemic.”
In a series of posts to this private Facebook group, Kurt said in part,
If you were in charge of Federal response to the Pandemic what would your recommendation be. Please only serious responses. I have direct channel to person now in charge at White House and have been asked for recommendations. I have already expressed concern for need for ventilators and more PPE (personal protective equipment) for frontline and test kits.
Here’s what you need to know:
Kurt Kloss, Karlie’s Father, Sent 12 Recommendations for the Coronavirus Pandemic to Jared Kushner, Politico Says, After ‘Crowd Sourcing’ Suggestions on Facebook
Then, after some members apparently challenged the validity of his connection to the White House, Kurt posted another message:
“So for transparency I will provide some background about my unique circumstance,” he wrote. He continued, “Our daughter Karlie Kloss (one of the top models in the world, 45 Vogue covers and counting; proud dad commentary) is married to Mr Joshua Kusher. His brother is Mr Jared Kusher, son-in-law to the president and who is now directly involved with the response to this.”
i guess Karlie Kloss’ dad’s facebook group helped https://t.co/baWsaSHZq7 — manik (@ManikRathee) March 13, 2020
Kurt explained he wanted to crowd-source suggestions for Jared, his son-in-law, to hand over to Jared’s brother, Joshua, who is married to Ivanka Trump. He said, “I hope to have this posted before I go to bed later this morning. In the almost 30 years of training for and practising EMERGENCY MEDICINE I have not been afraid until today.”
The information was first posted by The Spectator, and has since been verified by multiple publications. Karlie has not given a comment, nor has the White House.
According to Politico, Kurt did send Jared Kushner 12 recommendations on Thursday. The Facebook group in question, EM Docs, has over 22,000 members, all of whom are required to show their credentials before they join.
Karlie Posted Photos of Her Father Frequently up Until 2018; She’s Paid Tribute to Him on Father’s Day More Than Once
Kloss has not posted many recent pictures of her father. However, she did post a Father’s Day tribute to him in 2018, writing, “Happy Father’s Day to my forever hero, my greatest teacher in life and the man who taught to always put family above all. Thank you for inspiring me to dream big, work hard and play harder. I love you Dad ❤️”
Karlie has been married to her husband, Josh Kushner, since 2018. She has three sisters, Kristine, Kariann, and Kimberly.
In addition to posting photos of her father, Kurt, she often posts pictures of her sisters and mother, too.
This is a developing post and will be updated. | {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
Check out our new site Makeup Addiction
And im just sitting here
add your own caption
And im just sitting here
add your own caption
And im just sitting here
add your own caption
And im just sitting here
add your own caption
And im just sitting here
add your own caption
And im just sitting here
add your own caption
And im just sitting here
add your own caption
And im just sitting here
add your own caption
And im just sitting here
add your own caption
And im just sitting here
add your own caption
add your own caption
eVERYONE'S READY TO ORDER DESSERT AND I'M JUST SITTING HERE masticating | {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. — The Tampa Bay Rowdies announced on Wednesday the club had signed experienced defender Tarek Morad. The 25-year-old will be available for selection in the club’s game on Wednesday night against the Charleston Battery (7:30 p.m. ET | Match Center | ESPNews).
“We’re always happy to improve our squad and when a player of Tarek’s ability is available, it’s a great addition,” said Head Coach Neill Collins said. “He’s a player that has played a lot of games in this league at a really high level and we’re excited to have him in our team.”
Morad has made 94 appearances overall in the USL, having recorded six goals and two assists over that span. A native of California, Morad began his career with OKC Energy FC in the 2014 season and spent the past three seasons with Louisville City FC, where he helped the side claim the 2017 USL Cup.
Morad made 32 appearances in all competitions for Louisville in the 2017 season as he helped the side finish top of the Eastern Conference standings prior to its USL Cup victory. He scored a pair of goals in the club’s 4-0 victory against Bethlehem Steel FC in the Eastern Conference Quarterfinals of the USL Cup Playoffs and was Louisville’s all-time appearances leader with 88 following the conclusion of the 2017 season. | {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
AHA Taxis
One Solution for Taxi Transportation in India!
Welcome to the state of reliable and safe taxis. We, at AHA Taxis, guarantee to make your ride comfortable and easy – offering you a hassle-free travel experience within your city or outstation all across India. As one of the leading car booking service providers having presence across PAN India, we bring to you the best chauffeur driven cabs in your desired location.
We are reckoned as India’s finest outstation cab service provider, operating our fleet of modern, air-conditioned, GPS enabled vehicles across multiple cities of India. Our cabs combine the latest mobile technology to ensure safety and to provide passengers with the highest quality of service.
As there has always been a need to connect the country end-to-end, we have increased our geographical presence and fleet size to provide passengers with the amazing quality and easy cab booking service on thousands of routes across India. With more than 25000+ driver partners spread across more than 4,000+ Indian cities, we have you covered all across India..
You can choose from the wide range of cabs including luxury Sedan and SUV options to the regular Hatchback alternatives as per your requirements, preferences, convenience, and budget. We offer car hire services with seating capacity ranging from 4 to 40 passengers. Not only this, but we also provide both one way outstation cabs as well as round trip taxi rental options. One can also book a cab for hourly rental, airport transfers, corporate travel, employee transportation, weekend, honeymoon package tours and much more.
Insist on AHA Taxis to get an affordable, reliable, and on-time taxi service that you need and deserve! | {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
The decision is Largent v. Reed (Pa. Common Pleas Nov. 8, 2011), and it involves a discovery request by the defendant in a civil case arising from a car accident. The defendant has filed a Motion to Compel Facebook Login Information in an effort to look through the plaintif’s account for evidence that she was exaggerating her injuries. Judge Walsh grants the request, ruling:
Plaintiff . . . must turn over her Facebook login information to Defense counsel within 14 days of the date of the attached Order. Defense counsel is allotted a 21-day window in which to inspect [Plaintiff]’s profile. After the window closes, Plaintiff may change her password to prevent any further access to her account by Defense counsel.
Judge Walsh spends pages 10-12 considering how the Stored Communications Act applies to this situation, and given that he relies on an article I wrote, let me offer a quick comment. Judge Walsh writes that the Stored Communications Act isn’t implicated because the defendant seeks information directly from the plaintiff. As a result, neither the defendant nor the plaintiff is a regulated entity (known as an “RCS” or an “ECS”) under the statute:
In this case, [Defendant] seeks the information directly from [Plaintiff]. The SCA does not apply because [Defendant] is not an entity regulated by the SCA. She is neither an RCS nor an ECS, and accessing Facebook or the Internet via a home computer, smartphone, laptop, or other means does not render her an RCS or ECS. See Kerr, 72 Geo. Wash. L. Rev, at 1214. She cannot claim the protection of the SCA, because that Act does not apply to her. “The SCA is not a catch-all statute designed to protect the privacy of stored Internet communications.” Id. Rather, it only applies to the enumerated entities. Largent being neither an ECS nor an RCS, the SCA does not protect her Facebook profile from discovery.
While it’s true that neither the plaintiff nor the defendant are regulated entities under the statute, Facebook clearly is. Facebook is an ECS provider in some ways and an RCS provider in other ways. As a result, the privacy of Facebook communications are protected by 18 U.S.C. 2701 of the Stored Communications Act, which protects ECS providers, in addition to 18 U.S.C. 1030, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, which protects all computers generally. Both of these statutes prohibit accessing electronic accounts without authorization or in excess of authorizaton. So while ordering the plaintiff to disclose her password to the defendant doesn’t itself violate the SCA or the CFAA, it’s at least an open question whether the defendant’s future act of accessing the plaintiff’s account might violate those statutes.
As with many questions of the CFAA (and related provisions of the SCA), it hinges on what “authorization” means. Here’s the question: If Facebook says that only the individual account holder can access the account; the individual account holder refuses to voluntarily disclose the password; and someone else accesses the account only because the account holder was forced by a judge to disclose the password, is the “someone else’s” access authorized or not? Put another way, what governs authorization: The views of Facebook and the views of the account holder, or the views of the trial judge who granted the discovery request? It’s not an easy question, creating a significant risk that granting the motion to compel invites the movant to commit a federal crime in the course of discovery. | {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
E così anche l’ultimo bastione del M5S potrebbe cadere presto. La regola dei due mandati per la prima volta è stata seriamente messa in discussione da Luigi Di Maio con l’ok, a sorpresa, di Beppe Grillo. Una sperimentazione che è avvenuta nel Lazio, tra i consiglieri grillini, un mese fa, e che al di là di come sia finita ha aperto un varco definitivo nella diga innalzata a suo tempo da Gianroberto Casaleggio. Era quello che voleva Di Maio, e potrebbe ridisegnare gli scenari sul governo gialloverde. Fino a oggi il tetto dei due mandati è stato un vero e proprio tabù. Ma la politica è come il vento che leviga le cose, smussa le acerbità e le spigolature. E le vecchie abitudini possono tronare utili quando la strategia si intreccia alla sopravvivenza. Non è un caso, infatti, che ai vertici del M5S si sia cominciato a studiare l’ipotesi di rompere il vincolo elettivo proprio nei giorni dell’azione di corteggiamento scatenata da Silvio Berlusconi, quella “Operazione scoiattolo” che punta tutto sul timore dei parlamentari al secondo mandato di non essere rieletti. Ma c’è anche un altro motivo, che guarda più lontano, nella convinzione che il tetto dia un vantaggio competitivo a Matteo Salvini, di cui il leghista si fa forza.
Contro le sirene di Berlusconi e Salvini “Pronti a ricandidare tutti i parlamentari”
Di fatto, il grillino ha testato nel Lazio l’addio al principio aureo dei due mandati per avere un piano B, se con la Lega dovesse finire male dopo le Europee. E quel piano B c’è. Perché se Di Maio ha messo in discussione questa regola vuole dire che si sta preparando all’eventualità di un divorzio traumatico dal Carroccio e che preferirebbe tornare al voto, piuttosto che esporre i parlamentari 5 Stelle a un esodo verso il centrodestra. Il vicepremier e i grillini al governo si sono convinti che i due mandati siano una gabbia che “ci indebolisce nei rapporti di forza con i leghisti”, usata a suo favore da Salvini, come fa Berlusconi, sempre in agguato. Ma per capire di più cosa ha in testa il leader M5S bisogna partire dall’antefatto, a Roma, dove è maturato il precedente che torna utile a Di Maio. A fine novembre si vota la mozione di sfiducia al governatore del Lazio Nicola Zingaretti. I 5 stelle sono nel panico. Alcuni di loro sono al secondo mandato, come l’ex deputata Roberta Lombardi. Di Maio ordina di votare la sfiducia. Come spiegano fonti del M5S regionale, assicura: ”Verrete ricandidati con liste uguali”. Il divieto sarebbe derogato. “Diremo che sono passati solo sette mesi dal voto, non è un mandato completo, Beppe è d’accordo”. Grillo infatti è favorevole. Telefona: anche lui vuole la testa di Zingaretti. Non lo è invece Davide Casaleggio, custode delle norme sacre del padre. La spaccatura si proietta sul gruppo consiliare. Tra i più tiepidi c’è proprio Lombardi, che è capogruppo, sempre più distante dai vertici nazionali. Alla fine, il M5S vota compatto per la sfiducia, ma il governatore si salva.
Il caso dei consiglieri laziali al secondo mandato rispecchia una situazione identica per una settantina di parlamentari. Dopo il passaggio a Forza Italia del deputato Matteo Dall’Osso, i capigruppo hanno avvertito Di Maio su almeno un’altra decina di grillini pronti all’addio. E al capo politico non sfugge cosa potrebbe succedere dopo le Europee se si dovessero confermare i sondaggi così favorevoli alla Lega. Salvini “chiederebbe di più”, e non esclude possa anche esserci uno smottamento verso un governo di centrodestra. “Dobbiamo tenerci pronti” dice Di Maio: “Rassicurarli che verranno ricandidati”. Ma questo è un ragionamento che risponde a un’urgenza del momento. Poi c’è una riflessione sul lungo periodo. Il leader è sempre più a suo agio in politica. Ed è tempo di ammettere, secondo lui, che la regola che nella visione di Casaleggio Padre era la premessa all’uno vale uno, al ricambio continuo di eletti subordinati all’ideale assolutista del Movimento e ridotti a suoi strumenti, è una zavorra in politica, perché ti preclude una dimensione essenziale, il futuro, e inibisce un fattore altrettanto fondamentale in ogni carriera: l’ambizione. Per Di Maio il passaggio da Movimento a partito è nelle cose. E in questa prospettiva, definisce “un limite” il divieto del terzo mandato, levarlo aiuterebbe a costruire un argine psicologico nella competizione contro Salvini.
BY NC ND ALCUNI DIRITTI RISERVATI | {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
Fucking Sephora, man. There's nothing like it. Part store, part museum, part laboratory, part psychologist. Densely packed with products, brightly lit as an operating room, gleaming like a jewelry counter, frenzied like a factory, Sephora is not just a cosmetics store. It's a beacon, a flame to which women flit and flock like moths.
Sephora's irresistible allure is global. Earlier this month, Sephora opened a flagship store in Shanghai, China. It has 7,000 products spread over five floors. FIVE FLOORS. Five floors of perfumes, eyeshadows, moisturizers, tweezers, serums, makeup brushes, lipglosses, teeth whiteners, eye creams, nail polishes, hair dryers and body glitter. My god.
The top four fascinating things about Sephora are:
1. How addictive it is
2. How you will find women of all ages and races and socio-economic levels inside (in NYC at least)
3. The oh-so-public grooming on display
4. The complete and utter lack of a male equivalent
This is something women do. Gawk at packaging, test shades of lipstick, search for self-improvement, hope for the best. One mirror at a time.
Men do not do this. Men do not gather en masse and gaze upon their pores in magnifying mirrors. Men's grooming is marked by its brevity; the barber shop may be a chatty hang out, but when it comes to services, guys are usually in and out — snip, snip, done. Yes, men may buy shaving cream or hair products. But not the way women wander, browse, search, look, read, question, quest in Sephora. Weaving through the aisles, ogling but not seeing, wishing for miracles, flashes of brilliance, a magic solution for under-eye circles.
Sephora turns the simple act of maintenance into a luxurious journey towards self-creation (or re-creation). Whether you're into self-help or self-acceptance is up to you; Sephora has not only what you need but what you never knew you needed or wanted.
We arrive at Sephora with dragons to slay: dull skin, small eyes, lifeless hair, lack of a signature scent. On Sephora's shelves stand the tiny knights ready to do battle on our behalf; that Nars Multiple is a little soldier who gallops into war, rose-colored banner waving for you. It's all for you. A better you, a different you. One with longer lashes and bee-stung lips, courtesy of Diorshow and Lip Venom. If you can dream it, you can be it, as long as it involves only your most superficial level of being. Sephora is for your outsides. But, of course, your outsides can change your insides: Slathering on a new bright red lipstick can tap into your inner screen siren, giving you confidence and putting pep in your step. Daubing a new scent in your décolletage can draw out a sensual, reflective side, one who breathes more deeply and suddenly has an urge to read poetry out loud. And there's no explaining the earth-shattering effects the right eye makeup can have — a lingering gaze ignites sparks, and suddenly you're smoldering hot. And feeling it. I can't count the number of times I had a meeting after work — whether it was work-related, a date, or a drink with a friend — and I stopped in Sephora on my way. A blush here, a lip-freshen there, a spritz everywhere and suddenly my whole aura is brighter, bolder. Shoulders back, chin up. Armed.
The problem with Sephora — and there is a problem, ladies in Shanghai, be warned — is that, like many drugs, too much is never enough. Sephora is a smoke monster, a rainbow, a Mobius strip of promises. There's no getting a grip on it. There is no end. There's only more. You can chase the dragon of self-improvement slash self-enhancement slash self-acceptance until the day you die; there's always a new fragrance, a new lip color, a new miracle cream right around the corner. Sucking your bank account dry. You go in for a lip balm and come out with body polish, dry shampoo, BB cream, and Kat Von D's "Sinner" smoky eyes palette. (The are over 100,000 videos titled "Sephora Haul" on YouTube to watch should you have any doubts.) Oodles on display, a myriad of options, infinite possibilities. When you think you've finally found the solution, the crutch, the key, either you run out and need more; they stop making it and it vanishes like so much sparkly Guerlain Terra Cotta dust; or you find that what once satisfied you no longer does the trick. A deliciously sticky honey trap, from which you never fully escape; you leave, but the pull is strong, keeping you coming back.
Fucking Sephora, man.
SEPHORA Opens Its Largest Flagship Store in China [Herald]
Sephora Opens Largest Store in Asia [WWD] | {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
Ciudad de México, 13 de marzo (SinEmbargo).– MVS dio a conocer esta tarde una serie de lineamiento que a partir del lunes regirán la relación entre conductores y empresa, entre los que destaca la creación de un Comité Editorial en el que se decidirán y presentarán los temas que se darán a conocer en las distintas emisiones de radio.
El anuncio se da tras el diferendo entre el medio y Carmen Aristegui ocurrido por el uso de la marca MVS en la plataforma Méxicoleaks, en la que participan el equipo de investigaciones de la periodista y varios medios, y la cual fue dada a conocer el martes en el espacio radiofónico.
Como consecuencia de lo que la empresa consideró “un abuso de confianza”, la empresa despidió a Daniel Lizárraga e Irving Huerta, quienes hasta ayer formaban parte de la Unidad de Investigaciones Especiales de Noticias MVS Primera Emisión.
En repuesta, Carmen Aristegui exigió esta mañana la reinstalación de los periodistas e informó que al momento de ser despedidos investigaban la casa de Malinalco del Secretario de Hacienda, Luis Videgaray, quien la adquirió a crédito con una tasa menor que la del mercado a Grupo Higa, uno de los consorcios más beneficiados por el gobierno de Enrique Peña Nieto en el Estado de México.
Esta tarde, MVS dijo que con el propósito de resolver dicho problema la administración del medio presentó el día de hoy a sus conductores de noticias los lineamientos que regirán la relación entre conductores y empresa.
“A partir de esta fecha se incorporan al Comité Editorial todos los conductores de noticias quienes contarán con derecho de voz y voto en el seno del mismo. El Comité Editorial es un foro de intercambio de ideas y de toma de decisiones previos a la difusión. […] En ese sentido, no solo es obligación de los conductores asistir, conocer y dar seguimiento a la agenda informativa que presenta la Dirección de Noticias, sino también presentar por anticipado todo aquello de relevancia informativa que estén realizando con sus respectivos equipos o que tengan contemplado en sus respectivas agendas”, dice el lineamiento.
La empresa de Joaquín Vargas dio a conocer que el personal adscrito a la unidad de investigaciones especiales, ya no sólo prestará servicios a la primera emisión de conduce Carmen Aristegui, sino a todas las emisiones de Noticias MVS.
“La Unidad será coordinada por el Director de Noticias tomando en cuenta las recomendaciones del Comité Editorial con respecto a las solicitudes de los conductores de noticias. […]. Todos los elementos que conforman esta Unidad, así como el producto de sus investigaciones, será exclusivo de MVS y no podrán prestar servicios a ninguna persona, medio o plataforma ajenos a MVS”, refiere un tercer lineamiento.
En el documento se informa que la decisión de celebrar alianzas estratégicas y convenios de colaboración será exclusiva de la administración de la empresa. MVS dijo que en el caso de la designación de reporteros, corresponsales, analistas, comentaristas, coordinadores de información, defensor de la audiencia, etcétera, será determinada de manera consensuada entre los conductores y el Director de Noticias.
Se precisó que cualquier diferendo que pueda existir en relación a la dirección editorial y conducción de la emisión, entre los conductores y la empresa, será dirimida entre el conductor y el Director de Noticias.
Asimismo se dijo que “los conductores deberán hacer del conocimiento de la empresa cualquier interés personal o familiar que pudiera percibirse en conflicto con su trabajo”.
MVS comunicó que dadas las necesidades de optimizar los recursos financieros de la empresa, “a partir de esta fecha la cobertura de los sucesos en el extranjero se llevará a cabo vía Agencias Internacionales, que darán servicio a todas las emisiones noticiosas de la Empresa”.
Informó que los conductores de noticias deberán realizar comentarios editoriales que serán transmitidos en las distintas emisiones en coordinación con la Dirección de Noticias.
Dijo que a través de empresas especializadas se llevará a cabo una valoración periódica de todas aquellas secciones, investigaciones, segmentos, mesas de debate, comentaristas, etcétera, con las que cuenta cada una de las emisiones.
La empresa dio a conocer que las suplencias y transmisiones especiales serán definidas y autorizadas por el Director de Noticias, “quien deberá realizar los análisis adecuados para cada una de las emisiones, así como la conveniencia o no, de transmisiones especiales”. | {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
First Saturday Volunteer Days
Come by CFET on the first Saturday of every month from 9:45 am until 12:45 pm to help us with work projects based around Eve’s Gardens. For more details or to let us know you’re coming, feel free to send us an email at [email protected]. | {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
Da sich meine Podcastepisoden immer bei den jeweiligen Beiträgen befinden, gibt es hier eine Seite, von wo aus du direkt zu meinen Podcasts kommt! 🙂
Pendulo Studios
Runaway: A Road Adventure Podcast
Runaway: Runaway – The Dream of the Turtle
Runaway: Runaway – A Twist of Fate
Hollywood Monsters
Hollywood Monsters 2 – The Next Big Thing | {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
0 0
A solar array in St. Thomas after Hurricane Irma: Photo Caption
Hurricane Harvey recently devastated several parts of the United States of America such as Texas, Louisiana, Alabama, etc. It caused huge flooding in parts of Houston. It resulted in the loss of 83 previous lives and property worth more than $65 billion stood damaged. Similarly, Hurricane Irma caused catastrophic damage in areas including Barbuda, Saint Barthélemy, Saint Martin, Anguilla, and the Virgin Islands. The hurricane killed at least 132 people and damaged property worth billions. And now there is Hurricane Irma. One of the problems faced in such situations is that all energy infrastructure such as electricity lines or generators get destroyed and their is no power left to run machines to clean up the mess or bring lives back to normal.
In such unforeseen natural disasters, technology can play a pivotal role in providing relief and getting lives back on track. One such innovation is flexible solar panels that can roll out from trucks like a carpet. They can offer a first response emergency solution for hurricane-affected regions, including islands, as well as offer energy security as they can be part of a counter hurricane strategy and energy infrastructure.
Developed and designed by Renovagen, the super flexible solar panel can be rolled up and down—pretty much like a carpet. So, in case of places struck by disaster, these can be immensely beneficial. Basically, you can drive off to a hilly remote area for a picnic and roll out the solar panels, which will recharge your car. So you basically don’t have to worry about getting fuelled-out.
Solar Roll-Arrays are quick to deploy and easy to use
Called Roll-Array, the technology can be towed by any car and is fairly simple to use. First, you hook it to the back of a car and drop the Roll Array to where you want to place the solar power panels. You can use a spool to connect it to the back of a car. You can then drive the vehicle forward allowing the spool to pull the Roll-Array, which rolls out like a carpet. Your very own power generation system is up and running as the solar panels get on the job fairly quickly.
At present, the device can churn around 18 kW of maximum power. It also comes with a 53 kWh lithium energy storage system together with fans and filters for cooling and ventilation. In size, it can easily fit into a helicopter or a truck. The uptime is also less, meaning it can hit the ground running.
Solar power: renewable energy for the present and the future
Solar power has been on quite a roll over the past few years. In fact, the number of rooftop solar installations have increased substantially as the technology has kept on getting increasingly better as well as affordable. Therefore, innovators and inventors have not only focused on improving solar cell efficiency, but are also trying to develop more creative and flexible designs.
The flexible solar power system is strong and rigid; this allows the carpet to have multiple roll-in’s and roll-out’s without causing any damage. It is like a fully functional microgrid. The system is perfectly suited for camping, mining activities, festivals, as well as a source of emergency power.
Other tech developments in solar energy
Recently, the world’s biggest floating solar power plant has been made operational in Huainan city, Eastern China. The 40-MW plant is situated on a reservoir and is in close proximity to the city. Offshore from Huainan, the plant has been successfully connected with the power grid. The world’s first floating wind energy farm is now functional near the north-east coast of Scotland.
About the author: I am an environmentalist, technology evangelist, women empowerment advocate, writer and editor. Basically I am a storyteller at heart and want to make the world a better place. I want to be the catalyst for making the world green and clean and rid the Earth of disasters like global warming and climate change. You can mail me at [email protected] or connect with me through LinkedIn, Twitter, together with Facebook. Looking forward to hearing from you soon.
Image credit: Inhabitat | {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
A few shoutouts, a few questions, a few answers, and a lot of tangents: it's time for some real talk with the dads. | {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
From the beginning of Trump’s candidacy I expected and hoped that it would accelerate racial polarization and White radicalization as well as discredit the anti-White media and its false narratives. As that racial polarization — the Great Divide — occurs, our success or failure, and with it the life or death of our race, will depend on how many of the people of our race break to our side of the divide. If it is most of them, we will probably win and our race will be saved. If not, our chances will be greatly diminished, and for something of this importance, this seriousness, with this much — literally the life or death of our race — at stake, we must take the utmost care to maximize our chances.
In April 1989 I gave a talk at a gathering of Instaurationists entitled “Creating a Moral Image.” It was well received and Wilmot Robertson published it in the August, 1989 issue of Instauration. It turned out to be the most controversial essay yet to appear in its pages. According to Wilmot most of the criticism was of a very low quality, too low even for the “Safety Valve,” but he did publish one essay-length response which, like the other criticism, wrongly saw my paper as a pacifistic rejection of warrior values. The critics missed the main point of the essay — the decisive battle for the hearts and minds of our people is being fought on the battlefield of morality. Violence per se was rejected only if it was immoral (by public perception and/or traditional Western standards) or counter-productive, and the example I cited was clearly both. I maintained that those who practiced or preached such immoral violence, or in any other way projected an immoral public image, were hurting our cause and playing into our opponents hands.
Over twenty-eight years later, in the wake of the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, we see how little has changed, how clearly our battle is still one of morality, and how the points I made in that essay are, if anything, even more true now than they were then (see also “Moral Capital and White Interests“). Our anti-White opponents know this well, but too many pro-White activists have yet to heed the lesson. The storm now shaking the country, and the whole of the Western world, including the Trump administration, is one of perverse anti-White values and policies presented as consensus traditional and universal morality. Our anti-White antagonists were given, or arranged, the opening or opportunity they were looking for and took full advantage of it at our expense. They seized the moral high ground and from those heights are showering us with a torrent of moral invective, denunciation, condemnation and epithets, creating false pretexts to justify suppression of our message, our platforms and our gatherings as our moral image seems to have been dragged to new lows.
They have succeeded at this because we have not yet succeeded in framing and communicating our message, and defining ourselves and our movement, in moral terms, and putting this into practice. We have a very moral goal, and it needs to be communicated effectively within the framework of a very moral narrative. It is really a simple message, as simple as it is moral. Expressing it simply, in terms easy to understand, we could say:
We want our race to live, but it is being destroyed. It is being destroyed by multiracialism. All those who promote or defend multiracialism, or oppose the preservationist solution of separation, are responsible for the destruction of our race, and are therefore guilty of the genocide of the European peoples.
Our antagonists usually deny this simple and damning truth for tactical reasons, to lessen the resistance of their victims by keeping them ignorant of their fate. Most of their victims seem not to know or care, or both. Whether they don’t care because they don’t know, or — per Heidegger — don’t know because they don’t care, it is of the utmost importance that we promote accurate knowledge of our ongoing genocide as far and wide as we can, at every opportunity we get. The facts are certainly there, in plain sight for everyone to see, brought on by immigration and intermixture, and it would be difficult to believe someone could not see them.
Indeed, the first half of our destruction or genocide, our displacement and replacement in our own countries, is already well underway. A healthy race exists at two levels, at the individual level and at the population level, as a racial population. Most of the European peoples have already been effectively destroyed at the population level and no longer exist as racial populations, as populations capable of continuing their racial existence. They have been destroyed by multiracialism, which has transformed them into multiracial rather than racial populations leading to the destruction and death of the White population. That is the first stage of White genocide, and we were nearing its guaranteed success before Trump’s election. His win temporarily delayed — we cannot yet say foiled — the intended progress of our genocide, frustrating and angering the anti-White coalition who had never before experienced such a reversal of their agenda.
Our anti-White opponents have responded by promoting numerous false narratives — the so-called “fake news” — and have run with these false narratives a very big way. We must hope they have gone too far, and by going to excess they may yet fall victim to their own trap, the trap they had set for us, and be hoisted on their own petard, caught in the coils of their own false narrative when the truth comes out. And we must hope the truth does come out, as much of it as possible.
In combating their false narrative, and promoting our own narrative and moral image, we should pay careful attention to our messaging and labeling, how we define and present ourselves and our positions, and make sure they are consistent with each other. If we reject the label of “White supremacism,” we must logically reject the labels of “neo-Nazi” and “KKK.” If our position is one of White preservation and independence, of continued White racial existence and control of our own existence, both of which require separation from other races to be successful in the long-term, and therefore not seeking to control other races so long as they are separated from us, then our labels and self-definition should be consistent with that.
The simplest and most direct labels are usually the best, as the least subject to misunderstanding and misrepresentation. This would make the label “pro-White” the best, defined as supporting White racial interests, of which the most vital interests are in continued racial existence and independence or control of our own existence. The simplest and primary label for the opponents of these ultimate White racial interests would be “anti-White,” which label could be extended to include those who oppose the promotion or defense of fundamental White interests.
Other labels that would accurately describe us in moral terms would be more specific in describing our pro-White positions, e.g., “White (or racial) separatist,” “White (or racial) preservationist,” “White (or racial) liberationist,” “opponent of White (or European, or racial) genocide.”
Our slogans should be consistent with our labels and positions. Examples would include “I want my race to live,” “Support the right to racial life,” “Support the continued existence of the White race (or the British, French, German, Italian, Swedish, etc. people),” “Stop White genocide,” and we should be prepared to show how those slogans refer to the real world.
Notice that none of these slogans mention or refer to non-Whites. The slogans are about us and our interests, not them, and so are positive expressions clearly motivated by love. Slogans that mention non-Whites in a negative, critical or adversarial way — and given our current precarious situation it is hard to mention them in any other way — invite accusations of hate, and our motives, whether love or hate, are a central part of our moral image. Certainly the harm that non-Whites do to our interests must be addressed, as they are central to our ongoing destruction. But this should be done in more detailed and in-depth forms of discussion that allow for an adequate and thoughtful presentation of our positions, not in slogans.
Wanting one’s race to live is not hate by any reasonable or traditional definition. Nor is it “supremacism” (properly defined as ruling, controlling or dominating other races) to advocate racial survival through separation and independence. It may be defined as a form of racism, but if so it is a moral form, with a highly moral purpose and goal — preservation rather than destruction. Our anti-White opponent’s false claims to the contrary — claims that advance their promotion of White genocide — represent their false narrative at the macro level. Their false claims about Charlottesville represent their false narrative at the micro level.
Only a value system that defines genocide as good could define racial preservationism as evil. Nevertheless, that is the anti-White value system of our would-be destroyers. They have a long record that makes this very clear. If we get a chance to fight on the moral battlefield with anything close to fair odds our morality should be able to beat theirs. That is the fight we need to win, the fight we should focus all our attention on, and let nothing else — no promotion of some other agenda, organization or ideology, no toxic influences or spoilers — divert or distract us from it. | {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
Kert Kingo selgitas Postimehele, et kõik iseloomustuses temale omistatud omadused ja tegevused on välja mõeldud või pahatahtlikult moonutatud ning tegemist oli otsese töökiusuga. Negatiivne iseloomustus on Kingo arvates seda kummalisem, et aastal 2015 märgiti ta ära MTA «Aasta parima» ja aastal 2016 «Aasta kolleegi» konkursil. | {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
April 7, 2013
By Chris Reed
The instant national chortling Thursday over the fact that President Obama had called California’s Kamala Harris the “best-looking” state attorney general ended up being more about seeing the usual slippery standards on political correctness. Democrats can often get away with little blowback for things that would get Republicans fricaseed, and this was one more example.
But if you are Harris, you probably don’t appreciate the Obama remark because of the likelihood that it will remind people that it was her attractiveness that gave her her initial foothold in state politics.
Harris caught Willie Brown’s eye in her 20s
The first time she ever appears in a Nexis.com search of California news is March 22, 1994, when she was Assembly Speaker Willie Brown’s date at his 60th birthday party. She was 30 years-plus younger. But she didn’t just date Brown. She cashed in from knowing him:
“Assembly Speaker Willie Brown, continuing his rush to hand out patronage jobs while he retains his powerful post, has given high-paying appointments to his former law associate and a former Alameda County prosecutor who is Brown’s frequent companion.
“Brown, exercising his power even as his speakership seems near an end, named attorney Kamala Harris to the California Medical Assistance Commission, a job that pays $72,000 a year.
“Harris, a former deputy district attorney in Alameda County, was described by several people at the Capitol as Brown’s girlfriend. In March, San Francisco Chronicle columnist Herb Caen called her ‘the Speaker’s new steady.’ Harris declined to be interviewed Monday and Brown’s spokeswoman did not return phone calls.
“Harris accepted the appointment last week after serving six months as Brown’s appointee to the Unemployment Insurance Appeals Board, which pays $97,088 a year.”
That’s from the Nov. 22, 1994, Los Angeles Times.
Two British newspapers are going where U.S. papers won’t and connecting the 2013 compliment Harris got from America’s most powerful black politician with the 1994 “compliments” she got from California’s most powerful black politiican. Both the London Daily Mail and the London Evening Standard mentioned Harris’ history with Willie Brown, without mentioning he was double her age.
Harris’ personal history is even more exotic than Obama’s. Her parents are Dr. Shyamala Gopalan, a breast cancer specialist, and Stanford University economics professor Donald Harris, who had Kamala after emigrating to the U.S. from India and Jamaica, respectively.
I’m sure this high-powered couple was just thrilled to see their daughter’s mentor/protege/girlfriend relationship with the aging, married Brown.
Yes, married.
“In September 1958, Brown married Blanche Vitero, with whom he had three children, Susan, Robin, and Michael. He has four grandchildren, Besia, Matea, Mateo, and Lordes, and a step-granddaughter, Tyler. The couple separated in approximately 1976 but remain married. He has a daughter, Sydney Brown, by political fund raiser Carolyn Carpeneti.”
How … continental. | {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
Dan Nowicki
The Republic | azcentral.com
Hillary Clinton, the Democratic front-runner who has led in the polls in Arizona, on Monday fired up supporters in a packed high school gymnasium in west Phoenix in a final push to get out the vote before the state's Tuesday presidential primary.
Speaking to a capacity crowd of 1,355 at Carl Hayden Community High School, an energetic Clinton detailed audience-pleasing policy proposals related to economic growth, college affordability and, especially, immigration reform.
"We are a nation of immigrants and of exiles. When I see people like Sheriff (Joe) Arpaio and others who are treating fellow human beings with such disrespect, with such contempt, it just makes my heart sink," Clinton said, eliciting boos at the mention of the controversial Maricopa County sheriff. "We are better than that."
Arpaio, whose Sheriff's Office was found by a federal judge to have engaged in racial profiling, has come up often in the Democratic presidential battle in Arizona, having also been denounced by Bernie Sanders, the left-leaning U.S. senator from Vermont who is challenging Clinton for the Democratic presidential nomination.
She also detailed her national-security experience as President Barack Obama's secretary of State and as a U.S. senator from New York during the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
Such experience will help her keep America safe, she said.
"Only the hard choices get to the president's desk," Clinton said. "Only the hard choices end up in the situation room. If it's easy, it gets made somewhere along that path.
"But when you are faced with making those tough decisions, like we were when I was one of the small group that advised the president about whether or not to go after (international terrorist leader Osama) bin Laden, it takes experience and it takes temperament."
Without mentioning by name Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump, Clinton lamented the tenor of the celebrity billionaire's campaign.
"It has been deeply distressing to me to see the divisiveness, the mean-spiritedness, the incitement of violence and aggressiveness in this campaign," she said. "I don't ever remember anything like it, to be honest with you. I just don't. Pitting groups of Americans against one another, it just is wrong. That's not who we are. That's not our values."
Clinton acknowledged some Americans are frustrated and angry. "But, you know what, folks? Anger is not a strategy," Clinton said.
Though Clinton arrived in Arizona as the favorite in Tuesday's primary, or presidential preference election, she is facing unexpectedly fierce competition from Sanders.
Sanders, who went zero for five in the March 15 primaries, is banking heavily on Arizona: He has television ads in heavy rotation and by Monday is expected to have held at least five campaign events across the state.
Bernie Sanders' last-minute drive to capture Arizona's Native American voters
The Clinton campaign likewise is taking the state seriously. Besides the candidate's appearance Monday at Carl Hayden Community High School in Phoenix, her husband, former President Bill Clinton, stumped Sunday on her behalf at Central High School in Phoenix. Her campaign also has dispatched a small army of campaign surrogates to spread her message across Arizona.
Secretary of Labor Tom Perez, speaking in his personal capacity, addressed the crowd before Clinton's remarks.
Former U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, D-Ariz., and Mark Kelly, her retired NASA astronaut husband, helped introduce Hillary Clinton at Monday's rally, as they did for Bill Clinton at Sunday's event.
Giffords, who nearly died in a Jan. 8, 2011, assassination attempt near Tucson, has made an inspiring recovery from the gunshot wound to the head that nearly killed her. In recent years, she and Kelly have emerged as high-profile national gun-control activists.
"You know what Congresswoman Gabby Giffords meant to this state," Clinton said. "You know what she did for her constituents and I am in awe of her courage and her commitment to continue to serve people by standing up and speaking out against the gun lobby in favor of (common-sense gun reforms)."
Gabrielle Giffords appearance brings Phoenix rally for Hillary Clinton to its feet
State Rep. Lela Alston, D-Phoenix, also spoke. She drew an enthusiastic reaction from the crowd when she predicted Hillary Clinton would "turn Arizona blue," just as Bill Clinton did in his 1996 re-election, when he became the only Democrat since President Harry Truman in 1948 to carry the state.
At Carl Hayden High, a school named for the long-serving Democratic U.S. Senate legend from Arizona, the gym was filled to capacity and a large overflow crowd was outside.
Sarah Boon, 24, who teaches special education in Tolleson, said most of her young friends are Bernie Sanders supporters. But Clinton’s combination of gender, experience and pragmatism won her vote.
“I think it is the coolest thing to have the opportunity to vote for a woman for president,” Boon said. “... And I think Hillary has a proven track record of being successful in politics and in Washington. So I think she’d be the best to represent us in the White House.”
Though Boon likes Sanders’ promise of free tuition at public universities, she doesn’t think it’s practical.
Mary Dee Camarena, 60, a retired Chandler teacher, said she has supported Clinton since she was first lady.
“She is very intelligent. She thinks things through. She’s a strong woman. She’s independent. She listens to others. And I like the way that she’s inclusive,” Camarena said. “But most of all I like the way she doesn’t give up.”
Camarena, who is Hispanic and whose father was an immigrant, said she also likes Clinton’s immigration policies.
“I used to work here at Carl Hayden High School. I worked with many ‘dreamers’ that were very intelligent and I want to make sure they have every opportunity,” she said. “I think (Clinton is) our best chance for all students, not just dreamers because she represents everybody.”
Is Arizona still Hillary Clinton country?
The Clinton event also attracted protesters. A small group of supporters of Trump demonstrated on the other side of Roosevelt Street. They held pro-Trump placards and signs with slogans such as "Hillary 4 Prison."
A least one anti-Trump demonstrator was on hand with a sign that read, "Trump is a Fascist."
Some Sanders fans also protested the rally. They carried signs with messages such as "Not With Her" and "Students Against Hypcri$y (sic)."
How to vote in Arizona's presidential-preference election
How the Arizona high school hosting Hillary Clinton became famous
Republic reporter Rebekah L. Sanders contributed to this article. | {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
Refugees traveling into the U.S. on Friday night were being detained at airports after President Trump's executive order immediately closed the nation's borders to refugees.
Two Iraqi refugees detained at Kennedy Airport in New York have filed a writ of habeas corpus seeking to be released, The New York Times reported Saturday.
They also filed a motion for class certification, to represent all refugees and immigrants being detained at ports of entry.
Trump on Friday signed an executive order that he said would provide a thorough vetting of refugees to ensure that "radical Islamic terrorists" cannot get into the United States.
Trump's order indefinitely blocks refugees from war-torn Syria from entering the U.S. and suspends all refugee admissions for 120 days while the administration determines which countries pose the least risk.
ADVERTISEMENT
Admission will resume only after vetting has been deemed "adequate" by the secretary of State, the secretary of Homeland Security and Director of National Intelligence.
One of the Iraqis detained at Kennedy Airport, Khalid Darweesh, has worked for the U.S. government in Iraq for 10 years, according to the Times report.
The other detainee Haider Sameer Abdulkhaleq Alshawi was arriving to the U.S. to join his wife, a U.S. contractor, and his young son.
The men were on separate flights into the U.S.
Complaints about their detainment were filed by the American Civil Liberties Union, the International Refugee Assistance Project at the Urban Justice Center, the National Immigration Law Center, Yale Law School’s Jerome N. Frank Legal Services Organization and the firm Kilpatrick Townsend & Stockton.
Attorneys told the Times that they weren't being allowed to meet with their clients. | {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
Image copyright AFP
Bank of England policymakers voted unanimously to hold interest rates at their current historic low of 0.5% again in April, the minutes of the latest meeting show.
It comes as inflation sits at a record low of 0%.
Bank policymakers expect the Consumer Prices Index (CPI) to fall into negative territory in the coming months and to remain low this year.
And they remain concerned about low wage growth, the minutes show.
Figures from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) earlier this month showed average wages excluding bonuses rose by 1.8% in the thee months to February compared with the same period a year earlier.
But while wage rises are now well ahead of inflation, Bank policymakers fear they are not rising quickly enough to meet the Bank's 2% inflation target in the medium term.
The minutes come a week before the ONS publishes its first estimate of UK economic growth for the three months to the end of March.
The Bank minutes showed policymakers thought there was still a risk of "weak price pressures persisting for longer than would be consistent with bringing inflation back to target within two years", despite evidence that the eurozone economy was beginning to show signs of improvement.
But on a more upbeat note, Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) members thought it was unlikely that economic growth could continue at its current pace for long without generating greater inflation in wages and prices.
Samuel Tombs, senior UK economist at Capital Economics, said the latest minutes showed inflation was unlikely to return to its 2% target until "well into 2016" and would remain near zero for much of the rest of this year.
He added that he expected there would be little pressure on Bank policymakers to raise interest rates until the middle of next year and that interest rates were unlikely to rise above 1% before the end of 2016 and 1.5% by the end of 2017. | {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
Al Franken is not happy with the Federal Communications Commission.
The Minnesota senator, an outspoken liberal, says the FCC is failing to protect equality of access to the Internet.
“As a source of innovation, an engine of our economy, and a forum for our political discourse, the Internet can only work if it’s a truly level playing field,” Franken wrote at Reader Supported News. “Small businesses should have the same ability to reach customers as powerful corporations. A blogger should have the same ability to find an audience as a media conglomerate.”
“This principle is called ‘net neutrality‘ – and it’s under attack,” the senator said.
What he is upset about is a new set of rules the FCC approved today which for the first time govern the behavior of companies who provide the public with Internet service. The rules are aimed at protecting net neutrality, but Franken and others say they fall short of that.
The rules create two categories of Internet access: fixed-line access provided by cable companies like Comcast, and wireless access provided by telecom companies like AT&T and Verizon.
The rules bar fixed-line broadband providers from blocking access to websites and applications. The rules also prohibit wireless companies from blocking websites, but allow these companies to block many applications and services, except for those like Skype that directly compete with the providers’ voice and video products.
Franken points out that for many Americans – particularly those who live in rural areas (like much of his state, Minnesota) – Internet access depends on mobile, wireless services. Others note that young people, especially in lower income communities where families cannot afford home computers, often get Internet access solely through their phones. The proposed rules, the senator said, effectively allow discrimination against major sectors of the population.
Speaking on the Senate floor on Saturday, Franken said, “Maybe you like Google Maps. Well, tough. If the FCC passes this weak rule, Verizon will be able to cut off access to the Google Maps app on your phone and force you to use their own mapping program, Verizon Navigator, even if it is not as good. And even if they charge money, when Google Maps is free.”
He added, “If corporations are allowed to prioritize content on the Internet, or they are allowed to block applications you access on your iPhone, there is nothing to prevent those same corporations from censoring political speech.”
Franken said he was very disturbed that FCC Chair Julius Genachowski had called CEOs of major Internet corporations seeking their public endorsement of the rules.
Genachowski, a Democrat, was appointed by President Obama to head the five-member commission.
The two Republican commissioners, Meredith Baker and Robert McDowell, opposed the rules. Republicans claim that net neutrality rules are a form of government overreach. In a Wall Street Journal op ed, McDowell went so far as to claim that any regulation of Internet service companies would inhibit capital investment, deter innovation, raise prices and kill jobs.
The two other Democratic commissioners, Michael Copps and Mignon Clyburn, acknowledged that the regulations are not as strong as they would have liked. But they said the rules had been improved this month as a result of discussions, and they joined Genachowski in voting for them, saying some protection of the public Internet was better than no protection.
Copps said he is not entirely happy with the final outcome, CNET News reported. In particular, Copps expressed concern that, even though the rules prohibit fixed line Internet providers from “unreasonably” discriminating against traffic on their network, service providers could implement “paid prioritization.” That would give big corporations or other big money groups a “fast lane” on the Internet, while everyone else is put in the “slow lane.”
In a statement issued before the commission’s vote, Copps said he wanted to ensure that the Internet “doesn’t travel down the same road of special interest consolidation and gate-keeper control that other media and telecommunications industries – radio, television, film and cable – have traveled.”
“What an historic tragedy it would be,” he said, “to let that fate befall the dynamism of the Internet.”
Photo: Yutaka Tsutano CC 2.0
| {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
In between considering a batch of pardons for convicted war criminals and stonewalling a congressional investigation into his own alleged crimes, President Donald Trump last week deigned to lecture immigrants about “personal responsibility,” reminding communities of their duty to be self-sufficient. He announced that he would hold family members of immigrants accountable for whatever social welfare benefits are used by those they sponsor to come to the United States.
But billing immigrant sponsors for their loved ones’ welfare costs is not about responsibility, it’s about assaulting the bonds of family and community at the heart of a democratic society.
The White House memorandum resurrects an obscure and rarely enforced provision of a Clinton-era welfare reform law that mandates the sponsors of new immigrants — primarily citizens who are supporting immigrant family members seeking to resettle in the U.S. — to compensate Uncle Sam for any need-based federal aid that the immigrants receive, such as Medicaid. Though the administration has not spelled out how various agencies running public assistance programs will actually calculate the costs or compel individuals to repay their “debts,” the subtext is clear: The administration wants to prioritize what little is left of the threadbare federal safety net for white, native-born citizens.
The memorandum further illustrates Trump's overarching immigration agenda — a business-friendly program that aims to prioritize “merit-based” immigration, based on skills and education, rather than family reunification, which has historically driven the growth of immigrant communities.
The memorandum is, more broadly, the latest in a string of Trumpian schemes to exclude immigrants from public services and civic life. Earlier this month, the administration moved to kick immigrants out of federally subsidized housing through a ban on undocumented immigrants — even those living with legal-resident family members — who are currently able to live in mixed-status households. The proposed rule would lead to the eviction of an estimated 55,000 children who are either citizens or green card holders. Ben Carson, secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, claimed the policy aims to preserve “our scarce public resources” for legal residents.
But the assumption that government-supported housing is too “scarce” to share with immigrants blatantly ignores the fact that many citizens are deeply embedded in mixed-status households that form the lifeblood of multicultural communities. Driving immigrants into homelessness won’t alleviate the shortage of affordable housing, but it would aggravate the terror already haunting poor immigrant families under Trump.
The threat of eviction deepens the panic that the administration triggered with an ongoing campaign to penalize immigrants for using social welfare. Last fall, a proposed rule change sought to tighten the criteria for deeming immigrants likely to become a “public charge” — or at risk of becoming primarily dependent on public assistance — when immigrants apply for admission to the U.S. or for a green card. Immigration authorities could, under the new policy, evaluate immigrants by judging their estimated need for cash assistance, potential for dependence on long-term institutional care under Medicaid or even their mental health status or English proficiency. It’s yet another signal that the administration seeks to penalize immigrants for using government assistance even when they are fully entitled to it.
Although the public-charge rule has not yet been implemented, according to the Urban Institute, surveys already show a major chilling effect: Last year, about one in seven adults in immigrant families avoided using a noncash form of public assistance, like food stamps — including one-fifth of low income immigrants. Reflecting the racialized nature of Trump’s border crackdown, Latinx adults in immigrant families were twice as likely as other racial groups to report being deterred from benefits programs. Many immigrants have apparently determined that it’s safer to expose themselves to illness or hunger than to risk running into trouble with immigration authorities.
So the impact could be even more devastating if the proposed rule actually goes into effect. According to the Migration Policy Institute, out of an estimated 27 million immigrants and family members who would potentially be affected, “5.4 million to 16.2 million ... could be expected to disenroll from programs.” Both citizen and noncitizen children would potentially lose access to health care, food stamps and other benefits, because “their families deem the potential immigration consequences of continued access to be too great."
Trump’s war on immigrants is expanding to target people who support immigrants as well. Under former Attorney General Jeff Sessions, the administration launched an unprecedented assault on so-called “sanctuary cities,” by threatening to cut off federal funds for the growing network of municipalities that have pledged to refuse to cooperate with federal immigration enforcement efforts. City leaders have managed to thwart the administration's move, but unilateral federal crackdowns on immigrants continue in cities regardless of local backlash.
An even cruder attack on allies of immigrants was the prosecution of four volunteers who tried to aid migrants at the southwest Arizona border. The humanitarian workers, members of the group No More Deaths, were convicted last January after getting “caught” placing jugs of water in a protected desert area for migrants making the deadly journey.
Trump’s anti-immigrant decrees effectively weaponize the politics of exclusion, by imposing shame and stigma on immigrants just for seeking support from a public agency or relying on it for the care of a loved one. And the administration's efforts to wield the law to attack the loved ones of migrants — to impose debts on their family members, to criminalize even the smallest act of charity — all play into a crusade to shift the border ever inward, seeking to divide communities and further alienate the undocumented. But the relatives, neighbors and allies of immigrants will never stop supporting their loved ones, with or without papers. Trump has only raised the price of defending the unbreakable bonds of family, across communities and beyond borders. | {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
President Trump wants Congress to improve border security and end chain migration in exchange for protecting an estimated 700,000 so-called Dreamers, who entered the country illegally as children, from deportation.
Trump also made clear that he doesn’t want immigration legislation attached to the year-end spending bill and risk a government shutdown over the immigration status of people who came to the country illegally as children.
Trump laid out his demands on during a meeting with seven Republican senators at the White House on Thursday.
ADVERTISEMENT
"He wants a solution, he put it back into the Congress’s lap on [the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program] DACA. He gave us until early March and he expects a solution but any solution to DACA’s got to include an ending to chain migration,” Sen. David Perdue (R-Ga.) told reporters after meeting with the president.
Former President Obama issued an order in 2012 to create the DACA program to protect immigrants who were brought to the country illegally as children and have spent years integrating into American culture.
Trump rescinded the program in September but established a six-month phase-in period for Congress to come up with a solution.
Perdue said Trump also wants provisions strengthening border security as part of the package.
“Border security, this is part of that tight package that he really wants,” he said.
Up in the air is whether to also end the diversity visa lottery program, which Sayfullo Saipov, who is accused of killing eight people in a terrorist attack in New York on Tuesday, used to enter the country in 2010.
ADVERTISEMENT
Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn John CornynBipartisan praise pours in after Ginsburg's death Chamber of Commerce endorses McSally for reelection Airline job cuts loom in battleground states MORE (Texas), the second-ranking Senate GOP leader, who also attended the meeting with Trump, expressed concern earlier in the week that language ending the diversity visa lottery could weigh down the immigration bill.
Perdue and other GOP senators at the meeting said Trump was “emphatic” about keeping the immigration bill separate from the year-end spending bill.
That raises the possibility that Trump may be willing to postpone the debate over funding a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border, something he insisted on as part of a government-funding package earlier this year.
Sen. Tom Cotton Tom Bryant CottonRenewed focus on Trump's Supreme Court list after Ginsburg's death Republicans call for DOJ to prosecute Netflix executives for releasing 'Cuties' Loeffler calls for hearing in wake of Netflix's 'Cuties' MORE (R-Ark.), who also attended the meeting, said there was “more back-and-forth on what border enforcement would look like” than on how to end chain migration.
Cotton, for one, believes building a 30-foot wall along the border would be effective to stop illegal migration.
“The logical, coherent, tightly-wound package of giving legal status to the DACA recipients is to try to control the two negative side effects to that: chain migration and greater enforcement,” Cotton said.
Lawmakers would end so-called chain migration by restricting green cards to close relatives of legalized residents.
“American citizens, green-card holders of all kinds would no longer be able to get a green card for anyone other than their spouse and their unmarried minor child,” Cotton said of the agreement Trump and GOP senators expressed at Thursday’s meeting.
With Congress focused on tax reform this month and then moving to the spending debate in December, an immigration bill would have to wait until next year.
“We definitely ruled out putting any kind of DACA package on the omnibus bill, end of story,” said Cotton. | {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
WASHINGTON.- La OEA propinó una paliza al socialismo bananero latinoamericano de Cuba, Venezuela y Mexico.
Por amplia mayoría de 23 votos contra 10, el Consejo reeligió a Luis Almagro al frente de ese organismo.
Almagro venció por paliza a la ecuatoriana Maria Fernanda Espinoza, apoyada por los regimenes bolivarianos de Cuba, Venezuela y Mexico, qiue forman una isla purulenta de corrupción y crimen en America Latina.
Almagro cuenta con la mayoria de los países de America Latina y Estados Unidos. Ha encabezado una lucha intensa por la democracia contra las dictaduras de Cuva, Venezuela, Bolivia y Nicaragua, a pesar de haber sido canciller del izquierdista Jose Mugica en Uruguay.
Almagro dió un giro hacia la derecha y por elo es considerado traidor al socialismo Castrista que se había convertido en un imperio comunista.
Almagro ha denunciado las intenciones del Foro de Sao Paulo, Grupo de Puebla y la izquierda socialista de España encabezada por José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero para retomar control de esa organización y colocarla al servicio de dictaduras y crimen organizado mangoneado desde Cuba. | {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
If you need to install a brand new Tankless Water Heater in your bathroom, kitchen or laundry room or you need to replace or repair the existing one, our Tankless Water Heater Repair Company is certainly the right place to look for professional assistance. We deliver 24-hour plumbing help around Sacramento, California. Affordable prices and expert technicians are additional benefits in favor of our company. | {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
I want something from the vending machine but i only have a credit card
193 shares | {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
Get breaking news alerts and special reports. The news and stories that matter, delivered weekday mornings.
MIAMI — Grisel Robles arrived in Miami in late September, after Hurricane Maria flooded her house and wiped out the life she and her family had. Starting a new job and rebuilding her life, along with her husband and 6-month-old daughter, has left little time to focus on politics. But she is taking note of one aspect of the political landscape.
"I have noticed who is defending our rights as Puerto Ricans," she said.
While Robles expressed disdain for President Donald Trump because of the administration’s response to storm-ravaged Puerto Rico, she praised Gov. Rick Scott of Florida, a Republican, for his efforts in helping settle Puerto Ricans displaced by the storm. But she also likes Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla. She met him and called him "a humble and accessible man."
Scott is expected to enter the 2018 Senate race against Nelson, and early polls have them in a dead heat.
It could very well be that Puerto Ricans like Robles are the deciding factor in that race and a number of other key races. Since they may not be as familiar with local and state political parties — Puerto Ricans who live on the island vote in elections there — they are becoming a potential group of swing voters who can have a real impact on upcoming elections, according to some experts.
As American citizens living on the island, Puerto Ricans cannot vote in presidential elections and can send only nonvoting representatives to Congress. But once they make the move and are living on the mainland, they only need to register to be eligible to vote.
Politicians from both parties are taking note.
“Puerto Ricans in Florida, just like the state, are a swing population. By that, I mean they are issue oriented,” said Edwin Melendez, director of the Center for Puerto Rican Studies at New York’s Hunter College.
So far, over 189,000 Puerto Ricans have migrated to the state after the hurricane left unimaginable destruction throughout the island. Planes arriving from Puerto Rico remain full and some estimate as many as half a million people will eventually make their way to Florida.
Although some, particularly the older generations, will eventually return to the island, experts believe most will remain here. Central Florida is their preferred destination, but areas like South Florida and Tampa are also seeing an influx of Puerto Ricans.
The Morning Rundown Get a head start on the morning's top stories. This site is protected by recaptcha
They are joining over 1 million who already live in the state, many of them coming in recent years fleeing the economic crisis on the island. At the rapid pace the population is growing, Puerto Ricans will soon displace Cubans as the largest Latino group in Florida.
Puerto Ricans are an attractive group of voters because of their high participation rates and their ability to group together as a voting bloc, like they did during the 2016 elections. Melendez calls them “a swing voting bloc,” similar to how Cuban-Americans once were.
But Melendez thinks Puerto Ricans voted overwhelmingly for Hillary Clinton in 2016 because of the negative comments Trump made about Mexicans during his campaign and the fact he was seen by many as anti-Latino. Trump went on to win the state by a mere 112,000 votes.
In 2016, Rep. Darren Soto, a Democrat, became the first Puerto Rican from Florida elected to Congress.
He calculates that Florida Puerto Ricans have been about 50 percent Democratic, 25 percent Republican, and 25 percent independent.
“We’re definitely a constituency that you have to earn," said Soto.
The freshman congressman doesn’t take any votes for granted. “We are specifically making sure to help the new arrivals with all these new constituent issues, from enrolling kids in school, to housing, to health care and food assistance,” he said.
Because political parties in Puerto Rico differ from the ones on the mainland, it takes for newcomers to figure out the ideologies and decide on whether to join a party. When registering to vote, many check off the box that says NPA, or No Party Affiliation, and then change it once they get a grasp on the politics here.
Republican state Rep. Bob Cortes, who is Puerto Rican, said the same thing happened to him when he moved stateside with his wife and their child 32 years ago.
“These are the same voters that will not vote straight party lines," he said. "They are the voters that usually will vote for the candidate that appeals to them.”
But not everyone thinks the new wave of Puerto Ricans voters will be up for grabs. Angelo Falcón at the National Institute for Latino Policy says the pattern among Puerto Ricans in Florida is to vote Democratic. He believes Trump has further alienated Puerto Ricans from the Republican Party with the administration’s slow response to hurricane relief. Many Puerto Ricans have expressed anger at comments Trump made when he blamed the beleaguered island for a financial crisis “largely of their own making” as well as critical tweets saying Puerto Rican leaders “want everything to be done for them.”
RELATED: When did we stop being Americans? Puerto Ricans dismayed, angry over Trump tweets
“People have been very angry at Trump and at the Republicans and the way Puerto Rico has been treated with the hurricane disaster, so I think that’s going to be an important factor,” Falcón said.
That hasn’t kept political figures like Scott from courting Puerto Rican voters.
In October, Scott set up disaster relief centers in Miami and Orlando to help arriving Puerto Ricans get settled. He made it easier to enroll kids in public schools by waiving the documents normally required and he also asked colleges and universities to offer in-state tuition to Puerto Rican students.
Groups like Mi Familia Vota are planning to register Puerto Ricans and other Latinos to vote in January.
"Mi Familia Vota Florida plans to register upwards to 25,000 Latinos to vote in 2018 and expects at least half of those registered to be of Puerto Rican descent," state director Esteban Garces said. The 2018 Florida elections include governor, U.S. Senate and Congress.
For Robles, rebuilding her life in Miami is a priority at the moment. It will still be awhile before she learns to navigate the political sphere.
“Right now, I don’t know who I would vote for,” she said.
FOLLOW NBC LATINO ON FACEBOOK, TWITTER AND INSTAGRAM. | {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
When it comes to the top NBA players of all time, there's plenty of speculation and room for debate, though many may not think so. Though Michael Jordan is easily considered the greatest player ever, some may say players like Kobe Bryant, LeBron James, or Kevin Durant give him a run for his money. Who are the best NBA players? This list includes the best basketball players in NBA history, along with the top basketball players today.
Anyone can vote on the best NBA players here, which means these players are truly fan favorites. NBA fans can even add their own rankings to this list. Whether they have a famous jumper that just won't quit or ball-handling skills that leave their opponents spinning, these top 100 NBA players rule the hoop and the hardwood, and this list is a celebration of those skills. This list should answer who is the top 100, top 10, and best NBA player ever.
If you've ever asked, "Who's the greatest basketball player of all time?", look no further. Ranked by votes from thousands of fans, this list features the all time NBA GOATs, including Michael Jordan, Kobe Bryant, LeBron James, Magic Johnson, Julius Erving, Wilt Chamberlain, and Larry Bird. Vote up the best basketball player ever, and those who follow close behind. Then head over and vote on the best NBA players of the 2010s. | {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
The owners of Good Fortune hoped to open several months ago, but typical city hiccups snarled those plans. But victory is in sight as ownership said they’re opening the highly-anticipated Logan Square spot in less than two weeks.
Reservations are online and the opening date is pegged for August 15. The restaurant, 2528 N. California Avenue, fits into a stretch of Logan Square that includes a pair of acclaimed Mexican spots (Mi Tocaya Antojeria, Quiote) and spicy chicken wing slinger Landbirds.
Good Fortune started as a pop-up back in 2017 and focused on seafood. Don’t expect the same menu at the restaurant as chef Charles Welch and creative director Andrew Miller moved away from just fish. Customers will find meats fired in a wood-burning oven, Mediterranean flavors, and fresh pastas.
Welch gushes about the flavors a wood-burning oven can impart. A halloumi dish really benefits from the smokiness of the hearth, he says. Another menu highlight is a pork collar. The Good Fortune owners want to retain the ability to change its menu daily. It’s a way to keep things fresh and random. It’s also a way to occupy Welch.
“You can’t shut off a restless mind, and Charlie definitely has a restless mind,” Miller said.
Miller and Welch say Good Fortune is a come as you are neighborhood restaurant with a high level of execution. Miller wants to throw a nightly dinner party, capturing the same energy dinners at his home have. There are 52 seats in the space, which formerly housed the General, including eight at a bar.
Miller talked about how important it was to create an experience for customers. He feels restaurants, for many people, are their primary form of entertainment — not as many folks are going to the theatre.
“We want customers to remember where they’ve eaten for years,” Miller said.
Miller and Welch have a trio of upcoming projects right now. They’ve formed a company, Out to Lunch Hospitality. At the end of the summer, they will retool the longtime Ukrainian Village dive bar Happy Village, and they also have plans to open a bar called X in Logan Square.
The Chicago restaurant veterans worked together at Honey’s, an acclaimed spot in Fulton Market that closed in early 2018, and their experience there helped forge a strong bond. The two, who both live in Logan Square, have a level of trust that they hope sets Good Fortune apart from other restaurants in the area.
Stay tuned for more details on the space and menu in the coming weeks. | {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
Matthieu Alexandre / AFP | A photo taken on May 27, 2016 shows the facade of the Hotel Ritz on the Place Vendome in Paris.
Coco Chanel lived there, Princess Diana spent her last night there and Ernest Hemingway led its liberation from the Nazis – the Ritz Hotel in Paris, which reopened its doors Monday after a four-year closure, boasts a history as rich as its clientele.
Advertising Read more
After four years of renovations - originally estimated to cost 140 million euros ($150 million) - the Ritz finally reopened its doors Monday, giving the rich and famous the chance to return to one of their favourite haunts.
The renovations, carried out at the behest of Egyptian owner Mohamed Al-Fayed, are meant to bring the hotel back up to the high standards of luxury and innovation for which it became famous. But while the makeover includes installing the latest technology in guest rooms and a movable glass canopy over its restaurant, it could be argued that it is the history of the hotel – sometimes romantic, sometimes scandalous, but always glitzy – that gives it its real lustre.
Proust's last words
"In the building there is something, in the walls there is something. When people came inside they talk in a whisper like in church," says Claude Roulet, who worked at the Ritz for 14 years and has written two books on its history.
Opened in 1898 by Swiss hotelier César Ritz, it wasn't long before the luxury hotel on the Place Vendôme could list some of the biggest celebrities of the day among its clientele. One of them was Marcel Proust, who liked the hotel so much he came there for dinner practically every day, says Roulet, and who wrote one of his most famous works, "In Search of Lost Time" (À la recherche du temps perdu), there in 1909. "All the characters in the book were based on real-life clients at the hotel," says Roulet.
Proust was a frequent visitor right up until his death in 1922, and the story goes that while on his death bed with pneumonia, he sent his chauffer Odilon to fetch him a bottle of beer from the Ritz – apparently, nothing else would do.
“Thank you, my dear Odilon, for getting me the Ritz beer," were rumoured to be the writer's final words.
The bar of the Ritz Hotel in 1961.
While most writers these days will probably find the hotel's prices a little too steep, it could be argued that the Ritz has in days gone by played a small but significant role in 20th century literature.
F. Scott Fitzgerald was a regular (especially at the bar) and the hotel features in his novel, "Tender Is the Night".
Noel Coward was also a frequent guest and his play "Semi-Monde", a tale of the extravagant lifestyles but ultimate monotony of the Paris elite, was set at the Ritz.
Hemingway 'liberates' the Ritz, celebrates with champagne
But it was Fitzgerald's friend and drinking buddy Ernest Hemingway who was perhaps the hotel's most committed literary devotee. Not only did he drink enough at the hotel's bar that it is now named after him, he also once proclaimed that: "When in Paris the only reason not to stay at the Ritz is if you can't afford it."
There is one particular story about Hemingway that is now the stuff of legend – that at the end of War World II he more or less single handedly "liberated" the hotel from the Nazis.
There are several different versions of the story, but the basic version goes like this: Hemingway, having returned to France as a war correspondent embedded with American D-Day invasion troops, found himself back in Paris. Though the liberation of the city by allied forces was imminent, Hemingway decided that he couldn't wait any longer to pay a visit to his favourite haunt. So he rounded up a few French resistance fighters, commandeered a jeep, and set off to take it back from the Nazis himself.
But when he got there, the doorman informed him that the Germans had already left.
"The doorman told him he couldn't take his gun inside so he left it by the door, went in and ordered champagne," says Roulet.
Wartime at the Ritz was one of the darker chapters in the hotel's history. When they arrived in Paris, the Germans used the hotel as a swanky headquarters for high-ranking officers, Hermann Göring among them. The Nazis took over half the hotel, allowing the other half to remain open to guests.
Coco Chanel and her Nazi love affair
Among those guests were famed French fashion designer Coco Chanel, who made the hotel her home for some 35 years.
Coco Chanel photographed in Paris in 1944
Although Chanel's link to the Ritz is celebrated – the room where she stayed is now called the Coco Chanel Suite – her time there is marked by allegations of collaboration with the enemy.
It was while she was staying at the Ritz during the war years that she had a romantic liaison with Baron Hans Gunther von Dincklage, a German officer and Abwehr spy.
Recently declassified documents suggest she was providing information to the Nazis, though Roulet doubts how active her role really was.
"I don't think she ever collaborated directly. I think she was just in love with a German officer and he exploited it," he says.
In fact, there has been no shortage of love affairs behind the palatial doors of the Ritz – and probably many more that will forever remain unknown.
It was at the Ritz that the photographer Robert Capa met and fell in love with Ingrid Bergman, while Sophia Loren once said, “The Ritz is the most romantic hotel in the world because a woman really feels a man loves her if he takes her there."
At times, those romances have been tinged with tragedy. It was at the Ritz that Princess Diana and her boyfriend Dodi Fayed, Mohamed Al-Fayed's son, spent their last evening before they were killed in a car crash in a Paris tunnel.
Modern age
With the doors of the storied hotel now once again open, it will no doubt be the scene of plenty of new tales of the escapades of the rich and famous. But with the modernisation of the hotel is there a risk that some of its heritage and history could be lost?
Not according to Roulet, who says that tradition will always trump change in the Ritz's palatial rooms, bars and corridors.
He recalls the time he tried to introduce the idea of a dedicated guest relations manager at the hotel when he first started there in the 1980s, something it had never had.
"It was very hard to introduce the idea among the staff. I got a lot of resistance from them. Fed up, I went to see the manager. He was a long, thin man who looked like a priest. He offered me a seat, told me to calm down, looked at me for a while and then said: 'You will never change the Ritz to fit your ideas, the Ritz will change you to fit its'."
To celebrate the iconic hotel's reopening, the Ritz Paris partnered with director Zoe Cassavetes to make a short film. The movie, “Behind the Door”, will be released on Wednesday (see the trailer below).
Daily newsletterReceive essential international news every morning Subscribe | {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
In today’s film news roundup, Brandon Routh will star in “Anastasia,” a Chuck Berry documentary is in production, and “Birthright” is in the works as a feature film.
CASTING
Brandon Routh has been set to star as Czar Nicholas in the upcoming live-action family film “Anastasia.”
He’ll portray the father of Anastasia in the re-imagining of the classic story in which Anastasia Romanov escapes through a portal when her family is threatened by Vladimir Lenin and finds herself in the year 1988.
Routh, who appeared in “Superman Returns,” currently has a recurring role on “Arrow” and stars in “Legends of Tomorrow.”
Production began last summer in Lexington, Ky., with filming the 1988 portion of the film with Emily Carey and Amiah Miller co-starring. Shooting resumes in April on the 1917 portion of the film.
Producers on “Anastasia” are Armando Gutierrez, Eli Lipnik, Peter Lees, and Bret Jones. Blake Harris is directing from his own screenplay, based on the concept from Gutierrez and Harris.
“Anastasia” marks the second production between Swen Group and Florida-based production company Conglomerate. Routh is repped by UTA and Main Title Entertainment.
BERRY DOCUMENTARY
Cardinal Releasing has announced an exclusive agreement with the estate of Chuck Berry and his widow Themetta Berry to produce the feature documentary, “Chuck! The Documentary.”
Jon Brewer is directing and producing. His music documentaries include “B.B. King: The Life of Riley,” “Nat King Cole: Afraid of the Dark,” “Jimi Hendrix: The Guitar Hero,” and “Beside Bowie: The Mick Ronson Story.”
“I am very privileged to be able to produce and direct this fully authorized and official story of the legendary Chuck Berry,” he said.
Cardinal Releasing has also acquired the rights to produce a Chuck Berry Biopic as a feature film. Pre-production will commence this summer, upon completion of the documentary.
Berry died on March 18 at the age of 90. His first hit came in 1955 with “Maybellene.”
‘BIRTHRIGHT’ ANNOUNCEMENT
Skybound Entertainment and Universal Pictures are developing the comic series “Birthright” as a feature film.
The comic, written by Joshua Williamson and drawn by Andrei Bressan, follows the story of a family whose son, Mikey, disappears. A year later, a man named Michael Rhodes appears with the story that he’s been in another world where time goes faster. Cinco Paul and Ken Daurio, who teamed on “Despicable Me 3,” are writing the script.
Birthright joins as the third feature attached to Skybound Entertainment’s first look deal with Universal. Previously announced projects include Robert Kirkman’s long-running comic series “Invincible” and the Skybound/Image comic series “Kill the Minotaur.” Skybound’s Robert Kirkman, David Alpert, Bryan Furst, and Sean Furst are attached as producers as well as Jeb Brody. | {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
Success Kid
flatmate comes home just as i am about to start going for it
turn on hairdryer to mask buzzing noise and finish | {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
Have you ever been in a situation where you had to "feed" an old coin, parking meter and had no quarters (or at least as many as you wanted to pay for)? I certainly have been in this situation several times. What do you do when you do not have quarters? Simply park without paying or pay for less. Obviously this might work once or twice but in the long run parking enforcement will hand you the ticket. Just to make it clear, I am all about enforcement; this is how people will get to comply with the parking rules and allow for a parking spot turn around that facilitates the flow of customers in local businesses and serves as many drivers as possible. However, with the coin meters the problem is that they are not "user-friendly". They require coins and actually not all of them but only quarters.
Well this is changing throughout the nation, since more and more cities substitute these meters to modern ones that accept credit cards. While the reasons behind such decision on changing the infrastructure vary from city to city (e.g., modernize infrastructure, ride the hype of "smart cities" or even simply traditional coin meters are potentially not available anymore) I set out to examine how this new technology has affected the compliance of drivers with parking payments.
Under the Freedom of Information Act I requested and obtained the parking citations in 5 neighborhoods in Pittsburgh (Oakland, Shadyside, Squirrel Hill, Downtown and Brookline) from the beginning of 2011 until the end of 2013. The new parking meters started being widely installed in the city towards the end of July 2012. However, in Brookline, the meters were installed later (late May 2013) and this creates an interesting setting for evaluating the impact of pay-by-plate system on compliance with paid parking.
The naive approach would be to estimate the average number of citations (e.g., monthly) before and after the installation of the new meters and see whether there is a decline. However, this approach is not correct! There might be other confounding factors that might have led to the reduction of citations all together (e.g., less enforcement staff on the roads). In such cases, difference-in-differences comes to the rescue. Diff-in-diffs is a quasi-experimental technique that can make causal connections (when applied carefully). The key idea of the method is shown in the following figure.
In particular, there is an "object" (in our case a metered area) that is getting a treatment (in our case the installation of pay-by-plate) at time Tintervention (in our case July 2012) and we want to see the impact on a metric y (in our case the monthly parking citations). In order to examine this we need to have a "control object" (in our case a metered area that did not get a pay-by-plate machine in July 2012). The idea is to examine whether there is an additional impact on the treated instance as compared to the one expected if there was not any treatment. In order, though to calculate this counterfactual an important assumption needs to be made that many times is not checked when diff-in-diffs is applied. In particular, both treated and untreated instances need to exhibit a parallel trend. Assuming that this parallel trend is true, then the difference-in-differences estimator is DD. It can be shown that the same estimator can be obtained through traditional ordinary least squares regression.
In our case the period t1 before the treatment is the 9-month period prior to July 2012, while the period t2 is the 9-month period after July 2012. During the period t2 Brookline had not been introduced to the pay-by-plate systems and hence, it can serve as our control (the assumption is that all of these neighborhoods are exposed to similar externalities and confounding factors such as changes in parking enforcement, weather etc.). Before we start we examine the assumption of parallel assumption. One way to examine this assumption is to estimate the difference-in-differences during a period where no treatment was applied. If DD=0 then this serves as an evidence that under "normal" conditions the treated and untreated instances follow a parallel trend. In our case we use the first 8 months in our dataset (these do not overlap with the period t1 above) and estimate the "null" DD. We consider the time for this "pseudo" treatment the middle of the period. The estimated null DD is 242.75, but the corresponding p-value is 0.6, which means that we cannot reject the hypothesis that this estimate is practically 0. This is a good evidence that there is a parallel trend with respect to the monthly citations in the Pittsburgh neighborhoods (of course, given the small period of time that the dataset includes for estimating this null DD, an issue that might arise is that of an underpowered test).
The installation of pay-by-plate parking meters seem to have led to better compliance from drivers in Pittsburgh!
Moving now to the estimation of the impact of the treatment we obtain the following results with respect to the estimated DD between the control and the various treated instances:
As we can see all the difference in differences estimated are negative, meaning that the installation of pay-by-plate systems have increased the compliance of drivers. This might be a sign that people want to pay for parking but you have to give them better options for doing so - forcing them to only pay with quarters is not a good idea. Actually analyzing another dataset from the pay-by-plate parking meters in the city more than 60% of the transactions are with a credit card. Someone might argue that there is still a 35-40% of the transactions that happen by "coins". Furthermore, the transaction that were not completed with credit card their median cost was less than $1 (in particular $0.75), while the average was also less than $1 and equal to $0.91 (p-value = 0, for testing equality with $1). Given that the minimum charge for a credit card transaction at the system is $1, it comes natural that for the transactions that cost less people will try to use other options - but at least they are not limited to quarters now. I am sure that the mobile payment system recently introduced by the city will further help! | {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
Chris Matthews
It’s Time to Give Socialism a Try.” So declared the headline of a Washington Post column in March; one imagines Katharine Graham spitting out her martini. The article, by a twenty-seven-year-old columnist named Elizabeth Bruenig, drew more than 3,000 comments (a typical column gets a few hundred); a follow-up piece, urging a “good-faith argument about socialism,” received nearly as much attention.
By now, the rebirth of socialism in American politics needs little elaboration. Bernie Sanders’s surprisingly strong showing in the 2016 Democratic primary, and his continued popularity, upset just about everyone’s intuition that the term remains taboo. Donald Trump’s victory, meanwhile, made all political truisms seem up for grabs. Polls show that young people in particular view socialism more favorably than they do capitalism. Membership in the Democratic Socialists of America, which has been around since 1982, has grown from about 5,000 to 35,000 since November 2016, and dozens of DSA candidates are running for office around the country. In June, one of them, twenty-eight-year-old Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, upset New York City Congressman Joe Crowley in the Democratic primary, knocking off a ten-term incumbent and one of the most powerful Democrats in the House.
The meaning of socialism has always been maddeningly slippery, in part because it has always meant different things to different people. Michael Harrington, one of the founders of the DSA and the most outspoken American socialist of the postwar era, writes on the first page of his 1989 book, Socialism: Past and Future, that socialism is “the hope for human freedom and justice.” By the end of the book, the definition hasn’t gotten much more concrete. Karl Marx himself spent more time critiquing capitalism than describing communism, a habit that subsequent generations of leftists inherited. Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart famously said of pornography that, while he couldn’t define it, “I know it when I see it.” Socialism sometimes feels like the inverse: socialists know it when they don’t see it. Bernie has only made things murkier by defining his brand of socialism in terms hardly indistinguishable from New Deal liberalism. “I don’t believe the government should own the corner drugstore or the means of production,” he declared in the fall of 2015, at a speech at Georgetown University, “but I do believe that the middle class and the working families who produce the wealth of America deserve a fair deal.” But while the meaning of American socialism in 2018 begins with Bernie, it doesn’t end there. Every political movement needs an intellectual movement, and when it comes to today’s brand of socialism, it’s the thirty-five-and-under crowd doing much of the heavy lifting.
Bruenig, the Post columnist, is perhaps the most prominently placed of a small but increasingly visible group of young writers unabashedly advocating for democratic socialism. In writing her attention-grabbing article, she helped elevate a discussion that has long taken place on Twitter. Of course, the relative merits of socialism—and Marxism, Maoism, anarcho-syndicalism, you name it—have been debated in lefty journals and academic circles for a century or more. Members of this new generation, however, aren’t just talking among themselves; they’re trying to take socialism mainstream. And unlike their predecessors, they have reason to think Americans will take their ideas seriously.
They’ve got a double challenge. The first is to convince skeptical Americans that, despite what they may have learned in high school, socialism doesn’t have to mean Stalinism, and it doesn’t lead inexorably to the gulags of Soviet Russia or the starvation of Nicolas Maduro’s Venezuela. The second may be even trickier. They must explain how their version of socialism fits, or doesn’t, into the American political system while showing how, specifically, it is distinct from traditional Democratic Party liberalism. In other words, they must not only defend socialism in the twenty-first century; they must define it.
Nathan Robinson hated Bernie Sanders before he loved him.
It was the fall of 2015. Robinson, a doctoral candidate at Harvard and, at the time, a recent law school graduate, had been steeped in socialist thought since high school, when he discovered the writings of anarchistic socialists like Mikhail Bakunin and Noam Chomsky. Socialism has always been dogged by the question of whether it’s possible to participate in electoral politics while remaining truly radical. Like many leftists, Robinson initially saw Sanders as an example of intolerable compromise.
“Based on Senator Bernie Sanders’s public statements, one of the following things must be true,” he declared on his blog in October 2015. “(1) Bernie Sanders is unaware of the definition of socialism or (2) Bernie Sanders is fully aware of the definition of socialism, and is lying about it.” Sanders, he explained in a follow-up post, was “not asking for public ownership of the major sectors of the economy,” but merely calling for expanded welfare and regulations. “Socialism means an end to capitalism. Bernie Sanders does not want to end capitalism. Bernie Sanders is not a socialist.”
Those turned out to be among Robinson’s last blog posts. In January 2016, he launched Current Affairs, a deeply irreverent leftist magazine, with backing from a Kickstarter crowd-funding campaign. Despite being essentially a one-man operation, Current Affairs quickly developed a substantial following on the left thanks to Robinson’s extraordinary writing talent—especially his knack for composing viral takedowns of conservative intellectual hucksters like Ben Shapiro and Jordan Peterson.
By 2017, Robinson seemed to have fully shed his earlier hostility toward Sandersian socialism. Here he was, last summer, writing on the difference between leftism and liberalism: “As Nancy Pelosi said of the present Democratic party: ‘We’re capitalist.’ When Bernie Sanders is asked if he is a capitalist, he answers flatly: ‘No.’ Sanders is a socialist, and socialism is not capitalism, and there is no possibility of healing the ideological rift between the two.”
That’s a long way from calling Sanders an ignoramus or a liar. What happened?
Much has been made of how Sanders has pulled the Democratic mainstream to the left. Presumptive 2020 presidential candidates are racing to capture the Bernie vote by declaring their support for policies—single-payer health care, free college—that once seemed impossibly radical. But Robinson’s evolution on Sanders is representative of a complementary phenomenon that has received less notice: Sanders seems to have also pulled the far left closer to the mainstream. The American left of center is like a soft mattress, and Bernie is an anvil dropped in the middle: whichever side you’re lying on, gravity pulls you a little closer to him.
“Those of us who consider ourselves on the more radical left were kind of disdainful of the political system,” said Robinson. “It was a real minority within Occupy saying you should even contest elections.” Sanders’s tantalizingly strong primary run—roughly equivalent to the MIT basketball team making the Final Four—made some lefties reconsider. For the first time, it seemed as though they could actually win. But winning requires engaging in politics, and politics requires some degree of pragmatism—a recognition that the achievable will always fall short of the ideal. That, in turn, requires giving up the ideological purity of the fringe.
Consider Jacobin magazine, the leading publication of the Millennial far left. It’s a magazine that wears its Marxist affections on its sleeve, with the tagline “Reason in Revolt.” Across the first seventeen issues, by my count, the word “Marx” or its derivations appeared an average of about forty times. But, since then—that is, beginning in summer 2015, when people started feeling the Bern—that’s fallen to only about twelve times on average.
Bhaskar Sunkara founded Jacobin in 2011, while an undergraduate at George Washington University—which now makes him, at age twenty-nine, something like the granddaddy of Millennial socialists. The magazine doesn’t have a strict party line. In May 2015, its website ran dueling pieces on Sanders’s candidacy. One, by Ashley Smith, called Sanders’s campaign an “obstacle” to the formation of a new left. But the other, by Sunkara, argued that the left should welcome Bernie’s run, “even if Sanders’s welfare-state socialism doesn’t go far enough.”
Since then, while Sunkara continues to distinguish in theory between Sandersism and full-blown socialism, Bernie has practically become the magazine’s mascot. A Jacobin Facebook ad, which reads, “It’s not you, it’s capitalism,” features an image of Sanders superimposed over the Jacobin logo. The winter 2016 issue featured a cartoon of Sanders on its cover, alongside Jeremy Corbyn of the British Labour Party. And a health care–focused issue from earlier this year reads as an extended brief in favor of Medicare for All, Bernie’s single-payer plan, featuring a fawning Q&A with Sanders. The editor’s note that opens the issue begins, “When future historians chronicle how Medicare for All was finally won . . .” To cast Medicare for All—not even fully socialized medicine, since it would nationalize insurance, but not providers—in such grandiose terms is a striking shift of the socialist goalposts.
“We push for social democratic reforms in the here and now,” Sunkara told me, though he insisted that his long-term vision remained as radical as ever. “There’s a need to at least dabble a little bit more with strategy and some more policy-oriented stuff, instead of just merely trying to build an opposition movement and mainly talk about theory.”
Not everyone on the left is happy about it. Socialists, the leftist writer Fredrik deBoer wrote last year for Current Affairs, “seem to be falling into the models of the welfare state without really knowing we’re doing it, sliding rightward as we talk about a reinvigorated left, slouching towards liberalism.” At its core, he argued, socialism means moving sectors of the economy into communal ownership—not merely expanding the welfare state, which is social democracy, or perhaps social insurance, but not democratic socialism. Taking issue with an op-ed by Sunkara in the New York Times, deBoer worried that the Jacobin editor’s “alternative” vision “does not look very different from a more humane, more nurturing liberal capitalist state.”
Nathan Robinson, who published deBoer’s piece, and is currently at work on a book about what socialism means to young people, doesn’t deny that his own thinking has become less doctrinaire. “I’ve sort of come around to the idea that ‘socialism,’ the word, should less be used to describe a state-owned or collectively owned economy, and more used to describe a very strong commitment to a certain fundamental set of principles,” he said. “It should be used to describe the position that is horrified by solvable economic depravations, rather than a very specific and narrow way of ordering the economic system.”
For Robinson, the heart of socialism is not this or that policy, but rather the fundamental values that should drive our politics. During the election, Hillary Clinton bragged about having the support of “real billionaires” like Mark
Cuban and Michael Bloomberg, in a shot at Trump’s refusal to disclose his finances. Obama, after he left office, was promptly seen vacationing on Richard Branson’s private island and partying with celebrities on billionaire David Geffen’s yacht. That makes someone like Robinson skeptical that the Democratic Party is actually committed to reducing inequality—which, after all, would require taking back some of the wealth of people like David Geffen.
A socialist, in other words, is hungry for a little class warfare. Sunkara, in the intro to his Sanders interview in Jacobin, wrote that while Sanders “may share some of the same policy goals as progressives like Elizabeth Warren,” the difference is his “confrontational vision of social change,” which involves calling out “the millionaires and billionaires” who are hoarding too much wealth.
Or, as Robinson put it in a Current Affairs essay (published under a pen name, a habit he has since dropped) titled “It’s Basically Just Immoral to Be Rich,”
After all, there are plenty of people on this earth who die—or who watch their loved ones die—because they cannot afford to pay for medical care. There are elderly people who become homeless because they cannot afford rent. There are children living on streets and in cars, there are mothers who can’t afford diapers for their babies. All of this is beyond dispute. And all of it could be ameliorated if people who had lots of money simply gave those other people their money. It’s therefore deeply shameful to be rich. It’s not a morally defensible thing to be.
If Sanders and the prospect of political power have made some preexisting radical leftists start talking more like New Deal liberals, the even bigger effect of his prominence has been compositional: by defining socialism in an especially capacious and inviting way, he pulled in people who might otherwise still identify as liberal or progressive. “What Roosevelt was stating in 1944, what Martin Luther King Jr. stated in similar terms twenty years later, and what I believe today, is that true freedom does not occur without economic security,” he said in his Georgetown speech in November 2015. “Democratic socialism means that we must create an economy that works for all, not just the very wealthy.”
This kind of talk is enough to make a certain kind of liberal’s eyes roll clean out of her head. What Democrat doesn’t believe in those things? But Sanders couldn’t have claimed this ideological real estate if his overwhelmingly Millennial supporters didn’t feel that mainstream liberals—embodied by Hillary Clinton and the Democratic establishment that lined up behind her—had abandoned it.
Briahna Gray, a contributing editor at Current Affairs who was recently hired as a politics editor at the Intercept, told me she probably wouldn’t have identified as a socialist in 2015. “The primary in 2016 radicalized me,” she said. Gray, a Harvard Law School–educated lawyer, has made a name for herself by embodying an intersection of identities that’s rare in media: a leftist, Sanders-supporting black woman. That has given her credibility to puncture the “Bernie bro” stereotype and take on Sanders critics who dismiss his movement as insufficiently attuned to racial or gender issues.
“The most disappointing part of the 2016 primary was centrist candidates convincing Americans that policies that are implemented in wealthy nations all over the world, much less wealthy than ours, are completely a fantasy world,” she said. (Clinton declared during a primary debate that single-payer health care would “never, ever come to pass,” and later ridiculed Sanders in her campaign memoir for essentially promising Americans free ponies.) This was a recurring theme in conversations with young socialists. To their ears, the term “liberal” has come to represent an intolerably unimaginative posture toward politics: less “Yes we can” than “Not so fast.”
Still, the worldview Gray sketched out—“where socialism is used to mitigate the negative effects of capitalism”—sounded like good old Keynesian liberalism. If you’re someone who believes a word should have a fixed meaning over time, or who believes in the importance of the liberal tradition, then this approach—socialism as liberalism, just more liberal—can be deeply exasperating. Sean Wilentz, a historian and longtime friend of the Clintons, captured some of this frustration in a recent essay in the Democracy journal. “[T]here is something essentially dishonest about trying to assimilate the New Deal legacy as ‘socialism,’ ” he wrote, referring to the speech in which Sanders tied himself to Franklin Roosevelt.
There’s no denying that much of what today’s socialists are demanding fits within the liberal tradition of a Ted Kennedy or Paul Wellstone. Advocating something like single-payer health care, but calling yourself a socialist, can look like mere positioning. In fact, the socialist writers I spoke with didn’t really have a problem with that. “Part of it is just a rhetorical claim,” said Ryan Cooper, an opinion writer at the Week who identifies as a democratic socialist. He said that the core aspects of his political agenda are creating a “complete welfare state” and reducing inequality by democratizing ownership of capital. Why use a term as loaded as socialism to describe those ideals? “The point is to say, ‘Here’s a left,’ in a way that just could not possibly be co-opted by Andrew Cuomo types.”
Nathan Robinson echoed the sentiment. “I used to call myself ‘progressive,’ and then the term became used by
everybody, and now it doesn’t really mean anything,” he said. “If you’re trying to say, ‘I’m further to the left than Obama and the Clintons,’ you’re stuck!” (Disclosure: I’m friendly with Cooper, who is a former Washington Monthly web editor, and Robinson.)
The divide may owe as much to differences in memory as to ideology. If you’re old enough to remember Democrats getting absolutely creamed in three consecutive presidential elections in the 1980s, then you’re old enough to remember them seemingly needing to pivot to the center to regain power in 1992. They didn’t compromise their core values (they would love a complete welfare state, if only it were possible), they just did what they had to do to win votes from what looked like an overwhelmingly conservative electorate. That included getting cozier with Wall Street and members of the plutocracy to ensure a stream of campaign funding that could rival the right’s.
But if the 1980s are when you were born, that’s not your experience. You remember that the Bill Clinton years were pretty good—but yielded George W. Bush. We got eight years of Obama—then Trump. If cautious, corporate-friendly liberalism gives way time after time to revanchist Republican administrations, is it really doing its job? If liberal figureheads stop even talking about a truly ambitious social safety net, how long should we keep assuming that’s what they want, deep down? Someone under thirty-five years old has no memory of a Democratic presidential nominee, let alone president, to the ideological left of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. Meanwhile, that young person is broke: a report by the St. Louis Federal Reserve recently warned that households headed by ’80s babies have 34 percent less wealth than expected based on earlier generations at that age, and are thus “at greatest risk of becoming a ‘lost generation’ for wealth accumulation.”
Telling a young radical that, despite all their sharp disagreements with the liberal mainstream, they’re really a part of it, is a bit like telling a football fan that the Cleveland Browns are actually good because they won some championships in the ’50s and ’60s. It’s fair to wonder how many years a political movement can distance itself from certain principles before it runs the risk of a rival movement claiming them for its own.
(It must be said, too, that “liberal” is an unfortunate term. It belongs to that category of words—like “sanction” or“oversight”—that mean both a thing and its opposite; thus a “classical liberal” is really a free-market conservative. An acute instance of this problem is the even more awful “neoliberal,” which itself has two meanings: one is simply Reagan-Thatcher laissez-faire capitalism; the other, elaborated in the pages of this magazine in the 1980s, is more akin to the “New Democrat” philosophy of Bill Clinton. But these definitions overlap, because Clinton added financial deregulation to the agenda.)
It’s a bit unfair to ask the term “liberal” to cover every political position to the left of conservative and to the right of seizing the factories. The socialist label might be annoying, but it’s useful. Of course, the policies Bernie Sanders and many of his followers are calling for fit within the American liberal tradition, if you go back far enough. But to insist that they therefore owe loyalty to liberalism itself is to get the point of political movements backward. Ask not what you can do for your ideology; ask what your ideology can do for you. If young people increasingly feel like liberalism as it exists today doesn’t represent their values, then perhaps it’s up to liberalism to win them back.
If you think the Millennial socialist movement is only about protesting Clintonism, however, you haven’t been paying close enough attention.
The tricky part of advancing ideas under the banner of “socialism” is threading the needle between two contradictory critiques. The first is an evergreen: that real-world socialism inevitably leads to catastrophe and dictatorship, and only someone totally ignorant of history could deny this. (A representative headline in the National Review: “Despite Venezuela, Socialism Is Still Popular in the U.S.”) The second critique, as we’ve seen, is that self-identified socialists actually aren’t socialists. (David Brooks managed to make both these points at once in a recent column. The idea that capitalism is inherently flawed, he wrote, has “been rejected by most on the left.” Nonetheless, today’s progressive left, drunk on populism and identity politics, “seems likely to bring us the economic authoritarianism of a North American version of Hugo Chávez.”)
Few people seem to be working harder to tackle that challenge than Matt Bruenig, the twenty-nine-year-old founder of the People’s Policy Project, a one-man socialist think tank—and the husband and intellectual teammate of Liz Bruenig, the Washington Post columnist. I met them for lunch near Dupont Circle in Washington, D.C., in April. Former high school sweethearts who met on the debate team in Arlington, Texas, they’re an odd couple, by which I mean both that they are different from each other and that they are individually odd. Matt is tall and scruffy, with a paunch and a patchy beard. Liz is barely five feet tall and had her hair pulled into a tidy bun the day we met. He is hyper-analytical and obsessed with economic policy. She is a religious Catholic—her pro-life views have made her enemies on the left, whereas Matt, she joked, “loves abortion”—and more concerned with philosophical questions than policy specifics. “I make a much more romantic case for socialism than Matt does,” she said.
Matt gained some notoriety in 2016 when he was fired from his part-time blogging gig at Demos, a liberal think tank, after directing a stream of Twitter insults at the head of a different liberal think tank. At the time, Liz was thirty-eight weeks pregnant with their daughter, Jane. I asked what happened after the kerfuffle.
“We went to Twitter boot camp,” Liz said.
“Who was the drill sergeant?”
“Me.”
In 2017, Matt launched his crowd-funded think tank, which immediately began being noticed in liberal policy circles. His work, which in its faith in winning arguments by marshaling the right facts calls to mind a socialist Ezra Klein, is often cited in places like the Atlantic and Vox, and he has been quoted as an expert by CBS News and elsewhere. Even among prominent young lefties, his Twitter presence, even post–boot camp, stands out—277,000 followers as of June.
The Bruenigs argue, as Liz has written in the Post, that “it makes sense to think of socialism on a spectrum, with countries and policies being more or less socialist, rather than either/or.” Much of Matt’s work revolves around making the case that real socialist policies have been implemented successfully in other countries, particularly Nordic nations like Norway and Sweden. The question of how to describe the governance of these places has become quite contentious, because if these healthy, happy, rich nations are meaningfully socialist in some way, it’s hard to argue that socialism always ends in disaster. Conservatives protest the most loudly, but liberals, too, deny that socialism is afoot in Scandinavia. These countries are, we’re told, “mixed economies” or “social democracies”—bigger welfare states, sure, but fundamentally capitalist systems.
But in a post last summer, Matt used data from the OECD library and the International Labour Organization to show that a strong welfare state is only one part of the story. Most strikingly, at least some of the Nordics come out ahead on that textbook aspect of socialism, state ownership. In Norway and Finland, he wrote, the government owns “financial assets equal to 330 percent and 130 percent of each country’s respective GDP,” compared to 26 percent in the U.S. Norway’s government owns around 60 percent of the nation’s wealth—nearly double the level for the Chinese government—including a third of its domestic stock market. “There is little doubt that, in terms of state ownership at least, Norway is the most socialist country in the developed world,” Bruenig wrote a few months later—“and, not coincidentally, the happiest country in the world according to the UN’s 2017 World Happiness Report.”
The Norwegian example figures prominently in what is probably Matt’s most interesting policy proposal. In a New York Times op-ed last November, he argued that the easiest way to combat American inequality would be a “social wealth fund,” which he described as akin to an index or mutual fund, “but one owned collectively by society as a whole.”
Norway has such a fund, he pointed out, which is valued at over $1 trillion and is used to pay for its generous welfare state. Alaska has one, too, paying its citizens cash dividends from the proceeds of a diversified investment fund that, like Norway’s, started with oil money. Under Bruenig’s idea, the federal government would create an investment portfolio—perhaps by selling federal assets, or through “taxes on capital that affect mostly the wealthy,” or by redirecting recession spending by the Federal Reserve—and distribute a regular cash dividend to every American, or every American adult, each of whom would have one equal share in the fund. If the fund came to own a third of the nation’s wealth, he calculated, that would have meant an $8,000 payout to everyone between the ages of eighteen and sixty-four in 2016.
In addition to arguing for a social wealth fund, Bruenig published a long paper authored by Ryan Cooper, the writer at the Week, and Peter Gowan, a Dublin-based researcher, arguing that the best response to the problem of housing affordability would be a massive new “social housing” project, in which the federal government would pay to build ten million homes over the next ten years. Unlike traditional American public housing, this would be “designed to cater to people of various income levels, rather than just serving the ‘deserving poor.’ ” Again, they point to Europe for proof of concept: in the 1960s, facing a housing crisis, Sweden built one million social-housing units over the course of a decade, increasing its housing stock by a third. In Vienna, Austria, they report, “3 in 5 residents live in housing built, owned, or managed by the municipal government.”
These ideas aren’t exactly new, nor are they even all that radical: Hillary Clinton claimed in her campaign memoir to have considered running on a universal basic income paid for by a wealth fund, and in a recent book, the arch-centrist Brookings scholar Bill Galston likewise flirts with the idea. That’s partly the point. The socialist wonks are out to prove that moving toward a more collective, equitable ownership of the economy doesn’t require tearing up the American way of life—that, as Bruenig wrote in the Times, there are socialistic policies that could “work within the system we now have.”
But are socialists really happy working within the system we now have? At the heart of the split between liberals and socialists, at least in theory, is the question of what to do about capitalism. Liberals tend to see it as something that needs to be fixed. Socialists see it as something to be defeated.
They say they do, anyway. As we’ve seen, the Millennial socialist intellectuals aren’t really calling for government takeover of industry. Still, their stated opposition to capitalism-as-such has consequences for how we address the problems of the modern economy.
Like all fights about the future, this one is really about the past. In western Europe and the United States, the three decades after World War II—in which international capital flows were restrained and nations were able to spend aggressively on social programs, funded by high tax rates—saw the greatest growth in productivity and living standards in history. The gains were widely shared: inequality declined, and, uniquely since the dawn of capitalism, there were no major banking crises. But, in the face of various pressures, particularly inflation, this order began to break down in the 1970s, creating room for the Reagan-Thatcher neoliberal revolution. That revolution ushered in a fiercely laissez-faire approach to capitalism—financial deregulation, a retreat from antitrust enforcement, tax cuts, an assault on labor, and so on—and with it, a return to the rampant inequality and economic concentration, as well as the periodic financial collapses, of the prewar era.
To the non-socialist left, the postwar period of broad economic growth was evidence that a “decent capitalism” is possible, as journalist Robert Kuttner puts it in a new book, Can Democracy Survive Global Capitalism? The Reagan-Thatcher takeover was an unfortunate and unnecessary departure from the Keynesian consensus. “This was the road once taken,” Kuttner writes, of the postwar order. “There was no economic need for a different one.”
Socialists, however, are more sympathetic to the argument that the postwar “golden age” was just a temporary deviation from the inexorable logic of capitalism. The neoliberal turn was capitalism’s true nature reasserting itself. “The midcentury was quite anomalous,” as Matt Bruenig put it. The Great Depression and World War II created historically unique conditions that couldn’t last forever. “True, inequality goes down. But excepting that, we’re right back on the trail. Marx would tell you: Capital accumulates. It’s a natural tendency.”
If you buy this account, then the logical answer is, as Jacobin’s Bhaskar Sunkara wrote last year, “to not merely tame but overcome capitalism.” Most of the young intellectuals I spoke with echoed this idea at some point—even Liz Bruenig, who, you’ll recall, has elsewhere cautioned against treating socialism versus capitalism as a binary choice.
There’s always a danger in getting bogged down in fights over terminology. But blaming an impersonal force called “capitalism” for all our problems can lead to unhelpful readings of political change. If capitalism is the enemy, and liberals and conservatives both like capitalism, then it’s easy to flatten out the crucial differences between them. “There was no contingency or ambiguity in any of this,” wrote Nivedita Majumdar in a Jacobin piece titled “Why We’re Marxists” in 2014. “The obscene concentration of wealth in the two decades preceding the 2008 crisis shows that there is no mechanism to push for a sustainable, let alone fair, allocation of resources within capitalism.” But, of course, there was contingency, both in terms of deliberate policy choices that didn’t have to be made, and world events—Vietnam, the oil embargo, the Iran hostage crisis—that made the conservative backlash possible. It was Margaret Thatcher who used to say that “there is no alternative” to neoliberalism. That so much of the left is willing to treat Reaganomics as the true definition of capitalism marks a dramatic linguistic and intellectual victory of the conservative movement.
Consider a piece by Jacobin staff writer Meagan Day on the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. For the most part, the article could have appeared in any left-of-center publication. “The CFPB has accomplished a lot in its young life,” Day wrote of the agency, a creation of the Dodd-Frank law and a brainchild of Elizabeth Warren that is being slowly dismantled by the Trump administration. But Day strikes a strange note when she tries to draw a broader lesson from Trump’s assault on the CFPB: “The sacking of the agency is a naked admission that under our existing political setup the capitalist class can never suffer any consequences, no matter how badly it screws up.” Is it? Or is it a reminder that elections matter, that there is a deep difference between a Democratic Party that, flawed as it may be, created the CFPB, and a Republican Party that exists to do the bidding of the 1 percent? We can be sure that, for all Hillary Clinton’s faults, the CFPB would be humming right along if she were president. That could be awkward for a socialist to admit.
The American left of center is like a soft mattress, and Bernie is an anvil dropped in the middle: whichever side you’re lying on, gravity pulls you a little closer to him.
In our conversations, even the socialists who insisted most strongly that they want to eliminate capitalism tended to sketch out worlds in which capitalist markets still play at least some role. “Profit itself isn’t the problem,” Sunkara said. “The problem is the work-or-starve contract that forces some people to give up their autonomy.” No one I spoke to was calling for total state ownership of all industry. But their commitment to the “Get rid of capitalism” rhetoric raises the prospect that these very smart people will turn up their noses at the less ideologically pure work of structuring market competition itself.
This distinguishes socialists from the budding anti-monopoly movement, which has done much of its thinking in the pages of this magazine. This school of thought, sometimes referred to as the New Brandeis movement, has its purest expression at the Open Markets Institute, a D.C. think tank, but also has drawn allies elsewhere in Washington, most notably Elizabeth Warren. Their central insight is that one of the greatest—and least appreciated—achievements of the New Deal and postwar era was the U.S. government’s strong commitment to preserving real economic competition, especially through antitrust enforcement. And that, on the flip side, one of the key causes for the radical post-1980 rise in income inequality was the retreat from antitrust enforcement prompted by the Reagan administration and changing judicial doctrine.
A renewed commitment to competition policy and an ambitiously universal welfare state aren’t mutually exclusive, of course. But there seems to be a reluctance among the socialist left to engage with an agenda that promotes competition. (One exception is Ryan Cooper, who has written favorably about the anti-monopoly movement.) That, in turn, means a reluctance to think about how to tackle the question of concentrated economic power. What is the socialist answer to the dominance of Amazon, Facebook, and Google? Matt Bruenig told me that competition policy is, for him, “way down on the list of priorities.” When someone on Twitter asked Liz Bruenig why she didn’t subscribe to the New Brandeis movement, her reply was that “the answer to the destruction wrought by capitalism isn’t more, better capitalism.”
The term “capitalism”—like “socialism”—can’t be reduced to any simple fixed meaning. At its core, it refers merely to an economy based on market exchanges aimed at private profit. But a response like Liz Bruenig’s illustrates just how degraded the meaning of the word has become.
Here, again, liberals may want to turn their gaze inward. The conservative movement has faced little resistance to its successful rebranding of American capitalism as synonymous with a laissez-faire, dog-eat-dog form of competition, in which maximizing the ability of the rich to accumulate ever more wealth is seen as the only unmitigated economic good. This vision depends on propping up the myth of a market that’s as “free” from regulation as possible. It’s a myth because, in fact, there can be no such thing as a modern market in the absence of regulation of one sort or another, and many forms of commerce, like intellectual property, owe their very existence to government.
Yet modern liberals have overwhelmingly ceded the terrain. Rather than making the affirmative case for using government to structure and spur equitable markets, liberals tend to fall into the binary of a free market versus regulation. Instead of presenting a vision of how to use government to make markets work in the public interest, the message has too often been, “Capitalism is fine, we just need more regulations to patch up the failures.” Democrats, in other words, start with something that the left hates, and then add something that everyone hates.
Ultimately, the New Brandeis folks and the socialists may have more in common than they realize. They’re both rooted in the sense, largely ignored by mainstream liberalism, that it simply shouldn’t be possible for anyone to gain as much wealth and power as the richest corporations and individuals wield today. Call this feeling socialism, call it progressivism, call it liberalism; whatever you call it, it’s where anyone who wants to harness the energy behind the rebirth of American socialism needs to start. | {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
Rogue One Finds The Wars In Star Wars
Director: Gareth Edwards Starring: Felicity Jones, Diego Luna, Ben Mendelsohn, Mads Mikkelsen, Forest Whitaker, Riz Ahmed, Donnie Yen, Jiang Wen, Alan Tudyk Running Time: 133 minutes
The ambition to have a Star Wars movie come out every single year may end up hitting a point of diminishing returns, but for now the annual return to a galaxy far, far away is still fresh enough to be music to the ears of fans and lining to the pockets of Disney. No one knows quite like they do how to appeal to a wide range of demographics; though The Force Awakens definitely owed a lot of its success to the memories it stirred in fans who had been left in the cold by the prequels, it aimed and succeeded at continuing the series tradition of kid appeal, something that goes right back to George Lucas’ attempts to recreate his own childhood joy watching pulp sci-fi serials. Rogue One: A Star Wars Story is unlikely to sell as many toys as last year’s film, but it should provide older fans that have grown up with Star Wars with they’ve always wanted: more of the actual wars.
Set shortly before the events of the original Star Wars, Rogue One is the story of how the plans for the Death Star arrived in the hands of the Rebel Alliance. Jyn Erso (Felicity Jones) is an Empire prisoner with a long rap-sheet and survival skills provided by absent father figures. Rescued but essentially recaptured by the Rebels, she’s given the task of locating her father Galen (Mads Mikkelsen), head of the team that has designed the Death Star. Galen himself was kidnapped years ago to work on the superweapon by Orson Krennic (Ben Mendelsohn), a childhood trauma for Jyn that left her mother dead and her in the care of Saw Gerrera (Forest Whitaker), a paranoid extremist even to the Rebels. Jyn is not in it for their revolution, but in the Star Wars universe the lure of the Dad is impossible to resist and it’s not long before she’s leading a motley crue. These rogues include Diego Luna as an unscrupulous Rebel operative, Riz Ahmed as a defecting Imperial pilot, Ip Man Donnie Yen and Jiang Wen as a blind Force-believing martial artist and his sceptic assassin friend and Alan Tudyk who provides the voice for K-2SO, a 7 foot tall Imperial droid that’s been programmed to work for the other side, reaching Marvin the Paranoid Android levels of quippy pessimism in the process.
It’s a large and diverse cast of talented performers, but one of the ways that Rogue One breaks from the series norm is that it never quite invests in getting to know these characters. They’re a shadier bunch that fit the story, but in the hastily moving plot they don’t connect much with each other, which makes it hard for them to connect to us. Felicity Jones plays Jyn as capable but can’t give her much personality. Amidst the constant action chaos, there isn’t much room for Forest Whitaker or Mads Mikkelson to act in, which is not just a waste of great actors but a harm to the story, considering how key they both should be to Jyn’s motivations. Brief bright spots aside, the film tends to pass most of the cast by. That a fatalistic air hangs over these characters stories may mean that the writers and director Gareth Edwards were more focused on the bigger picture than getting to know them. Knowing what happens after all, has never been a problem with movies about World War Two or Vietnam and Rogue One is a war picture in so far as a Disney product can be. Rather than the operatic tragedy that comes with death in the series up to now, Rogue One is focused more on smaller stories, on the cost of death in war that adds up through volume of numbers. Still, a little more to the personal relationships could have helped the emotions to come through.
If Edwards has brought over his character struggles from previous films like 2014’s Godzilla, it must be said that he has carried over his strengths as well. Scale and spectacle are where the director’s talents are, both of which help give Rogue One a look just distinctive enough to other Star Wars films and a grandness befitting the genre. Jetting around various locations-an old Jedi temple, an Imperial base-Edwards keeps the camera back to take them in. Planets feel planet-sized and considering how important the threat of the Death Star is to the plot, it’s never looked bigger than it does here. The firepower of the (not yet) fully armed and operational battle station is shown from the ground level, which makes for a stunning display of special effects.
Fans who are looking for something new in their Star Wars should be happy enough with what Rogue One provides. It plays around with series iconography, with the opening crawl avoided and lightsabers having their briefest screentime by quite some distance. Despite skewing older, it’s less reliant on nostalgia than The Force Awakens, there are cameos yes, but it feels more comfortably at place in the series without the pressure of having to relaunch it. The action is frantic but easy to follow, featuring a wide variety of guns, ships and fighting styles. It’s thrilling to watch Donnie Yen smack his staff into Storm Troopers and fun to watch K2S0 toss people around, a robot in Star Wars that’s finally effective in a fight because he’s as strong as, well, a robot.
There is plenty to like in Rogue One, but not a lot to love, not with flat characters too busy rushing to the set piece to get to know each other. It makes for a solid addition to the series, but much like how things are left for the Rebels at the end, there’s a sense that the truly great work is still to come.
(3.5 / 5)
Rogue One: A Star Wars Story will be released at midnight, December 15. | {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) said Wednesday that emails being withheld by Senate Republicans show that Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh may have lied under oath during his prior confirmation hearings in 2004 and 2006. The Democrat claimed that six emails from Kavanaugh’s time in the George W. Bush White House may contradict testimony Kavanaugh gave when being confirmed for his federal judgeships. But according to Leahy, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) has labeled the emails as “committee confidential,” meaning they can’t be released to the public. “There is simply no reason they can’t be made public,” Leahy said during confirmation hearings Wednesday.
We have discovered evidence that Judge Kavanaugh misled the Senate during his 2004 and 2006 hearings. Truthfulness under oath is not an optional qualification for a Supreme Court nominee. Watch as I question him here: https://t.co/twNcwl91PR — Sen. Patrick Leahy (@SenatorLeahy) September 5, 2018
Leahy’s assertion shined a bright light on the fact that committee Republicans are rushing the judge’s nomination through without disclosing a huge number of documents related to his work in the White House counsel’s office under Bush. Grassley only requested between 10 and 15 percent of the documents from Kavanaugh’s time in Bush administration, and only 7 percent ― 457,000 documents ― have been provided to the committee. Of the documents that have been turned over, Grassley is refusing to publicly release 189,000. The committee asked for no records from Kavanaugh’s time as White House staff secretary.
Chip Somodevilla via Getty Images Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) questions Supreme Court nominee Judge Brett Kavanaugh.
The six emails in question related to a scandal from 2002 and 2003 in which a Republican Judiciary Committee staffer named Manny Miranda stole emails from the committee’s Democrats that included strategy memos about how they would question Bush’s judicial nominees. Leahy alleged that Kavanaugh, in his role preparing those judicial nominees for their confirmation hearings, knew he had received these stolen emails from Miranda detailing the Democrats’ strategy on the nomination of Priscilla Owen to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. Kavanaugh claimed in both his 2004 and 2006 confirmation hearings that if he did receive those documents, he “never knew or suspected” that they were stolen. Under tough questioning by Leahy on Wednesday, Kavanaugh stated that what he said in 2004 and 2006 was “100 percent accurate.” Leahy’s line of questioning first focused on three emails that are available to the public, then later alluded to the six emails that are not. Leahy brought up an email sent on July 19, 2002, from Miranda to Kavanaugh and another Bush official that, according to the senator, asked “why the Leahy people were looking into financial ties between two special interest groups and Priscilla Owen.” Kavanaugh proceeded to read the email and concluded, “I don’t really have a specific recollection of any of this, senator, but it would have not have been unusual [to say] ... ‘The Leahy people are looking into this and the Hatch people are looking into that.’” Then Leahy asked about a January 2003 email. “Mr. Miranda forwarded you a letter from me and other Judiciary Democrats to then-Majority Leader Tom Daschle,” the senator said. “The letter was clearly a draft. It had typos and it wasn’t signed. Somebody eventually leaked its existence to Fox News.”
Win McNamee via Getty Images Judge Brett Kavanaugh reads from an email sent to him when working at the White House while answering questions from Sen. Patrick Leahy.
“Here’s the thing,” Leahy continued. “You had the full text of my email in your inbox before anything was said about it publicly. Did you find it at all unusual to receive a draft letter from Democratic senators to each other before any mention of it was made public?” Kavanaugh pointed out that the only reply he made to this particular email was asking, “Who signed this?” According to Kavanaugh, this meant that he did not realize that the document was a draft and, therefore, remained oblivious that the document had been stolen. Leahy then wanted to know if Miranda ever asked Kavanaugh to meet outside of the White House or the Capitol. “I can’t rule that out,” Kavanaugh answered. Leahy continued, “Did he ever hand you material separately from what would be emailed back and forth?” “I don’t know the answer to that, senator,” Kavanaugh said before hemming and hawing about how sometimes the Democrats and Republicans on the committee worked together. After his failure to remember whether he met with or received documents by hand from Miranda, Leahy asked Kavanaugh about another specific email. This was the first allusion to confidential emails the committee was not disclosing to the public. “When you worked at the White House did anyone ever tell you they had a mole that provided them with secret info?” Leahy asked. Kavanaugh said he didn’t “recall the reference to a mole.” Leahy got more specific: “You never received an email from a Republican staff member with information claiming to come from spying?” “I’m not going to rule anything out,” Kavanaugh said, echoing previous denials. “If I did, I wouldn’t have thought the literal meaning of that.” “Wouldn’t that surprise you that you got an email saying that they got that from somebody spying?” Leahy pressed. Kavanaugh, realizing that Leahy was talking about a document without revealing it, responded with his own question: “Well, is there such an email, senator?” This led Leahy to turn to Grassley: “We’d have to ask the chairman what he has in the confidential material.”
Win McNamee via Getty Images Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) shouts at Leahy as he questioned the lack of disclosure of Kavanaugh's documents. | {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
In the next week or so, we'll be making some improvements to the design and layout of the BBC News website.
Since our launch in 1997, we've worked to make sure the site continues to develop to meet your needs and expectations. This is the latest stage in that process of evolution.
We have focused on design and navigation, looking to see how we can make all the existing content we produce each day easier for you to find, use and share. I'd like to use this post to offer you a first glimpse; you can see a slideshow here.
Read the rest of BBC News website redesign (1) on The Editors. | {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
C'est une reprise en main à l'issue incertaine. Début août, l'Angleterre effarée découvrait l'état déplorable dans lequel se trouvait la prison de Birmingham. Dans la foulée de deux inspections au bilan éloquent, cette maison d'arrêt, gérée par une société privée, était partiellement renationalisée. Une mesure radicale, et une première au Royaume-Uni, qui a relancé le débat sur la gestion publique/privée des établissements pénitentiaires.
Ces dernières semaines, la situation était encore loin d'être florissante. Interrogés par la BBC, des détenus libérés récemment décrivaient toujours un site infesté de cafards, des douches prises avec une eau saumâtre engendrant des infections, et un dénuement tel que les pages des livres à disposition des prisonniers finissaient en papier à cigarette.
Pourtant, d'après l'Association anglaise des officiers de prison (POA), citée par cette même BBC, les améliorations sont réelles. Trois cents détenus ont ainsi été orientés vers d'autres établissements, ramenant à 900 le nombre total de prisonniers. Dans le même temps, un nouveau gouverneur a été nommé, et une trentaine de surveillants supplémentaires embauchés, alors que deux d'entre eux, corrompus, étaient licenciés. Les cellules les plus dégradées font l'objet d'un nettoyage approfondi, et d'un « point régulier sur leur propreté ».
1434 agressions en un an
C'est loin d'être un luxe, tant les contrôles d'août ont décrit une véritable cour des miracles. L'inspecteur en chef des prisons du Royaume, Peter Clarke, avait évoqué « la pire prison » qu'il ait visitée. Dans les parties communes : des traces de sang, de vomissures et des sols jonchés d'excréments de rats ou de blattes. Dans l'air, l'odeur tenace du cannabis avait frappé les contrôleurs, qui décrivaient une violence latente, une prison livrée aux gangs face à des gardiens quasi terrorisés.
En quelques semaines, sur sept détenus décédés, quatre l'avaient été du fait d'une ingestion de drogue. Au Royaume-Uni, et particulièrement derrière les barreaux, les cannabinoïdes de synthèse - « Spice » et autres « Black Mamba » - font en effet des ravages, comme l'ont montré plusieurs vidéos diffusées. Ils sont accessibles « même dans les quartiers d'isolement », relève le rapport de contrôle de Birmingham. De juillet 2017 à juillet 2018, l'établissement a par ailleurs enregistré 1434 agressions. Un record national.
Renationalisation...provisoire
Pour les détracteurs de la privatisation, cette dégradation est née de la concession de la prison au groupe privé G4S en 2011, et s'est surtout accélérée ces 18 derniers mois. Rory Stewart, le ministre des prisons, reconnaissait ainsi que l'établissement ne parvenait pas à mettre en œuvre « un environnement sûr et décent. » « Le constat est celui d'un échec cuisant, auquel s'est ajouté un laxisme dans le contrôle de l'exécution des contrats confiés à cette société », appuyait Peter Clarke, l'inspecteur en chef. | {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
thierry ehrmann / Flickr)” width=”637″ height=”426″ />Painted portrait of Edward Snowden. (Photo: thierry ehrmann / Flickr)
On Friday, Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro announced that Venezuela would offer political asylum to NSA whistle-blower Edward Snowden
Regardless of what happens next, President Maduro’s announcement was world-historical. With his announcement, Maduro has invited Americans to live in a new world: a “multi-polar” world in which the US government’s power is limited, not by a single “superpower adversary,” but by the actions of many independent countries that are not US adversaries; countries that agree with the US on some things and disagree with the US on other things, as is their right; countries that do not always accede to US demands, as is their right. The day after Snowden claims political asylum in Venezuela, the US and Venezuela will continue their robust economic trade; in particular, Venezuela will continue to be one of the top four suppliers of foreign oil to the United States.
It’s a general constant in human affairs that no one likes to be told that they have too much power for the general welfare. Nonetheless, we’re all capable, when we want, of seeing things from the other guy’s point of view.
And from the point of view of most people in the world, it’s not a good thing for the United States to have too much power in world affairs; from the point of view of most people in the world, it’s not a good thing for any one country to have too much power in world affairs.
The limiting of US power is no reason for Americans to panic: We’re going to be fine. The day after Snowden claims political asylum in Venezuela, we’ll still be responsible for a fifth of the world economy; we’ll still have an absurdly huge military; we’ll still have a veto on the UN Security Council. We’ll still be able to go to sleep peacefully in the knowledge that no one’s going to be invading or occupying us any time in any future that we can see – something that, unfortunately and unjustly, many people in the world still cannot do.
Obviously, the US government has a claim on Mr. Snowden. He was a US government employee, and as such, signed agreements about not disclosing classified information.
But it’s just as obvious that there are important, competing claims to the US government claim; and if these competing claims trump the US government claim on Mr. Snowden in this case, most Americans will be better off.
One important competing claim to the US government claim is the internationally-recognized right of political asylum. As Amnesty International noted last week: “The US authorities’ relentless campaign to hunt down and block whistleblower Edward Snowden’s attempts to seek asylum is deplorable and amounts to a gross violation of his human rights . . .”
Said Michael Bochenek, director of Law and Policy at Amnesty International, of Snowden, “It is his unassailable right, enshrined in international law, to claim asylum and this should not be impeded.”
Another important competing claim to the US government’s contention is the public interest in protecting whistle-blowers, especially national security whistle-blowers. As Human Rights Watch noted last week:
The law often criminalizes the disclosure of secrets by employees or agents of a government. But international law recognizes that revealing official secrets is sometimes justified in the public interest. In particular it may be necessary to expose and protect against serious human rights violations, including overreaching or unjustifiable surveillance. International principles on national security whistle-blowers outline various circumstances under which governments should protect people from punishment if they disclose information of public concern.
US whistle-blower protections fall far short of these standards for people who disclose abuse in the national security arena. US law simply does not provide national security whistle-blowers with adequate protection from retaliation or punishment for disclosures in the public interest.
Snowden, a former National Security Agency consultant, faces various charges in US federal court, some of which could carry lengthy prison sentences. These include charges under the antiquated US Espionage Act. The US government has interpreted this vague statute in ways that are inconsistent with international human rights law, providing no exceptions or adequate defenses for whistle-blowers who disclose matters of serious public import.
As Human Rights Watch suggested, the public interest in protecting whistle-blowers trumps the government interest in protecting state secrets in this case.
So, in acting to protect Snowden, Venezuela did most Americans a good service, and we Americans owe Venezuela a debt of gratitude, as Michael Moore noted.
But in the wake of Venezuela’s announcement, many people have a practical question: How could Snowden physically get from the Moscow airport to political asylum in Venezuela, given that, apparently acting on US instructions, Spain, France and Portugal blocked the plane of Bolivian President Evo Morales on suspicion that Snowden was on board?
This situation is something that a few hundred American peace activists could do something decisive about. You may have heard the word “flytilla” before. It comes from Palestine. It refers to efforts of international peace activists to challenge the Israeli government’s control over international travel to the West Bank, by flying in to Tel Aviv and publicly declaring that they intend to participate in solidarity activities with Palestinians in the West Bank living under Israeli occupation.
The word “flytilla” is of course derivative from the word “flotilla,” which has referred to efforts to break the Israeli-Egyptian blockade of Gaza by sailing into Gaza’s port from the Mediterranean in defiance of the blockade. Now, as you may know, there is a project called Gaza’s Ark to defy the blockade by sailing from Gaza’s port to the Mediterranean, carrying Palestinian goods for export, in defiance of the Israeli-Egyptian blockade on these goods.
A Snowden accompaniment flotilla of prominent and peace-loving Americans could assemble at the Moscow airport and fly together from Moscow to Caracas. Snowden could fly from Moscow to Caracas under the protection of our company, like the Fellowship of the Ring. If we fill the plane and pay for it, we can pick the plane’s flight path. Memo: the plane will not pass over Europe.
Of course, there remains the theoretical possibility that the US Air Force could try to force the plane down in international airspace.
But we have two protections against this.
One protection is that President Obama promised he was not going to be “scrambling jets to get a 29-year-old hacker.” And the other protection is the political protection of the presence of prominent Americans on board the plane. I voted for President Obama twice, gave him campaign money, made phone calls and knocked on doors in Indiana. Is President Obama going to shoot me down? I double dog dare him.
The participants in the flytilla could look like this. Many prominent Americans – backed by 26,000 other (mostly) Americans – signed a letter to Ecuador’s President Rafael Correa, urging him to grant Snowden’s request for political asylum. We wrote to President Correa because we thought that’s where Snowden was headed; if we had known that Venezuela would turn out to be the more likely destination, we would have written to President Maduro instead. I know personally many of the people who signed this letter, and I don’t doubt for a moment their willingness to follow words with deeds. In particular, Oliver Stone, Michael Moore, Naomi Klein, Noam Chomsky, Daniel Ellsberg, Tom Hayden and Danny Glover signed this letter. Maybe Uncle Noam and Grandpa Dan are getting a little long in the tooth for international travel adventures. But Oliver, Michael, Naomi, Tom and Danny are traveling the world all the time. (Some pedant will say: But Naomi is Canadian! Whatever! Her parents are American; that’s close enough.)
If you would like to ride in the Snowden accompaniment flytilla, please note it in the comments. And please note any special gifts you have to offer, like owning a plane or being licensed to fly one. | {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
A recent Washington Post headline asked the following: “It’s hard to build cities for kids. But do they really need them?” There’s plenty of evidence that suggests city-dwellers feel the answer is a resounding yes. Take the trending urbanist focus on building residences fit for multiple generations of a family. Look at municipal efforts, such as Seattle’s push for affordable family housing and Chicago’s aim to make sure all of its children live within a 10-minute walk of a park or playground. Two years ago, San Antonio citizens voted for a sales tax increase to fund pre-kindergarten.
Indeed, despite the “cost of families” that the Post cited (“a two-parent family with two kids costs [a city] $6,200 annually, and a childless couple generates a net gain … of $13,000”), the experts and audience who gathered last night for Next City’s “Making Philadelphia Family Friendly,” moderated by Sara Lomax-Reese, president and GM of 900AM-WURD, turned the paper’s question on its head, asking “How can Philadelphia hold onto its new, younger residents once they start families?”
The panelists had plenty of ideas. Here are some of the highlights.
We need to fund our schools according to our community values.
Pennsylvania is one of only three states that determines school district budgets without a statewide formula for education funding. Education advocates across the state agree this must change if we expect high-poverty districts like Philadelphia to improve. In noting how public schools in more affluent Philly neighborhoods called on their parents to fill budget holes for basic needs, Helen Gym, founder of Parents United for Public Education, said, “Parents should not be buying an extra day for a school nurse. They should not be buying paper.” But they, and the communities, should be part of a larger public process that determines individual schools’ needs, and a mere lack of well-off parents should not stand in the way of schools getting the resources they need to meet those needs.
South Philadelphia High School Principal Otis Hackney added that a fair funding formula isn’t just a city issue: “A lot of my suburban colleagues are being stressed by parents moving out of Philly,” he said. “They want a fair funding formula so that maybe Philly can keep some of those parents and their kids.”
But while fair funding is essential, the panelists agreed that no “magic number” was going to singlehandedly turn around schools. Communities must come together to do that.
Schools and communities need to become one.
“A school must not be a silo in a neighborhood,” said Hackney, who has taken a number of steps to turn his school into a true community resource. Open houses during the school day allow neighborhood residents to visit the school and see it in action, for example. Hackney, who previously headed a high school just outside of the city, said that in most suburbs, schools are used as sites for town meetings, cultural activities and other events that draw the community into the school. Philadelphia, he said, is behind on that, but can and should do the same.
The city’s schools need to rebrand.
James Johnson, a Philadelphia real estate agent who sends his children to their neighborhood school, said, “People are shocked when they hear I send my children to public school. How do we change the narrative?” Hackney agreed that the narrative needed to be changed, but noted that “We’re not controlling the language. They” [the critics of public education] “are buying the ads, and we’re sitting on the sidelines, hoping parents will choose us. We can’t be in hoping-they’ll-choose-us mode.”
Early childhood education is the next frontier.
“It would be ideal if the federal government funded early childhood education,” said Dennis Campa, associate director for policy reform and advocacy at the Annie E. Casey Foundation, “but the feds aren’t doing it. It would be good if the states did it, and some states have. But where states don’t do it” — Pennsylvania doesn’t — “the cities need to step in. Early childhood education will have a positive impact in more ways than one, he said. It will create more school-ready kids, the opportunity for more parents to work outside the home, and it will create jobs. “Economically, there will be payoff,” Campa said. The mayor of San Antonio campaigned on a platform of instituting a tax for pre-kindergarten. It didn’t work too badly for him; he’s now secretary of housing and urban development.”
Natural space for play matters too.
As might be expected from the man whose title is commissioner of the department of parks and recreation, Michael DiBerardinis stressed the role of Philadelphia’s parkland and playgrounds in children’s growth and development. Philly’s Fairmount Park is huge, but it’s not convenient to many city neighborhoods in need of green space. One relatively easy way to get that space where it’s needed, he said, is to convert the open space around many city schools. “Our schools have 450 acres of paved surfaces, much of it in areas with no green space,” he said. The challenge here comes in getting a city administration committed to making that space green: “Will the next mayor be committed to investing in high-quality open space?” DiBerardinis wondered.
And will the next generation of millennial parents be a force for change in the city? That question came up several times throughout the evening as panelists and audience members pointed to rebounding community schools in areas that have attracted young families. Indeed, these parents are essential to the city’s future just as their predecessors similarly turned around schools and shaped communities. And while millennials may have a reputation for a more activist and urban bent, many in the audience urged their neighbors not to overlook the people who have been in the city all along, fighting for better schools in the face of a broken system. Just as no “magic number” alone can solve the schools’ problems, no magic demographic can solve Philadelphia’s.
900AM-WURD recorded the entire “Making Philadelphia Family Friendly” City Session discussion; listen here:
“Making Philadelphia Family Friendly” was the first of Next City’s City Sessions in Philadelphia, sponsored by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, and presented in partnership with 900AM-WURD and AL DÍA News. Register now for the next sessions: “The University as Community” and “Gentrification, Integration and Equity.” | {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
Before posting to reddit I google any grammar rule that I am unsure of and spell check every word Only to end up backspacing and reworking my entire post until I get soo frustrated that I don't even bother posting at all.
156 shares | {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
Michaael Mina is bringing his Bourbon Steak concept to Dana Point. It is replacing his fine dining venue Stonehill Tavern. (Courtesy Bourbon Steak)
Chef/owner Amar Santana of Vaca and Broadway is opening a new restaurant in South Coast Plaza in 2018. He is seen here at the annual Tastemakers event in Costa Mesa. (File photo by Cindy Yamanaka, Orange County Register/SCNG)
Sound The gallery will resume in seconds
Michael Mina’s Bourbon Steak, which has locations around the country (shown), is coming to Monarch Beach Resort in Dana Point. (Courtesy Bourbon Steak Facebook page)
SteelCraft Garden Grove will be similar to the cargo containers food hall in Long Beach. (Nancy Luna, Orange County Register/SCNG)
Black Tap Craft Burgers & Beer, a New York burger joint known for its whimsical trademarked CrazyShakes, is opening its first California location next year in Downtown Disney. (Courtesy Black Tap)
Former Knott’s Berry Farm creative director Lara Hanneman, shown, hand-selected the eclectic antiques, overstuffed chairs and Persian rugs for The Cauldron. The sophisticated witch-themed tavern is slated to “soft” open Wednesday, Jan. 3 at 8028 Beach Blvd. (across the street from Knott’s Berry Farm).
A historic sign discovered beneath a half-inch of plaster in the future home of the Old Towne Urth Caffe has been brought back to its former glory as part of the restoration of the 1888 building. (Courtesy of Spectra Company)
A historic photo shows the soon-to-be Urth Caffe in Orange in its original form, the home of Hemphill & Morse Real Estate, Loans and Investments.(Courtesy of Spectra Company)
Amar Santana’s James Beard benefit dinner will include a sampling of the restaurant’s wood-fired steaks. (Photo Courtesy Sarah Knight Photography )
Black Tap Craft Burgers & Beer, a New York burger joint known for its whimsical trademarked CrazyShakes, is opening its first California location next year in Downtown Disney. (Courtesy Black Tap)
SteelCraft Garden Grove will include artisanal retailers and restaurants selling goods from cargo containers as long as 40 feet on a 1.8-acre lot behind City Hall. (Rendering courtesy Studie One Eleven)
Urth Caffe has been carefully restoring this 1888 building for its next Orange County location. It spent several months restoring a old cottage in Laguna Beach for its first local cafe and restaurant.(Rendering courtesy Urth Caffe)
Malibu Farm has a cafe and restaurant on the Malibu pier. The farm to table restaurant is opening a single restaurant at Lido Marina Village in spring 2018. (Courtesy Malibu Farm)
Black Tap Craft Burgers & Beer, a New York burger joint known for its whimsical trademarked CrazyShakes, is opening its first California location next year in Downtown Disney. (Courtesy Black Tap)
Chef Michael Mina opened Stonehill Tavern 11 years ago. Mina is converting it to Bourbon Steak. (Courtesy Monarch Beach Resort)
TAPS Director of Brewing David Huls is ready for a larger brewery to expand TAPS’ beer distribution. (Photo by Cindy Yamanaka, Orange County Register/SCNG)
About 40 firefighters from Anaheim, Orange, Garden Grove and Fullerton responded to a fire at the Anaheim White House on Saturday, February 4, 2017. (Photo by Nick Agro, Orange County Register/SCNG)
The Ritz space will become an Italian steakhouse by Ron Salisbury, whose family founded the string of El Cholo restaurants. Address: 2801 W. Coast Highway (Register file photo)
Black Tap Craft Burgers & Beer, a New York burger joint known for its whimsical trademarked CrazyShakes, is opening its first California location next year in Downtown Disney. (Courtesy Black Tap)
The Cauldron Spirits and Brews is a sophisticated witch-themed tavern by former Knott’s Berry Farm creative director Lara Hanneman. The intimate bar and restaurant features eclectic antiques, overstuffed chairs, Persian rugs, and ornately-framed vintage illustrations of witches and black cats. (Courtesy The Cauldron)
Cracker Barrel is coming to Victorville in February. (Courtesy Cracker Barrel)
Executive chef and former Creative Director for Knott’s Berry Farm, Lara Hanneman, is the mastermind behind The Cauldron Spirits and Brews, a 17th century witch-themed bar and restaurant that features French-casual bites with a wicked twist, local craft beer, themed cocktails and a wine from various regions in California. (Courtesy The Cauldron Spirits and Brews)
Executive chef and former Creative Director for Knott’s Berry Farm, Lara Hanneman, is the mastermind behind The Cauldron Spirits and Brews, a 17th century witch-themed bar and restaurant that features French-casual bites with a wicked twist, local craft beer, themed cocktails and a wine from various regions in California. (Courtesy The Cauldron Spirits and Brews)
In 2017, Orange County saw yet another lofty increase in the number of restaurants operating from Seal Beach to San Clemente.
The restaurant count soared to 9,159, a jump of 282 establishments from last year’s count of 8,877 as of Dec. 1, 2017, according to county records.
And it was a thrilling year for fine dining and international concepts — from the reborn Marche Moderne in Newport Beach to one-dish wonder Yang’s Braised Chicken Rice in Tustin.
Looking ahead to 2018, expect more dazzling dining coming to Orange County including Chef Amar Santana’s new global food market at South Coast Plaza.
From rain forest coffee to a food hall made of cargo containers, these are the new restaurants to watch for this year.
1. Urth Caffe in Old Towne Orange
The last we heard from Urth Caffe, renovation crews were uncovering pieces of history from an 1888 building that will serve as the coffee shop’s next Southern California location. Urth’s Los Angeles outlets, frequented by celebrities, are famous for their heirloom organic coffees and pastries. The Orange location, which will serve breakfast and lunch, has a view of the city’s historic downtown plaza — and is ironically surrounded by two Starbucks cafes. Opening: The cafe was expected to open by late 2017. No word yet on when it will open in 2018. 100 W. Chapman Ave.
2. The Hall
Celebrated local chef Amar Santana is giving birth to his third concept: The Hall at South Coast Plaza. Santana’s global marketplace will house two European food stands selling French baked goods, sandwiches, salads, Mediterranean dishes, coffee and fresh juices. Santana, a “Top Chef” finalist, is the chef-owner of Vaca in Costa Mesa and Broadway in Laguna Beach. Those restaurants deliver the goods and we expect this European marketplace to be no different. Coming late 2018 to the old Z-Tejas space.
3. The Rebirth of the Anaheim White House
Last February, a fire destroyed most of the iconic Anaheim White House, owned by philanthropist and CNN Hero Bruno Serato. His palatial restaurant was in ashes — and he was heartbroken. His nightmare is almost over. The restaurant is currently being rebuilt, and restored so it more closely resembles the original features of the 1909 home. Expect a few frescos and dazzling fixtures as before along with a new layout and second floor bar called the B Bar. The restaurant is accepting reservations for an anticipated reopening in February.
4. Malibu Farm
Does Orange County need another farm-to-table outsider? Yes — if it combines a view of Newport Harbor with the rustic luxe look of Malibu Farm. The transformed Lido Marina Village is getting a mashup version of Malibu Farm’s two popular pier venues — a casual breakfast cafe and a separate bar and restaurant. The Lido restaurant will offer a menu of organic and locally sourced ingredients as well as some exclusive specials and handmade ice cream. Opening in spring 2018.
5. Steel container food hall in Garden Grove
Orange County diners, who embraced the food hall movement years ago, are slated to get another unique food experience when SteelCraft Garden Grove opens in late 2018. The food hall project behind Garden Grove City Hall is the second shipping container development for partners Howard CDM and SteelCraft. The two Long Beach companies developed and opened SteelCraft Long Beach in early 2017. Garden Grove’s version will be twice as big with a mix of beer, wine, coffee and dessert shops, as well as five food tenants — all housed in cargo containers as long as 40 feet.
Retailers and restaurants will be announced at Garden Grove’s State of the City address Jan. 31, 2018. The project will break ground Feb. 1. 12900 Euclid St.
6. Mystery restaurants at Irvine Spectrum Center
What exactly is the Irvine Co. building in the old Macy’s space? It’s been almost two years since the developer announced plans to raze the closed department store and replace it with as many as 20 new shops and restaurants. Construction has come along way in recent weeks, yet the Irvine Co. has been hush hush about food tenants. (We know a Sephora is coming.) Will there be a food hall? Will the mobile Hello Kitty Cafe get a permanent home? This we know: the ever expanding Irvine Spectrum Center, which opened in 1995, is going to get even more crowded.
On New Year’s Eve Stonehill Tavern served its last meal at Monarch Beach Resort. The critically-acclaimed fine dining venue is being rebranded as Michael Mina’s Bourbon Steak. It is slated to open to in February after some minor renovations. Bourbon is Mina’s well-regarded “timeless” and seasonally-driven steakhouse. There, premium cuts of beef including Japanese wagyu are first poached in butter, and then finished on the wood-fired grill.
When it opens, it will join a bevy of modern steakhouses in Orange County: Selanne Steak Tavern in Laguna Beach, Vaca in Costa Mesa and the soon to be rebranded Leatherby’s Cafe Rouge, which is becoming a steak house later this month. Let the “2018 Steak Wars” begin.
8. TAPS Brewery & Barrel Room
At most craft breweries, food is an afterthought. But at TAPS Brewery & Barrel Room in Tustin, the cuisine will be just as important as the quality of the beer. That’s because Orange County’s newest brewery will be run by a company that knows how to give equal time to its brews and food. The 19,000-square foot production brewery and taproom in Tustin will have a 1,900 square foot tasting room, a dedicated food truck, pinball games and plenty of parking — up to 155 spaces.
“This will be a modern, comfortable space for beer lovers with everything under one roof and an emphasis on the casual, fun and hip,” owner Joe Manzella said.
The brewery, at 15501 Red Hill Ave., was slated to open in January, but we hear there could be some delays. Stay tuned.
9. Italian steakhouse by El Cholo
The closed Ritz Prime Seafood restaurant on Coast Highway in Newport Beach is becoming an Italian steakhouse.
Ron Salisbury, the owner of El Cholo restaurants in Southern California, plans to serve prime steaks and classic pastas and salads in a Cape Cod-inspired atmosphere. That means, he’s scrapping all the glitz from the old Ritz to make his waterfront restaurant more approachable. The veteran operator has also negotiated a deal to prevent towering yachts from blocking the pristine waterfront view — something that was a problem for the Ritz. Diners will finally get the sunset view they expect, he said. The yet-to-be named restaurant, at 2801 W. Coast Highway, is slated to open in late 2018.
10. Black Tap at Downtown Disney District
Any restaurant with a trademark menu item called CrazyShakes will always get my attention. Let’s hope the whimsical and over-the-top shakes from New York-based Black Tap Craft Burgers & Beer meet our expectations. I’m especially looking forward to the shake made with Strawberry Pop Tarts. The better burger restaurant by Michelin honored chef Joe Isidori is opening next year at Downtown Disney. (Note: Huge changes are coming to Downtown Disney, where construction is slated to begin this year on a new luxury 700-room hotel that will result in the exit — temporary or permanent — of many food tenants including Starbucks, Earl of Sandwich, ESPN Zone and Rainforest Cafe.)
11. Il Barone relocation
The classic fine dining Italian restaurant owned by Franco and Donatella Barone is relocating to a closed Coco’s, giving the husband-and-wife team a fresh start in a new location.
The remodel of the 5,000-square foot coffee house has taken much longer than expected. Donatella said she expects the new restaurant, which is nearly double the size of the current Il Barone, to debut soon. The 90-seat Coco’s, at 900 Bristol St., will have about 20 extra seats, plus a patio. The restaurant is in the same center as Moulin cafe.
12. Cracker Barrel
OK. Not in Orange County, but let’s face it. Everyone in Southern California who has ever stopped for comfort food and knickknacks at this Midwest staple is over the moon about the pending opening of Cracker Barrel’s first California location in Victorville. It’s the first of at least six Cracker Barrel restaurants planned for California. The restaurant, at 11612 Amargosa Road, opens Feb. 5, 2018.
13. The Cauldron Spirits and Brews
It is appropriate for this final entry to land at No. 13. The Cauldron is a sophisticated witch-themed tavern by former Knott’s Berry Farm creative director Lara Hanneman. The intimate bar and restaurant features eclectic antiques, overstuffed chairs, Persian rugs, and ornately-framed vintage illustrations of witches and black cats. Hanneman, the artistic mind behind multiple Knott’s Scary Farm haunts, is billing her dream tavern as a classy dive bar — with strong pours on traditional well drinks, as well as craft cocktails. The menu features French Provencial-style bites and hearty home-cooked comfort food. The Cauldron is slated to open this month (January) at 8028 Beach Blvd. (across the street from Knott’s Berry Farm). Stay tuned. | {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
Hollow Knight: Silksong was initially intended to be a DLC, but developer Team Cherry said "it quickly became too large and too unique" to stay that way. That means the three-person team is going to take a little longer to put Silksong together than fans had expected -- there's not even a hint of a release date yet.
So, what's new? Well, in Silksong you'll play as Hornet from the first game. Hornet was always more sprightly than the Knight, and from the trailer it seems that's going to be represented in a more acrobatic style of combat and platforming than before. It's likely the basic Hollow Knight loop -- explore area, face off against boss, get new skill to gain access to new area -- will remain intact, but Silksong is set in an entirely different kingdom from the original, and will include over 150 new enemies.
Hollow Knight: Silksong will be launching on PC (Windows, Mac and Linux) and Nintendo Switch, with Team Cherry saying "more platforms may happen." Anyone that backed the original game's Kickstarter will recieve its sequel free of charge. | {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
BOWLER — The Stockbridge-Munsee Band of Mohican Indians has followed the lead of the Menominee Indian Tribe of Wisconsin and established a curfew on its reservation lands.
As an additional way to limit transmission of the COVID-19, the tribal council enacts a reservation-wide curfew. This curfew is from 10 p.m. to 6 a.m. daily from April 10 until the end of the tribal public health state of emergency. People who are away from their homes during curfew hours are considered to be trespassing and will be subject to a $500 fine.
People can still travel for legitimate business purposes or for reasons of safety. Law enforcement, fire department and EMS personnel are authorized to travel during curfew hours. The curfew also does not prevent travel by people due to an emergency, such as a health emergency that requires transport to a hospital or if people needs to leave a location to ensure the safety of themselves or their children.
Community members who need to travel during curfew hours such as for travel to and from work should provide prior notice of their hours of travel and reason for travel to the tribe by emailing the information to Police Chief Jim Hoffman at [email protected] or 715-793-4394. | {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
We use cookies to provide you with the best experience possible. By using See Tickets, you accept our cookie policy | {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
(CNN) -- At first, James Sevigny didn't know where he was. He was sprawled on the ground when he came to, and he shivered as he noticed how much of his blood had splattered across the snow.
Sevigny had had a premonition that he would die like this. He just didn't have any inkling that it would happen on this spring morning.
Only moments earlier, the 28-year-old mountaineer was climbing in an isolated part of the Canadian Rocky Mountains. Suddenly, he heard a tremendous roar: avalanche. Sevigny blacked out as a wall of snow hurled him 2,000 feet below.
When Sevigny awakened, he could barely stand. His back was broken in two places, his knees were busted, and he had internal bleeding. He gave up hope of surviving and curled up in the snow to die. But then he felt an odd sensation. He felt someone behind him and heard a voice: "No, you can't give up. You have to live." Read all about cheating death
"It was right over my right shoulder," Sevigny said. "It was like if I would sneak up to you and put my nose a quarter of an inch from your neck. It was that kind of physical sensation."
What happened next was so profound that Sevigny, a scientist who disdains organized religion, says he couldn't talk about it for years afterward without crying. Sevigny still doesn't know who that voice belonged to, but another man does. He calls it "The Third Man."
Who is the Third Man?
John Geiger has sifted through the survival stories of people like Sevigny for six years. Adventurers, sailors, prisoners of war and pilots, they all tell strikingly similar stories of being saved from death by a mysterious presence, he says.
In the book "The Third Man Factor: Surviving the Impossible," Geiger attempts to solve the mystery of that presence.
Most of the people who've encountered the Third Man aren't mystics, says Geiger, a senior fellow at the University of Toronto and governor of the Royal Canadian Geographical Society. They include a NASA astronaut, aviator Charles Lindbergh, polar explorer Ernest Shackleton (he coined the "Third Man" term) and atheists.
Third Man encounters aren't restricted to exotic locales, either, Geiger says: He experienced a Third Man-like encounter in the study of his home while writing his book.
"When I give talks about the book, there are always a few people who will come up afterward to say they have similar stories," Geiger said. "The debate around the book is not 'are people actually encountering an unseen being' but rather, 'what is it?' "
What science says about the Third Man
Ron DiFrancesco thinks he knows who it is. He recently experienced one of the most publicized Third Man encounters.
DiFrancesco was working in the World Trade Center's south tower on September 11 when the building was hit by a hijacked plane. He was trapped on the 91st floor of the 110-story building, gasping for air as the smoke and flames closed in. How doctor recovers after showing "no signs of life"
He was about to pass out when he sensed someone near him. Then he heard a male voice. He says it told him to get up, and it guided him through a maze of hazards to safety.
DiFrancesco was the last person to get out of the south tower before it fell, Geiger writes.
DiFrancesco never saw nor could he ever find out who helped him. But he doesn't think the presence was something his subconscious conjured.
"It was a higher being rather than an internal being," DiFrancesco said. "Maybe it was an angel. I didn't see the face of God, but I know somebody came and helped me."
Geiger says the Third Man could have several explanations. He says scientists studying the phenomenon were able to evoke the sensation of someone standing next to a solitary person in a lab by stimulating certain parts of the subject's brain.
Yet that presence did not have the active, benevolent and intelligent presence that others often cite during Third Man encounters, he says.
Maybe the Third Man is a coping mechanism, Geiger suggests. The brain creates a companion to help a person survive a terrible situation. Or perhaps there is an "angel switch" in the brain that's activated in life-or-death struggles. How some explain near death experiences
The Third Man appeared to him during one of the worst struggles in his life, Geiger says: over grief.
Geiger alludes to that moment at the beginning of his book, where the dedication page reads: "For James Sutherland Angus Geiger, June 15-21, 2007."
James was Geiger's son. He died a week after birth because of heart problems. Geiger calls the experience "the worst stress I've ever had."
Geiger says that while working on the book alone in his study, he felt an odd sensation. Someone entered the room. It felt like his son. This happened several times.
"It's instantaneous, and it's overwhelming," Geiger said. "It's like you're sitting in a room with the light off and someone enters the room. It's that kind of vividness."
Mountain climber led to safety
Sevigny, the mountain climber, says the presence he encountered in April 1983 was just as real.
After the avalanche, Sevigny says, he was passed out for about an hour in the snow before he came to. The crumpled body of a climbing companion was nearby. The fall had killed him.
"Blood was everywhere," he said. "We had fallen 2,000 feet."
When he first heard the voice, Sevigny says, it reminded him of a woman. It was warm and nurturing, and it gave practical advice: "You have to get your jacket on. You have to get water."
It even told him to arrange the blood dripping from his body in the shape of arrows, pointing to the way he was walking in case rescuers came up on his trial.
"I didn't question it," Sevigny said. "I didn't think about it. I did exactly what the voice said."
The presence led him through a valley to Sevigny's campsite. It constantly encouraged him when he felt like giving up.
When he arrived at the campsite, Sevigny saw three people skiing nearby and called for help.
At that moment, the presence left him, he says.
The trio rushed toward Sevigny. One was a mountain guide, another was an elite cross-country skier, and the final person was a nurse.
"If you were to be in a place and you could find three people to help you, you couldn't pick three better people," he said.
Sevigny spent months in the hospital. Today, he's an environmental consultant in Canada and a father. For about two years afterward, he couldn't talk about what happened.
"It made me cry," he said. "It was so powerful. I just couldn't tell many people."
As he talked about his experiences, his 1-year-old son, Tuzo, started crying in the background after falling.
"He's like his father," Sevigny said with a chuckle. "He climbs, and then he falls."
Sevigny says the experience didn't make him religious. He sees himself as a scientist and has little use for organized religion ("Organized religion and organized crime share a number of parallels").
"I don't give it great thought," he said. "I'm not a spiritual person. I don't say it was God or a guardian angel. I have a Ph.D. in chemistry."
What he will say is that mysterious presence was the only reason he got off that mountain alive.
"If it wasn't for the Third Man, I would be dead," he said. "There's no way that I would have the strength to get up and walk across that valley and do the things I did to survive." | {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
Body of Assyrian Deported to Iraq Flown Back to Michigan
Jimmy Al Daoud, an Assyrian who was deported to Iraq from Michigan. You've seen the video, or maybe thumbnails of the video.
It features a Michigan man speaking directly to a camera, pleading to come home.
I begged them, I said 'please, I've never seen that country, I've never been there.' They forced me. I'm here now." Jimmy Al Daoud said in a video that's gone viral.
From Hazel Park to living on the streets of Baghdad, Al Daoud's deportation is one of many stories of Christian Iraqis, also known as Chaldeans, being sent from Michigan to the Middle East. Part of President Donald Trump's immigration crackdown, those removed had criminal records and had served time.
While reports of Al Daoud's death was what went viral, it's not the only factor that's upset opponents of Trump.
"I don't understand the language - anything. I'm sleeping on the streets. I'm diabetic. I take insulin shots. I've been throwing up, throwing up, sleeping in the streets," said Al Daoud.
Al Daoud didn't understand the language because he was born in Greece and brought to the U.S. when he was only six months old. He lived his life in Hazel Park.
"Deporting him to Iraq was a death sentence," said Rep. Andy Levin.
The Michigan Congressman has arranged for Al Daoud's remains to be flown back to Michigan where they will be laid to rest in metro Detroit. Officials worry similar stories will begin to surface as a result of the deportations.
"Unfortunately, it seems there is not enough coordination with Iraqi authorities about these kind of people deported from America," said Yonadam Kanna, head of the Rafidain Christian Bloc. "And he's not the only one. There's a lot of them"
That means people who may be sick, don't speak the language, have never visited the country or don't have citizenship papers for the country they are being flown to.
"He wanted to be heard by the U.S. government so he could return so he said 'I want to stay in my place, I don't want any VIP treatment because I am suffering here and I need the government to see that'," said Martin Dawood, a priest of the East Assyrian Church.
However, that return won't happen - at least not in the fashion his family would have wanted.
"The president could have stopped this at any time, he's the one who started it," said Levin. | {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
Thought you had dodged a speeding fine? You haven't been so lucky.
Victoria Police is reneging on its offer to wipe thousands of speeding fines issued to motorists after the WannaCry ransomware was detected in the state's speed camera network.
The virus had no impact on camera accuracy, an investigation has concluded, meaning that 61,000 fines will stand.
The investigation by the Office of the Road Safety Camera Commissioner found the ransomware failed to deploy properly and had no impact on camera accuracy. | {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
Nick Foligno took a shot at himself after seeing what he looks like sniffing smelling salts
Must See: Torts - 'Oh, c'mon. Ask me a hockey question here...I've got things to do'
Smelling salts can really catch you by surprise if you’ve never tried them before, but even if you have it’s hard to ever get used to the feeling and the rush that comes from that split second of inhaling.
With the NHL playoffs in full swing the eight remaining teams are probably going through smelling salt like crazy right now as players do whatever they can to be able to perform at the highest level every single game. During Game 2 between the Boston Bruins and the Columbus Blue Jackets, Nick Foligno was caught in the act of using smelling salts on the bench as a quick wake up call.
Do you smell it? That smell. A kind of smelly smell. The smelly smell that smells... smelly. #StanleyCup pic.twitter.com/L5VSn8X4Ci — NHL (@NHL) April 29, 2019
After coming across the GIF, the Blue Jackets captain decided to take a jab at himself on Twitter.
With a nose like mine you can tell that whiff really did the trick!! 👃🤪 #whateverworks #smellingsalts2019 https://t.co/WYvVnOdIW8 — Nick Foligno (@NickFoligno) April 29, 2019
As a result, other fans chimed in with some hilarious responses.
We know that feeling.
(H/T Twitter/NickFoligno) | {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
The Henderson City Council on Tuesday night approved compensation rates for several independent law firms that will represent city officials named in a lawsuit filed by former police chief Patrick Moers.
Henderson Mayor Debra March during a city council meeting at Henderson City Hall in Henderson, Tuesday, March 6, 2018. Erik Verduzco Las Vegas Review-Journal @Erik_Verduzco
Henderson Police Chief Patrick Moers listens during a special City Council meeting at City Hall where he was sworn in Tuesday, July 17, 2012. (K.M. Cannon/Las Vegas Review-Journal)
The Henderson City Council on Tuesday night approved compensation rates for several independent law firms that will represent city officials named in a lawsuit filed by former police chief Patrick Moers.
The lawsuit, filed in Clark County District Court in June, accuses Mayor Debra March and other city officials of soliciting false sexual misconduct allegations against Moers and damaging his reputation. He seeks more than $50,000 in damages.
The city is enlisting the help of several law firms at a rate of $350 per hour for attorneys and $100 per hour for paralegals. The firms are Garman Turner Gordon LLP; Peterson Baker PLLC; Holley, Driggs, Walch, Fine, Wray, Puzey, and Thompson; and Snell and Wilmer LLP.
“The City of Henderson has a statutory obligation to provide legal representation to current or former employees named in this lawsuit whose actions fall under the scope of their existing duties or those they would have performed while employed by the City,” City Manager and CEO Richard Derrick said in a statement. “The City retained these law firms to fulfill its statutory obligation and will stand by its current or former employees in defending them against this meritless lawsuit.”
City spokesman David Cherry said the law firms were brought in to represent numerous defendants to mitigate any potential conflicts of interest. The city has a budget for all outside counsel, he said.
March abstained from the vote.
Moers left the department in May 2017 after signing a separation agreement. The city allowed him to cash out more than $163,000 of unused paid time off and kept the reason for his departure concealed. He would not have been paid if he had been fired.
Former Deputy Chief Bobby Long left the department at the same time and has not sued officials.
The Las Vegas Review-Journal reported in January that Moers was forced out after the city hired an outside law firm to investigate sexual harassment complaints.
In a special meeting earlier Tuesday, Henderson’s newly appointed city attorney, Nicholas Vaskov, was sworn in. His contract, which includes an annual salary of $200,000, was approved last month.
He replaces Josh Reid, who left the position on June 1.
Vaskov previously served as city attorney for North Las Vegas, and most recently the Nevada System of Higher Education’s general counsel and vice chancellor for legal affairs.
Contact Blake Apgar at [email protected] or 702-387-5298. Follow @blakeapgar on Twitter. | {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
O ex-presidente Michel Temer foi preso na manhã desta quinta-feira, 21. A Polícia Federal também prendeu o o ex-ministro de Minas e Energia, Moreira Franco e o Coronel Lima, apontado como amigo de Temer. Ao todo foram emitidos dez mandados de prisão. O MPF pediu a prisão preventiva de Othon Luiz Pinheiro da Silva, o Almirante Othon, ex-presidente da Eletronuclear, mas o pedido foi negado.
Os mandados de prisão foram emitidos pelo juiz Marcelo Bretas, da 7ª Vara Federal Criminal do Rio de Janeiro. As informações são do jornal ao Globo. Essa operação foi batizada de Descontaminação e é um desdobramento da Radioatividade, que investigou crimes envolvendo Angra 3.
O Almirante Othon foi condenado pela Justiça Federal em 2016 (e solto em 2017), após a Operação Radioatividade.
As prisões de hoje são um desdobramento desta investigação.
++ A cobertura completa da prisão de Michel Temer e Moreira Franco
A Radioatividade foi a 16ª fase da Lava Jato e investigou contratos de empresas com a Eletronuclear. Deflagrada em junho de 2015, esteve no centro da polêmica sobre o desmembramento da Lava Jato quando o Supremo Tribunal Federal (STF) decidiu repassar parte das investigações para a Justiça do Rio de Janeiro, em outubro daquele ano. A operação passou então para a 7ª Vara Criminal do Rio, sob o comando de Marcelo Bretas.
As investigações da Radioatividade baseavam-se sobretudo na delação do ex-executivo da Camargo Corrêa Dalton Avancini e levaram à prisão do ex-presidente da Eletronuclear, o vice-almirante da Marinha, Othon Luiz Pinheiro da Silva.
Solto pela Justiça, Othon foi preso novamente na Operação Pripyat, deflagrada em junho de 2016. A Pripyat investigou novas denúncias de corrupção envolvendo a Eletronuclear. Othon foi condenado pelo juiz Marcelo Bretas a 43 anos de prisão, mas liberado por um habeas corpus concedido pelo Tribunal Regional Federal da 2ª região em outubro de 2017.
A Pripyat era baseada em delações de funcionários da Andrade Gutierrez e foi a estreia da força-tarefa da Lava Jato no Rio. O foco principal da operação eram desvios de recursos em obras da Usina Nuclear de Angra 3, até hoje não concluída. Os investigadores estimaram na época que Othon recebeu até R$ 12 milhões em propina a partir do esquema de desvio de dinheiro.
A terceira operação a mirar contratos da Eletronuclear foi a Operação Irmandade. Em agosto de 2016, agentes da Polícia Federal prenderam Samir Assad, acusado de ser operador financeiro da construtora Delta Engenharia, de Fernando Cavendish. A operação envolveu também a construtora Andrade Gutierrez.
Segundo as denúncias, a empreiteira usava outras quatro empresas como fornecedoras de recibos falsos em recursos que, na verdade, eram usados para abastecer um esquema de caixa 2 que teria movimentado mais de R$ 176 milhões.
De acordo com a Folha de São Paulo, José Antunes Sobrinho, sócio da Engevix, afirmou em depoimento à Polícia Federal que foi cobrado pelo coronel João Baptista Lima Filho, amigo do ex-presidente Temer, por um pagamento de R$ 1 milhão. O depoimento foi dado no inquérito que apura crimes do setor portuário.
Ainda segundo a Folha, o pagamento de R$ 1 milhão seria relacionado à subcontratação da Engevix para serviços prestados à Eletronuclear, por meio de uma empresa ligada a Lima. Os recursos teriam sido utilizados na campanha de 2014. Lima também é alvo de um mandado de prisão, afirma a GloboNews
A lista dos mandados de prisão emitidos pela Justiça Federal do Rio na Operação Descontaminação
Prisão preventiva
— Michel Temer (preso)
— Moreira Franco (preso)
— João Baptista Lima Filho, o Coronel Lima (preso)
— Othon Luiz Pinheiro da Silva
— Maria Rita Fratezi
— Carlos Alberto Costa
— Carlos Alberto Costa Filho
— Vanderlei de Natale
— Ana Cristina da silva Toniolo
— Alberto Montenegro Gallo
Prisão temporária
— Rodrigo Castro Alves Neves
— Carlos Jorge Zimmermann | {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
Al-Amir Dawes’s old-fashioned three-point play with 1:09 to go turned out to be the eventual game-winning shot as Clemson (Team USA) advanced to the Gold Medal Game of the World University Games with a 75-73 victory over Israel Tuesday in Naples, Italy.
The two-point victory was the Tigers’ fourth by four points or less in five games at the World University Games, and it was their third by two points or less, including a second straight two-point win. They also beat Ukraine by one-point in the preliminary round.
Once again, it was Clemson’s defense that got a much-needed stop at the end to hold on for victory. Golan Gutt’s three-point heave as time expired secured the Tigers’ win, but the Israelis had four opportunities on their previous possession to take the lead in the last 30 seconds.
Michael Brisker missed all three of his shots, which could have given the Israelis the lead. He last shot bounced off the rim and off a Clemson player’s hand and out of bounds with 10 seconds to play. Rafi Menco then missed a three-pointer with five seconds to go following a timeout.
Clemson’s Chase Hunter got the rebound, but he missed both fouls shots. Gutt’s heave at the end of the game was off the mark.
Israel lived and died by the three-pointer on Tuesday. They made just 6 of 23 shots from downtown after coming into the semifinal game as one of the best three-point teams in the field.
The Tigers, now 5-0 at the World University Games, will play the Ukraine in the Gold Medal Game Thursday at 2 p.m. (EST). Ukraine beat Australia by two points in the other semifinal game.
The United States was led by Aamir Simms’ career-high in points and rebounds. The junior forward scored a game-high 27 points and had a game-high 16 rebounds for the Tigers. He also had three assists.
Clemson also got 16 points from Dawes, who connected on 4 of 5 three pointers. John Newman added 10 points and had six rebounds on 4 of 7 shooting.
Team USA outrebound the Israelis 53-36, including a 23-8 edge on the offensive glass.
Early on, it looked like Israel was going to run away from Clemson like it has everyone else in the tournament. They used an 18-0 run in the first period to grab a 22-5 lead on the Tigers.
Following a Dawes’ three, that gave them a brief, 5-4 lead, the Tigers missed five shots and turned the ball over once during their next six possessions, allowing Israel to build its lead.
Israel led 26-12 after the first period.
However, Clemson responded with a 15-2 run to open the second period to get back in the game. Simms scored nine of those 15 points, including three points on a shot and a foul.
The Tigers then went on a 10-0 run to take a 37-32 lead with 2:26 to play in the half following a Khavon Moore basket.
The game was tied 41-41 at halftime.
The third period was nip and tuck as Israel led 53-51 after three periods. They then led by a many as seven points, 58-51, in the fourth when Menco drained a three with 8:19 to play.
But like they have done the entire tournament, the Americans were not done. They answered Israel with an 8-0 run, capped by a Simms’ layup with 5:09 to go after an Israeli turnover.
After the Israelis took a two-point lead on their next possession, Dawes buried a three that but Clemson back on top, 62-61, with 4:37 remaining. Simms then scored seven straight points for the Tigers to give them a 69-62 lead with 2:52 to play.
But Israel had one last run in them and cut the lead to one, 71-70, on a Brisker layup at the 1:27 mark. That set Dawes up for the game winner as he sliced inside for a layup and drew the foul. He completed the three-point play and gave the Tigers a 74-70 lead with 1:09 to go.
From there, Clemson hung on to get the win and advanced to the Gold Medal Game. | {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
Synopsis
Storyline:
When a group of college students take part in a clinical drug trial, an unexpected side effect of the experimental medicine gives them terrifying visions of their own deaths…which begin to come true. As they scramble to escape their fate, they discover that the killer is among them and shares their ability to see the future – only he seems to be one step ahead of their efforts to survive.
User Reviews: For a low budget film, the story was good, actors were good, and the idea was semi original. It’s not brilliant, but it’s not terrible either, perfect for one of those "I want to watch a movie, but I don’t know what I want to watch" kind of days. | {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
It’s an irony that Subramanian Swamy claimed that his Rajya Sabha nomination was for his excellence in economics. Swamy has many achievements to his credit in the recent past, most notably his fight against big-ticket corruption by the UPA government, his fight for some Hindu causes, et al. But I would certainly exclude his economic thoughts from the long list of successes.
Before proceeding further, I would have to place some historical credit where it is due. Much of the economic reforms of the early nineties that are attributed to Manmohan Singh should rightfully be placed on the shoulders of Subramanian Swamy. Manmohan was no liberaliser and his instinctive economic approach was to use the “visible hand of the government” to guide market outcomes – MNREGA, public-private partnerships, etc. All of these policies are disastrous from an economic stand-point and it’s hard to envisage such a diehard neo-Keynesian being an advocate for market solutions as was done. To his credit and on account of his belief in karma, Swamy has largely stayed silent and allowed Manmohan Singh to reap the praise for what were essentially his ideas and policies. Despite what follows hereafter in this article, I applaud Swamy for it.
A lot has been written criticising Swamy’s attacks on Rajan, but not many have focused on the economic fallacy of his arguments for lowering interest rates. Swamy essentially calls for an expansionary monetary policy to counter the economic slowdown in the Indian economy. He further quotes the Keynesian theory on the causes of the Great Depression and states that Rajan, being aware of the theory, must be willfully keeping interest rates high to intentionally destroy the economy. That is his central premise.
Other arguments such as Rajan being “mentally not fully Indian” (MNFI), etc, are not even worth going into. Even if it’s true that Rajan is MNFI, I would any day prefer a MNFI Rajan to the MFI economic illiterates we have had prior to Rajan, or, for that matter, the ones that are likely to follow. I would any day prefer a MF American Jim Grant to MNFI Rajan. The requirement of the job is primarily outstanding economic credentials/track-record and a commitment to delivering a sound monetary framework. Very little outside of these is necessary – especially in a world that is bereft of sound monetary ideals and where the bond vigilantes have been asleep for decades.
Returning to Swamy’s fallacies, one would have thought that Keynesian ideas for a monetary stimulus would have died along with the stagflationary seventies. If not then, at least with the ongoing two decades of Japanese experiments or and the US’s own seven years with ZIRP – zero interest rates policy. Apparently it has not, and loose monetary policies seem to click with economic professors as a solution to problems caused by loose monetary policies in the first place.
Murray Rothbard wrote the best ever thesis of “America’s Great Depression” (a book by the same name). While summarising a Rothbard book into a few lines would be injustice, I will attempt the same here. Post-1921, the US fed engineered a stock market bubble though loose monetary policies and, like all bubbles, this one had to burst, which it did in 1929. Instead of allowing the market cleansing process and liquidation of bad debt, initially the Hoover, and later, the Roosevelt administrations repeatedly intervened to prolong and worsen what would otherwise have been a deep but short recession. Those interested, can download the book and unlearn the Keynesian thesis which is nothing but propaganda unleashed by the US Fed/government to usurp power from the markets.
So for Swamy to argue as if the Keynesian thesis is gospel truth demonstrates his economic ignorance. I don’t know if Rajan subscribes to the above Keynesian thesis, but it’s quite unlikely that he does. Even if he does, it doesn’t automatically follow that he should be cutting interest rates in India today. The period of 1929 to 1936 in the US saw a cumulative deflation of 18 percent, while that’s hardly the case in India.
So essentially Swamy’s economic thesis is wrong and even otherwise, his remedial measures of interest rate reductions do not automatically flow from it. The bylanes of Mylapore are hardly a credible place to vet economic ideologies, much as Swamy might claim support for the same. So instead of sending Rajan to Chicago, Swamy would do himself and India a lot of good, if he can take a sabbatical and go to Auburn (Headquarter of the Mises Institute) and learn some real economics.
Further Reading
Why Swamy’s Case Against Rajan Is Weak | {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
The selection of CNN's senior White House correspondent shows that Team Trump, despite all the bluster, believes that Acosta and his network are generally credible — that a report with CNN's name on it carries enough weight to help counter the Kremlin, even with a single, unnamed source as its basis.
AD
That does not mean Trump's frustration with CNN's critical coverage is entirely manufactured. It means that when he says “they've hurt themselves very badly,” as he did Thursday in Warsaw, he doesn't actually believe that the network's reputational damage is serious enough to render its reporting meaningless.
AD
If that were the case, providing information for Acosta's coverage would be a waste of time.
Comparing actions to rhetoric is a worthwhile exercise as Trump thrashes CNN for recent missteps, including a prominent retraction that prompted resignations by three journalists and an online article in which the network withheld — but threatened to publish in the future — the name of the meme maker who inspired this:
Trump's words often project a level of ferocity that his behavior does not match. He rails against news outlets' practice of granting anonymity to certain sources yet sometimes demands that administration officials not be quoted by name in media reports, for example.
AD
Trump included ABC News in that memorable “enemy of the American people” tweet and spent much of the presidential campaign complaining about journalists' alleged favoritism of the Clintons, but he respects George Stephanopoulos, the ABC anchor who was Bill Clinton's communications director.
Trump blasts the “failing” New York Times on the regular, but he still grants interviews to the paper's journalists and seems to hold Maggie Haberman in especially high regard, despite her tough coverage. | {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
In the 2019 Global Hunger Index, Cuba is one of 17 countries with a GHI score of less than 5. These countries are not assigned individual ranks, but rather are collectively ranked 1–17 out of 117 qualifying countries. Differences between their scores are minimal. With a score of under 5, Cuba suffers from a level of hunger that is low [See overview of GHI calculation].
<5 ≤ 9.9
low 10.0–19.9
moderate 20.0–34.9
serious 35.0–49.9
alarming ≥ 50.0
extremely alarming
Cuba's GHI Score Trend
Trend for Cuba's Indicator Values
Note: Data for GHI scores are from 1998–2002 (2000), 2003–2007 (2005), 2008–2012 (2010), and 2014–2018 (2019). Data for child stunting and child wasting are from 1998–2002, 2003–2007, 2008–2012, and 2014–2018. Data for undernourishment are from 1999–2001, 2004–2006, 2009–2011, and 2016–2018. Data for child mortality are from 2000, 2005, 2010, and 2017. See Appendix B of the 2019 GHI report for additional information regarding the selection of indicator data. | {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
I have every intention of pooping as soon as you pick me up
148 shares | {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
They don’t come any bigger – in reputation at least – than Tom Brady. With his decade and a half of calling the shots for the New England Patriots and four Super Bowl rings decorating his fingers, this is a giant of the sport, a genuine all-time great in an era when claims of greatness are too easily made. This is a 38-year-old who has been there, done that and delivered the decisive pass time after time, a man who deserves to be listened to.
Two weeks ago the quarterback watched Rob Gronkowski, one of his go-to men, carted from the field late on. “The Gronk”, as the Colossus of a tight-end is known, had his legs swept away by Denver’s Darian Stewart. Memories of last December flooded back, when Gronkowski was reduced to tears after suffering a knee injury that threatened his livelihood.
This time he was more fortunate, although he remains on the sidelines – another footballer nursing a wounded knee. This week’s absentee lists across the NFL has 359 players out through injury or suspension; 82 with knee problems, nearly double the next most common complaint. Twenty six are missing through concussion. Here is the issue that has become the talk of the locker room over the last few years. Would you take a hit to the head or a hit to the knee? And has the focus on protecting the head – which has been proved potentially life-threatening – meant the knee is now taking the strain?
Brady was asked after the Denver game whether rules introduced over the last five years in an attempt to limit the number of concussions have led to teams switching tackling tactics, aiming low where they would have once gone high.
“I hate to see it but it’s really the only way for the defence to hit now, so…” he said and then shrugged. “I bet if you asked a lot of the players they would probably say they’d rather you go high than low. When you go low that’s what happens.
“You hate to see one of your guys take hits and I do think they should change some of those rules with defenceless receivers.”
Brady’s is not a lone voice and there are many who will have nodded along with what he said. As Michael Bush of the Chicago Bears put it last year: “If you get hit in the knee, that’s your career.”
Tackling has changed markedly since the 1980s, when wrapping up an opponent was the preferred method. Instead, in the 2000s, it has become about hits, bone-jarring collisions. When the rule changes began in 2010 as the NFL belatedly addressed its serious problem with head injuries and their consequences – introducing restrictions on hits to shoulders and heads – players were quick to point out where that would lead.
“Guys are going to be fearful of being fined so they’re going to start going at the knees,” forecast LaMarr Woodley of the Steelers. “That’s going to be a serious problem, knees being blown out, mess up the way they walk for the rest of their lives.”
For some it is a black and white issue. Take a bad hit in the knee and you know about it, excruciating pain, the operating table and possibly the immediate end to your career. Head injuries come in shades of grey – the latest reports suggest it is not the big hits that necessarily lead to chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) but rather the totting up of blow after blow across the course of a career. They go almost unnoticed by the recipient – these are tough men – and it is not until helmets are hung up that the sometimes lethal effects are realised. According to data gathered between 2000 and 2014, knee problems keep players out for longer than any other injury. Between 2002 and 2012 there were an average of 43 anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) related injuries per season. In 2013 that rose to 65 and stuck at that level in 2014. Concussions, meanwhile, have fallen – from 2012 to 2015 they dropped 35 per cent.
When Gronkowski was taken out low by Cleveland safety TJ Ward last year he tore right anterior cruciate and medial collateral ligaments. It threatened his future and there were plenty who suggested it was caused by rule changes.
Gronkowski is 6ft 5in and Denver were accused two weeks ago of deliberately going low having spent much of the game bouncing off his upper body. Players, as in rugby, are getting bigger, stronger, faster and so more difficult to stop. That is one reason advanced for the rash of knee injuries, another is the shorter pre-season teams now undertake in order to limit the wear and tear on players’ bodies – instead, some claim, it leaves those bodies inadequately prepared for the season once the hits start raining in. Changes in footwear that have led to lightweight shoes designed for speed as well as different turf are also cited as contributory factors.
Others point to the concussion rules, believing it pushes the focus from high to low. The latest change aims to protect offensive players attempting to catch an intercepted ball – they “cannot be hit in the head or neck area”. The only choice is to go low.
NFL 2015 in pictures Show all 48 1 /48 NFL 2015 in pictures NFL 2015 in pictures New Orleans Saints 31 Atlanta Falcons 21 Benjamin Watson had a career-high 127 yards as the Saints beat the Falcons 2015 Getty Images NFL 2015 in pictures San Diego Chargers 20 Pittsburgh Steelers 24 Le'Veon Bell scores a 1-yard touchdown to win the game with time running out 2015 Getty Images NFL 2015 in pictures New York Giants 30 San Francisco 49ers 27 Larry Donnell scored a spectacular game-winning touchdown with only 21 seconds left 2015 Getty Images NFL 2015 in pictures Tennessee Titans 13 Buffalo Bills 14 Bills quarterback Tyrod Taylor threw a touchdown and run in another 2015 Getty Images NFL 2015 in pictures Detroit Lions 17 Arizona Falcons 42 Matthew Stafford was benched and the Lions are still winless 2015 Getty Images NFL 2015 in pictures Atlanta Falcons 25 Washington Redskins 19 Robert Alford returns an interception for a long touchdown NFL 2015 in pictures Philadelphia Eagles 39 New Orleans Saints 17 DeMarco Murray finally delivered for the Eagles with 83 yards and a touchdown 2015 Getty Images NFL 2015 in pictures Tampa Bay Buccaneers 38 Jacksonville Jaguars 31 Dough Martin scores one of his three touchdowns for the Bucs 2015 Getty Images NFL 2015 in pictures Green Bay Packers 24 St Louis Rams 10 Aaron Rodgers threw his first home interception in nearly two years - James Jones ran in a long score 2015 Getty Images NFL 2015 in pictures Oakland Raiders 10 Denver Broncos 16 Cornerback Chris Harris Jr returned a late touchdown 74 yards for a decisive score NFL 2015 in pictures Dallas Cowboys 6 New England Patriots 30 Julian Edelman catches a touchdown as the Pats kept their 100 per cent record 2015 Getty Images NFL 2015 in pictures Cincinatti Bengals 27 Seattle Seahawks 24 Andy Dalton led the Bengals to win from 17 points down 2015 Getty Images NFL 2015 in pictures Baltimore Ravens 30 Cleveland Browns 33 Travis Coons kicks a game-winning field goal in OT NFL 2015 in pictures Kansas City Chiefs 17 Chicago Bears 18 Running back Jamaal Charles seriously hurt his knee during the defeat 2015 Getty Images NFL 2015 in pictures Houston Texans 20 Indianapolis Colts 27 Matt Hasselbeck won again in the absence of star man Andrew Luck on Thursday night 2015 Getty Images NFL 2015 in pictures Week 4 Steelers 20 Ravens 23; Dolphins 14 Jets 27; Bills 10 Giants 24; Bucs 23 Panthers 37; Bears 22 Raiders 20; Bengals 36 Chiefs 21; Falcons 48 Texans 21; Colts 16 Jaguars 13; Redskins 23 Eagles 20; Chargers 30 Browns 27; Broncos 23 Vikings 20; 49ers 3 Packers 17; Cardinals 22 Rams 24; Saints 26 Cowboys 20; Seahawks 13 Lions 10 2015 Getty Images NFL 2015 in pictures Green Bay Packers 38 Kansas City Chiefs 28 Randall Cobb scores one of his three touchdowns for the Packers - quarterback Aaron Rodgers threw five in total 2015 Getty Images NFL 2015 in pictures Detroit Lions 12 Denver Broncos 24 Demaryius Thomas scores a touchdown as the Broncos continued their perfect start to the season; the Lions are still without a win 2015 Getty Images NFL 2015 in pictures Seattle Seahawks 26 Chicago Bears 0 Star tight end Jimmy Graham scored his first touchdown as the Seahawks ended their losing streak for their first win of the season 2015 Getty Images NFL 2015 in pictures Miami Dolphins 14 Buffalo Bills 41 Ryan Tannehill threw three interceptions as the Dolphins lost to their divisional rivals 2015 Getty Images NFL 2015 in pictures Arizona Cardinals 47 San Francisco 49ers 7 Cardinals safety Tyrann Mathieu picked off two of Colin Kaepernick's four interceptions 2015 Getty Images NFL 2015 in pictures Baltimore Ravens 24 Cincinnati Bengals 28 AJ Green caught 10 passes for 227 yards and scored two touchdowns as the Bengals beat the Ravens in a topsy-turvy clash 2015 Getty Images NFL 2015 in pictures New York Giants 32 Washington Redskins 21 Rueben Randle celebrates a touchdown as the Giants beat their long-time rivals in New York on Thursday night 2015 Getty Images NFL 2015 in pictures Carolina Panthers 27 New Orleans Saints 22 Josh Normanintercepted a last-gasp touchdown throw from Luke McCown as the Panthers held on against the Saints 2015 Getty Images NFL 2015 in pictures Cleveland Browns 20 Oakland Raiders 27 Latavius Murray rushed for 139 yards and the Raiders ended an 11-game losing streak on the road 2015 Getty Images NFL 2015 in pictures Dallas Cowboys 28 Atlanta Falcons 39 Devonta Freeman ran for three touchdowns as the Falcons came from behind to beat the Cowboys, who were missing stars Tony Romo and Dez Bryant 2015 Getty Images NFL 2015 in pictures Houston Texans 19 Tampa Bay Buccaneers 9 Ryan Mallett secured the first win of his career 2015 Getty Images NFL 2015 in pictures Minnesota Vikings 31 San Diego Chargers 14 Chad Greenway returned a Philip Rivers interception for a touchdown 2015 Getty Images NFL 2015 in pictures Tennessee Titans 33 Indianapolis Colts 35 Frank Gore scored two rushing touchdowns as the Colts and the Titans played out a thriller 2015 Getty Images NFL 2015 in pictures New England Patriots 51 Jacksonville Jaguars 17 Tom Brady became only the fourth quarterback to throw 400 touchdown passes in a career - he threw two against the Jags 2015 Getty Images NFL 2015 in pictures St Louis Rams 6 Pittsburgh Steelers 12 The Steelers won but will be without quarterback Ben Roethlisberger for at least four weeks because of a serious knee injury 2015 Getty Images NFL 2015 in pictures New York Jets 17 Philadelphia Eagles 24 Darren Sproles returns a punt for an 89-yard touchdown - the 5ft 6in running back also rushed for a touchdown 2015 Getty Images NFL 2015 in pictures New England Patriots 28 Pittsburgh Steelers 21 New England Patriots quarter-back Tom Brady throws a pass Getty Images NFL 2015 in pictures San Francisco 49ers 20 Minnesota Vikings 3 Adrian Peterson returned after a year on the sidelines but the Vikings lost to the 49ers Getty Images NFL 2015 in pictures Atlanta Falcons 26 Philadelphia Eagles 24 Julio Jones had 140 yards and two touchdowns as th Falcons impressed against the Eagles Getty Images NFL 2015 in pictures Dallas Cowboys 27 New York Giants 26 Jasson Witten celebrates a last minute touchdown after the Cowboys drove down the field Getty Images NFL 2015 in pictures St Louis Rams 34 Seattle Seahawks 31 The Rams celebrate after Greg Zuerlein's overtime field goal pushed them past their rivals Getty Images NFL 2015 in pictures Tampa Bay Buccaneers 14 Tennessee Titans 42 No 1 draft pick Jameis Winston was outplayed by No 2 pick Marcus Mariota as the Titans beat the Bucs Getty Images NFL 2015 in pictures Chicago Bears 23 Green Bay Packers 31 Former league MVP Aaron Rodgers three three touchdowns as the Packers beat their divisional rivals Getty Images NFL 2015 in pictures Buffalo Bills 27 Indianapolis Colts 14 The Bills surprised play-off contenders the Colts thanks to a great performance by Tyrod Taylor, who impressed in his first NFL start Getty Images NFL 2015 in pictures Kansas City Chiefs 27 Houston Texans 20 Travis Kelce scored two first quarter touchdowns as the Chiefs held on after a late Houston rally Getty Images NFL 2015 in pictures Washington Redskins 10 Miami Dolphins 17 Jarvis Landry returned a punt for what turned out to be the game-winning score Getty Images NFL 2015 in pictures New York Jets 31 Cleveland Browns 10 Ryan Fitzpatrick threw two touchdowns as the Jets had five takeaways to beat the Browns Getty Images NFL 2015 in pictures Jacksonville Jaguars 9 Carolina Panthers 20 Cam Newton and the Panthers managed just 263 total yards but did enough to beat the Jaguars Getty Images NFL 2015 in pictures Denver Broncos 19 Baltimore Ravens 13 Former Raven Darian Stewart intercepted a Joe Flacco pass with 28 seconds left to seal a Broncos win Getty Images NFL 2015 in pictures Arizona Cardinals 31 New Orleans Saints 19 Carson Palmer threw three touchdowns in his comeback game from a torn ACL Getty Images NFL 2015 in pictures San Diego Chargers 33 Detroit Lions 28 Philip Rivers led the Chargers to 30 straight points for San Diego to comeback against Detroit Getty Images NFL 2015 in pictures Cincinnati Bengals 33 Oakland Raiders 13 Jeremy Hill ran for two touchdowns as the Bengals beat the Raiders Getty Images
“It wouldn’t be surprising to see the NFL attempt to add rule protection for lower body injuries,” said Jene Bramel, a doctor and writer on the NFL for the website footballguys.com. “Hitting a quarterback below the knee in the pocket is a penalty. But narrowing the target area for defenders playing at speed is easier written into the rule book than accomplished on the field.”
For the NFL, who two years ago reached a £477m settlement with up to 4,500 former players after being accused of having misled them on the dangers of head injuries, concussion remains the No 1 concern. It is a live issue. In September a study found 87 out of 91 former NFL players tested had a brain disease linked to concussions received during their careers. This week Bennet Omalu, the forensic pathologist and neuropathologist who first discovered CTE in football players, wrote in The New York Times that all children under 18 should be banned from playing high-impact sports like football. He compared playing them to letting your children drink alcohol or smoke. A film, starring Will Smith as Omalu, documenting the doctor’s campaign opens in the US on Christmas Day.
The data around concussion is conclusive. That around the cause of knee injuries is not. For example, Reggie Bush, the 49ers running back, recently tore his ACL after slipping on the concrete surrounds of the field of play in St Louis. There has also been a spate of ACL injuries suffered in pre-season, few of which have involved contact.
Whatever the rules this is a brutal sport. On the first weekend of November the injury count reached 32, many serious. “Speed and size play a role in injury, but football is much more than a contact sport,” said Bramel. “Some refer to it as a collision sport, but it’s really supervised trauma. The force and location of impacts during the game can cause injuries similar to those seen in car accidents or falls. Part of the allure of football has always been the combination of power and athleticism. With that comes the risk of violent impact.”
Brady’s calls deserve to be considered but the overwhelming priority remains to protect the head. After that the sport has to decide how much it wants to change. | {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
Episode 802: The Hotel at the Center of the World
Enlarge this image Marcie LaCerte/NPR Marcie LaCerte/NPR
Two years ago, one of the biggest companies in the world bought a failing hotel in a tiny rural hamlet in upstate New York. That made Planet Money reporter Noel King, curious. She grew up in the town and worked at the hotel as a teenager. Why, she wondered, would a multi-billion-dollar Chinese company invest in her hometown?
Planet Money #802: The Hotel at the Center of the World The Hotel at the Center of the World Listen · 21:10 21:10
The HNA Group, the company that bought the hotel, started as a small airline in southern China. Today, it employs hundreds of thousands of people, and takes in billions of dollars of revenue. In the past three years, HNA has spent billions buying stakes in Hilton Hotels and Deutsche Bank. They own property on Park Avenue and eight golf courses in Washington State. They own the Radisson hotels, all of them.
What's behind HNA's buying spree? Why on earth did the company pay $13.8 million for the Hudson Valley Resort and Spa? And when are they going to fix it up?
The answers to these questions lead to us back to China, where government policies encouraged companies to look beyond mainland China and find their fortune in some places you wouldn't expect, including in a tiny New York mountain town.
Music: "Sunshine Summertime" and "Hoedown Fun." Find us: Twitter/ Facebook.
Subscribe to our show on Apple Podcasts, PocketCasts and NPR One. | {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
Now in our second week of the general election campaign, the polls continue to shift, with the Conservatives and Labour gaining ground, and the Liberal Democrats and Brexit Party on a downward trajectory. In his second blog of the campaign, Joe Greenwood considers these changes with reference to movements in support in the previous three general elections.
In my blog last week, I noted that one of the major questions facing election prognosticators is whether or not we will observe campaign effects that shift party support in the 2019 general election. We’re now in a position to start observing this, but it is worth doing so with reference to examples from the recent past. Each poll is a snapshot of public opinion at the time its questions were asked and will be influenced by the quality of the sample and decisions made by the polling company, for instance about how to ask questions or weight their data. As such, it is sensible to refer to average polling figures, or polls of polls, such as those produced by the BBC and political scientists. These are showing that the first week of the general election campaign, and indeed the week preceding it, have seen a shift in voting intention towards the Conservatives and Labour, and away from the Liberal Democrats and the Brexit Party, though only by a few percentage points.
But will this continue for the next three-and-a-half weeks until polling day? In order to answer this question, it is worth looking at what happened in the equivalent periods during the last three UK general elections. For each of those contests, the below chart shows the shift from the average of voting intention polls with four weeks to go to the average on the last day before the election. I compare polls against polls, rather than against the election results, because we are interested in change when using the same measure. Also, given the flaws with the polls in 2015 (too many Labour voters in the samples, and an over-estimation of turnout amongst young people) and 2017 (not enough Labour voters in the samples), comparing them against the actual election results would exaggerate the change in public opinion over the campaigns.
Figure 1: Change (%) in average polling levels of support for parties over the final four weeks of the campaigns.
In 2010, the most dramatic shift during this period was towards the Liberal Democrats (remember ‘Cleggmania’?), though of course the final polls notably overestimated support for the party. Nevertheless, it is clear that there was a shift in voting intention towards the Liberal Democrats and away from the Conservatives and Labour during the 2010 campaign (UKIP and the Greens were subsumed in ‘other parties’ at the time). This was not the case in 2015, when there was no meaningful change in the average voting intention for any of the parties over the last four weeks of the campaign. It was a similar story of no change for the Liberal Democrats, UKIP, and the Greens in 2017, but the Conservatives saw a sizeable decline in support that was matched by the rise in support for Labour.
Labour will, of course, be hoping for an increase in support in the vein of 2017, when their estimated vote rose by around 5% in the final four weeks before election day, and they then saw the last polls underestimate their share by an additional 4%. Three things make a repeat of this scenario unlikely, however: time, opponents, and updated polling methods.
In the first instance, by this time in 2017 the Labour Party was already half-way through a rise that moved them from 26% to 36% in the eight weeks after the election was called. That put them on around 31% with four weeks to go in 2017, compared to 28% with the same time to go now. Turning to opponents, it seems unlikely that we will witness a similar decline in support for the Conservatives, who are still rising in the polls (though their decline did not begin until this point in 2017). Jeremy Corbyn will be less of a revelation this time and although Boris Johnson and his colleagues have made some missteps, they appear to be maintaining their gains from the Brexit Party (even if the deal between the two parties does not affect key Labour marginals that the Conservatives need to win). They will, of course, still need to continue their upward trajectory in order to reach or surpass their vote share in 2017 (which they are currently 4% below). The Liberal Democrats have the opposite trajectory but sit 7% above where they were at this stage in 2017, and 10% above their final vote share. Finally, pollsters know that inaccurate polling is bad for business. As such, they examine the causes when their figures don’t reflect actual results, and then make changes to their methodologies. Indeed, the underestimation of the Labour vote in 2017 was in part a consequence of the adjustments made in light of the overestimation of the Labour vote in 2015. Thus, it is less likely that the pollsters will be underestimating the Labour vote this time than in 2017.
How much will the polls change over the coming weeks? Both the Conservatives and Labour seem likely to continue their rise, meaning that the former could reach or exceed their 2017 vote share from their current levels of support. Labour, however, needed longer than they currently have available to realise their impressive gains in 2017, and cannot count on pollster lowballing their support this time around. They are also confronted by a more difficult Conservative opponent and a Liberal Democrat party that is more popular and will probably attain a higher level of support than in 2017, despite its current downward trajectory. This all presumes that the trajectories remain roughly the same as they are at the moment, but plenty could happen between now and 12 December to alter them.
________________
About the Author
Joe Greenwood is a LSE Fellow in the LSE Department of Government, where he teaches on GV101 (Introduction to Political Science). He previously worked at YouGov and, before that, completed his PhD at the University of Essex. His research focuses on political participation, privilege, and perceptions in the British context. He tweets @niceonecombo. | {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
Jelena Dokic is working as commentator and analyst during the Australian Open. The former world no. 4 and Grand Slam semi-finalist wrote an interesting column on The Herald Sun about the current happening in the Tour. 'There is life after Serena Williams, there is no need for “panic,”' Dokic wrote.
'The irony is that some used to say Serena’s dominance made the game boring. Now you hear women’s tennis is boring without her! While some have criticised the current crop of women for lacking star power, as I see it the tour is in transition.
An exciting one. A new generation is on the rise. The twenty-somethings of women’s tennis are making their mark. You only have to watch players like current world No. 1 Simona Halep, Karolina Pliskova, Elina Svitolina and Jelena Ostapenko to see where women’s tennis is and to know the future will be incredibly bright.' Next Gen players are coming on the ATP circuit as well, and Dokic is confident they will breakthrough: 'Rafa Nadal and Roger Federer won’t be around forever and neither will Serena.
It’s time for fans to come to terms with that. Although people might lament 36-year-old Serena’s absence — she is an incredible player — today’s generation isn’t “bad” or “weak” as some may say.
I wouldn’t say that at all. What I would say is there is a lot of young girls who are currently under the media radar. The tennis world know about them, they are still very young, but they will rise up in the next couple of years and rivalries will be formed and with maturity their games will attract a whole new legion of fans.' ALSO READ: Tense match between Ryan Harrison and Dudi Sela, here is what happened | {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
In a case of no honor among thieves, a group of attackers has found a way to hijack the Petya ransomware and use it in targeted attacks against companies without the program creators' knowledge.
A computer Trojan dubbed PetrWrap, being used in attacks against enterprise networks, installs Petya on computers and then patches it on the fly to suit its needs, according to security researchers from antivirus vendor Kaspersky Lab.
The Trojan uses programmatic methods to trick Petya to use a different encryption key than the one its original creators have embedded inside its code. This ensures that only the PetrWrap attackers can restore the affected computers to their previous state.
The Trojan also removes all mentions of Petya from the ransom message, as well as its signature red skull designed in ASCII.
Petya first appeared a year ago and immediately stood out from other ransomware programs. Instead of encrypting files directly, it replaces the hard drive's master boot record (MBR) code, which normally starts the operating system, with malicious code that encrypts the drive's master file table (MFT).
The MFT is a special file on NTFS volumes that contains information about all other files: their name, size, and mapping to hard disk sectors. The actual contents of the user's files are not encrypted, but without the MFT, the OS no longer knows where those files are located on disk.
Unlike other ransomware infections that only lock access to certain files by encrypting them, Petya locks access to the entire computer. With a corrupted MBR and MFT, the operating system will no longer start, and users will only be greeted by a ransom message on the screen when they turn on their computer.
The decision to hijack and use Petya without its authors' consent is clever because it solves several problems for the PetrWrap attackers. First of all, they don't have to write their own ransomware program, which is hard to get right, and they don't have to pay someone else for a ready-made solution either.
Second, because it has been around for a while, Petya has had time to mature into a well-developed piece of malware. The PetrWrap attackers use Petya version 3, the latest variant of the program, which, unlike previous versions, has no known flaws. That's because its creators have perfected their encryption implementation over time.
Creating something like Petya from scratch would not only be prone to errors but would also require knowledge of writing low-level bootloader code for the MBR.
Once inside a network, the PetrWrap attackers look for and steal administrative credentials. They then use the PsExec tool to deploy the malware to all endpoint computers and servers they can access.
There is no tool to decrypt the MFT of hard disk volumes affected by Petya, but because this malware doesn't actually encrypt the file contents, some data recovery tools might be able to reconstruct the files from hard disk raw data. | {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
Story highlights Michael J. Knowles' "Reasons To Vote For Democrats" is a #1 bestseller on Amazon
The book's 266 pages are all blank
(CNN) Looking for a quick vacation read? It doesn't get any quicker than Michael J. Knowles' "Reasons To Vote For Democrats" -- all of the pages are blank.
Knowles is a Yale graduate and correspondent for the Daily Wire, a conservative website. He self-published the book, which contains only headers and a bibliography, along with 266 empty pages. The book, a clear attempt to troll Democrats, has set the internet on fire and vaulted to the No. 1 bestseller spot on Amazon.
"What's really great about this book, you can go cover to cover in about 15, 20 seconds," Knowles said on " Fox & Friends " Thursday.
'BEST TO LEAVE THE PAGES BLANK': @michaeljknowles' new book 'Reasons to Vote for Democrats' is completely blank! pic.twitter.com/ZasbMCZedN — FOX & friends (@foxandfriends) March 9, 2017
The book's Amazon page touts it as "the most exhaustively researched and coherently argued Democrat Party apologia to date."
"'Reasons To Vote For Democrats: A Comprehensive Guide' is a political treatise sure to stand the test of time," the description reads. "A must-have addition to any political observer's coffee table."
Read More | {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
結婚は健康にとってプラスに作用することを示唆する研究が多く発表されている
国勢調査を分析している国立社会保障・人口問題研究所によると、2015年時点で50歳まで未婚の日本人男性は23.37%、女性は14.06%だったという。結婚にはさまざまなメリットとデメリットが付きまとうため、結婚する・しないは個人の自由だ。
ただ、世に発表されているさまざまな研究は、健康面にポジティブに作用することが多い点から結婚を推奨しているようだ。海外のさまざまなニュースを伝える「MailOnline」にこのほど、「結婚する10の理由」と題したコラムが掲載された。結婚が健康に与える好影響を本稿で紹介しよう。
健康的な生活を送れる
アメリカの研究者グループが1,700人を20年以上追跡調査したところ、幸福な結婚生活を送っている人は、伴侶を健康的な活動に参加させているという。さらによく眠れ、飲酒を控えめにし、医師との約束をすっぽかさないなど、全般的に健康な生活習慣を身につけられるとしている。
長生きできる
2013年のアメリカでの研究では、独身者は中年で結婚した人よりも早期死亡のリスクが2倍高いという結果が得られている。
うつ病に打ち勝つ
1991年の研究によると、既婚者は同棲している男女と比べ、うつ病になるリスクが有意に低かった。また、精神疾患になるリスクも、少なくとも50%は低かったとのこと。
心臓発作に打ち勝つ
2013年のフィンランドのターク大学の研究者グループによると、既婚者は男女とも、そうでない人と比較して最大で心臓発作のリスクが66%低かった。既婚者の方が経済的にゆとりがあり、必要なときに伴侶が救急車を呼ぶからだと考えられている。
男性の脳卒中のリスクが低くなる
アメリカ心臓協会が行った2010年の研究は、肥満や喫煙、糖尿病といった脳卒中のリスクファクターの有無に関係なく、幸福な結婚生活を送っている男性は、独身者や不幸な結婚生活を送っている男性よりも致命的な脳卒中のリスクが64%低いことを明らかにしている。
術後の生存率がよい
2011年の研究によると、既婚者は独身者よりも心臓手術後の15年生存率が3倍も高かったとのこと。この違いはパートナーが世話をしてくれることに関係していた。
アルコール依存症になるリスクが減る
320万以上のスウェーデン人を対象にした研究によると、結婚はアルコール依存症になるリスクを男性で60%、女性で70%も低減させた。この恩恵は、アルコール乱用の家族歴がある人で特に強かった。
骨が強くなる
2014年のアメリカでの研究によると、既婚男性は独身男性や離婚した男性と比べて骨密度が高かった。女性の場合は、結婚そのものというよりも、頼れるパートナーがいることが強い骨と結びついているようだった。
大腸ガンに打ち勝つ
中国広州の研究者グループによると、性別に関係なく独身者の大腸ガン患者は、既婚者と比べて37%も死亡率が高かった。
女性の睡眠を改善させる
幸福な結婚生活を送っている女性は、独身女性よりも睡眠に問題を抱えていない。ピッツバーグ大学の研究者グループは、アルコールやカフェインの消費、性生活の充実度、経済状態にかかわらず、特に中年女性の場合は睡眠の質と幸福な結婚との間に関連があることを発見している。
さまざまなモノやサービスがあふれている現代は、独身でも幸福な人生が送れる。ただ、健康寿命を延ばして生涯を存分に満喫したいという人は、結婚をした方がいいのかもしれない。
※写真と本文は関係ありません
| {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
A family is waiting to find out whether a 6-year-old girl will be disfigured by a dog bite she received at a North Canterbury playground.
The dog, a Staffie-American bulldog cross named Vedda, was put down after the incident at the Good Street Reserve in Rangiora on November 26.
The owner, Josh Charles McCracken, a 34-year-old labourer, admitted being the owner of a dog which attacked a person, at the Christchurch District Court.
Judge David Saunders decided not to fine McCracken, but ordered he pay $500 in emotional harm reparations to the girl's family.
READ MORE:
* Neighbour, your 'sweetheart' dog just bit me
* Christchurch woman savaged by neighbour's dog
The Waimakariri District Council, which prosecuted McCracken under the Dog Control Act, said McCracken was at the park with his children and the dog, which was being encouraged to run around the playground equipment.
The 6-year-old was at the playground with her grandmother. Vedda jumped up and bit the girl on the chest area while she was on the flying fox, causing injuries 1cm and 1.5cm long near her right nipple. Her clothing was ripped.
She was taken to hospital where the wounds were stitched. The doctors say the injuries may eventually distort the nipple area and the growth of the breast.
McCracken had taken the dog to the park to play with the children and was not aware dogs were not permitted on the playground. The council said he was very concerned for the victim.
Defence counsel Rupert Ward said it had been upsetting for the girl and her family.
McCracken was horrified about what happened, which had been "traumatising for everybody concerned". McCracken had owned the dog for six years and it had never shown any sign of aggression, he said.
Judge Saunders was told the Act required the destruction of the dog, but that had already been carried out at McCracken's instructions. | {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
Ohio State University had its trademark application for the word “the” rejected by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office this week. The main reason appears to be the university’s choice of font size.
According to a local news report, The Ohio State University had its trademark application for the word “the” rejected this week.
The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) provided two reasons for the rejection. First, fashion designer Marc Jacobs filed a request to trademark “the” just two days before Ohio State submitted its application. However, the USPTO also rejected Jacob’s application on August 28.
The primary reason for the rejection is related to the university’s narrow usage of the word “the” on university-branded apparel and accessories. In a letter, the USPTO wrote that the large size of the word “the” on Ohio State University apparel was a significant factor in the decision-making process. According to the trademark office attorney, a trademark only exists when the alleged mark is used in a variety of applications and sizes. Because”the” is only featured on Ohio State University apparel in a single manner, it is not a valid trademark.
The size, location, dominance, and significance of the alleged mark [“THE”] as used on the goods are all relevant factors in determining the commercial impression of the applied-for mark. With respect to clothing, consumers may recognize small designs or discrete wording as trademarks, rather than as merely ornamental features, when located, for example, on the pocket or breast area of a shirt. Consumers may not, however, perceive larger designs or slogans as trademarks when such matter is prominently displayed across the front of a t-shirt.
A spokesperson for OSU claims its their fight to trademark the word “the” is not over. In fact, the USPTO gives applicants six months to provide a counterargument after an initial rejection has been made. | {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
analysis
Updated: Sep 19, 2019 18:02 IST
Despite their integrity, hard work and competence, Indian Administrative Service (IAS) officers, who occupy almost all senior administrative positions in the states and at the Centre, have not been able to improve development outcomes for citizens. India could not achieve many Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), particularly in hunger, health, nutrition, gender, and sanitation. India’s social indicators are today worse than poorer countries such as Bangladesh. Besides, growth has not helped the most marginalised groups such as tribals and women. Section 46(1) of the Rajasthan Tenancy Act still places women on a par with lunatics and idiots. Of all these groups, tribals have been the worst sufferers because of anti-tribal forest policies, displacement laws, and poor governance.
IAS officers have not been able to ensure that teachers and doctors stay in their place of postings and provide quality services. Land records are outdated with the result that two-thirds of all pending cases in the courts are related to property disputes, which take an average of 20 years to settle. The list of beneficiaries for State programmes has huge errors of inclusion and exclusion.
IAS officers are not able to ensure regular monthly honorarium to contractual staff, such as para teachers, rozgar sahayaks, anganwadi workers, and cooks in mid-day meal programmes.
Secretaries in the states, who belong to the IAS, often collude with the junior staff, and don’t honestly report figures on hunger deaths, malnutrition and usage of toilets, leading to an erosion of accountability. While looking at the number of missing toilets in 2014 for Maharashtra, I could not help shouting at the secretary, “Vandana, your data is bogus.” She retorted, “Sir, don’t call it bogus, this is advanced statistics. This is what we will achieve after 10 years, but since we are very fond of the sanitation programme, we report it right now!”
My new book, What Ails the IAS and Why It Fails to Deliver, describes how reforms initiated failed to make any impact because most IAS officers resist change, or are indifferent to the poor. As revenue secretary in 1981, I got a law passed in Uttar Pradesh to prevent tribal land alienation, but not a single acre was restored to the tribals. The economic philosophy that I followed in my career was, “socialism for the poor and free market for the rich”. The political and administrative system in India, on the other hand, seems to believe in “indifference to the poor, and controls over the rich to facilitate rent seeking”.
As joint secretary, minorities commission, I exposed the communal bias of the district administration in handling the riots in Meerut in 1982. I received a written warning from the home secretary, and was shunted out from Delhi to Afghanistan as punishment for bringing to light the killing of innocent Muslim women and children by the police. When the Bihar bureaucracy had collapsed during the Lalu Prasad years (1990 -2005), I sent a letter to the chief secretary accusing many IAS officials of behaving like “politicians — the English speaking politicians — corrupt, with short-term targets, narrow horizons, feudal outlook, disrespect for norms, contributing nothing to the welfare of the nation, empty promises, and no action.”
A key element of an IAS officer’s work experience is their encounter with the political leadership. A most telling instance, in my own long bureaucratic experience, was the time I “bribed” a chief minister to scrap oppressive laws against tribal women.
Many poor women in Odisha were arrested in 1995 because they collected “hillbrooms” from forests to make brooms. However, under the rules, they were not permitted to stock, or sell, this produce to anyone else except to a government contractor. When I requested the Odisha bureaucracy to scrap the law, I was told that the government was annoyed with me because I published an article in a newspaper, condemning it for anti-tribal and anti-women policies.
Ultimately, I had to do what many Indians do to bend the government in their favour — resort to bribing. When the chief minister came to the Planning Commission for funds, as secretary of the Commission, I said, “Sir, please get this law changed, I will give you ~50 crore extra in your outlay this year as advance, and the same amount next year after my work is done”. He agreed. He was a tribal, and empathised with the issue. So the oppressive law was scrapped in March 2000, and 67 minor forest produces were de-nationalised, and freed from government control.
The system requires changes in many welfare programmes, such as the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme, the Integrated Child Development Services, housing for the urban poor, and the public distribution system, as these schemes have design flaws.
What is needed is a change in the policy regime in many cross-cutting systemic issues, such as the role of politicians, stability of tenure, size and nature of Indian bureaucracy, accountability, monitoring of programmes, and civil service reforms, which will transform the individual competence of IAS officers into better collective outcomes.
NC Saxena is former secretary, rural development, Government of India, former secretary, Planning Commission, and former member, National Advisory Council.
The views expressed are personal | {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
(Warning: This post contains spoilers for “The Haunting of Hill House” through the finale.)
The Red Room: the bane of every Crain family member’s (and “Haunting of Hill House” fan’s) existence.
The mysterious location — described by poor, deceased Nellie Crain (Victoria Pedretti) as the titular home’s “stomach” — spends the better part of the 10-episode Netflix series “digesting” the family, by lulling them into a false sense of security within its walls so it can learn their fears and desires and prey on them more easily.
But you don’t find that out until the final moments of the finale, when the four living Crain siblings — Steve (Michiel Huisman), Shirley (Elizabeth Reaser), Theo (Kate Siegel) and Luke (Oliver Jackson-Cohen) — are trapped inside its walls, once again allowing it to play tricks on their minds, and must rely on their father, Hugh (Timothy Hutton), to negotiate with their now-ghost mother Olivia (Carla Gugino) to get them out.
Also Read: 'Haunting of Hill House' Creator Explains How They Kept Red Room Twist Hidden Until the Very End
(And if you’re wondering how the show kept that room hidden in plain sight this whole time, we’ve talked extensively about that with creator Mike Flanagan, which you can read about here.)
It all turns out (mostly) OK in the end. Every Crain except for Olivia, Nellie and Hugh — who sacrifices himself so his children can escape — goes back to his or her life and changes for the better, after that dark night in the Red Room. We even close the whole show on Luke’s 2-year sobriety.
Except, maybe we didn’t.
Also Read: 'Haunting of Hill House' Star Didn't Know About Stages of Grief Fan Theory - But 'Totally' Sees It Now
While discussing the intricacies of playing Luke — a recovering drug addict and Nellie’s twin brother — with TheWrap, Jackson-Cohen talked “Hill House” Easter eggs, pointing out one he’s still waiting for fans to discover. And brace yourselves, because this clue might just undo the show’s bittersweet ending, by revealing the Crains are still trapped in a fantasy inside the Red Room.
“There’s this thing that happens when we’re all in the Red Room,” Jackson-Cohen told us in an interview Monday. “Every, uh — again, I feel like I have to be careful if I’m saying this right. (laughs) But whenever each child, each sibling, is in the Red Room, something in the fantasy is red. And it’ll be a very, very small thing. For Luke, when Luke gets taken to the hotel room, he’s worn Converse throughout the show, and all of a sudden his Converse are red. And it’s so slight you can barely even see it. And I think Steven is wearing a red jumper [in his fantasy.]”
“And so there’s something at the end — it was Kate [Siegel], who plays Theo, who kind of pointed it out to me — with Luke’s sobriety cake,” he continued. “Um, she went, ‘The cake is red.’ And on set I went, ‘Oh, my God!’ And she went, ‘I don’t know!’ And I asked Mike [Flanagan], and he went ‘I don’t know.’ And so I can’t tell whether or not I’m just crazy with this — or whether or not it’s something that could have legs.”
Also Read: 'The Haunting of Hill House' Season 2: If Story Continues, It Won't Be About the Crains
Here’s a screenshot of Luke’s red Converse in his Red Room fantasy:
And here’s a screenshot from the closing moments, with a red cake for Luke at his sobriety party:
So, uh, we’ll let you digest that, while we ask Jackson-Cohen if he was happy with how the Crains story ended — or if he wants the door to be left open for more from Luke and his siblings.
Also Read: 'Chilling Adventures of Sabrina': Ross Lynch Is Just as Into Harvey-Nick Bromance As You Are (Video)
“Well, I think it’s always a bit of a tricky one,” he says. “When you fall in love with playing a character, it’s always a hard thing. Even if it’s just a movie, a standalone movie. It feels quite sad to say goodbye to the character, in a way, as an actor. Especially someone that you love so much. So I think whatever direction — again, I have to be so careful about how I answer these questions, because Netflix supposedly hired snipers to like live opposite our houses and just shoot us if we say anything else (laughs).”
“I think, you know, the great thing about the show is it can go anywhere,” he continued. “You could revisit the Crains. There’s Easter eggs in the show that not many people have actually picked up on yet — which I find quite surprising — where you could very, very easily go back and visit the Crains. You could do an anthology, which I know is what Mike definitely feels he wants to do. So I think it’s kind of the exciting thing about being a part of a show like this, where you just don’t know where it’s going to go next. So I’m really interested to see what they come up with, and what everyone decides they want to do with this. It’s weird, we get all these questions, but we just don’t know.”
“Haunting of Hill House” Season 1 is available for streaming now on Netflix. | {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
You can call me Goldy or Vi /Post art/Can not speak English very well/pls don't use my art with out my permission | {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
Blockchain Specialists: Who Are They and How Much Do They Earn?
Relatively new
blockchain technology
is developing quite actively in recent years, which inevitably leads to increase of jobs number in this industry. Considering that, the infrastructure is still not very developed well in this area, it can be assumed that the trend of increased demand for qualified personnel will still remain for many years. In this article we will talk about blockchain specialists, find out who employers are looking for, what average salaries are offered, and in the end we will talk about where to learn this craft.
1. Briefly about blockchain technology
Let us briefly remind what blockchain is, and why many people predict a great future for it? So, in simple words, blockchain is an open (that is, public) registry of data, which is stored in separate blocks and has a chain structure. Each subsequent block stores the information about the previous one. For example, let`s take a usual book, which is divided into separate pages, so after 45, there 46, 47 should go, etc. Attempts to change or delete a block, which has already been entered into blockchain, will immediately be noticed by the network.
The increased security of Blockchain is backed up by data storage. The fact is, that the entire data registry has hundreds of thousands copies (depends on number of miners in network), which are located throughout the world.
2. What experts are now in demand in the industry and how much do they earn?
When it comes to blockchain specialists, most people imagine a highly qualified programmer who knows all the programming languages, Morse code, and the depths of cryptography. But in reality, to be a fairly successful developer, you need to know:
basics of programming;
C ++ language ideally, but this is optional, Python, Java, Golang, etc. will also work.
Having these knowledge and at least minimal experience in programming, one can become a blockchain developer without any particular problems. The wage, in this case, will directly depend on experience, depth of knowledge and a particular company. In Europe and the United States experienced developers
can get
to $175 thousand per year.
But it’s not necessary to be a programmer to work in the blockchain industry. This is not a complete list of vacancies, this young market needs:
Investment Director . It is a key position in any crypto startup, because its main task is to search and work with potential investors. This is a quite difficult job, because now many people are still wary of cryptocurrencies and blockchain as a whole, and they are not in a hurry to invest their savings. The salary depends on the amount of raised funds, from which a certain percentage is given to an investment director.
Marketer, PR manager . As Thomas Macaulay said: “Nothing Except The Mint Can Make Money Without Advertising”. This profession is very relevant absolutely in any field and the blockchain industry is no exception. To succeed in this position, the specialist is obliged to speak several foreign languages, to have experience in international sales. Salaries of the specialists depend on the scope of a project, as well as a marketing record of a marketer.
Bounty manager . The rapid development of the ICO market has led to emergence of brand new professions. This position involves conduction of all processes, interaction and verification of performers for tasks implementation. Salary of these specialists can hardly be called high, it rarely exceeds $1,000.
Crypto analyst . This profession implies the deep knowledges of the cryptocurrency market. An analyst should be able to carry out a fundamental analysis of any coin, and on the basis of this data make his or her own predictions of investments growth. This is one of the most promising areas in the blockchain industry, since the analyst’s wages have no limit. Large investors will be happy to pay a certain percentage of commission to a such specialist for a good tip.
Lawyer . There is literally “a long row to hoe” in the blockchain field for these professionals. The fact is that legislative base here is still at a very early stage of its development and there is still a lot of work to be done in this direction.
We want to remind you:
3. Where to study for a blockchain specialist?
Higher-education institutions are already training specialists in this direction. A number of
leading universities
offer introductory courses into blockchain, cryptocurrency, etc.
To master any of the above mentioned professions of the future, you can take online courses on the Internet, the number of which is sufficient now. But when choosing a training program you should be extremely careful and before entrusting your money and time to some “blockchain guru”, read the information about him carefully.
4. Conclusion
The crypto industry differs with a rather rapid pace of development. To work in this area, you must always keep “your eyes open” and be able to adapt quickly to a new circumstances. Every year new professions appear, which offer new opportunities and high wages. | {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
Earlier this morning we showed you a video of a mother frantically beating her son after she found him participating in the Baltimore riots.
Now, the mother is speaking out as to why she reacted in the way she did.
Toya Graham explains that she doesn’t want her son to be another Freddie Gray.
“At that point, you know — [I was] not even thinking about the cameras or anything. That’s my only son, and at the end of the day I don’t want him to be a Freddie Gray.”
25-year-old Freddie Gray died of a severe spinal cord injury while in police custody. Following his unexplained death, protests and riots alike have ensued in parts of Baltimore — all within the last 24 hours.
Watch Toya’s explanation below.
You can watch more of her interview on CBS Evening News with Scott Pelley when it airs later Tuesday night and also CBS This Morning on Wednesday for a live interview. | {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
There has been one camgirl who’s been dominating the Miss MFC charts for a while and her name is RocknRose. You could say she’s been rocking the ranks (and members’ wallets) with an astounding back-to-back wins in February, March, and April of 2018! (As well as three #1s in 2017), and she is poised to win AGAIN this month! She has some loyal tippers helping her make it, and there is a very good chance she will.
So, what is the tip that CRUSHED all others before hers? The previous high tip was a massive 1.2 MILLION tokens ($60,000 USD) tipped to LocaLoca, who is also no stranger to high tips.
RocknRose received a chart-topping, mind-bending tip from RocknKing going toward charity in the amount of 1,347,673 tokens! This comes out to $67,383.65 USD. Many would dream of earning this much in a year and RocknRose managed to earn it in one night. What is her secret? One sure way to find out is to visit her room! 😏
| {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
They’re coming out of the woodwork today.
Travis Browne jumped on the opportunity to clown on Derrick Lewis after he suffered a technical knockout loss to Mark Hunt at last night’s (Sat., June 10, 2017) UFC Fight Night 110 event on Fox Sports 1 (video highlights here), calling him a quitter with no heart that should indeed retire.
Now, Francis Ngannou is giving “The Black Beast” a taste of his own medicine, as well, as “The Predator” took to Twitter to clap back at Derrick for downplaying his victory over Andrei Arlovski given his age by reminding him that Hunt —who is older than “The Pitbull” at 43 years of age -- just beat him up.
Lewis said I win Arlovski because he's old with 37 but Mark Hunt 43 years old beat he like a baby — Francis NGannou (@francis_ngannou) June 11, 2017
Cold.
Indeed, Hunt took it to Derrick throughout the bout, and though he didn’t exactly punish him or deliver a vintage knockout as we have grown accustomed to, Mark did eventually finish “Black Beast” after the referee on duty felt Lewis had nothing to offer in the fourth round.
Afterward, Derrick stated that it was probably the last time he would ever step foot inside the Octagon, revealing that he wouldn’t want to put his family through anymore pain.
If it is the end of Derrick, fight fans will never get to see a heavily-talked about and much-anticipated Heavyweight showdown between Francis and Derrick. But at least “The Predator” can find comfort in being able to deliver one final blow in.
For complete UFC Fight Night 110 results and coverage click here. | {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
Колумнист Sobesednik.ru политолог Станислав Белковский о том, что стало с Россией за 1,5 года влияния санкций.
Всегда приятно иметь дело со средством массовой информации, излагающим от своего имени содержание твоих личных мечтаний – очень тайных или совершенно явных. Вот у меня такого СМИ, к сожалению, нет (во всяком случае, пока не появилось). А у президента РФ Владимира Путина – есть. И это совсем не то, что вы подумали, а прямо-таки американский журнал Forbes, который некогда объявил Путина самым влиятельным политиком мира и с тех пор продолжает в том же духе. Некоторые наблюдатели говорят: это потому, что издатель журнала Стив Форбс очень не любит Барака Обаму и постоянно хочет как бы уязвить его через фигуру Путина. Впрочем, так это или нет, для нас сейчас неважно. Мы о другом.
[:same:]
Намедни Forbes опубликовал пространный материал своего обозревателя Кеннета Рапозы – о том, что уже в марте 2016 года западные санкции против России скорее всего отменят. Потому что Западу, с одной стороны, понравилась речь Путина на юбилейной сессии Генассамблеи ООН, а с другой – до синих чертей надоела Украина с ее вечным нытьем на тему РФ-агрессии. Дескать, уже и Крым западные лидеры готовы де-факто признать неотъемлемой частью России. Вот до марта еще покочевряжатся и спустят санкционное дело на сверкающих тормозах.
Что ж, может, доля правды в словах г-на Рапозы и есть. Та же Украина действительно в последние месяцы начинает серьезно раздражать своих титульных друзей отсутствием эффективных реформ и стабильно высоким уровнем коррупции, которой любая война нипочем. Но...
Колумнист Станислав Белковский / Russian Look
Дело-то по большому счету не в Украине. А в неконвенциальном поведении России на мировой арене. Москва превратилась для Запада в субъект, от которого теперь можно ожидать любой подлянки в любой временной момент. Вот за что санкции, а не за Крым или Донбасс как таковые.
Еще весной 2014-го, когда санкционная эпоха только начиналась, наш первый вице-премьер Игорь Шувалов сказал одну весьма правильную вещь. Прямые санкции, заметил он, может, когда и отменят. Но вот только косвенные, которые гораздо страшнее, останутся. Доверие стяжается долго, а растрачивается быстро. Россия превратила себя в плохого парня мира. И ни в марте 2016-го, ни вскоре после того эта проблема не рассосется.
Что бы там ни говорил всесведущий Forbes.
Другие материалы на тему антироссийской политики читайте на странице Санкции и продукты. | {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
It’s always the loudest guy in the room who ends up having much to hide.
This is likely the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the Broward County Sheriff’s Office. The national spotlight will help uncover much that incapable local reporters don’t have the guts or moxie to write.
Certainly, more to come.
There are more than 66 investigations by the Broward County State Attorney’s office into Broward County Sheriff’s deputies and employees, ranging from drug trafficking to kidnapping since 2012. All the internal investigations occurred under embattled Sheriff Scott Israel’s watch, whose office is now under investigation for allegations that his deputies failed to allow first responders from treating patients at the scene of Stoneman Douglas High School shooting on Feb. 14, and that multiple deputies failed to enter the school to defend the children during the rampage that left 17 people dead, this reporter has learned.
“Approximately 66 BSO (Broward Sheriff’s Office) deputies and other employees, including supervisory personnel were arrested for, charged with, and/or convicted of crimes that run the gamut from Armed Kidnapping, to Battery, Assault, Falsifying records, Official Misconduct, Narcotics trafficking, and other crimes involving dishonesty and violence in the years immediately proceeding 2013 when Jermaine was killed. Most of the offenses on the list occurred in the years 2012-2013,” according to court records filed by Schoen against Israel and the Broward County Sheriff deputy defendants.
“Often the cases against BSO (Broward Sheriff’s Office) employees are resolved by guilty pleas resulting in short or no period of incarceration and a chance for the criminal record to be cleared after a period of time.”
Broward County Sheriff’s office could not be reached immediately for comment.
READ MORE: | {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
The instant Ashiok arrived on Ravnica it was clear a trap had been set and sprung. Unable to leave the plane Ashiok came close to knowing fear. Ashiok lifts that fear like a rug hiding a secret passage and finds bliss.
While the Dragon-God’s dream of grandeur is realized the people of Ravnica scream in terror. Gruul rioters run through the streets looting, pillaging, causing destruction and mayhem in attempt to avoid their own fears—that they’re nothing without a system to attack.
Everyone has a fear here. Yes, even the Dragon-God. Buried in the back of his mind lingers a worry that he’s missed something, some single piece of his grand scheme. Hubris and self-doubt, two sides of a coin best spent on improving oneself. Fears rise like cream to the top of the general populace’s collective unconscious. They drift, formless, but not for long.
Ashiok turns terror into live beings. A child’s imagination—always so ripe—gives rise to a Skulker. A creature born of whispers. The child has seen her parents speaking in low voices as the world burns, cries, and crumbles. She wonders what they say to each other. Will everything be alright? No, child. Not this day.
Dipping into one mind after another, pulling from each a thought, an idea, a worry. Ashiok finds threads to weave nightmares and horrors. What a wonderful gift Bolas has provided, an entire plane of fear. What a delicious buffet to feast from. And yes, it looks as though dessert will be served. The Dragon-God’s small worry is growing, his plan has holes. Holes Ashiok will pour smoke into and tear wide open. What will come forth? Oh the anticipation is the stuff of dreams—at least for one. | {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
Curated Commentary
Q1 Walk through your initial assessment of this patient. What are the critical aspects of the assessment of this patient?
In responding to this question, Dr. Titone and Thompson pointed out a couple of key concepts. First, as brought up by Dr. Titone, a standardized approach to the initial assessment of the patient is crucial. It is very easy (as Dr. Titone points out) to get mentally distracted by dramatic physical exam findings. In addition, performing these assessments in an unfamiliar environment is an added challenge that could lead to missed injuries or inattention to the basics of prehospital resuscitation. Dr. Thompson very nicely addressed this by listing out an ABCD outline of the patient’s problems. For some more reading on the basic approach to the blunt trauma patient in the prehospital environment, check out this podcast done with Dr. Steuerwald that outlines his, quite rigorous, approach to these patients.
Second, most everyone was in strong agreement that this patient would need to have their airway managed. Indeed this patient does have several reasons that might lead you take secure his airway. As pointed out by Dr. Titone and Thompson, both the patient’s current mental status and his predicted clinical course would suggest intubation is warranted. Dr. O’Brien however brought up the possibility of using an extraglottic device to manage the patient’s airway, at least initially. Indeed, there were several varied opinions on how best to proceed with airway management, which were highlighted in the responses to questions 2 and 3.
Q2 Do any procedures need to be performed on this patient? If so, who performs the procedures? In what order should they be done? Where do you do these procedures (squad/in flight/receiving hospital)?
Airway Management
Most commenters leaned towards intubation and RSI for this patient. Dr. Renne was rightly concerned about the administration of an induction agent and a paralytic in a patient, who is presumed to be deep in the throws of hemorrhagic shock and currently hypotensive. He brings up the possibility of beginning aggressive resuscitation with product first before going forward with RSI. Indeed hemodynamics as well as oxygenation are going to be incredibly important in this patient who we presume to have a significant TBI. Wanting to avoid hypotension and hypoxia at all costs, several commenters brought up the preference for using ketamine as their induction agent (and potentially at a slightly lower dose as pointed out by Dr. Renne) and brought up the importance of pre-oxygenation. While no one it up, apneic oxygenation is going to be a crucial component of this patient’s eventual intubation. Dr. O’Brien brought up the possibility of using an extra-glottic device like an i-Gel. The idea of a “rapid-sequence airway” is interesting primarily because it is exceptionally fast and may be just as effective as placing an endotracheal tube. Given this patient’s mental status, one should expect that, just like after intubation, some sedative medication would be required in order to maintain the EGD.
Other Procedures Mentioned in the Discussion | {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
Yesterday, I showed a graphic that lays out popular devices by display size. In this post, I want to show a version created using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. The upside of doing this programmatically rather than manually in a drawing program is that it’s easier to update, adjusts to each user’s viewport, and can be made interactive. The downside is that sometimes web technology isn’t up to the task of rendering something nicely yet.
With the programmatic approach, the main function takes in a set of objects, each of which represents a device with corresponding specs: display size (diagonal in inches), display resolution (height and width in pixels), and physical dimensions (height and width in inches).
Each device is then rendered as a div. The aforementioned specs are used to determine its size and shape, with the content area of the div acting as the display and its border serving as the bezel. The display size is also used to determine the horizontal position of each device.
There are also three optional parameters. Scale factor defaults 1 millimeter to 1 pixel, but can be varied per device. Vertical shift centers the display in the bezel by default, but can be tweaked for certain devices such as the Kindle. Finally, curve factor can customize the roundedness of a device using the border-radius property, useful for devices like the Veer, although there are some kinks with that.
Below is a screenshot of the results, and you can view the live version here. You can also have a look at the code, but pardon the cruft as this is just a proof of concept. | {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
‘Every drop of your tear sears our heart’: J-K Police have a moving message for daughter of slain cop
india
Updated: Aug 29, 2017 22:43 IST
It takes only one picture to see the pain.
An image showing the five-year-old daughter of a slain Kashmiri cop weeping at his wreath-laying ceremony in Srinagar on Monday has moved social media, with many posting heartfelt messages and offering condolences.
Assistant sub-inspector Abdul Rashid was shot at by suspected militants in south Kashmir’s Anantnag district on Monday and died of his injuries at the hospital.
The Jammu and Kashmir Police reached out , posting a message for Zohra, Rashid’s daughter.
The DIG of Police South Kashmir posted on Facebook: “You are too young to understand as to why this happened... Your father like all of us represented Jammu Kashmir police force -- a hallmark of valour and sacrifice.”
“Remember we all are one family at this critical phase. Every drop of your tear sears our heart,” it read, adding that the force will always cherish the memory of Rashid as a true policeman.
Many on Twitter shared Zohra’s “heartbreaking” image, with one user lamenting, “She doesn’t deserve this pain.”
Heartbreaking. Daughter of martyr J&K Police officer Abdul Rashid, weeps during wreath laying ceremony at District Police Lines in Srinagar. pic.twitter.com/grUzegwvAk — Aditya Raj Kaul (@AdityaRajKaul) August 28, 2017
Sorry, very sad. very sad. wished this was not shown. it was very very personal moment of grief. Not for anybody else to see and comment. — Tarun Vijay (@Tarunvijay) August 28, 2017
How do you write about pain & suffering of our children, here daughter of slain police officer Abdul Rashid during his wreath laying cer. pic.twitter.com/O25hamoYPW — Sameer Yasir (@sameeryasir) August 28, 2017
Heart wrenching!Daughter of martyr J&KPolice officer AbdulRashid,weeps during wreath laying ceremony in Srinagar.She don't deserve this pain pic.twitter.com/K5f1m1P9hB — JammuKashmir5 (@JammuKashmir5) August 28, 2017
Heart wrenching images.😭😭
Children of a Martyr ASI Abdul Rashid, weeps during his wreath laying ceremony at DPL in #Srinagar.#RIP #Kashmir pic.twitter.com/vLaNevGHyb — Mauseen Khan (@mauseen_khan) August 29, 2017
Heart wrenching picture.Daughter of slain JK police officer Abdul Rashid . May God give her strength to bear this loss.😢😢😢 RIP#Kashmir pic.twitter.com/gxa7XybAwQ — Tahir Syeed (@TahirsyeedK) August 28, 2017
SP Vaid, director general of J-K Police, also paid his tributes to Rashid during the wreath-laying ceremony held at the police headquarters in Srinagar. | {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
An innovative advancement in chewable supplementation, each delicious apple cinnamon wafer provides a complete profile of vitamins and minerals. Source of Life is an incredible nutritional breakthrough which emulates natures wholesome goodness with a powerful blend of nutrients. With its revitalizing, energy-giving ingredients, Source of Life is no ordinary multi-vitamin. And, with Source of Life, you will experience a Burst of Energy and The Feeling of Nutritional Well-Being. Source of Life has a perfect blend of vitamins, minerals, lipids, bioflavonoids, enzymes, plant pigments, amino acids and herbs. Whole brown rice, spirulina, sunflower seed oil and black currant seeds are other ingredients which offer the most health-giving, life-supporting nutrients. All these have been ingeniously combined in this formula to create powerful, synergistic effects that will result in a Burst of Energy you`ll want to experience every day!
*Product descriptions are subject to change. Please view product at your local retailer for current ingredient details.
**These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease | {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
This is an update of my previous post “How to build LLVM from source” (2018-04-16), which is now out-of-date. LLVM has moved to a “monorepo” design instead of a collection of smaller tool-specific repositories. So this new post has fewer steps!
UPDATE, 2020-03-22: Patch D69221 seems to have made the procedure much simpler, eliminating the need for Jens Jorgensen’s patch, at least on OSX 10.14.6. Therefore I have shortened this post considerably. You can find the old version in the blog’s git history or on the Wayback Machine.
The LLVM codebase’s official home is https://github.com/llvm/llvm-project .
(However, to submit patches to LLVM projects, you must use the official Phabricator; don’t submit GitHub pull requests against llvm/llvm-project ! At least not as of November 2019.)
Step 1: Fork!
Go to your GitHub account and fork the following repository:
Step 2: Get the code!
Locally clone the repo to the right place.
cd $ROOT git clone [email protected]:llvm/llvm-project
This is a good time to set up the .git/config for the repo you just cloned (for example, $ROOT/llvm-project/.git/config ). I set it up this way:
[remote "origin"] url = [email protected]:Quuxplusone/llvm-project.git fetch = +refs/heads/*:refs/remotes/origin/* [remote "upstream"] url = [email protected]:llvm/llvm-project.git fetch = +refs/heads/*:refs/remotes/upstream/* [branch "master"] remote = upstream merge = refs/heads/master
This gives me two remotes: one named upstream whence I can pull, and one named origin whither I can push. My local master and origin/master will both track upstream/master . Anything I do in my local repo, I will do in a feature branch; my feature branches will track origin .
Step 3: Build!
mkdir $ROOT/llvm-project/build cd $ROOT/llvm-project/build cmake -G Ninja \ -DDEFAULT_SYSROOT="$(xcrun --show-sdk-path)" \ -DLLVM_ENABLE_PROJECTS="clang;libcxx;libcxxabi" \ -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release ../llvm ninja clang ninja cxx
Making clang will build both clang and clang++ .
If you omit -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release (or at least -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=RelWithDebInfo ), this first part will still work, but you’ll produce a “debug-build” version of clang that is super slow, and then the “bootstrap” step below will take days instead of minutes. So watch out for that.
On my laptop, cmake takes about 42 seconds; ninja clang takes about 96 minutes.
Troubleshooting step 3
If something goes wrong, you can usually recover via
rm $ROOT/llvm-project/build/CMakeCache.txt
and, absolute worst case, you can rm -rf $ROOT/llvm-project/build and start over.
If you succeed in building clang , but then when you run it you get errors about the standard C-language headers, like this,
$ bin/clang++ test.cc test.cc:1:10: fatal error: 'stdio.h' file not found #include <stdio.h> ^~~~~~~~~ 1 error generated.
then you may have set DEFAULT_SYSROOT inappropriately. On 10.14.6, when I run xcrun --show-sdk-path , I get /Library/Developer/CommandLineTools/SDKs/MacOSX10.14.sdk . Your results may vary.
If you get errors about the C++ headers, such as <vector> , it’s because you still need to build libc++: run ninja cxx .
Step 4: Bootstrap check-clang and libc++.
Here we will instruct CMake to build Clang again, using the Clang we just built. There is apparently an official way to bootstrap Clang (probably out-of-date). However, I use an approach inspired by the CMake FAQ. Note that we will not be installing Clang over top of the system compiler; that would be super dangerous and you should never do it!
mkdir $ROOT/llvm-project/build2 cd $ROOT/llvm-project/build2 CXX="$ROOT/llvm-project/build/bin/clang++" \ cmake -G Ninja \ -DDEFAULT_SYSROOT="$(xcrun --show-sdk-path)" \ -DLLVM_ENABLE_PROJECTS="clang;libcxx;libcxxabi" \ -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=RelWithDebInfo ../llvm ninja clang cxx ninja check-clang check-cxx
Now you have built two versions of clang++ : $ROOT/llvm-project/build/bin/clang++ is the version built with your system compiler, and $ROOT/llvm-project/build2/bin/clang++ is the version built with that version. You can extend this to build3 , build4 , etc.
Making cxx will build libc++.dylib , libc++.a , and libc++abi.dylib . Making cxxabi will build libc++abi.a . Making check-cxx will build libc++experimental.a . (Unfortunately, compiler-rt will not build on OSX.)
This time, cmake takes about 58 seconds; ninja clang takes about 153 minutes. ninja check-clang takes another 53 minutes: 36 minutes to build a bunch of additional tools, and then 17 minutes to run the actual tests. ninja cxx takes about 84 seconds. ninja check-cxx takes about 50 minutes (but see the caveat below about cxx_under_test ).
Step 5: Run specific tests.
Running a specific test or directory-of-tests for any product is easy:
cd $ROOT/llvm-project/build2 ./bin/llvm-lit -sv ../llvm/test/Analysis ./bin/llvm-lit -sv ../clang/test/ARCMT ./bin/llvm-lit -sv ../libcxx/test/std/re
However, before you can successfully run one of these lines, you must have run the corresponding one of make check-{llvm,clang,cxx} at least once, to initialize the right stuff under the build2 directory.
(Thanks to Brian Cain for documenting this recipe.)
But watch out — both make check-cxx and llvm-lit will by default use your system compiler to run the libc++ tests! This is not what you want! Tell llvm-lit to use your newly built Clang by passing the cxx_under_test parameter, like this:
./bin/llvm-lit -sv --param cxx_under_test=`pwd`/bin/clang ../libcxx/test/
On my laptop, this command line again takes about 50 minutes to run all the libc++ tests, but this time it correctly uses the bootstrapped compiler. | {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
Excellent Redheaded Superstar With Incredible Jugs Ariel Stretches Gams And Frigs Her Moist Gash
Excellent redheaded superstar with incredible jugs Ariel stretches gams and frigs her moist gash | {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
General Motors has filed an application to register LT5 as a trademark with the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), GM Authority has discovered.
The automaker’s September 19th, 2016 application is assigned serial number 87175676 and specifies that the mark will be used to name “Engines for automobiles, sport utility vehicles, trucks and vans.”
This is the second time time that General Motors has applied for the LT5 trademark, with the first time being on April 2nd, 2013.
The GM Authority Take
This second trademark filing fans the rumor flames that peg LT5 as a forthcoming GM V-8 engine destined for duty in the upcoming C7 Corvette ZR1, which is said to make over 700 horsepower.
We believe that the reason for GM’s second filing for the LT5 mark is directly associated with the automaker’s true desire to secure rights to the mark, but unfortunately running out of time to do so using the original 2013 application.
It’s worth noting that, to successfully register a trademark, an applicant bears the burden to prove to the USPTO that the name for which it is filing (in this case — LT5) is a real-world product or service. This is performed via a document called Statement of Use, a vital element of the trademark application process that the applicant has up to three years to provide to the office.
To note, the LT5 mark was re-filed concurrently with the a trademark application for LTX.
Stay tuned to GM Authority for LT5 news as well as for continuous GM news coverage. | {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
Casey Wilson told Seth Meyers earlier this year that Hulu’s Hotwives franchise would follow the American Horror Story anthology model, using the same actresses over and over but recasting them in new roles.
So whom from The Hotwives of Orlando will be rejoining Wilson for the next installment, The Hotwives of Las Vegas, when it streams weekly on Hulu starting Aug. 18, 2015?
Here’s the cast of characters populating The Hotwives of Las Vegas:
Callie Silversan (Erinn Hayes) – A sensuous, mysterious, raven-haired witch.
Denise Funt (Danielle Schneider) – Neurotic, needy and recently divorced.
Ivanka Silversan (Andrea Savage) – A European ex-model, she believes she is the standard of beauty and perfection as is her family.
Jenfer Beudon (Casey Wilson) – Cocky, southern, white-trash and very pregnant.
Leona Carpeze (Dannah Phirman) – A tough, straight-talking broad. Matriarch of the group and self-appointed peace keeper.
Phe Phe Reed, Esq (Tymberlee Hill) – Smart, outspoken, always juggling several jobs. Newly relocated to Las Vegas from Orlando.
Stephanie, aka First Lady (Angela Kinsey) – A highly tailored, uptight snob. Was married to the former mayor..of the Vegas strip.
Hill is reprising her role from Orlando, where she was joined by Wilson, Schneider, Savage, Angela Kinsey and Kristen Schaal.
Creators Schneider and Phirman write the series and executive produce alongside Jonathan Stern and Paul Scheer. | {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
IGTV/YouTube screenshot by Chris Matyszczyk/CNET
I fear I may have found a more emotive subject that Apple vs. Samsung. Or Apple vs. Microsoft. Or just Apple.
For one of the world's top academic institutions, Carroll University in Wisconsin, decided to tread into that cauldron of high dudgeon: cats vs. dogs.
I understand that, though some people have pets of both types, many take sides on this issue.
I can now say, with hand raised as if under oath, that those who say dogs make for the better pets are plainly lacking in intelligence.
Please, this is not my opinion. I have very few of those. This is the conclusion of a study that plumbed deep into the psyches of pet owners.
As Live Science reports, it seems that cat lovers scored higher than dog lovers on measures such as introversion, open-mindedness and a term used far too loosely in society, sensitivity.
Dog lovers are, on the other hand, just frisky little conformists looking for a good time. They were deemed more energetic and outgoing, as well as more likely to follow rules.
As with all the research, this piece needs to be a taken with a very salty dog biscuit.
However, the most painful conclusion was surely the one that declared cat lovers more intelligent than dog lovers.
You might be floored by the logic that Denise Guastello, an associate professor of psychology at Carroll University, offered.
She said: "It makes sense that a dog person is going to be more lively, because they're going to want to be out there, outside, talking to people, bringing their dog. Whereas, if you're more introverted, and sensitive, maybe you're more at home reading a book, and your cat doesn't need to go outside for a walk."
People still read books, professor? Perhaps only at Carroll University. And the notion that people have dogs in order to force themselves to go outside is a curious one.
Could it be that a lot of cat lovers like to go outside, but don't really like the idea of dragging a pet with them?
It's a peculiar definition of companionship that makes you want to drag a dog on a leash. The French poet, Gerard de Nerval, had an excellent riposte to those who walked their pets.
He preferred to walk his pet lobster. He described lobsters as "tranquil, serious and they know the secrets of the sea."
Of walking other pets, however, he said: "What could be quite so ridiculous as making a dog, a cat, a gazelle, a lion or any other beast follow one about?"
As seems so often happens with university research these days, the guinea pigs were actually 600 students. Though some might wonder whether students are representative of anything other than themselves, these results replicate those of previous research.
However, should cat lovers suddenly experience a smugness beyond even their own superior intelligence, might I offer a word of intellectual caution?
John Bradshaw, a British anthrozoologist, has a different take on the human-cat relationship. He believes that cats see us as just big, stupid cats.
So much for cat lovers' alleged sensitivity. | {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
The Sam Houston State product with Jim Miller’s old number.
The Chicago Bears announced on Wednesday that Josh McCown will start instead of Caleb Hanie at quarterback on Sunday night against the Green Bay Packers in Lambeau Field.
McCown, who was acquired on Nov. 23, replaced Hanie for the last two drives Sunday and completed just one pass and threw an interception. Since 2007, McCown has attempted just eight passes, completing two.
“I’m just gonna get myself ready like I’ve done every week, and then we’ll see what happens,” McCown said Tuesday. | {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
You would think the director of the Vatican Observatory would ooze credibility, but Brother Guy Consolmagno squeezes in all sorts of lies in a single answer during an interview with the Vancouver Sun.
The question was straightforward, though by no means simple: “Do faith and science have to be in conflict?”
Let’s break down his answer line by line.
Too many public scientists are insecure about their rank as scientists.
This is based on what now? The scientists who have the ability to talk about the subject are usually fairly confident in their knowledge (if not their ability to communicate it).
The scientists that you see on TV who are proclaimed atheists because they think it gives them credibility in science — which it doesn’t — are turning off the nine-tenths of the population that don’t call themselves atheists.
Consolmagno thinks a bunch of scientists on TV call themselves atheists for the PR boost?! When has atheism ever given people a better reputation? And who are these people? Neil deGrasse Tyson, perhaps the most famous science communicator on television, goes out of his way to avoid the atheist label! And the other scientists who don’t hide their non-belief in God aren’t just saying that to play a part; they’re atheists for the same reason the rest of us are: they’ve looked for the evidence for God and realized there’s nothing there.
It’s true that an atheist scientist who belittles religion may turn off large portions of the religious public, but most of the scientists you see on talk shows or who give lectures are not like Richard Dawkins. They don’t talk about religion at all.
But the strangest line came at the end of that answer:
Carl Sagan said “an atheist is someone who knows more than I do.” Even he had to admit that he just didn’t know about the existence of God.
Google that quotation, and you’ll find a handful of sites featuring it… all because they’re quoting Consolmagno.
The closest I can come to Sagan’s own words is a paraphrase of the line in which Sagan told an interviewer in 1981, “An atheist is someone who is certain that God does not exist.” If that’s an accurate quotation, well, Sagan was wrong. Atheists don’t possess certainty of our views. Dawkins doesn’t put himself at the very end of his own atheism spectrum. We’re all just pretty sure we’re right. There’s a difference.
Normally, modern Catholics are pretty good about science. They have no problem accepting evolution. But if this is one of the Vatican’s most prominent scientists, maybe we need to rethink the Church’s relationship with the subject.
(Thanks to Brian for the link. Screenshot via YouTube)
| {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
A quiet, densely wooded area off Goodlette-Frank Road bordering the Gordon River in Naples might have become the scene of a revenge killing last summer.
It was there that Xavier Sierra, 18, was lured, confronted and shot by Connie Serbu on July 7, 2016, in a plot to avenge her daughter’s rape, according to a criminal complaint filed with the Collier County Clerk of Courts this week.
Serbu, an acquaintance of Sierra’s, was already at the Naples Jail Center on suspicion of custodial interference when she was served with an arrest warrant Aug. 25 on a charge of second-degree murder.
More: Sister arrested, accused of killing one of two men shot in Naples in 2016
More:Circumstances surrounding Naples double homicide still unclear
More:New details released in Naples double-homicide
More:Police ID two bodies found in wooded area of Naples
Serbu is accused of leaving the state with her son last October while being investigated as a witness in the homicide, according to court records. She is being held without bail.
Serbu’s brother, John Vargas, 29, was also killed in the shooting.
The criminal complaint details the day the Naples Police Department responded to the 700 block of Goodlette-Frank Road to reports of shots fired.
At the end of a dirt road near the wooded area, officers found a blue four-door Hyundai and met Serbu, who appeared panicked and said two men she knew had been shot. Officers took her to the police station to calm her and get more information.
Serbu told investigators “it’s all my fault” and said she didn’t want her brother to get in trouble, the complaint states.
She asked police to book her and said, “So I don’t care, he raped my daughter ... she told me everything that happened,” according to the complaint.
During the investigation, detectives found that Serbu sent Sierra a text message July 7, 2016, to ask for his help building a bunk bed at her house in exchange for money, the complaint states.
“Connie Serbu stated that she planned on confronting Xavier Sierra regarding the molestation of her daughter” the day she asked him to install the bunk beds, the complaint states.
Serbu’s daughter told her mother over Memorial Day weekend 2016 that Sierra sexually assaulted her on two occasions several years ago, according to police.
After learning about the alleged assault, Serbu repeatedly talked to friends and other witnesses about wanting to kill Sierra, court records state. Serbu’s daughter asked her mother not to hurt Sierra, and a friend of Serbu’s tried to persuade her to go to police instead of taking things into her own hands, according to police.
Serbu, a mother of two, told her husband in May that he would have to prepare himself to take care of their kids on his own because “she was going to do something,” the complaint states.
Serbu originally planned to ask a friend to install the bunk beds but changed her mind when her daughter told her she had been assaulted, according to police. The complaint states that getting the teen to do the job provided Serbu “the perfect ruse to get Sierra alone.”
Serbu had her brother accompany her to pick up the teen and confront him, court documents state. Vargas, of New York, had spent a few weeks visiting Serbu and staying at her house before he died.
According to the complaint, Vargas was intellectually disabled and because he "had a mind like a child," Serbu persuaded him to help her.
Investigators said Vargas and Serbu left her house with two guns registered to Serbu, two stun guns, a potato to use as a silencer, an ice pick, plastic gloves, bags and paper towels before picking Sierra up.
Sierra had a job interview at a spay-and-neuter clinic in Golden Gate the day he was killed. After leaving the interview, he waited for Serbu to pick him up at a Winn-Dixie on Golden Gate Parkway and take him to her house to install the bunk beds.
According to the complaint, Vargas asked Sierra about the assault while Serbu drove them out to the wooded area. When they arrived, Sierra got out of the car and tried to run away, but Vargas and Serbu chased him, according to the complaint.
Police said Sierra wrestled with Vargas for one of the guns, and Sierra ultimately was shot with both guns a total of six times. Vargas was shot once in the abdomen, according to police. The complaint doesn’t say who shot Vargas but states he was shot first.
Both guns were found at the scene. Gunshot residue testing revealed Serbu’s hands tested positive for residue, the complaint states.
Lt. Seth Finman said Tuesday the department could not comment on the case because it still was being investigated. | {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
Subsets and Splits